Book Review: Those Guys Have All the Fun: Inside the World of ESPN by James Andrew Miller and Tom Shales
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By James Andrew Miller and Tom Shales
Little, Brown; 784pp; $27.99
In 1980, as he entered the embittered-crank years of his dotage, Howard Cosell lamented that ours had become a "sick, sports-obsessed country." The founders of ESPN, then a wobbly year-old enterprise, must have heard this comment and thought, "From your mouth to God's ears, buddy." For in those days, the concept of a 24-hour sports channel, far from making perfect sense, seemed radical: an idea that could only have been dreamed up by ... well, a sick, sports-obsessed mind.