Next week, excerpts from the long-awaited ESPN oral history Those Guys Have All The Fun will start trickling out, including one next week when the June issue of GQ drops. There are a lot of very nervous people in Bristol right now, and if the following passage is any indication of the book's contents, they have good reason. It's a brief snippet about some ESPN executives', erm, unique extracurricular activities, and it appeared in an early version of Those Guys but was later excised.
Our tipster typed up the section and printed it out, with names redacted to protect the guilty (for now). We don't know who the speaker is.
It reads:
You hear about the "Rug Races?" Well, [redacted] had this place near [redacted] and we used to go out there for meetings a couple times a year. There was a lot of drinking that went on there, a ton of drinking. [Redacted] and his buddies apparently called these hookers and in front of [redacted], he got them to lie naked on the floor on their backs with their legs spread and apparently [redacted] and one of his buddies kneeled down naked in front of them and just started licking them and sort of like pushing them along the floor, with their tongues in the girls' crotches
Can you get chlamydia on your face? Yeesh. Again: We don't know who's doing the talking here; we don't know the context; and we don't know the names of the executives (yet), though our tipster tells us that some of the Rug Racers still work for ESPN. We did get Miller on the phone, though, and while he wouldn't give us any names or additional details, he did acknowledge that the quote appeared in the original manuscript. He said it was removed along with 350 pages in all. (The final version checks in at 784 pages.) We haven't seen the book yet, but considering what Miller and Shales got SNL people to spill in Live From New york, it's probably safe to there will be no shortage of the seedy stuff.
Those Guys hits stores on May 24; we'll have more of these deleted sections in the coming weeks. Some of the items will surprise you. But if you have followed any of our coverage of ESPN over the years, most of it will not.