The Greatest Show in Sports

A FOND LOOK BACK AT ALMOST 30,000

V EPISODES OFTHE BEST REASON /

TO WATCH TELEVISION, AS TOLD

BYTHE PEOPLE WHO LIVED IT

The Greatest Show in Sports was born at seven p.m. Eastern time on September 7, 1979. That night the networks were showing Fantasy Island, The Bockford Files and Dallas. Only 1.4 million households got ESPN, and well under a million viewers saw Lee Leonard and George Grande, the original SportsCenter anchors, launch the Entertainment and Sports Programming Network.

More than 27 years and nearly 30,000 SportsCenters later it's an ESPN world, with ESPN.com, ESPN Zone restaurants, a magazine and a radio network. ESPN's eight TV channels beam sports from 27 dishes (the smallest is slightly less than 12 and a half feet across, the largest more than 36 feet) in sleepy Bristol, Connecticut to a sat­ellite approximately 22,000 miles up and from there to more than 92 million households, plus every bar across the sports nation.

But it all began back in 1979 when Leonard looked at a lens in a ramshackle studio and said the words that kicked off SportsCenter: "If you're a fan, if you're a fan, what you'll see in the next minutes, hours and days to follow may convince you you've gone to sports heaven."

GENESIS: IN THE BIG INNING...

LEE LEONARD, anchor, 1979 to 1980: That line about sports heaven wasn't planned. It just came out. I didn't prepare any­thing because I had no feeling ESPN would be a success. Talk about chaos....

GEORGE GRANDE, anchor, 1979 to 1988: Lee and I drove to Bristol from New York and found a muddy, unpaved park­ing lot. There was a trailer with no glass in the windows and mosquitoes and flies buzzing around. Lee said, "What have we gotten ourselves into?"

LEONARD: I took it as an interim job. Cable was new, and ESPN was below the level of a local TV station. The audience was minuscule. George was serious about sports, but I was irreverent—to me athletes are all a bunch of big guys in funny pants.

GRANDE: I came from CBS, where they couldn't believe I'd go into the woods of Connecticut to join a cable network. A creek ran past the stu­dio, which was unfinished. Wood-chucks would rustle through our trash cans. Just before we went live I told Lee, "Strap yourself in, buddy." There was a football game that night—Colorado vs. Oregon. We had a live interview with Colorado coach Chuck Fairbanks, but we lost the audio. No sound. Then two satel­lite feeds went down.

During that first SportsCenter broadcast a bulldozer rumbled out­side the trailer where the anchors sat. It collided with the show's pro­duction trailer, knocking it over and sending technicians flying. The trailer came to rest right side up, and the techs got back to work. After the show's half-hour debut

the new network went to a college-sports preview followed by a live slow-pitch softball game between the Kentucky Bourbons and the Milwaukee Schlitzes.

GRANDE: SportsCenter was filler at first. Its purpose was to keep the network on time. If we had live pro­gramming till 9:45, we'd do 15 min­utes of SportsCenter to get to the top of the hour. But some of us thought we were doing something special. The networks would talk down to the viewer as if they were the gods of sports. Not us. We were real fans, and now we had time to talk sports on the air. If you were a local sports-caster, like most of us, you were used to doing three minutes on the six o'clock news and three minutes on the 11 p.m. show—six minutes of sports. On SportsCenter we'd do that much before the first commercial.

DAW PATRICK, anchor and all-around face of ESPN, 1989 to the present: I was watching SportsCenter, lying in a sleeping bag in a house my college buddies and I rented on the University of Dayton campus. Beer was cheap, but we had

to choose between heat and cable TV. So we were in our sleeping bags, freezing. We could see our breath. We managed to convince our dates to come over, and it was so cold they had to get into the sleeping bags with us. So it was a twofold proposition— cable and cuddling. But that night, watching ESPN, I wasn't thinking about cuddling.

GRANDE: Remember those ugly orange blazers we wore? Getty Oil, our prime investor, made us wear them. We had to pin the ESPN patch on the blazer. Sometimes we'd be reading a score and the patch would fall off.

LEONARD: What those Getty guys knew about television you could stick in your eye and you wouldn't have to blink.

BOB LEY, anchor, host of Out­side the Lines, 1979 to the present: I joined on the third day. SportsCenter was Flintstones tele­vision—Fred and Barney pedaling as fast as they can. Our mandate was simple: stay on the goddamn air as long as we could. Never mind the lights blowing out and the flies in the studio. Huge flies.

GRANDE: One horsefly knew which camera was on. He was on my ear, and then we cut to Jim Simpson, another early anchor, and the fly went to his nose. Cut back to me, and the horsefly left Jim's nose and landed on my forehead.

LEY: The day they paved the park­ing lot a Minicat was grading the dirt while I was on the air. I heard a panicked shriek in my earpiece: "I think we took a torpedo!" The Minicat had backed into our remote trailer and knocked it over. The techs were in there sitting on the wall, working sideways, like some­thing out of Das Boot.

Leonard was by far the best-paid anchor, making more than $2,000 a week. He left for CNN in 1980, but by then a new voice was boom­ing in Bristol.

GRANDE: Chris Berman was this big, big kid with long hair and a mustache—the kid sportscaster from Brown University.

Berman, then 24, had done radio play-by-play for Brown's sports teams, given traffic reports while driving around the campus and spent summers as a toll collector on the Connecticut Turnpike. In October 1979 he was hired to anchor the late-night SportsCenter, airing at three a.m. Eastern.

