Dick Ebersol Talks New Autobiography, SNL, Vin Scully & More with Rich Eisen | Full Interview

Thank you very much. Do I get a Mercedes?

With you. Great. I'm at Notre Dame with Willie and my wife Susan, speaking to a couple of groups today. Just enjoying life and having no pressure, just seeing friends.

Well, for starters, the greatest football television producer who's ever walked the face of the earth, to require that they get Godelli. So that game last night was extra special because Fred Gaudelli was doing it, and Al was calling it. You know, and Al was pulling it. And Al likes Fred still, says tones in his ear. Of course he does.

Well, I was pretty far down the line already with John, and John's agent Sandy Montag is a master. And I never had any doubt I was going to be able to get him.

And we had a ball doing it together.

First, he wanted out. He didn't want to do it. He was only going to do play-by-play because I wanted him to do play-by-play. I think of Chris like his son. And he was ready to do it, but fortunately enough, John... my career and maybe more interestingly enough, how blessed I've been to have the life that I've had. Susie and Charlie, my oldest son, took me to lunch in New York about, I guess, three years ago and said, 'Enough already. You've sort of gone back and forth. You're going to write it, you're not going to write it. You've written a couple of chapters. You've got to do it. You've got to get somebody who you're really comfortable with to write it with you.' And I looked at Charlie, I said, 'Who?' And he said, 'Erin Cohen.' And Erin Cohn is an unbelievably talented young writer who had written Olympic openings, for example, for me for years, the ones that Bob would do, welcoming you to the nightly telecast and telling you the story of the stories that were about to unfold.

Fortunately for me, Roone Arledge, who was the most important sports television producer who ever walked the face of the earth. He's the one who pushed all of his young people, of which I was one, to be storytellers, never to have a telecast where you weren't prepared from the time you came on the air to set the stories of the people who were about to participate in the event that was almost ready to unfold as we came on the air.

Convince them they weren't race car fans, but I said I'd like to see the 24 Hours at Le Mans. The father of the household and his three sons, and I drove to Le Mans. And I think I was about 17 at the time, but I went off on my own. All I wanted to do was find the Wide World of Sports people. I did. I became a gopher: go for coffee, go for ice cream, go for cigarettes, you name it. And by the time that long weekend at Le Mans was over, they said to me, 'When you're back in the States, come into New York, meet Roone. But most importantly, we'll fix you up with some of the producers there, and for various events you can be a gopher.' And gopher expanded usually beyond going for cigarettes, coffee, and ice cream to being the guy who... that's why I was there as a foreign exchange student.

They were. When I came back to the States, I was finishing up at Yale. I had a year left. And every weekend I would get the car, a rent-a-car, drive to Kennedy most times, and fly to Europe and hook up usually with an event that Jim McKay was the lead announcer on. Jim is the father of storytelling in American sport. He was already a great newspaper storyteller, but I became the guy who would give him the... into his mind, it wouldn't sound like he was reading something.

Herb Schlosser ran NBC for a number of years, and he tried at one point to get me to be interested in being the head of NBC Sports. I was still a kid, and I was wise enough to know I couldn't compete against Roone first of all. I might know a little bit about producing, but I knew nothing about negotiating. And you can't be a success in television sports until you know how to acquire the event rights. If you don't have the rights, it doesn't matter how good you think you are or how good... Schlosser, having headed me into that NBC sort of attempt to get me to do sports, it led him to inquire whether or not I'd be interested in running NBC Sports. As I said, I really wasn't interested in doing that. But one day he threw in, 'Would you like to create a new late night show that we're there on Saturday nights?' And after about a week of thinking about it, I accepted it, dropped out of Yale. My parents were out west on the first long... pardon me. Oh, Johnny didn't want his reruns on Saturday night anymore, and that's why... Saturday Night Live. So Johnny didn't want his reruns on Saturday night. That time slot opens up, and you get offered the gig. He was trying to get down from five nights a week of doing a show to four nights a week of doing his show. And so it was sort of a free ball for me to find something. I roamed around comedy clubs in the United States and Canada looking at young comedy talent, wasn't really getting anywhere. And one day I was at a famous Hollywood manager's office, and out of a door came this young man, and he came over and introduced himself. He was Lorne Michaels. And he invited me to go to dinner, or first of all to see a comedy club in LA with him. We had dinner. When dinner was over, serendipity struck again. We went to the Polo Lounge of the Beverly Hills Hotel. I lived in the Beverly Hills Hotel. Enough. Roone was sitting there with his wife, Howard Cosell and his wife. I walked over. Roone stood up with open arms. I walked over. He gave me a huge hug, as did Howard, which was very rare. Howard was not a big hugger. And I sat with them for a while. I realized that Roone held no hard feelings of the fact that I'd left. And I just felt real comfortable from that point on about where I was with my life and what I wanted to do. And off I went, continuing to look for people with Lorne. And we found some other production people. Chevy originally we found as a writer, not as a performer, but he kept pushing Lorne that he had great ideas about stuff he could do on the show. Chevy had been pushing, pushing, warning me for this thing he wanted to do. And I thought it was nuts. Lorne was willing to try it. When all of a sudden Chevy took off in this driving rainstorm down the middle of Third Avenue, and he must have had some idea of what I'm about to tell you. He's probably 30 feet in front of us, and suddenly he kind of disappeared. And he'd fallen into, as we learned later, deliberately, this enormous pothole. He was sopping wet. He got out of the pothole, as I said, we're probably 30 or 40 feet away, turned back to us, took a bow. And Lorne looked at me and said, 'Now aren't you really willing to give a guy crazy enough to do that a break and let him do it on our show?' And I said yes. As the president of the United States, Gerald Ford, right? Gerald Ford was legitimately the best athlete who ever been president. That's right. That sort of evolved into kind of a joke. But we went to the White House, Lorne and I and Chevy and a couple of other people, to shoot show openings. 'Live from New York, it's Saturday Night.' Blah blah blah. 'I'm Gerald Ford and you're not.' And the ultimate irony is that if he finished his last thing that he had to record, which had been on a cue card, he started to walk away forgetting he was hooked up to the camera. He pulled the camera over and went flying all over the floor with a film camera. But we never showed that piece of tape because he was such a guy, we were not going to add to the falling mythology.

