Those Guys Have All the Fun - James Andrew Miller [87]
The next week, ESPN was televising the Davis Cup, and we did the same thing with Mary Carillo interviewing John McEnroe about the state of tennis. That was great too. So now, from a producer’s standpoint, I’m thinking I’ll have seven minutes’ worth of coverage I won’t have to worry about. So the next week John Walsh sees me and goes, “Hey, I noticed the last couple of weeks you’ve done this ‘Conversation.’” I didn’t necessarily know what he was going to say, but then he says, “I really like it. Do you think we can do more of these?” I replied, “Well, yeah, I don’t see why not.” So the next week we did one with Peter Ueberroth from Cooperstown.
I can’t say it was any grand vision I had to start “Sunday Conversation” on SportsCenter; it’s just how a lot of ideas in the early days of SportsCenter came up. “Hey, let’s try this. I got three minutes here or five minutes here; let’s give this a shot.” And sometimes you hit and sometimes you missed. When you hit, it’s great, and when you miss, you say, oh well, it’s one show out of 365 days—there’s another one tomorrow.
After that, I left to produce NFL GameDay. Then the guy who took over for me, producer Steve Vecchione, comes up to me and says in a kind of joking fashion, “I hate you.” I said, “Why?” He says, “Because now we are going to have to do these ‘Sunday Conversations,’ and the first three you rip out are Jack Nicklaus, John McEnroe, and Peter Ueberroth. What I am I going to do?” I kind of felt bad for him having to follow that lineup, but c’est la vie.
CHRIS BERMAN:
I didn’t do many SportsCenters in the nineties, but in the late eighties, I was doing SportsCenter with Tom Mees, and that was one of the most fun things I’ve ever done at the network.
MATT SANDULLI, Senior Coordinating Producer:
Back then, if you wanted to know what was happening at that moment, you had to rip wire copy off the machine. Production assistants were literally assigned to a desk where you would answer the phone and rip the wires. In August of ’88, I was filling in that day and a wire crossed that Gretzky had been traded to the Kings. It was like a bomb exploded in the newsroom. The greatest player in the game had just gotten traded. People started running around going crazy. When the press conference started, I was assigned graphics, which wound up being incredibly exciting. It was an unbelievable night, and we were there, watching it unfold right in front of us, and we felt like we were the only ones around. We were using TSN from Canada, but there was no Fox, there was no Comcast. We were the place to go for that kind of stuff, and it was really cool when those big ones happened.
CHARLEY STEINER:
The first couple of months, I was doing the 2:30 a.m. show—11:30 Pacific time. I would go home after the show was over and pop in a videotape, like a quarterback watching plays unfold. I was constantly critiquing myself. I’m only there a few months, and Walsh and Anderson take me to this little restaurant in Bristol and ask, “Well, how’s it going?” And I said, “Well, I don’t like this nine p.m. to five a.m. shit. I don’t need to be in Bristol, Connecticut, and I don’t know how much longer I can do this. If you are planning on keeping me on these hours, I’m going home.” They said, “Well, what do you mean, ‘home’?” “I mean I’m going home!” And to their everlasting credit, they said, “By February first, we’ll have you on the seven o’clock show.” And that’s where I stayed for about twelve and a half years.
BOB LEY:
John doesn’t drive, so I would drive him home. We’d be leaving there 12:30 at night, because I was doing the 11:00 p.m. SportsCenter. He’d been there all day. I can recall him slamming his fist down in frustration, because people weren’t listening. I had to educate him. I told him, these people have just gotten out of prison. They just had a very tough period of time being managed by someone who didn’t have great people skills. They saw people fired. Now another guy is coming through the door with a lot of changes. Meanwhile, CNN