CHRIS BERMAN, elder states­man, anchor, 1979 to the present:

The show was basically a night-light. I signed for SI6,500, which seemed like a lot because I'd been doing local TV on weekends for $23 a show, the union minimum. I used to spend hours editing clips and writing my script; then the weatherman would come in five minutes before airtime, move a couple of clouds around and get his S23. At ESPN we put on what­ever the hell highlights we could get. If we got two minutes of tape from the Angels-Mariners game, we'd run all two minutes.

GRANDE: ESPN was more regional then, by necessity. I would cover a game in New York or Boston and bring the tape back in my car. Our Canadian football highlights literally came on a bus from Saskatchewan. That led to the line everyone would say when a tape hadn't arrived: "It's on the bus from Saskatchewan."

BERMAN: One lowlight was the

skunk. The studio had big garage doors we needed to leave partly open so the cables could run in and out. One night a skunk came in and let fly. He probably thought the show stunk. The smell lasted two weeks. I was try­ing not to hold my nose on the air.

During a blizzard in 1986, Berman drove from Hartford, Connecticut to Bristol on slick icy roads at 70 miles an hour to deliver an NFL highlight reel. His claim to fame, however, is the Bermanism, a wacky sort of nick­naming that began in 1980 when he blurted out the name of the Royals' John Mayberry as "John Mayberry RFD. " Other Bermanisms include Bert "Be Home" Blyleven, Jeff "See-Through " Blauser, Rick "See Ya Later" Aguilera and Todd "Which Hand Does He" Frohwirth.

BERMAN: People ask where I got my style. I guess it's from sitting around in college, sipping bottled water—okay, it was Schlitz. But my secret, if there was one, was enthusi­asm. I liked sports. You used to hear TV people, even sports people, say, "Oh, the Royals are playing Seattle. Who cares?" Well, Royals fans and Mariners fans care, and baseball fans and just sports fans care too. The real fans trusted us with their passion, and we thought, Damn it, we better live up to that.

In 1985 executive producer Jack Gallivan told Berman to knock it off with the nicknames because they were undignified.

BERMAN: I couldn't believe it. No nicknames! So I started referring to Mookie Wilson as William Wilson and

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Babe Ruth as George Herman Ruth. People supported me. George Brett led the charge. I was friendly with him, and one day when he was surrounded by reporters he said, "If my man Chris Berman can't do his thing anymore, I'm not watching." By spring training 1986 that producer was gone and the nicknames were back. LEY: We're the one network with fans, and it's because we talk to viewers the way we'd like to be talked to. Later we got the heinous, cancerous crap called focus groups. If you do this job for a while, your gut's more accurate than any focus group. It's our duty to stay true to that gut feeling.

We also have a duty to the athletes. These are incredibly skilled, proud people. If you want to feel humbled, go stand by the cage at a big-league batting practice. You think, I could hit a fastball, or I could go out there and pitch. Wrong. Come on, you couldn't throw a ball 65 miles an hour.

One night on the show I said, "Dave Winfield, zero for four tonight. He's struggling out of the gate, hitting .072 on the season." A few days later at Yankee Stadium Winfield pulled me aside. Now, I'm five-foot-11 and pudgy; he's six-foot-six and sculpted. "I haven't lost it," he says.

"Dave, I didn't say you'd lost it. I just reported the stat."

He went on to have a fine season, and that moment made an impres­sion on me. You can imagine how much damage a cheap shot can do.

GRANDE: We started to get noticed in the 1980s, but ESPN was still a low-cost operation. When ABC Sports

exec Don Ohlmeyer came on as a con­sultant he asked what we'd spent to cover the Olympics. I said S240.000, and he laughed. He said, "Our limo bill was more than $250,000."

In 1989 NBC offered Berman $800,000 to leave ESPN. Berman, who was making SI 85,000, asked his bosses if they could "get within a nine iron" of the NBC offer. The best they could do was $600,000. He stayed.

BERMAN: I loved my job. One night fellow anchor John Saunders and I had a 10-minute "Sunday Conver­sation" with Jack Nicklaus coming up on tape. We were pretty hun­gry, so we rolled the tape and Mike McQuade, a producer, and I zoomed to McDonald's. It's only 500 yards down the road, but this was tight timing. We bombed through the drive-through, got our Quarter Pounders, sped back and ran into the studio. After one bite, we were on—out of the tape to a live two-shot, showing both anchors—and we said, "Yes, that was quite a 'Sun­day Conversation' with Jack Nick­laus," as if we'd been sitting there the whole time. If that tape had broken, we would have been dead!

In 1987 ESPN executive Steve Born-stein made a fortuitous visit to a Norwalk, Connecticut liquor store.

CHARLEY STEINER, anchor, 1988 to 2002: I'd been a radio guy in New York for 10 years. Then WABC lost its contract with the Jets. I was let go in the sub­sequent purge but with nine months' pay. So I disappeared. I was living with a woman in Wood­stock, playing tennis, still getting

paid. I considered myself a profes­sional tennis player. Then Steve Bornstein went to the liquor store, and Larry the liquor guy said, "My favorite sports announcer got fired. You should hire him." When they tracked me down I said, "I know nothing about television." They said that was fine.

ESPN wasn't a monolith yet; it was a crapshoot. But instead of going to a UHF station in Altoona, I went to the cable station in Bris­tol. My agent said I was crazy. My first day on the job, one of my new colleagues saw me in the news­room. "You're the new guy," he said. "You're from radio, right?" I said I was. He said, "This fuckin' place!" and walked away. He was sure ESPN was going to hell.

Steiner was one of a slew of hires made by John Walsh, a longtime magazine editor who brought a sharp, news-oriented approach to SportsCenter.