Well, after Lorne left the show, they gave it to somebody else, and that person did not have much luck. But she did hire Eddie. And when I got to Saturday Night Live about two months after he was hired, it took me about four seconds to realize he was about the most talented young person in comedy I had ever met. On top of it, he really could conceptualize all kinds of things. And with two writers who later wrote most of his movies, Blaustein and Sheffield, they began to write sketches for me. And almost every one of them were memorable, including... committing a big mistake here, but you're making my life really difficult. He said, 'Come on, Dick, this is really a good idea.' So, excuse me, I said yes. And the three of them, Blaustein, Sheffield, and Eddie, sat down, wrote 'The Assassination of Buckwheat' about two hours later. They're back in my office and they said, 'We got to do the follow-up.' And I said, 'What's the follow-up?' And they said, 'The Assassination of John David Stutts.' I said, 'Who's John David Stutts?' 'Well, he's the assassin.' You know, write down the three names. It couldn't be Jack Ruby or something like that. Only the only addition to that story is that about a day and a half before it aired, they came into my office and said, 'We've got a problem.' I said, 'What's the problem?' They said, 'We've been staging his character, but we... get out of here.' And they kind of realized their folly and they stopped doing that.

Yeah. Same year. I'm sitting at my desk, my assistant comes in and says, 'Fred Rogers is downstairs.' I said, 'Yeah, sure, sure.' Anyway, I finally said, 'Bring him up.' So he came up and he sat with me, and I think Bob Tischler, my co-producer at the time, and we heard him out. And he just said he thought it was sacrilege. And Mr. Rogers had this pure reputation and all that. And I said, 'Mr. Rogers, I can't just stop it. Let me take you down to the writers' offices and where Eddie is.' Oh, gosh. There alone, I figured particularly Eddie would romance the hell out of him anyway. A little while later, Mr. Rogers stopped by my office to say goodbye and said he was sorry it hadn't worked out. I quickly went back down the hall. I said, 'What the hell happened?' And he said, 'We tried everything, boss, but he just doesn't want it done.' I said, 'Well, we're doing it, but we just are not going to talk to Mr. Rogers anymore.' And sure enough, we introduced the character that weekend. It was a sensation. And since it was such a wet kiss to Mr. Rogers, nobody in the media or anywhere else ever said a word about it. I never heard from Fred again. Oh, my gosh.

I do. As soon as I got the job, it just struck me, having followed Scully for so many years and knowing him a little bit, I was sure I could convince him to come through the telecast with... within... and what was up? He just needed to be really comfortable. And he agreed to do the color to Vin's play-by-play, Reagan. And Reagan had already agreed to be party to it because I had taken Vin to... about two hours before air, I got a phone call that Vin was going to be late. So I went downstairs to wait for him, and they brought him into a waiting room under the stands behind home plate. And he said, 'I won't do my Reagan impersonation because it's terrible.' But he said, basically, 'Dick, I'm here only because I was able to persuade Mommy to let me come.' Talking about Nancy Reagan. He said, 'I had a fall.' Indeed, he had had a fall off of a horse the day before. But he did that telecast, and I don't think anybody out there saw anything lost. He was terrific for the two innings he was up there. And the only thing was unbelievable. The All-Star games in the previous years, immediately previous... obviously throughout all the years, having a moment that the country would love to see, and then it happens. To use your word, serendipity to the nth degree. I mean, you got Vin and Ronald Reagan and Bo Jackson homers off Rick Russell. I mean, that is unbelievable.

But then, if you've read my book, you know that good things just continued to happen for me. I've been... I've never said I didn't work hard, but I was blessed by good friends and almost always the ability to get into the room. I always say to people, the thing that matters most is being there. And I managed to get into the room, whether it was... GE, that owned NBC at the time, had always entrusted me with tens of millions of dollars to buy the rights, to hire somebody. And I just kept getting people and kept building the reputation of NBC Sports to a level that no sports department has ever been in since the halcyon days of ABC Sports.

Thanks for that. Will. Much love to your bride right back at you.