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Reviewed by:
  • Those Guys Have All the Fun: Inside the World of ESPN
  • Troy Reeves
Those Guys Have All the Fun: Inside the World of ESPN. By James Andrew Miller and Tom Shales. New York: Back Bay Books (Little, Brown, and Company), 2011. 800 pp. Softbound, $17.99.

James Andrew Miller and Tom Shales collaborated in 2002 to write a history of NBC’s long-running late-night show, Saturday Night Live (SNL). In that work, they interviewed hundreds of men and women associated with SNL to serve as the backbone to the book. Eight years later (or nine, if one waited for the paperback), they re-created that model not just for a show but for an entire network with Those Guys Have All the Fun. According to the authors, they met with over 500 people—recording most, if not all of them on audio cassette—to fill 800 pages about “The Worldwide Leader in Sports.”

Breaking the book up into eight chapters, the authors give the sports junkie just about anything to satisfy his or her curiosity. Miller and Shales follow ESPN’s history from the initial idea in the late 1970s, through its growth in the 1980s and 1990s, to its acknowledged spot, by the 2000s, as the aforementioned “Worldwide Leader.” Stories abound about financial issues; leadership changes; office romances (although they gave more ink, and rightfully so, to the sexism and misogyny women have dealt with while on the “Bristol campus”); their produced shows, including SportsCenter and Pardon the Interruption; and the network’s live coverage of major (and minor) sporting events throughout the country and world. The co-authors did not limit their scope to those who worked for ESPN; they include excerpts from their discussions with stars of myriad major U.S. sports, as well as notable sports fans, such as President Obama.

Anyone interested in sports or television history, corporate America, or twentieth and twenty-first century U.S. pop culture will find someone to like in Those Guys. Miller and Shales, throughout the book, offer the ten reasons that ESPN ascended to “world dominance,” which help guide readers through the tome. The publishers provide an index to help readers cherry pick their way through sections important to them. They illustrate the book with a few pictures, not nearly enough; plus they put them all in one section in the middle, which seems so yesterday.

A good OHR book review should address this criterion: Is the piece being critiqued as an oral history work? Well, it is a sure sign of one’s self-inflated ego when he or she references a work of his or hers in a book review. It has taken the reviewer almost thirteen years as a professional oral historian and twenty years as an interviewer, but his ego has swelled to that point. In The Oral History Review 38:1, I reviewed The Simpsons: An Uncensored, Unauthorized History. In that review, I noted that the book did not meet our professional definition of oral history. (Two points to note: First, this reviewer claims no new ground here. Other book reviewers in the OHR, including Susan Davis and three colleagues [OHR 36:2 (Summer/Fall 2009)] who did a collaborative review [End Page 372] of David Isay’s Listening Is an Act of Love, discuss that criterion. As did John Wolford, Barb Sommer, Mary Kay Quinlan, and Sherna Gluck when they co-led a session at the 2010 OHA Annual Meeting in Denver, entitled, “What Is This Thing Called Oral History?” Second, for those new to oral history or the OHR, the 2000 Oral History Association Evaluation Guidelines defined oral history “as a method of gathering and preserving historical information through recorded interviews with participants in past events and ways of life.” The 2009 update of the Guidelines offers a deeper definition. See http://www.oralhistory.org/do-oral-history/principles-and-practices/).

I would argue similarly for Those Guys Have All the Fun: It also does not meet our professional definition of oral history. While Miller and Shales note in their acknowledgments that they recorded the interviews (on cassette at the behest of their transcriptionist), they mention nothing...

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