CHRIS LAPLACA, ESPN execu­tive: SportsCenter turned out to be the best thing we had. All our brand extensions—ESPN.com, ESPN Zones—are really driven by SportsCenter. But it took a lot of tinkering. The thinkers behind that were John Walsh, ESPN exec Steve Anderson and Steve Bornstein. Anderson knew TV, and Walsh had a great journalistic pedigree. Walsh saw what the show was doing. We would run through all the Ameri­can League highlights first and then the National League; he said, "Why don't we lead with the most important story?"

THE BIG SHOW: SPORTSCENTER EN FUEGO

JOHN WALSH, ESPN executive and SportsCenter guru: The ballsi-est thing anybody did here was com­mit to a daily sports-news show in the first place. After that the ques­tion was, What form should it take? One thing was already established: We would do highlights differently. The difference between Sports Tonight on CNN and SportsCenter on ESPN rested on one rule: Don't give away the result of a game until you have to. CNN told you the final score before showing the highlights. But we treated the highlight as a form of drama.

We also hired good reporters. Jimmy Roberts had been a pro­ducer at ABC; to get a job here he reshot his ABC pieces with himself in the stand-ups. Andrea Kremer came from NFL Films. We hired beat reporters for particular sports: Chris Mortensen for the NFL, Peter Gammons for baseball. And then, of course, there were the anchors.

I was one of several people hiring them. Al Jaffe, an ESPN recruiter, should get more credit for that; he's the one who found them. Steve Anderson and I had to okay any new anchors, but if you interview Dan Patrick or Robin Roberts, it's pretty obvious you should hire them.

In 1988 Patrick decided to leave his job at CNN after the network rejected his request for a $5,000 raise.

PATRICK: I thought Sports Tonight on CNN was better than SportsCenter, but CNN didn't acknowledge its sports guys; it's a news network. I called John Walsh and said, "Do you know who I am?"

WALSH: As a sports fanatic, I watched CNN's Sports Tonight with Fred Hickman and Nick Charles; the backup guys were Dan Patrick and Gary Miller. Dan belonged at ESPN. He had a good writing style and great camera presence. Best of all, he knew when to be serious about sports and when to be whimsical.

PATRICK: I flew up to Connecti­cut on a Monday. John was look­ing for a journalistic infusion. "We're gonna break stories and write better," he told me, "and do the best highlights." That was his vision, and it's why he hired me. I told (continued on page 157)

SPORTSCENTER

(continuedJrom page 60) my wife, "You're going to like Bristol. It's...autumnal."

Another Walsh hire was Robin Roberts, a for­mer college basketball star and the daughter of one of the Ihskegee Airmen, the fust black Air Force unit in i ..S. history. ROBIN ROBERTS, anchor, 1990 to 2002: We all came from local stations where sports was the redheaded step­child. A 24-7 sports network was a dream. I was coming from an Atlanta station, so central Connecticut was a cultural shift. One day in a mall 1 saw another black person—we waved to each other.

ESPN is a mostly male place. Women have to prove themselves, and it helped that I had played ball. A lot of the guys haven't played anything since they were cut from their Little League team. A bunch of us played pickup basketball at the local Y. There was longtime anchor Tom Mees—a teeny guy—and Dan Pat­rick, of course. Dan is a fierce competitor. He thinks he can really shoot. I wanted no piece of guarding him, so we played a lot of zone.

PATRICK: Yeah, I can shoot. I played high school ball. One night when the Suns' Dan Majerle and Cedric Ceballos were having a pregame three-point-shooting contest, they said, "You want in?" Well, sure. 1 beat Ceballos, but Majerle crushed me. Then came the 1993 NBA finals. Suns vs. Bulls. I was at a Suns practice with former NBA coach Dr. Jack Ramsay, and Majerle went, "You want a piece of me?"

I said, "I've got a suit and tie on." "Oh," he said, "you're scared." Then Phoenix coach Paul Westphal stopped practice. All the Suns were watching. I loosened my tie and gave Dr. Jack my coat. Majerle made I I out of 15 threes. I'd made 10 of 14 when he stopped me. "If you make the last one, you only tie," he said, "but if you bank it in, you win." So I banked it—and made it. The ball went through and the Suns just erupted, all of them laughing, de­riding Majerle. Charles Barkley was just killing him.

The next night Majerle hit six three-pointers in the finals, tying a record. He said it helped make up for the low point of his career—losing to me.

I told Michael Jordan, "One day I'm gonna get a piece of you, Michael. One-on-one." This was after an interview. He undid his microphone and looked at me like. Oh really? You think so? I thought. Wow, I just saw the Look. Part of me was joking about playing him, but another part knew I could do something to score on Michael. It's that shooter's mentality. Maybe I'd start crying and get a sympa­thy basket off him.

On April 5, 1992 Patrick teamed for the first time with another new guy, former Los Angeles sporlscaster Keith Olbermann. Their

// p.m. edition of SportsCenler, a.k.a. the Big Show, look ESPN to n new level. KEITH OLBERMANN, anchor, 1992 to 1997: On my first SportsCen­ler 1 did the same ratio ofjokes to min­utes as I'd done on L.A. newscasts, on which the sports segment was much shorter. By the end I'd done some­thing like 90 jokes. Dan sat there quiv­ering. He said, "I'm gonna need some time to adjust."

