Magic: The Gathering Drive to Work Podcast - #518: ESPN2

Episode Date: March 9, 2018

For many years, Magic was broadcast on ESPN2. This podcast looks back at that time and talks about the experience from behind the scenes.

I'm pulling out of my driveway. We all know what that means. It's time for another drive to work. Okay, so today's topic was a request from my blog. Somebody asked, wanted me to talk about ESPN2, which I'm going to. Okay, so for those that don't know, so ESPN is a sports channel. I assume you all know that. It's a pretty famous sports channel. But there are so many sports that they couldn't all fit on one channel. So, you know, the more popular sports go on ESPN. You know, your football, your baseball, your soccer, whatever.

But your slightly less popular sports, you know, fridge pulling or tractor racing or whatever, they had a second channel they called ESPN2. I don't even know if ESPN2 is still on. I assume it is. So anyway, there was a point in time where magic was on ESPN2. So today I'm going to talk a little bit about how that happened, about some stories about being on ESPN2, and just sort of fill you in on an aspect of magic that many of you might not know. Okay, so for this story, we're going back in time, back to 1997.

Okay, so a little setup for you. So 1996 was the start of the Pro Tour, I think February of 1996, in New York City at the Puck Building. February 1996 in New York City at the Puck Building. So what happened was Scaf Elias, one of the early playtefters, who was one of the East Coast playtefters that designed Antiquities. They did Ice Age and Alliances and Fallen Empires.

Scaf really came to believe that part of making the organized play system work is having an aspirational aspect to it. That you really want people, in order to sort of get people excited to play in stores, not for everybody, but for some people, that there's something to achieve. And so Scaf really had it in his mind

that he wanted to have a pro tour. So Scaf was kind of the creator of the pro tour. And I, when I first started at Wizards, because I started in October of 1995, this was already in motion, but they were still doing a lot of work on it. And I, at the time, because I was writing for the duelist, I wasn't allowed to compete in tournaments because I had advanced information. So I was doing a lot of running tournaments. I was doing a lot of judging and stuff.

And so I was really interested in organized play. And so I asked Scaf if I could be involved in doing the Pro Tour. So I was the liaison for R&D. I mean, Scaf was also an R&D. But I was the official R&D liaison to the Pro Tour. I mean, Scaf was also an R&D, but I was the official R&D liaison to the Pro Tour. In the first eight years, I went to all the Pro Tours, minus one, my daughter was born, but I went to all the Pro Tours, and one of the things that I tried to do was find a niche that made sense for me.

Well, one of the areas that I had a background in was communications. I actually went to school, a background in was communications. I actually went to school, got my BS in communications. I thought that was great. At good old Boston University College of Communications. And anyway, so one of the roles that I played was that I was in charge of, I was the producer for the video on the final day. Now, nowadays everything is streamed. That is not how we did things back the final day. Now, nowadays, everything is streamed. That is not how we did things back in the day.

The only thing that was, other than doing some interviews and stuff, the only thing that was recorded were the final, you know, the final day. We'd record the quarterfinals, the semifinals, and the finals. And I was in charge of coordinating. Early on, I actually did commentary

in the very, very beginning. We used to have a color commentator and a play-by-play. In the super early days, I did the play-by-play and then I would get a different pro player that didn't make the top eight to do the color.

So the first year and a half or so, I was doing the play-by-play. I was not amazing at the play-by-play. We decided that we could get people that were just stronger than me. And then I went on to just focus on producing. So I was both doing all the announcing stuff and producing. And it was just a lot of work. And I wasn't particularly great at the announcing part. So I started doing the producing. And my job was to coordinate things, to get the people who are going to be, usually the people that

did the play-by-play and the color, like the color coordinator was always somebody who was a pro player. Usually the play-by-play was also, ended up being pro players, but I had to get people that weren't actually playing in the tournament. There's a bunch of famous examples where like I was going to do something, but the person themselves made the top eight, so I had to get somebody else. Anyway, so one of the roles that I did is I played video producer. So anyway, we started in 1996. We realized a little bit into it. So in 1996, I have a whole podcast on, we made a video for the very first Pro Tour, Pro Tour New York. Go listen to that podcast. It was a crazy experience.

