By Eli S. Evans, N+1 Magazine
A Review of Those Guys Have All the Fun: Inside the World of ESPN by James Andrew Miller and Tom Shales. Little, Brown, May 2011.
I would guess that nearly every American sports fan born between, say, 1940 and 1985 has some come-to-Jesus story about ESPN—one that ends with the network occupying the spiritual center of his or her personal sports and entertainment universe. In their new oral history of the network, James Miller and Tom Shales do their best to, as they put it, tell “the story of ESPN.” Those Guys Have All the Fun is structured as a sequence of artfully excerpted interviews with scores of the thousands of people who have worked at, with, or against ESPN during its more than thirty-year history. Divided by epoch into eight chapters, from “1978–1979” to “2009 and Beyond,” this story is, despite the book’s heft (745 pages, to be precise), simple and iconic: a classic rags-to-riches tale takes the reader from the boiling hot Mazda with a broken air conditioner where the father-and-son team of Scott and Bill Rasmussen cooked up the idea for a twenty-four-hour sports network to what Miller and Shales describe, repeatedly and almost rapturously, as “world dominance.”
By and large, Those Guys reads like a book about to be made into a movie. Crucial moments in the story—charging cable providers per subscriber, generating the highly coveted “dual revenue stream,” hiring veteran Rolling Stone editor (and legally blind albino) John Walsh to run SportsCenter, giving the program sturdier journalistic bones while its best anchors were coming into their improvisational and irreverent own—might not sound exhilarating, but by shrewdly arranging the interview excerpts into often tense dialogic relationships and always emphasizing the precariousness of ESPN’s maturation, Miller and Shales succeed in creating the sort of high-stakes conflicts that drive your typical Hollywood thrill ride. These conflicts are brought to life by an obligingly colorful cast of characters: not only the famously mercurial “talent” (in one particularly energetic moment, former college basketball coach and current ESPN analyst Bob Knight describes ESPN reporter Jeremy Schaap, whose father he once counted among his friends, as a “chicken**** little **********”), but also an even more motley group of insecure, bombastic, at times vitriolic misanthropes from the business and production side of things—men and women (but mostly just men) for whom no success seems sufficient unless accompanied by the failure of others.
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It was a great day to be a Buckeye. Josh Samuels, a junior from Cincinnati, dates his decision to attend Ohio State to Nov. 10, 2007, and the chill he felt when the band took the field during a football game against Illinois. “I looked over at my brother and I said, ‘I’m going here. There is nowhere else I’d rather be.’ ” (Even though Illinois won, 28-21.)