WALSH: Really talented anchors always overdo it at first. It takes about six months before they find their rhythm. PATRICK: Keith and I were symbiotic. It got a little creepy when we started fin­ishing each other's sentences. I won't say he started to look better, but we clicked. He's a great writer, a quick study and a team player who'll set you up for a line and laugh at what you say. OLBERMANN: Dan and I always lis­tened to each other. If your partner's looking over only periodically to make sure you don't have a bullet in your head, you're in trouble. We were together in the no-man's-land of live TV—the two guys in a trench in World War I, with bullets coming at us. Sometimes the bul­lets came from behind us. PATRICK: One night I was about to do a Tigers highlight when a production assistant came in with news of the game that had just ended. I had 17 seconds to consume this information. I looked down and saw the name Ben Blowdoll.

OLBERMANN: Production assistants were quickly disabused of the notion that bringing us a highlight was a time for discussion. After about a week they'd hand us the page and clear out. But this PA, a gal named Shannon, stood there, saying, "This is important, Dan. The Tigers brought up a youngster with a very unusual name: Blowdoll." 1 saw sweat forming on Dan's forehead. PATRICK: Keith was next to me, work­ing his computer. He said, "There's no Blowdoll."

OLBERMANN: If there had been a Blowdoll in Triple-A baseball, I'd have heard of him. So we had to find out who he really was. I was yelling, "Get the Red Book," the American League guide. "Get the Green Book," the National League guide. "Get the Tigers' media guide!" Nothing. I told Dan we should just skip it. That's when our PA very sweetly added, "You can't skip it. I'm showing him coming into the game." PATRICK: The director was in my ear, saying, "Back in five, four, three...." I was yelling, "What's the guy's name?" Then we were on, and I started the highlight, saying, "Tigers in Gleveland, blah blah...." Suddenly Keith whispered, "AJ/omdahl! Ben BlomdM." OLBERMANN: Thus saving the day. PATRICK: And I said, "Ben Biomdahl, making his major league debut." Tigers rookie Ben Biomdahl (pronounced "bloom-doll") began and ended his big-league

career in 1995, going 0-0 with a 7.77 ER.A in 24.1 innings. By then on-air snafus were a part of SportsCenter lore. Tom Mees once referred to the Los Angeles "Leakers," and Greg Gumbel announced that tennis star Chris Evert had "won in straight sex." Then there was Man rice Hurst... STEVE LEVY, anchor, 1993 to the present: I was doing a Monday-night SportsCenter with Keith. In those days we'd go to a commercial when Monday Night Football ended, figuring a lot of peo­ple would switch over from ABC to us. We'd say, "Welcome to those who've been watching Monday Night Football." then do a riff on NFL injuries. The Patriots' defensive back Maurice Hurst was suffer­ing from a bulging disc. I had it spelled right in my script, but I said. "Maurice Hurst of New England is suffering from a bulging dick in his neck." We went straight into video of injuries—some awful career-ending injuries, guys tear­ing their ACL—but we were getting hys­terical. Keith was laughing, the research and camera people were laughing, the camera was shaking, and I was trying to keep it together. We came back, and Keith was on camera. He knew he'd lose it if he saw me, so he took off his glasses. Then he couldn't read the Teleprompter. He said, "Steve, do we have any video of that?" Brought the house down. NORBY WILLIAMSON, ESPN exec­utive: People like Berman, Ley and Mees established SportsCenter in the early days, but the show turned the corner with Olbermann and Patrick. I produced it when they started. That was really SportsCenter's middle age, when the level of sophistication and reporting went up. WALSH: We were becoming a source for important stories. The first was Pete Rose being banned from baseball. We covered that aggressively in 1988 and 1989. We had reporters in Cincinnati, Coopers-town and Washington, D.C. attacking the story from a multitude of angles. When the judgment came down we did 42 consecutive minutes on the story; at the time, SportsCenter ran for only half an hour. Later in 1989 when the earth­quake hit during the World Series in San Francisco, ABC had no generators, but we did and we stayed on. [For more than 30 minutes only ESPN had live fool-age from the scene; ratings quadrupled. ] We had Magic Johnson announcing he was HIV positive. We had Charley Steiner in the courtroom during Mike Tyson's rape trial in 1992.

STEINER: The Tyson trial was the best journalism I've been a part of. It got 90 seconds everywhere else, but we gave it five to six minutes, and we were the first with the verdict.

Tyson and I had a good relationship before the trial—15 to 20 sit-down inter­views, even some socializing. There was a lot to like about Mike, but there was also a devilish component, a street curse. He surrounded himself with bad guys.

At the trial, he felt I should defend him instead of reporting that he was getting his ass kicked in the courtroom.

Years later I was at a fight, ringside at the Staples Center, when the crowd murmured. In walked Tyson with his entourage. I was thinking, Oh God, his seat's right next to mine. He gave me a long look, then hugged me and said, "Even with all the shit between us, it's good to see you, man." Mike Tyson—a cross between Sybil and the Mormon Tabernacle Choir.

PATRICK: In 1993 or 1994 we started to get feedback from viewers and athletes. We thought, Holy shit, there are peo­ple watching! Jerry Seinfeld once said, "Dan, I use your home run call when I

leave the set: 'I'm... gone!'" Once after Bill Murray and I had dinner in New York, he ran into a boutique, bought me an orange tie and said, "You were talking about that on SportsCenter." I'd said something about covering Ten­nessee football and how hard it was to find an orange tie in Knoxville.

We had gone from the Wayne's World feeling of doing a show in a basement to thejaw-dropping idea that we had an audience.

