The Sporting News With Olbermann and Patrick, SportsCenter...achieved the perfect pitch.

Autorentext

Keith Olbermann was rescued from a sinking barge, and raised by wild ocelots in the Brazilian rain forest. Years later, he was found by a touring band of would-be soccer play-by-play announcers and brought back to civilization (well, Bristol).

Klappentext

The former tag-team partners of ESPN's award-winning "SportsCenter" shares with readers a controversial list of should-be Baseball Hall of Famers; the pantheon of all-time greatest athletes; the dirt on each other; what superstars and the press really think about them; and much more in this eye-opening look behind the scenes at ESPN.

Zusammenfassung
From World Sports Headquarters in historic Bristol, Connecticut, comes the book that's more colorful than Dennis Rodman's hair. Keith Olbermann and Dan Patrick, the former tag-team partners of ESPN's award winning SportsCenter, mark for the ages their most unforgettable moments, which have transformed the art of sports broadcasting -- bringing what People magazine calls their "Letterman-like loopiness and Koppelesque smarts" to the printed page in THE BIG SHOW
Less expensive (and easier to read) than a big-leaguer's autograph, The Big Show gives you the honest, horrifying, yet always entertaining story of two men, three cameras, and highlights run amok, including:

• How Keith and Dan made The Big Show run slicker than Pat Riley's hair

• The origins of Dan and Keith's patented phrases

• Keith and Dan's on-air flubs -- errors that made Bill Buckner's blunder seem minor

• Dan and Keith's pantheon of all-time greatest athletes (Okay, who picked Coach Reeves from The White Shadow?)

• And so much more we couldn't -- and wouldn't dare -- mention here!

Leseprobe
Chapter 1
Hi, hello, and how are you?

Warm greetings and welcome to the Big Show book. Alongside my tag team partner Keith 0lbermann, I'm merely Dan Patrick.

You're right about that "merely" part -- and right at the outset here I think we should mention, Dan, that it's an amazing coincidence that you and I speak in different type styles.

Stop it. Just stop it. We have a very important question we have to answer right away. People kept asking us, "Dan and Keith, barometers of the sports world you may be. Stars of television and radio, sure. But what are you doing writing a book? What exactly is the Big Show book going to be about?"

"It's going to be about nine inches high by about four inches wide by about two hundred pages long," we tell them. "That's what the hell it's going to be about." Then we explain that we were selected for People magazine's "TVs 40 Most Fascinating Stars" in 1996 and we placed ninth in TV Guide's list of the top ten performers in all of television for 1995 and all the other guys on the list had already written a book -- Seinfeld, Oprah, Marcia Clark -- and we felt it was our turn to rake in some easy cash. I mean, John Tesh has even written some music.

Well, sort of.

Right. Sort of. Anyway, we thought we could convey our take on the world of sports, pass along that kind of behind-the-scenes stuff of what goes into the making of our show, tell our dreams and hopes and favorite ABBA songs, explain why I can't drive and why it's the New York Mets' fault, and -- "

And how I invented the word "Gone." People are always asking us where all these catchphrases came from. You know, "Gone" for a home run, "The Whiff," "En Fuego," "Nothing but the Bottom of the Net," and all the other good ones. And of course the ones Keith uses, too. The ones he steals from other people, usually me.

That's right. You invented everything. The whole English language.

"Gawwwwwn!" -- give me a break! In ABBA's megahit "Dancing Queen" there's that moment when these two great singing legends pause for a moment. You know. "And then you're...gone." As old as you are, Dan, I believe that song came out even before your brilliant career began. So what if they were just repeating sounds they had learned phonetically and didn't understand a stitch of English? They still said "Gone!" Nothing is new. Not in sportscasting. Not in Swedish disco music.

What's wrong with you? Where did all this ABBA stuff come from? This is supposed to be a book about our show. We're supposed to be explaining the show, and introducing the book, and why you'd want to buy it or read it or maybe just steal it. We're supposed to be talking about all the ballplayers we know and how I got to meet Bill Murray and how Dennis Rodman wanted to write one of our commercials for us. Instead it's microdetails from the career of ABBA. What's next? "99 Luft Balloons?" Have you lost your mind entirely?

Well, we have been working together for five years now.

Could we possibly get this back on track? Where was I before you ruined it? Oh yeah. People are always asking us what this book could possibly be about and I tell them it's an attempt to translate the idea that every night we go out there and have fun with the world of sports. We show the highlights and tell the news, of course, but we're there enjoying what we're presenting. And, of course, we're doing it almost completely ad-libbed and we're seeing the highlights just as you're seeing them and that lends a certain "without a net" quality to our show that seems to attract people like a magnet. And sure, we have an attitude, we criticize the bad trends and the show-offs and the greedy players and the greedy owners, but we're there to have fun, and that's what I tell them the book's going to be about.

Of course by this point they've either walked away or taken a swing at one of us.

Usually me.

Well, you look guiltier.

I do look guiltier. Why do you suppose that is? I mean, the number of times you say something really stupid on the show about a player or somebody and then I run into him at a game or somewhere and he blames me for it. Remember that thing with Bob Knight, the Indiana basketball coach? When you showed him grabbing one of his players by the shirt and you said, "At home with the Knight family?" Real good, Keith. I saw him on the road and I thought he was going to put a chair through my thorax.

My point is proved. And it's not like you always defend me or anything, bub. The awards night? When you went up to Eric Lindros of the Flyers at the ESPYs and told him I kept bashing him on the air about not playing every night and he should come over and threaten to kick my ass? I mean, what was the idea there? If he'd hit me, I would've been drooling the drool of regret out of my ear instead of my mouth. And anyway, it backfired. We wound up buddies.

Oh, and won't we hear about that in the pages to come! It'll be Eric Lindros this and Eric Lindros that and Eric Lindros told me and my new best friend Eric Lindros and on and on and on.

It'll be in chapter 6, dear reader. Anyway, jealousy does not become you, Dan. As ABBA sang, "If I had -- "

Enough with ABBA already! We've got a book to start here, and you're babbling on about four singers nobody remembers anymore. Next thing you'll be working the 1899 Cleveland Spiders baseball team into it or what Joe Magrane did in the 1987 World Series or who won the All American Football Conference title in 1946!

It is that kind of historical context that allows you the freedom to express yourself every night on The Big Show. If we don't know our stuff, all the goofiness doesn't matter one whit. And the same goes for the Big Show book. High good humor and satire, yes. Without a question. But if there's no knowledge, no awareness of the past still hovering around us like a shielding diaphanous cloud, we are lost -- and this book is used by some guy to even out that one short leg on his desk. Historical context. Para…