It's a funny story. I talked all about it. But anyway, we, since I was in charge of the video, we decided about a year in, year and a half in, that we wanted to get a little bit more exposure for Magic. So we ended up getting in talks with ESPN and ESPN said, you know, maybe the main channel isn't for you, but ESPN too, that's for you. And so we started recording shows. So I think the first show we recorded, if my memory serves, was in 1997, the World Championship in 1997.

Oh, and what happened was, in order to oversee this, we hired a guy. His first name was Brian. I don't remember his last name. But Brian was someone who had experience in Hollywood, who had, you know, had worked with, you know, had a little more experience interacting with networks and stuff like that. So Brian was there as sort of the liaison to sort of interact with ESPN and oversee the things. So like we went from a, the way that the video stuff worked in the beginning was we'd set up a video camera, we'd record it, and then we'd have the material that we saved,

but we didn't, once ESPN got involved, we started having a little bit more requirements, so we started sort of caring about a few more things. So what happened was Brian and I were working together, because I was the video producer, and Brian was the expertise in understanding, you know, video and video production, but he didn't have knowledge of, actually, it wasn't and video production, but he didn't have knowledge of, actually, it wasn't even video production. He was more about doing the interactions of the network stuff and getting us time in the booth and stuff like that. But he didn't know magic particularly well. So I was sort of the magic expert. And so he and I would work together.

of the magic expert. And so he and I would work together. He had more expertise in sort of putting a larger show together. And I had more expertise in filming magic and understanding magic and stuff. So the first ESPN2 show was 97 Worlds. And so what happened was we did a lot of prep. So for the first time, because we knew we were doing the show, we did a lot more interviewing. So one of the things about doing the show in general is you need to produce enough material to fill your space. I think our shows were half an hour, but it's possible that maybe some of them were an hour. I don't remember exactly. I do know that one of the challenges we had when doing the ESPN2 shows was trying to make sure that we had enough content. And the other thing we were really interested in is we wanted to have some more stories about the players themselves.

So one of the things we did is we did a lot more advanced interviews, you know, a lot more sitting people down. And we did more follow-up where we would go to their hometown and film them at their house. We did more things where we could get some B-roll, as they say. B-roll is industry talk for while somebody's talking about something, you can see pictures of people doing things. And so we try to get more, what are these people doing? You get a sense of who they were. So that required a lot more upfront preparation.

Like one of the things, if you remember my podcast about the very first New York, where we were making a videotape, we did do some interviews, we did do some prep work, but we didn't, it wasn't quite as organized as it needed to be. And so this was a lot more organized. See, one of the things I remember about the 97 World Championship was Brian came to me and said, OK, who do we need to interview?

And I had to make a list of people to interview. Now, a lot of people to interview were just the top players, former champions. A lot of us interviewing were, hey, this person won this pro tour or this previous US Nationals or whatever. People that had done something that we could do. this pro tour or this previous U.S. Nationals or whatever, people that had done something that we could do. But there was one person that I said, I want to interview this person because I thought they were an up-and-comer, a guy named Jakob Schlemmer. And it turned out that Jakob won the 97 World Championships.

So I was real happy that we actually interviewed ahead of time. Because one of the cool things when you interview people is you get people saying, like, you know, I'm going to win or sort you know, sort of like claiming victory or talking about what it means to them before they've won. And that's kind of cool footage to have. The other really cool little trivia about 97 Worlds is one of the things that we needed when we went on ESPN is we needed to have an on-air personality. So we hired somebody. So what we hired was a young man named Jeff Probst, who you might know as the guy from Survivor.

So this is pre-Survivor. This is before Survivor. Survivor happened a couple years later. And at the time, I think he was just doing freelance work, and he had done a bunch of work with ESPN. So I think they recommended him. Brian found him. I'm not sure.

And so what happened is he would come in, and then we would write scripts for him to read to do all the different stuff we needed to do. So I was in charge of all the script writing. Because once again, I had both the subject matter knowledge and I can write. So I was doing a lot of the script writing and writing for Jeff Probst. Now, as we did more ESPN shows, it wasn't always Jeff. We had different hosts and stuff. And over the time, different people did it.

But it is just funny that like a little... If anyone said, what does Jeff Probst have to do with magic? I'm not sure many people can answer that trivia question. what does Jeff Probst have to do with magic? I'm not sure many people can answer that trivia question. But anyway, so the way it worked is 97, 97, the World Championship was held in Seattle. So this is the point in time

where Wizards of the Coast had opened up retail stores. For a while, we had Wizards of the Coast, you know, game stores. And the, our big one was in the University District at University of Washington. There was a big area we had if you've ever seen the dragon Mitzi that's in our lobby.