CRAIG KIL-BORN, anchor, 1993 to 1996: After (bur months on the job, I walked into the newsroom and saw Steve Levy, who knows his hockey but wouldn't know comedy if it hit him over the head with a stick. Steve and Karl Ravech were saying

Chevy Chase was funnier than Bill Mur­ray. Now, all respect to Chevy Chase, but this was inflammatory. They were totally unfamiliar with Bill's early work on Satur­day Night Live as the lounge singer, when he dominated. Dan and I said, "You guys are crazy. Bill is Cod." So Dan, who knew Bill, called him and said, "Kilborn and I were defending you." Later I got a call from Bill—the first time I ever spoke to him. He said, "You—you're funny. And thanks for sticking up for me." LEY: Pretty soon you couldn't walk into a bar without seeing Sportsdenter. One day I went into a Home Depot, sporting four days' growth of beard and a baseball cap. One of the greet-

ers said, "Hi, Bob." I thought, Shit, I'm just here to buy paint! ROBERTS: I knew something was hap­pening when guys started shouting, "Da-da-da, da-da-da!" at me in airports. The SportsCenter theme music, with its famed "Da-da-da, da-da-da" finish, composed by Grammy winner John Colby, debuted in 1989 but didn't take over the world until the mid-1990s.

PATRICK: I've got the topper. Dur­ing the birth of my daughter, a young doctor, an intern, kept talking about the New England Patriots. My wife was in the throes of labor, and this guy was ask­ing me about the Patriots' backup center. I was trying to answer quickly, thinking, My wife had better not hear this. Finally

my daughter Grace was born, and the intern said, "Da-da-da, da-da-da. There's your SportsCentrr highlight!" LEY: ESPN used to be the kid on the rise, the little guy with the chip on his shoulder. Then it became a behemoth. Now we're an easy target.

SHOTS HEARD ROUND THE WORLD

PATRICK: The backlash said we were just entertainers. We weren't. We knew our sports. Did we go too far sometimes? Yes. Did everyone start thinking that to get into our business you needed a catch-phrase? Yes. But as I still tell people, Bob Costas never had a catchphrase.

Al Michaels had one: "Do you believe in miracles?" John Madden has catch-phrases; Cris Collinsworth and Troy Aikman don't. You've got to be who you are. Don't be Dick Vitale. He's already Dick Vitale.

Catchphrases are like Stupid Pet Tricks. We're having fun. That's where "en fuego" came from. If I'm doing the Brewers against the Indians, I've got to have a little fun! But I'll admit I hear the criticism. One night I watched the show after I got home, which I hate to do. It felt forced, so 1 backed off. KTLBOBJX: Catchphrases? Forced? Not when I did them.

Kilborn, whose catchphrases included "Spank me!" and "Lay it in, you technically sound

spark plug, you," went on to host The Daily Show on Come­dy Central. He joined ESPN just before an­other joker.

KENNY MAYNE, anchor, com­mentator, gad­fly, 1994 to the present: I was in Seattle, making gar­bage cans—literally assembling them outdoors in the rain. But one day I had made all the cans they could use. The garbage industry had passed me by.

I got some sports-TV work. There isn't limitless vari­ety in that because there really are only three kinds of stories. There's the "he's good" story, the "he's not good" story and the "he overcame some­thing" story.

After contributing some bits to ESPN— mostly stand-ups with Ken Griffey Jr.—I got a tryout in

1989. When I was interviewed and they asked about the Rangers' middle reliev­ers, I said, "I believe they'll be coming in after the starters."

Five years later, in 1994, I sent a letter to the Wizard, John Walsh. "Dear John," it read. "Please mark the appropriate box and return." One box was next to the line "Contract on the way—stand by your mailbox." The next was "We'll be in touch if we need you," and the last was "We'll consider hiring you about the linu- KSPN5 hits tin- air." AL JAFFE, ESPN executive and chief recruiter: Kenny was a contro­versial hire. Some people didn't appre­ciate his dry wit. Finally we had an 159

opening, and someone said, "Al, what about that Seattle guy?" MAYHE: Catchphrases? "Yahtzee!" was one of mine. People still yell that to me. And to illustrate a highlight of guys jump­ing up and down after a game-winning home run, I said, "The players are gay." It's the first meaning of the word in the dictionary, you know. I was told not to reprise that one.

One night I was watching a silent movie, and the screen read, "I am Gofar. What have I to fear from Rome?" I thought. That sounds almost like a home run call.

CHRIS HARRIS, webmaster of top fan site SportsCenter Altar: I get about 25,000 visitors a month. Accord­ing to our SportsCenter Altar voting archives, the most popular catchphrase is Kenny Mayne's "Your puny ballparks are too small to contain my gargantuan blasts! Bring me the finest meats and cheeses for a clubhouse feast." LEVY: Mine is "Good evening and hi, everybody." Actually, I do have a couple. There's my home run call, "Get outta town." Or for a grand slam, "Get outta town, and he means it." But I'm more of a nuts-and-bolts guy. I try to get the score right.

ROBERTS: I had one: "Go on with your bad self." But English teachers com­plained, so I retired it. I've used it a few times now that I'm on Good Morning Amer­ica, but it tends to draw blank stares. LINDA COHN, anchor, 1992 to the present: It's a man's world. When I got there Dan Patrick was skeptical. "There were a few women before you,"

he said, "and they weren't that good"— almost like a warning to come in and kick some butt. He wouldn't say that to a guy, but I heard him. Once Dan and Keith and all the guys saw I knew my stuff, they gave me the key to their men­tal locker room.

I was a girl who played high school hockey on the boys' team. I'm as hard­core sports as anyone. Male viewers give me a great compliment. They say, "Linda, I never took my sports from a woman before you."

Doing SportsCenter live, winging half of it, is a thrill a minute. I'd like to say I've had a wardrobe malfunction, but that hasn't happened yet. LEY: One night I said, "We'll be right back," but the control room couldn't get us back on the air, so the rest of the show was 17 straight minutes of commercials. And the humbling thing was the ratings went up.

