Those Guys Have All the Fun - James Andrew Miller [97]
When I got to NBC, I had less work. You actually had less to do. There were fewer events. Everything was geared toward the weekend. You were taken care of. Everything was essentially first-class. They drove you everywhere. You had all the perks of being at a different place. I felt like Cinderella.
PETER ENGLEHART, Director of Program Planning:
In all candor, it was a guy’s culture, so most women didn’t even apply. To be a production assistant was a real guy kind of thing. And then Jaffe put in the test to answer trivia questions as part of the hiring process. It was pretty arduous. You had to go to sleep with batting averages in your head to answer some of these questions. And that’s how they would weed out the thousands of people who would apply. Hell, I couldn’t have answered some of that stuff.
ROSA GATTI:
Young people weren’t as skilled and experienced yet to deal in a workplace environment. Many young guys never really learned or were never trained in college. So we ramped things up, diversity and sexual harassment training. By the way, sexual harassment was not a term used in society in those early years. I talked with women all the time. When women joined the company, I would take them to lunch. Then it got so big I couldn’t do that anymore. I would coach women who came to me, but if there was a serious matter, which was rare, I would direct them to human resources. As an officer of the company, I had an obligation to do that. I coached many men too.
You always want to look at the individual and you want to handle matters the best way possible for all parties involved—all parties. As a senior leader, I was asked to sit with women so they could comfortably describe situations. Women would come to me, and part of what I tried to do is to help them understand how you handle certain situations. We had young people dating each other because they didn’t know a lot of people outside the company. Sometimes you would meet someone in the workplace and you would get to know them as a friend first, which can be a very good foundation for a relationship. But in some situations not everybody does the right thing. That’s not an anomaly for ESPN. This happened at many, many companies.
STEVE BORNSTEIN:
I think part of the sexual harassment stuff was location. Bristol, Connecticut. It’s one hundred miles from real civilization, and you got the kind of testosterone, jock mentality, frat house approach that’s pretty much a recipe for stupid decisions being made. If I could go back in time, would I have been more diligent? Yes, but it was part of the hand that we were dealt, and I think we did become better about managing it.
KARIE ROSS:
I think I had been termed a troublemaker after all that happened, so they put me on the 2:00 a.m. show and then took me off SportsCenter altogether. Then they put me on College GameDay, where my face was never shown. I just felt they didn’t want me anymore, so I had to leave. In fact, before the cafeteria meeting, I had a meeting with Steve Bornstein, and he said they wanted to renew my contract and they had only missed the renewal date because they were so busy with one of the new contracts. “We’re talking to your agent; it’ll get done,” he said. I told him that all sounded fine, but after the cafeteria, my contract was never renewed.
I’ve often wondered if I regretted standing up, but leaving Bristol eventually got me to Miami, where I met my husband, so everything worked out for a reason. I look back with no regrets.
A few men were disciplined for infractions in the late 1980s, and such remedial efforts as awareness classes and a more liberal