Mitzi was made, the Shippen Dragon was made to go in this place. It was a giant store and one section was a store, one section was an arcade, and it had like battle tech, you could have battle tech pods, and it had a lot of arcade games. And then in the bottom was a giant area to play Magic, so the idea that we could run tournaments and things down there.

So the 97 Nationals, it's not Nationals, the 97 World Championships was held at the Wizard of the Coast store. Now, it turns out the store wasn't big enough to hold Nationals, so we rented some space nearby. But we did hold all the finals in the basement, and that turned out to have all sorts of problems. Probably the biggest problem is the ceiling wasn't all that high, and in order to shoot magic, you need things like what they call a jib. So there's a camera that's over the playing area that's shooting down so you can see the board. Because seeing the board is pretty, you know, seeing the battlefield is pretty important. And the jib usually goes up and you can sort of zoom in and stuff. And the ceiling was so low that we barely could get the jib above the thing,

above the table. So anyway, this was the World Championship where Jakub Schlemmer beat... Where did he beat? Janusz Kuhn, I think, in the finals. Is that right? Jakub was Czech Republic. Janusz was from Germany.

And it was... Oh, and this was the U. And it was... Oh, and this was the U.S. team won in 95 and won in 96. In 97, they didn't even make the finals. I think I told the story. I did a story on World Championships, so I think I told the story. But the real quick...

It's funny, it's a real quick story. The U.S. team was led by Justin Gary. They show up to play, and a lot of the teams had dressed alike and had, you know, had very sort of, had team shirts or shirts that were reflective of their country, and the U.S. team had nothing. And, you know, there's a lot of thought that the U.S. team, we ended up doing two shows, I believe. We did an individual show and we did a team show. And we really wanted the U.S. team... Brian, in particular, felt like the U.S. team just didn't look good.

So he sent out somebody to scour the city finding American flag shirts. And it took the good part of a day. Some poor person was running around trying to find shirts and they finally, finally found them in time to get them on the players and then the players didn't make the top four, so they didn't even make the finals. So anyway, we shoot. We're there. We do all the shooting we need to do.

There's a lot of filming complications based on the space we were shooting, which wasn't really suited for what we were doing. The ceiling was too low, it was kind of stuffy. The ventilation wasn't great. Ventilation is important when you're filming with lights because it gets real hot. So anyway, so we finished doing that. So I believe at the time, one of the things that I had done was once it was clear that I wasn't going to do commentary, I set out to find two people to do commentary that we could use most of the time. They were still pro players,

so there's still a chance that they would qualify, but it's not often you make top eight. So what I did is I went out and searched for two, for a play-by-play and a color commentator that I thought were good. And then I, I then, the idea was we would regularly use them. I'm trying to think for 97. One of the things that's hard here is lots of things blur. The team I ended up getting, and I'm not sure whether this team actually was formed by the 97, 97 worlds or not. My gut is they weren't.

But anyway, the two people that I ended up getting that did most of the ESPN2 shows was a guy named Brian Weissman and a guy named Chris Bakula. So Brian Weissman, for those that don't know, probably is most famous for... He was the first person that played a deck that had a name. Like right now, the idea of named archetype decks, you know, is just commonplace. But early Magic, while the internet existed, it was young, and the nature of how metagames were working in the early days of Magic were very city-centric. Like, I tell the story, for example, that when I lived in Los Angeles, obviously, before I came to work at Wizards.

And a bunch of us were making a trip up to San Francisco. There was a big tournament. And I had traded for a bunch of motes. Because I had heard rumors that you could trade motes for a lot up in San Francisco. And the reason was because of Brian Weissman. So Brian Weissman had made a deck called The Deck. That was the name of the deck. And it was a very early control deck, one of the first real control decks.