COHN: In 1994 Gary Miller and I were supposed to do SportsCenter, but O.J. Simpson took off in his white Bronco. ESPN stayed with the O.J. coverage. Gary and I huddled over the TV moni­tors on the set. It was tragically funny; if our mikes had been on, you'd have heard us making bets. We figured three things could happen: O.J. would get stopped, O.J. would keep driving, or O.J. would blow his brains out. We tied because we both bet he'd wind up dead. So Gary and I were losers, and O.J. was the winner. KILBORN: On the air, your partner would usually finish his bit and toss to you by saying your name: "...Bulls win. Craig?" During the O.J. trial one of my

partners used my nickname accidentally, but it kind of worked.

"...Bulls win. Killer?"

"In the O.J. Simpson trial today...." HARRIS: Our second and third most popular catchphrases are "boo-yah!" and "cool as the other side of the pillow," both by Stuart Scott. People either love him or hate him.

STUART SCOTT, anchor, 1993 to the present: I was working in Orlando, not long out of college. One night I said, "Boo-yah," and the news director told me, "Save that for ESPN." I never had a real jones to be on SportsCentei: but they called when ESPN2 started. So I sent a tape to Al Jaffe.

JAFFE: When we have an opening we look at a lot of candidates on tape, then bring in three or four finalists for an audition. They have to write and per­form a 15-minute mim-SportsCenter. So we find out: Can they write under pres­sure? How clever are they? Do they have a phony style?

Afterward we talk sports. That's the job interview. A lot of sportscasters know their local market but don't have the na­tional knowledge we need. So if you're coming to us from a San Diego station, I won't ask much about the Chargers. I may ask about the AFC East. SCOTT: You've got to prep for your Al JafFe interview. I'd heard you needed to know at least five players on every major league team, so I studied the ros­ters. Sure enough, Al asked, "Can you name five players on every team?" I said yes. He gave me a couple of teams and I named six or seven guys. Finally 1 caught myself—"Wait, is he still with the Roy­als? " Al said, "I have no idea." PATRICK: Nobody knows every detail. That's why the unseen heroes are the PAs and researchers, kids who watch a two-hour game and give you the Cliffs Notes version in 45 seconds. We'll yell, "I need A-Rod's stats on Thursdays at night in cities that begin with M." And they'll find it. They're down below row­ing the boat while we're on deck, sun­ning ourselves.

There's enormous competition for anchor jobs because sports got glamor­ous. Bob Costas made TV sports look easy, Chris Berman made it look fun, and Keith Olbcrmann made it look interesting. You have to factor in Stu Scott, too—a completely different an­gle and voice.

Shortly after Scott was hired an ESPN higher-up reportedly told him not to "talk so black." LAPIiACA: Stuart's not for everybody, but he speaks to a big part of our audi­ence. And if you think he's all style, lis­ten to his writing. Stuart challenged me once: "Watch my highlights and see if I don't always tell you something you didn't know."

SCOTT: It's not all cute phrases. It's not just "LeBron |ames with a crazy dunk like bunnies with a bazooka' or "Yeast,

rise!" I'll also say, "He had 38 points; he's averaging 37 this month. He's only the fifth player ever to average 27 points, seven assists and seven boards in a sea­son. Jordan did it, Bird did it, Havlicek and the Big () did it." That's the job— putting things in context.

People talk about my catchphrases. "Boo-yah" is one, but if I say, "Al­len Iverson ran an okey-doke on that boy," that's not a catchphrase. That's just part of my lexicon. If I watch a game at home, I'll say, "LeBron James is straight freakin' kids on the court." It's another way of saying he's having an extraordinary game. Everybody has his own background, and one of the best things about this place is that our

bosses let us bring that to the job. WALSH: After li u in or became more a part of SportsCenter we had a spate of hires who thought there was a formula.

KILBORN: Bob Cost as told me, "You started this, sports guys try­ing to be funny." I apologized. "My bad. Bob." Now when I watch TV sports I'm yelling, "just give me the store!"

OLBERMANN: 1 heard Yankees out­fielder Bobby Abreu learned English by watching ESPN and HBO. Maybe some­where today there's a guy who speaks only three words of English: "From downtown—bang!" We had fun. For every broadcast team—from Bob and Ray to Huntley and Brinkley—one goal is to break the

other guy up. Dan and I liked the prison scene in JFK, when Kevin Bacon says to Kevin Costner, "You not a bad-lookin' man, Mistah Garrison. When I get out I'm gonna visit you." So we had a Cubs highlight of a shirtless, hefty fan. Dan said, "You're not a bad-lookin' man, mis-l.ih! " And I lost it.

WALSH: K very one ranks the Olberniann-Patrick show number one. I'd be hard-pressed to say it wasn't, but Stuart Scott and Rich Eisen had a special partnership. Linda Cohn and Steve Levy on the overnight show too. And I would remind people of (he Bob Ley-Dan Patrick pairing, before Keith. Dan was able to counterpunch Bob in much the

same way he counterpunched Keith, and SfwrlsCenter got its highest ratings with Bob and Dan.

I think Robin Roberts, Bob Ley and Charley Steiner on the early-evening show were really special, but they flew a bit un­der the radar because they didn't get many highlights. Everyone loves the highlights. ROBERTS: We had a healthy rivalry with Keith and Dan. We saw ourselves as the true journalists. But we were always dying for highlights. If there was an afternoon game, Charley and I would fight over that one highlight. STEINER: Keith and Dan got all the attention and called their show the Big Show, but our ratings were the same. We were pretty damn big too.

