Playing Hurt by John Saunders & John U. Bacon

Author:John Saunders & John U. Bacon
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Da Capo Press
Published: 2017-08-08T04:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 20

The Worldwide Leader

I MIGHT NOT HAVE KNOWN HOW TO SPELL ESPN BEFORE I started working there, but I didn’t need much time to figure out I had arrived at the right spot at exactly the right time. I immediately started hosting SportsCenter, ESPN’s main franchise at the time. The next year ESPN got the rights to cover NFL games, so I joined that studio show. The year after that, 1988, ESPN added Major League Baseball, so I did that too. And in 1990 I became the first on-air talent to cross over from ESPN to ABC to host ABC’s College Football Saturday, which they wanted to restore to its previous luster.

ESPN in the early days provided the perfect environment to welcome a newcomer. The company was still small enough to have a family feeling, an intimate operation compared to the giant it is now. Most of us were pretty young, just starting families, and learning to behave like sensible adults. I never sensed much jealousy or competitiveness among the staffers. We all just wanted to put out a quality product and prove that we were working for a serious outfit—and that wasn’t a given in the late eighties, when the old guard saw us as little more than a toy store. Our main goal was to make sure ESPN looked as good on the air as the three-letter networks.

In 1988 ESPN’s executives put me on the Calgary Winter Olympics, ESPN’s first, and we got lucky: Calgary gave us the Jamaican bobsled team and Eddie the Eagle, the ski jumper who seemed to crash as often as he landed safely. Everything we did over those two weeks was new to us, and we shared in each other’s success. It was a great time to be at ESPN.

I was also forging lifelong friendships. I got to know Bob Ley when we hosted the NCAA basketball tournament together. Chris “Boomer” Berman and I partnered on the NFL studio show and NFL Primetime, and Tom Mees and I worked on the NHL telecasts. All three became close, trusted friends. We lost Tom in a drowning accident in 1996, which I still think about. Bob and Boomer remain two of my best friends to this day.

I have never been paired with a TV partner I couldn’t work with. I’ve been lucky to have formed some terrific teams in my thirty years at ESPN—Chris Berman on SportsCenter; Barry Melrose on hockey; Dick Vitale on college basketball; Leo Rautins on Toronto Raptors games; Tim Legler, Steven A. Smith, and Greg Anthony in our NBA studio; and Craig James, Jesse Palmer, Mack Brown, and Mark May on college football, to name a few.

All good friends, but no one was more important to me than James Thomas Valvano. America fell in love with Jimmy V. in 1983 when he led NC State past Houston for the NCAA title, one of the biggest upsets in NCAA history. Then he ran around the court frantically looking for players to hug. On ESPN and ABC he proved to be a natural entertainer and became an instant star.

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