And Brian had figured out the concept of card advantage, which, once again, is a pretty basic idea. Card advantage, for those who don't know, is a gross oversimplification. Card advantage says that if I can have more cards than my opponent, either because I'm drawing more cards or because I'm using one card to get rid of multiple of their cards, I'm going to win, essentially. That if I have more cards, that's going to lead me to win. So Brian made a deck in which most of the cards were about

keeping the opponent from doing things and about gaining card advantage. And then I think the only win condition in the deck, I think, was a Sarah Angel, a couple Sarah Angels. He might have won secondary win condition. Like, I think he could mill people out because he had some card drawing that was directional. But anyway, Brian made this deck, became very famous for it, and in early Magic, did it like on the dojo, I think, and did a lot of writing about Magic early on, and did a lot for Magic theory. He then would start playing on the Pro Tour once the Pro Tour happened.

He played in the Invitational in Hong Kong, the very first Invitational. I think he also played in the Invitational in Rio. Brian had two top eights, if I remember correctly. the Invitational in Hong Kong, his very first Invitational. I think he also played in the Invitational in Rio. Brian had two top eights, if I remember correctly. Was a very good player. Actually, still a good friend of mine. And anyway, so Brian

was very knowledgeable, understood the game, talked well. So I made Brian the play-by-play guy. He had really, really good knowledge of the cards. And the other thing that Brian was really good about was seeing the board state and understanding

what the board state meant so that when he was doing the play-by-play, he wasn't just explaining what was happening, but he was explaining what could happen. There's a very famous match, which I think was also in ESPN too, which was at nationals, um, 98 nationals, I believe it was where, um, the finals was between, um, Mike Long and a guy, a kid named Matt Lindy.

Um, and it is, once again, I think I've talked about it before, but I make a lot of these podcasts. It was what I consider to be one of the most exciting, if not the most exciting finals ever. A big part was we had the audience there and that Brian and Chris were doing such a good job of explaining what was going on. The short version is Mike Long was playing Prosperous Bloom. Oh, was this 96?

Let me think about this. If he was playing Prosperous Bloom. Oh, was this 96? Let me think about this. If he was playing Prosperous Bloom, maybe this was 96, could that be right? No, no, no, but 96 Nationals was not that. Maybe it was 97 Nationals? Anyway, he was playing Prosperous Bloom, and his opponent, basically what happened was he had the game locked up, but he had to let his guard down for one moment and there was one card in the opponent's deck that if

Matt Lindy had this one card at this one moment, you know, Mike was going to win other than this one opportunity, that Mike had to let his guard down for one second to do something. And if his opponent understood the vulnerability and had the card, Mike was going to lose. And I believe this was in a game where, like, if Mike won, he won. He was the national champion. And for those who don't know Mike Long, Mike Long was the classic heel of the game.

He was the player that everyone loved to hate. So Mike Long becoming the U.S. national Champion, oh no, that can't happen. Um, and, uh, he had gone 14-0, and then the final, or he'd gone 13-0, and the final match, if you remember, it's the famous, uh, cadaver's bloom in the lap thing, where he was missing a card, and someone found him in his lap, and was he cheating, was he not cheating, and anyway, he ended up, he ended up, he went 13-0. I think he lost that last game. He wasn't disqualified, but he lost the match.

And then went into the finals. And everybody was all up in arms. They're always up in arms about Matt, about Mike. But even more so, and Mike made it all the way to the finals. And this was like the moment that mattered. And the thing that Chris and Brian had done really well was they set up that this is the moment so that everybody understood that if it happened here and now. And anyway, Matt

Lindy did have the card he needed. He did know to cast it. He did cast it. And they were playing in a closed studio two, three football fields away, like far away. And the audience screamed so loudly when Lindy, I forget whether he had it or drew it or whatever, but when it was clear that he had it, they yelled so loudly that Mike knew that Matt had the card. I mean, it didn't change things. knew that Matt had the card. I mean, it didn't change things, but anyway,

the reason I took that one just because it was an exciting moment is a lot of what made that moment so exciting was the commentary. That the audience understood the relevance of the moment. It's something that Chris and Brian did really well. Brian especially. I mean, Brian's specialty

was understanding the cards and looking forward and sort of understanding game states. Chris, Chris Bakula, Chris is also a longtime pro player. Chris has three top eights to his resume, almost had a fourth. fourth. The famous story with Chris is he was playing in a team pro tour, had the win on the table, and then had a little mind bubble. Just made a slight wrong play where he was going to go to the finals. He just missed something that was there.

It's one of those things where he had planned something ahead of time and then his opponent did something he didn't expect and then he forgot. He started with, because he had planned ahead, he forgot another route that was sitting in front of him. And there's a lot of talk that the reason Chris hasn't made it in the Hall of Fame yet is that he has three top eights and not four top eights.