Tensions were growing in Bristol. In August 1996 popular anchor Tom Mees drowned in his neighbor's swimming pool. BERMAN: I slill carry a picture of him in my wallet. We were in each other's weddings, saw each other's kids grow up. I'll never forget one of my final shows with Tom. It was a hell of a show, everything clicking. Shit, we were having a good time that night. With 20 seconds left we shook hands, and I said, "SportsCenter—the way Ciod intended it."

Feeling "creatively stagnant," Kilborn left for Comedy Central in 1996, while Olbermann dueled with ESPN management about con­tracts and other matters.

PATRICK: For all his brilliance, Keith could be difficult, quirky. He sent out a memo saying one researcher's shoes were too loud and researchers shouldn't eat popcorn in the studio because the noise of their chewing bothered him. 1 blocked it out. Keith's idiosyncratic ways were what made him great. We did butt heads when he was getting ready to leave ESPN, though. I said, "You're gonna miss this. You can get more money, but you'll never have a partner like me." OLBERMANN: When there was talk that Dan might go to Good Morning Amer­ica he told me it wouldn't happen. He said, "I couldn't stand all the questions about why I left SportsCenter." Hmm.... In 1997 Olbermann bolted for MSNBC,

then Fox Sports, only to return to MSNBC. ESPN ran a series of candidates through the Big Show, which would never again be called that.

SCOTT: I got a surprise on a show with Dan. We were on a break, when my contact lens rolled up in my eye. I couldn't see. So I took my mike off and Dan looked over like, What are you doing?

"My contact lens just went up in my head," I said. I gave him my scripts and went to the men's room. The show came back on, it was just Dan, and it was my segment. He had to read a script that wasn't his. So Dan was out there saying, "Allen Iver-son's been torch­ing kids," while I was in the men's room with two edi­tors, one of them a

woman, working on my eye.

The funny thing was, I got calls that night from two or three of my boys. "1 watched the show," they said, "and that wasn't even right. They didn't even show you. They just had the white dude on for like 15 minutes. Keepin' the brothers down again!"

The surprise successor to Olbermann: Kenny Mayne.

MAYTTE: I was nervous. The company had me do 500 interviews, as if it were a Mars mission. I'm sure it was weird for Dan.

PATRICK: Olbermann leaving threw me oil. What role did 1 play now? With Bob or Kenny I found myself having to

think about what used to just flow. I lost my compass a little.

MAYNE: But ESPN goes on. Keith is great, but there were no protests in the streets when he quit. If 1 quit or Dan or even Chris quits, ESPN will go on and thrive. And believe me, they let us know that.

PATRICK: Keith called me and said, "I'm making more money than you and Berman combined." I think he was missing the point. Was he happier than we were? The story goes that when he got to Fox he tried to convince them to pay me a million dollars to sit out the rest of my contract. 1 said, "Are you kidding? I'm gonna kick your ass!" I loved the challenge. In 2004 ESPN hired tin old colleague of Patrick's.

FRED HICKMAU, anchor, 2004 to the present: Back in 1980, when I was on CNN, Nick Charles and I watched SportsCenter, and the ESPN guys watched us—with mutual respect. [Many ESPNers

thought "Nick V Hick" had the better show. Now Sports Tonight is gone, defeated by ESPN.] It was primitive Cor all of us then. Sometimes we would put a game on our studio TVs and call play-by-play right off the screen.

I happen to be king of the office hot­foots. I almost got led Turner once, but I chickened out. Here's how: to do it: You sneak under someone's desk and plant the incendiary device, a wadded-up piece of paper, in the shoestring. Light it—just the tip, so it acts like a fuse—and then run to the other side of the room to watch. 1 haven't struck while we've been on the air...yet.

NEXT: WHAT 2 WATCH 4

With a changing cast of new and old anchors, SportsCenter rolls on, drumming "Da-da-da, da-da-da" into a new generation ofjockheads. WILLIAMSON: It's still evolving— the look, the graphics, the anchors, the amount of opinion versus straight news. Those are always in flux. Three

or four years ago we tweaked things a little toward humor and the unex­pected. It's not as though we turned the whole show into free association, but fans go a little crazy: "Oh my God, how could they change SportsCenter?" The past couple of years we've twisted it back a little toward hard news, but we still take chances.

NEIL EVERETT, anchor, 2000 to the present: 1 was an assistant ath­letic director at Hawaii Pacific Univer­sity, going from there to being a TV sports guy on KGMB-TV in Honolulu in the afternoon. Then, in 1998. I got a tryout in Bristol. I was god-awful. If they'd focused on surfing or sumo, I would have been fine, but I didn't know enough national sports. 1 went back to Hawaii with my tail between my legs.

Two years later I got the call and brought "Howzit" to SportsCenter. It's sort of a slang "aloha." That's a good thing about this place—representing the folks back home.

You know what's bad? The spray-on makeup. They actually spray it onto your face. It gets all over your shirt, and you worry that if you blow your nose your makeup will fly all over the studio. But our makeup ladies do fine work. I don't look nearly as good in real life. LEY: The SportsCenter you see tonight looks and sounds nothing like the show we did 10 years ago and nothing like what you'll see in five years. The show is constantly adapting to the marketplace and TV technology.

JAY LEVY, senior coordinating producer, a.k.a. Graphics Guy: Highlights keep evolving. The new stuff comes from video games. Last year we did a new highlights thing with catch­ers' mitts, made them blink and glow to attract the eye. Ten years ago we would have used an arrow. The arrow evolved into a spot shadow—when the screen goes gray except for the player, mitt or race car you want people to watch. The new blinking effect doesn't have a name yet; call it a reverse spot shadow. WALSH: SportsCenter worked in the first place because there was no established model for it. In that way, it's like Jon Stewart's Daily Show, which also made up its own model.

