Those Guys Have All the Fun - James Andrew Miller [88]
CHRIS MYERS, Reporter:
I didn’t get to ESPN until about a year after Walsh had gotten there, and I was assigned to cover the All-Star game in Anaheim. I was with my producer on the way to the game to talk to athletes and stuff, and—this is something you just can’t make up—we hear that Tim Burke of the Expos, who was scheduled to pitch, had just found out that he and his wife had gotten the paperwork approved to adopt a child in Guatemala. They hadn’t been able to have a child on their own, and now there was a certain time frame at an adoption center in a village down there in Central America. They had to get there in a certain amount of time or somebody else would get into the rotation. So both Tim and his wife needed to be there, something to the effect of signing the papers. When I talked to Tim, he said, “Hey, I’ve got to leave tonight, the late flight out of L.A. down into the jungle where this adoption center is.” I said, “Well, I hate to be rude, but if I could go along, would you mind?” And he said, “Sure, you could come along. But I don’t know exactly how it’s going to all turn out.”
So I asked Walsh, who was my boss at the time, if I could do it, and he says, “Go for it. This is a great story.” We got a camera crew lined up. Lasorda used him early, he pitched in the All-Star game, and he left while the game was going on. We got on this plane, flew into the jungle, and landed at the airport like you see in the movies, complete with weeds on the runway. We walked with him to the adoption center; his wife was there. Our camera man Rick Telles and our producer John Hamlin captured the moment when they first saw their child, with all the emotion and the excitement. It was incredible. But the story didn’t stop there. We flew back with them, and his wife took the baby home, and Tim had to go to a game in Cincinnati. We landed there while the game was going on. The Expos rallied to take the lead, Buck Rogers, Montreal’s manager, uses Tim in the ninth inning to pitch, and he saves the game for the Expos! As he’s walking off the field, Buck says something to him like, “That may be your second-best save ever.” We quickly put all the pieces together, and the story was on the air within a few days. We won ESPN’s first reporting Emmy.
JOHN WALSH:
There was one incident which occurred in September of ’88 that really got to me. It was a Saturday in September. I was in touch with the SportsCenter guys pretty much all day about what the lead story was going to be, and I had been talking to them about it being a big audience on Saturday night after college football. I was out with the kids somewhere and I got a phone call at six o’clock that they had canceled SportsCenter that night. I couldn’t believe it. I said, “What?!” They said, “We’ve got to replay a golf tournament.” I tracked Bornstein down at a restaurant, and I just went nuclear. I was very animated and very angry. It was a very heated discussion. Steve tried to defend the action, but I said, “I can’t do this job this way. These kids have got to care about this show; you can’t treat SportsCenter like this; and you have to be devoted to putting this show on every night.” After that night, it never happened again.
DAVID HILL:
John Walsh should be in a house living next to Bill Gates right now, because the Disney Company should get down on their hands and knees and pay him a boatload of money. He was their secret weapon back then.
BILL GRIMES:
In 1987, we had been looking for a new CFO, and we hired a headhunter who found someone they wanted me to interview. So I was on a business trip to California, and I’m sitting next to a guy who’s reading. I look over and see my picture in a Forbes magazine article about ESPN. So that caught my attention. The next thing I know, I see he has the ESPN business plan. So I don’t know what to do. I don’t whether to say something to him or not. So I got off the plane, thinking maybe there was some mistake. I mean, I did have a drink or two on the plane. The following day my secretary