And Chris really, really wants to make it to the Hall of Fame. There's a lot of talk of that one mistake is the mistake that has really wants to make the Hall of Fame. There's a lot of talk of, like, that one mistake is, like, the mistake that has cost him so far the Hall of Fame. So anyway, the one thing about Chris you need to understand is that Chris is a storyteller. Chris is one of the funniest people I've ever met. One of my favorite things is after Pro Tours and stuff, people would sit around, and Chris would just tell the most amazing stories. I mean, it was really funny. But Chris was also a really strong player.

Obviously, he was playing these tournaments. So I decided to try Chris out at the Color Commentary. So the first time he did Color Commentary was the Pro Tour that... the Pro Tour that it was a Pro Tour in Los Angeles that Price, Dave Price won. It was a Tempest-only tournament. So that must have been...

Okay, so now that I'm piecing this together, I don't think 97 Worlds, the two of them were the commentary. I might have been using Brian at that point, but I wasn't using Chris yet. Because Chris' first color commentary was at, and that must have been 98. The second or third Los Angeles. The one with Tempest in it. So it must have been 98, because Tempest came out in 98.

Oh no, Tempest came out in 98. Oh, no, Tempest came out in 97? Anyway, I'm pretty sure it was in 98 that that happened. Okay, but anyway, Chris was a storyteller. Chris was really funny. I tried him out, and just people were laughing. You know what I'm saying? Chris was not only good at covering the game and explaining what was going on

and getting the mindset of the people, because the color person really is giving expertise and sort of also explaining the context for what the players are going through and stuff. But the two of them were an amazing team. I mean, we've had other really, really good teams. They're my personally

favorite team. So we were doing the ESPN two shows. I would bring them to the booth. So no matter who actually did the commentary at live at the thing, I normally would bring them out. So the way it worked was that

although we did commentary live, because we had to edit the stuff, the live commentary often wasn't working only because live commentary assumes people have been listening consecutively to what you're saying. Where what we did when we shot the ESPN two shows is we were cutting out stuff because we were just getting to the meat of what was going on. Live is like, oh, if somebody thinks for

a minute, they think for a minute. But on the ESPN show, we don't show them thinking. We don't, you know, it's just action, action, action, action, because we want to get as much gameplay. And usually we get multiple games and not just one game. And so part of us doing that is we're cutting, we're cutting out kind of the downtime or even the time in which sometimes in games nothing really happens for a while so we would sometimes come into the game when the exciting part happened or you know we normally would let you watch the end of the game we wouldn't like start the game and not watch the end but we wouldn't always start at the beginning and sometimes we'd if the middle section like

nothing really happened we'd cut that and then what we did is we would shoot the commentary in the booth, partly because I would write text for them. And we had... Early on, we used to do coverage, like have Jeff Probst and people do what we call stand-up lines, where they would be live saying things. And then eventually we transitioned, instead of hiring talent from outside that we would use magic players.

So in fact, now that I think about it, the 97 commentary, like we had people like Jeff doing the stand up and then he would come in the booth and do the read over. But once we shifted away from that and more had our own people doing it, Chris and Brian and Chris were doing most of the commentary so we would fly them out to New York, which is where we would shoot at, and bring them into the booth. And so the one thing I remember is when we would fly out to New York

for some reason the Waldorf Astoria, which is a super fancy hotel in New York was right near where ESPN studios were or whatever. And so we would always... We'd stay at the Waldorf. I always thought it was funny. And then we would go in the booth. And the booth was this cool thing where...

The way it would work is... We would figure it out ahead of time. I would spend a lot of time... Brian and I would spend a lot of time looking through all the footage and figuring out what was interesting. And then I would spend a lot of time, Brian and I would spend a lot of time looking through all the footage and figuring out what was interesting. And then I would make a sheet basically where I would say, okay, so all the tapes, the way that video editing works is you burn a time code into the tape. And so I could say, oh, and remember there are multiple cameras, but I would usually just stay with the overhead camera.

