ON THE DL

Kenny Mayne Spends An Hour On the DL Talking ESPN, Mayne Street, Dancing, Belmont, & Books All While Going To The Local Landfill

If you ever wondered what an hour (literally one hour) of Kenny Mayne’s day was like, here you go.

We travel to and from his neighborhood landfill to deposit some big boxes he has to discard. We learn that the guy currently working at said landfill is pretty lax on the rules, including telling Kenny he can throw a

big box with styrofoam into the recycling. It turns out, the guy not working today is more of a stickler for the rules. We also nearly get pulled over -- so he thinks -- and discuss the cell phone laws and reckless driving.

And in between all that, we learn quite a bit about Kenny’s career at and before ESPN, his decision to do Dancing With the Stars, the Belmont, his book that came out last year and the second season of Mayne Street, which is starting up again on ESPN.com.

We start with Kenny’s current role at ESPN. He seems to be one of the few people at the WWL who can come and go as he pleases. He’s almost like a full-time freelancer.

“I have been fortunate. I’ve essentially carved some kind of job position that didn’t exist before. So yeah, I’m very lucky in that sense that I’m doing football and making up those stories, and horse racing that I love, and doing the Mayne Street internet show and the magazine interviews, so it barely sounds like a job. Other people are doing more important things than this, but I feel fortunate. At the same time, I wasn’t drawn out of a hat. I think I did some things to be able to get in that position.”

We discuss how his assignments work and if he pitches to the ESPN brass an idea for a segment or if someone there thinks of an idea that may be off beat and calls in Kenny as the off-beat guy to handle it.

“It evolved from a long time ago. I was probably doing the SportsCenters a little less conventionally than your next guy.
This is no criticism of anybody. Most people feel safer doing it conventionally. And I think I just get bored doing anything conventionally. It’s not to, at all, minimize what’s going on. I appreciate the athletes and the games and the meaning of it all, but we already have enough of that. So it was a good place for me to do it different.”

He tells the story when they decided to create the features we’ve grown accustomed to Kenny putting out. In Cincinnati seven or eight years ago he was working with Tom McCollum “two Cs, two Ls, U-M” and they decided to tell the players what to say to ensure it was funny. Thus the Mayne Event was born, which has now led to Mayne Street.

It’s ironic that Mayne was working with trash today because one of his many jobs before ESPN was working as a trash man. In fact after a few spots in local TV he spent some time assembling trash cans while he waited for ESPN to call him in for a job. Eventually they did, giving Kenny freelance work until hiring him full time.

We talk about his career path and if he was a guy who wanted to be in TV, wanted to be in sports, or both. In other words, how did he end up at ESPN? Was it just a perfect storm of interests?

“Coming out of school I didn’t have an interest in doing sports. I wanted to do straight news or documentaries. I think in my off time, people might be surprised, I follow more international events than what happened in the Marlins-Cubs game on a Tuesday night. Or maybe they wouldn’t be surprised, I don’t know.

“I think I just drifted toward, I don’t know if it’s the path of least resistance or what. But when I started doing local sports, I think while I still have an interest in the other stuff, it was like, ‘hey, I think I can do this.’ So I just started drifting toward ‘sportscaster guy’ and then that, as I got to ESPN, evolved into something less than truly covering the events.”

We talk about his tenure on SportsCenter and if he ever felt like he was becoming more of the highlight than the actual highlight itself. In other words, it wasn’t a home run until Kenny yelled Yahtzee! Did that generation of SC anchors change the show forever? And did he ever think he’d be more famous than Randall Cunningham?

We also discuss if people have to get him to get him. He doesn’t think his humor is so subtle that people won’t get it, but he admits that when coming up with some of the comedic bits he’s fine with the fact that people may not get the joke. Ironic that at this point Kenny stops the interview to avoid the law, so he thinks.

“I disagree that you always have to go to the widest audience. And now there is a police officer coming, hang on. I’m running from the law both with regard to the cardboard guy at the landfill and the ‘you can’t talk on a cell phone while driving.‘ It turns out it’s a house wife with a ski rack, it wasn’t a police officer. My eye sight is bad.”

Back to the question at hand.

“You have to always get the essentials out. You have to make sure you are correct on pronunciations and get the right statistics and all that stuff, but after that, I say let it rip and not worry about how somebody is going to take something or how you might be judged. If you constantly worry about whatever perceptions there are of you then you stop, you know, being you. You’re too guarded. So I’m generally one to (say), ‘okay what can I say right now that’s the most absurd thing.’ It’s a little bit like back how I conducted myself in fifth grade.”

We talk about how he seems to be the same person both on and off camera and how that differs from others in the business. Kenny points out that there is some suspension of reality when you put on makeup and stare into a TV camera, but he tries to be the same when he’s on air as off. He mentions that he’s noticed some of his colleagues at ESPN who are very funny off the air completely change to play it far safer on the air. He did not name names.

We talk about the old SC commercials and get some of his favorites. We also talk about the famous ‘It’s never iffy if it’s Griffey line’ and he explains that while taping that commercial the writers gave him some lines to use. He didn’t like the lines but wasn’t sure if they thought the lines were actually funny, or thought they were so bad it would make the commercial funny. So he lobbied to put his own lines in and the compromise was made to use some of each. That led to Kenny stepping

on the ‘iffy’ line by immediately saying ‘that blows’ in thinking they’d eliminate the line right then. But to his surprise, they kept it in, and thus, commercial hilarity was born.