Did you ever wonder why none of the networks could start a cable news outfit that worked? It's because they al­ready had a model: the network news­cast. It must be killing them that Com­edy Central created the next evolution of the news and that Stewart will be more influential than Walter Cronkite or Peter Jennings.

SportsCenter is now the model of its form, so maybe it's time to change. We've got no specific plan, but the show will evolve in light of the role the Internet plays in sports, the explosion of spoils talk radio, the way people gel blips of television from iPods, i'I lines and cell phones.

HIGHLIGHTS: PLAYS OF OUR DAYS

LEONARD: The tongue-in-cheek alti­tude so many of the anchors use? I brought that with me, but some of them are too cutesy. Keith was good at it. Dan too. I was in CNN's New York bureau when Dan got his first job in the big city. He was a peppy kid with a lot of pizzazz. BERMAN: One time in the early days I held an ESPN mike up to a ballplayer, and he said, "Oh yeah, ESPN—that's the Spanish station."

STEINER: I was lucky to get to ESPN when it was still a mom-and-pop store and to ride this unbelievable satellite into space. I run into young ballplayers, even not so young ones, who grew up with SportsCenter. When Mark Teixeira was a rookie, he said, "Mr. Steiner, I started watching you when 1 was seven."

I said, "Mark, it's lucky you're bigger, stronger, faster and younger, or I'd kick your ass."

COHN: What 1 love is that we're still sports fans. I was at the 2006 Super Bowl, sitting in the media section, root­ing for Seattle because I had spent some years there. An NFL representative said to me, "You're a bit too loud." So much for objectivity.

STEVE LEVY: To this day people come up and say, "You're the bulging-dick guy." And still no props from Mau­rice Hurst.

MAYNE: I can't listen to sports talk radio; there's a lot of hate mongering. "That guy sucks! The manager's an idiot." A lot of hating the athletes. We never did that.

I haven't done SportsCenter for two years. I don't miss getting home at 2:30 in the morning, and I don't miss the meetings about whether the Mets have improved their infield, but I miss the hour of live TV. That's a lively hour. SCOTT: 1 like tweaking perceptions. If a black player is on SportsCenter, I might say, "The guy's a gym rat." If he's a white player, I might say, "He's got a whole lot of athleticism," because it's always the other way around. One anchor who used to be here was calling a pass from Chris Mullin to another white guy to a black guy and said, "Mullin, he's a gym rat, over to so-and-so, another gym rat, to so-and-so and—whoa, there's some great natural ability!" I asked him how he knew the last guy wasn't a gym rat.

He wasn't being racist, just ignorant. But that's what racism is: ignorance. Another thing you hear is "He reminds me of a young so-and-so." If he's a white guy, he's always compared to another white guy. So I switch them. Inevitably you'll hear, "Adam Morrison is a young Larry Bird." Well, he also plays like Dale Davis. IsJ.J. Redick a young Mark Price? I don't know—Price could never move without tlu- ball like Redick. Why not a young Dennis Scott? It's subtle, but it can use some tweaking.

KILBORW: Of all my former shows, SjMirtsCenler is the only one I still watch. It's the best-produced show I've been on and arguably the most important pro­gram in television history. There's All in tlie Family, Monty Python and SportsCenter. Honorable mention to Fernwood 2Nite. ROBERTS: And the next time playboy does a SportsCenter story, I'm ready to do the cover.

SIGN-OFF: GOOD NIGHT, DAN. GOOD NIGHT, KEITH

OLBERMAOTST: After I left I'd be com­ing off tlie field at the World Series with a Fox microphone and wearing a Fox jacket, and a guy would yell, "ESPN!" I had a tough time dealing with it. Even now 10 people on the street a day will say to me, "Why'd you leave ESPN?" or "When are you going back?"

You get defensive. For a while I tried to explain. When I was in New York, I'd say, "Do you know where ESPN is? Take a left, drive two and a half hours and abandon all hope."

What changed it for me was talking with, of all people, Elizabeth Montgomery. [The sitcom actress starred as the nose-twitching witch Samantha on Bewitched.] She was a huge sports fan and knew me from my time in L.A. One day we were on the same flight from JFK to LAX, and while we talked ev­ery man on the flight came up to her and asked, "Could you do that nose thing?" Af­ter hours of this 1 said, "The next guy who asks I'm going to strangle with my bare hands." But she said, "Oh no, that's the highest compliment someone in our busi­ness can get. It means that something we said or did, even 10 or 20 years ago, stayed with that person. It means we've tran­scended lime." She paused and then said, "And if it's not that, they saw it on cable and we're gonna get a residuals check!"

That helped. I also realize that every dollar I've made since has been doubled by my being on ESPN. PATRICK: Keith made the best TV of anybody I ever worked with. If you have one symbiotic relationship like ours in a TV career, you're lucky. MSNBC may be as close to TV nirvana as it's going to get for him, but he does miss this place, begrudgingly.

I'm glad I'm still here. And our au­dience seems to be everywhere. I keep waiting for the day I'll go into the con­fessional and say, "Bless me, Father, for 1 have sinned," and hear the priest say, "Da-da-da, da-da-da!"

When you do sports 12 hours a day, five days a week, there are times when you need something else. At home I'll watch American Idol. Monster Garage, The Simpsons, Malcolm in the Middle. People find that amazing. "Hid you watch the game last night?" they want to know.

"No," I say, "I watched the highlights."