The way the time code works is when you shoot something in which there's multiple cameras, you burn a time code into all the shots. And the reason that's so important is when you go to edit, you can bring up all the different shots at once that are locked together because of the time code. And then when you're editing, you could pick where you want to go. So what I would do ahead of time was I would watch just the overhead shot because I'm watching the game. And I would monitor all the things that are going on in the game to say, oh, well, here's what we need to show. And then I would make a rough estimate based on how long we had

of how much we're going to show. So I don't remember exactly. I think our early shows were an hour. At some point they became half an hour. And what I would do is we would allocate some amount of time for interviews and a little of the history of the players and stuff, and then most of the time we were trying to show the gameplay. And ahead of time what I would do is I would then say,

oh, okay, we're going to show game one and then we always would show the finals. The finals were absolute. We would show the semi-finals and or quarter-finals if for some reason the finals didn't take up enough time. What we prefer to do if the finals were exciting is just show all the games in the finals. But sometimes if there were runaway games where like one player just got mana screwed or something, something in which

it's not an interesting game, we wouldn't show those games. And then we would I mean, we always would show the final game where somebody won. And then what would happen is I would craft that. So I would craft, I would cut down and sort of have a working model of what we wanted to edit, of what the things were. And then what would happen is I would craft that. So I would craft, I would cut down and sort of have a working model of what we wanted to edit, of what the things were.

And then I would write the scripts of the intro and stuff. And that is, what would happen is, you know, Brian, of course, usually Brian would do the lead in, would be, welcome to Grand Prix whatever, or Pro Tour whatever, and we're here doing this, and here's what's going on. And then what we'd have is we'd have scripts that would explain the context of the game up to that point. Now, the way the scripts would work is I would write, I tended to bullet point stuff.

I would write all the text for the intro and stuff, but when we were trying to sort of get people up to speed, I would just do the bullet points and give the bullet points to Brian. And then he would say, okay, and then he would make up so it sounded smooth and stuff. And then what would happen is we would recreate the play-by-play and color commentary

to match what you're watching. And the reason that was important was that when you're actually doing commentary in a real event, you assume the audience has been watching the whole time. So you'll say things like, he did this again, or I hope he learns his lesson, or whatever. You'll make references to things before. Or if you explain something once, you don't explain it again. But when we're shooting the show, look, if this is the first time the audience sees something, we need the color people, the commentators, saying what's going on. And so we had to do fresh commentary.

So what would happen is, usually there were two segments. First is, we would have to do an editing segment where we would edit and we'd take my rough breakdown and then sit with an editor with all the cameras and then figure out, okay, when do we need to show the battlefield? When do we need to show the player? You know, where's the action? And then we could cut it. When you shoot live video footage, usually use three or four cameras.

I think we had four cameras, so we had one overhead and the other three. But anyway, you usually use three or four cameras, and then you can edit them all together. So we would edit it first, then we would go back and record all the commentary. Because knowing what the shots were sometimes, when we would do commentary,

what would happen is these two editing things would happen at different times, usually. Sometimes we'd come in early and edit it, and then we'd fly in the commentators for like day two or day three. But what happened is we'd watch the edited footage

when we were doing the commentary so that we could, like for example, let's say we have a shot where we see someone, the board, then we see their hand, then we see their face, and they have a grimace or whatever. The commentators might make a comment about what they're thinking, because the audience is seeing the player. So we would sort of customize the commentary to also match what was going on.

So anyway, we would film that, and then it would air. Now, we were not high on the totem pole at ESPN. You know, I mean, even for ESPN2, the funny thing is now esports are a thing, right? The idea of games as sports really has made a made made a major leap since but at the time just getting people to admit that we were even sports like with hard i mean espn2 if you've seen the stuff on espn2 i mean they're they were more than happy to let us be on espn2 um but our time slots weren't great um one of the things that we had to do was we would tell people when we were on like sometimes we'd have slots're like, we're on at one in the morning. Like we'd be on like 10 p.m. on the west coast, but 1 a.m. on the east coast. So we would let people know when we

were on so they could, you know, record it. They could that era went on for three years or so. Um, I know the 1999 World Championship was on ESPN2. Um, the reason I know that is I really, really wanted Chris and, um, Brian and Chris to do the commentary, but Chris, for work reasons, I think, couldn't come. It was in Japan. It was in Yokohama. But I really, really wanted Chris to do commentary. So we flew Chris

in just to do commentary. So he wasn't there for all the earlier days. But essentially, he had the weekend off. So, like, I think he finished with work, went to the airport, flew, came in, did commentary, then flew back. And he was exhausted,

because it's at different times. And Japan is a mega different time. He lives in New York, or at the time he lived in New York. So we're talking, I mean, 12 hours or something. Or maybe even more than that. Just, when he's asleep, he's awake. When he's awake, he's asleep. That kind of thing.