We talk at length about his book, which came out last year, including some of the marketing campaigns used to target new media. He brings up the fact that projections for the book were far lower than he anticipated and he was disappointed with how low those expectations were.

“I was slightly, not slightly, greatly disappointed with how it all turned out. I was dead serious with the publishers when we had that big meeting talking about goals and what’s a good number -- I was like, ‘why can’t we sell like a million? There are three hundred million people in this country. You give me any group of 300 people in this country I bet you I could sell them one. So there you go, do the math, we’ve got a million sales.’ I was quite shy of that.”

Look, if you like Kenny Mayne you’ll like this book, so we talk about how the book came to be. Was he sitting around thinking there’s a book inside him somewhere or did a publisher come to him to do the book? It turns out, it’s the latter and he didn’t even want to write the book. But with his ESPN contract coming to an end and no sign that a new contract was going to be signed (obviously that worked out as he is still at ESPN) he thought the timing was right for the book.

We wonder if any book will work in this day and age. Even books that sell well, are they selling as much as they used to? Have we changed to an excerpt-laden nation? Are books like Kenny’s just to much darn reading for his audience?

Speaking of his audience, we move to Mayne Street which is starting it’s second season on ESPN.com. We talk about what he thought worked in the first season and what he thought didn’t work. We also discuss the angle of the show and if Mayne Event plays well because they are getting faces we know (Tom Brady, etc) to say these ridiculous lines and

play these roles, but Mayne Street didn’t play as well because the supporting cast were actors nobody had seen before. Kenny enjoyed working on the first season but admits that not everything is going to work from a comedy standpoint.

They’ve tried very hard not to fall into the trap of a regular sit-com. He acknowledges that people may not appreciate what they are trying to do on a sports site (give me my highlights not some comedy show) and also understands that not everyone is going to think it’s funny. He likens what he’s doing to movies by Christopher Guest, in that some find them hilarious and some find them weird and awkward. Good analogy.

“Any time you try something you’re going to get people who just think it was silly or think it was shallow. They’re going to have whatever their take is. And they could love something that I think is totally bogus. I guess that’s...free market.

“Really when you come down to it, and this is always true for anybody who has a job really in anything, except for freelancers who are always selling themselves, you really just have to impress one guy in a chair most often. The guy who keeps saying, ‘he’s still hired and he’s still making blank’ for whatever it is he does for a living, or she.”

We’re probably 40 minutes in and we haven’t gotten to the Dancing with the Stars. Does Kenny curl into the fetal position whenever he hears Hot Stuff? He gives us the full rundown of his week of professional ball room dancing (in fact he trained for much longer than a week). He rebukes the notion that he didn’t take it seriously, saying that if he had to teach someone how to play football he would start with throwing and catching, not the intricacies of the zone blitz. The dancing they were asked to do was much more advanced than he had wanted to do.

We talk about how he parlayed his one week into a recurring slot on the show doing DanceCenter spots during some shows. Not a bad gig if you

can get it. And others at ESPN want it. Both Mike Greenberg and Erin Andrews have now publicly lobbied to get on Dancing with the Stars. So who at ESPN would make the best dancer?

In his book he has a chapter on the Dancing which he outlines for us, where he went on Regis and Kelly after he and his partner were booted off the show and they were forced to dance. He said no, repeatedly, and almost left the set. When the producers finally relented, they were SET UP by the staff who assumed when the music started they would just play along. They did not. This led to a terribly awkward television moment.

Making a hard left turn, we talk about...left turns. Kenny loves the horses, and is working for ABC this weekend at the Belmont. We discuss the event and if the Belmont has lost luster in years where there isn’t a Triple Crown candidate. That said, Calvin Borel has a chance to win all three races as a jockey so how big a deal would THAT Triple Crown be? Mayne actually thinks the general sporting public makes more out of a Triple Crown winner than would actually be.

“The buildup is what’s exciting. It draws attention to that day, that race, the ratings. If someone actually pulls another one off soon, or whenever, it’s not like the following Sunday or Monday all of us are running to the race track and we have all these new, devoted fans. It’s just going to be a more interesting story for a week or two.”

Kenny handicaps the Belmont (you’re going to have to listen for his picks..nothing is free) and we talk about how the ease of gambling in other outlets has crushed the horse racing interest. In other words, online gambling and poker may have killed horse racing. I blame Norman Chad.

“The fact (is) people can avail themselves to other gambling and do it faster -- go to casinos and get dealt 100 blackjack hands an hour, or online gambling.

“Keep in mind, people make that point and they kind of forget that the NFL, as great as it is, I think it has even more attractiveness given that so many people are in fantasy football leagues and playing those kind of games, where I got a feeling there is a goodly amount of money being dispersed that way as well. Or the weekly pools picking games, I mean, when you have something in on it, it makes it a little more exciting.”

The long and winding road has come to an end, but not before we talk a little bit about Pearl Jam. Kenny is a huge Pearl Jam fan and we get his thoughts on the new album, new song and if this is a comeback or they never really left.

Obviously my great thanks for Kenny for taking so much time out of his day (and taking us along with him) to talk about things. He is indeed a gentleman.

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