DEERSALT

Game On! The Rise And Fall Of Keith Olbermann at ESPN

Olbermann
Lack came to me no more than an hour before the first [night of ESPN2] and said, “Walsh doesn’t know what the fuck he’s doing.” Which was true, but it was not inclusive enough. What I meant to say to him was, “None of you know what the fuck you’re doing. I don’t know what the fuck I’m doing. I don’t know what I’m going to say in an hour.”

Mitch Albom
SportsNight contributor
The network began on a Friday night. We were sitting in the dark waiting for the lights to come up, and I remember thinking, “Wow, this is the start of a network. I’m part of history here.” And with that thought in mind, the lights come up and Keith Olbermann, wearing a leather coat, says, “Welcome to the end of my career.”

Michael Mandt
Production assistant
I was working the teleprompter for that first show, and I can tell you that first line of Keith’s was not on the prompter.

An excerpt from GQ’s excerpt of Those Guys Have All The Fun: Inside the World of ESPN, a new oral history about the network by James Andrew Miller and Tom Shales. Click here to read the full excerpt about Olbermann’s story tenure at ESPN. That great illustration, by the way, was done by Ward Sutton, and apparently Olbermann likes it too, because it is now his profile picture on Twitter.