And that was a 1999 World Championship was the one with Kaibuda, where Kaibuda won for the first time. Kaibuda sort of emerged on the Pro Tour scene. He beat Marc Lepine, I believe, in the finals. And the problem with that finals

was that Kai won so quickly that we showing every piece of footage from every game, we couldn't fill up the time. And we ended up having to put, I think, the semifinals on. And that's one of the problems sometimes. The reason we would shoot, well, A, because we like to have the quarters and semis, but we always needed a backup for it. And a lot of the tricky things about the way the ESPN2 show worked was we didn't film every,

I mean, we always filmed with the finals, but as far as what quarterfinals to film or what semifinals to film, I was always juggling trying to show things because I wanted the audience to see all the different matches going on. And sometimes the matches would finish off camera. When I had the luxury, I would make sure they finished on camera, but sometimes we were pressed for time, especially with the quarterfinals, that wasn't always able to happen. Because if in order for me to show

you the final game, and know I'm showing you the final game, once somebody's one game away from winning, I can't let them play off camera, or else they might, that person might win, and there's a really famous example. This wasn't ESPN2 show, but when we did the,

the team finals in Washington, DC, the very first one, the one you, you, you, you, your move games one,

Dave Humphries, Dave Humphries, Darren Castle and Rob Doherty, all of which are in the hall of fame. When they won, I believe the game got won off-camera because I was filming one game and somebody won in a different place. And, like, the winners won off-camera, which is horrible.

And, anyway. But, so the ESPN2 shows went on for three years, three, four years. I mean, one of the nice things about it was it was kind of cool to produce a professional show. One of my favorite things about it was that it is neat. Like, I loved going to the booth and doing the editing and doing all the voiceovers. And that was just a lot of fun. One of the things that's interesting is when I first got this job, you know, like I went to school and studied, like I said, broadcast and film. And when I first took this job, I was like, oh, well, I guess a lot of, you know, I guess I'm going a different

path in life. And I learned a lot of stuff in college. And I guess a lot of that just won't end up getting used. And so it's kind of funny, like all my video production, like I did, I took a lot of classes of video production. All of them like actually got used, actually meant something. So it's, it is surprising how when you learn things, how you find ways to use your skills. And I've used a surprising amount of my communication skills being that I'm not, you know, working in Hollywood. And so this was, this was kind of the most, the ESPN2, that little era, was kind of the most

in some of my field of study of doing professional sort of video production stuff. Now, I don't know what ESPN2 stuff is available. I mean, it's professionally done, so somewhere it must be. It's the kind of thing that's fun to go back and watch. We, at the time, were really torn between how much do we aim it at someone who doesn't know magic, and how much do we aim it at someone that does know magic?

Because we didn't want to be completely unfathomable to somebody who just didn't know the game, but we also didn't want to be boring for someone who did and so we were constantly trying to find a balance there we did a lot of explanatory stuff we would have segments where we explained basic magic

what we found over time over the three or four years was we started erring more toward assume people know what's going on rather than always explain everything because what we found was even for people that didn't know what was going on, that it just, it was kind of more fun if they just assumed you did and you kind of picked it up rather than us sort of just explain everything all the time.

I mean, we definitely had the commentators explain situationally what was happening, but we had a little bit less of, like early ones would explain the rules of magic. And we found that was just kind of useless. And it was more like, well, explain the context of what's going on, but let people sort of pick it up. But anyway, guys, hopefully that was, today was a rambly day, but just a bunch of stuff that maybe you hadn't heard about. So that is ESPN2.

So anyway, I hope you guys enjoyed today's podcast. Like I say, I always take requests. My blog's the best place, but Twitter you also tell me. If there's things you want me to talk about that you know I know that I haven't talked about in the 500 plus podcasts I've done, I'm happy to take requests. So anyway, so whoever suggested this to Tumblr, thank you. And that, my friends, is ESPN2.

But I'm now at Wizards. So you know what that means? It means it's the end of my drive to work. So instead of talking magic, it's time for me to be making magic. See you guys next time.