56 SPORTS ILLUSTRATED
hair and makeup. These anonymous operatives in the
production truck can make or break a broadcast.
And inside that community word travels fast. Within a
year and a half of his introduction to the EVS, Crane’s skills
were an open secret. He was a man in demand. “Michael had
an innate ability to see things,” says Bob (Rossi) Rosburg,
a longtime network sports producer who worked tennis
events with Crane in the 2000s, “and, more importantly,
to present them in meaningful ways.”
Crane’s dream of working at ESPN? Heck, he’d already
worked football and basketball games for the network.
Here he was, still in his mid-20s, and John Madden—
in the booth for Monday Night Football and in need of
quick highlights for his famed telestrator—was asking
for him by name. CBS hired him to freelance the NCAA
tournament. Golf Channel and Tennis Channel tried to
book him the same week. The Grizzlies’ broadcast team
enlisted his services, offering him a seat on their plane.
In April 2004, Crane worked a tennis tournament for
ESPN in Charleston, S.C. Before the week was over a
producer asked, “Do you speak French?”
“No,” Crane responded, perplexed. “Why?”
“Because you’re damn good, and we need you in Paris
next month to work the French Open.”
Later that summer NBC would send Crane to the
Athens Olympics, making for a blistering several weeks
of work. “It was nuts,” he recalls. “One minute it would
be water polo and the next it would be volleyball.” In part
because of his deft handiwork, the network’s coverage
at the Games received an Emmy.
Not yet 30, the self-described “Alabama kid” with a
hickory-basted drawl was “living the effing life,” he says,
making $700 a day before overtime and a per diem, and
working 250 days a year. “The only reason it wasn’t more,”
he says, “was because I had to turn down jobs.” He was
“making national pay,” he notes, “and, remember, I’m
living in Alabama.”
The dream came at a price. His marriage fell apart—
Crane was in Athens when he asked for a divorce—and
all the travel kept him from seeing his son and new
daughter as much as he’d like. Still, at his 10th high
school reunion he could regale classmates with stories
from the road, and he could afford to be quick in throw-
ing down his credit card when his colleagues repaired
to the bar at the end of a broadcast.
Like so many of his coworkers, Crane got a rush from
the job. If on-air announcers projected calm and author-
ity, the vibe in the truck was the exact opposite, a hive
of frenetic energy. It wasn’t simply that live sports are
unscripted, unchoreographed, subject to sudden change.
It was the knowledge that an audience of millions was
about to consume his work.
The stress and the exhilaration, though, were com-
pounded by erratic hours and erratic travel. Crane was
working at Wimbledon in 2004 when rain delays threw
off his work schedule. By the time the tournament endedhe had to f ly directly to the Great Outdoor Games in
Reno, eight time zones away, and hit the ground running.
“Twelve Red Bulls got me through it,” he says. “I was in
the truck bouncing off the walls.”
Eventually the natural highs of the job—to say nothing
of caffeine-and-taurine-propelled ones—gave way to dark
lows. Crane says he did his share of heavy drinking, but
cocaine quickly became his drug of choice. He developed
a sixth sense for where to find it, sussing out dealers
in hotel lobbies, strip
clubs and dive bars. More
times than he can recall
he would show up to work
after a sleepless night, still
high. “I don’t know,” he
says, “if I was hiding [my
use] well or not.”
To which coworkers say:
yes and no. Brad Douglas,
an EVS producer who
often worked alongside
Crane, including at that
2004 French Open, re-
members him showing up
late for a shift in Paris, his
eyes rimmed in red, two
Coca-Colas in one hand
and two bags of chips in
the other. Douglas recalls
thinking, Do what you
want in your downtime,
but when it affects the
broadcasts we’re going
to have a problem. And
that never happened. “I
couldn’t believe what he
was doing,” Douglas says.
“He could whip together 10
clips and make a highlight
package during a commer-
cial break. Audio? Perfect.
Timing? On the money.
Not one mistake. “You
had an uncomfortable
feeling that things could go south for him at any mo-
ment—but as far as his work, he was a savant.”¬ THIS IS WHAT “SOUTH” LOOKED
like for Michael Crane.
Around 4 p.m. on Sunday, April 1, 2007, he checked into
his room at the Augusta Holiday Inn on Gordon Highway,
on the west side of town. Then, with half a day to kill before
his first production shift, he went about scrounging up a
fix. He found a pair of local dealers and invited them back
to his room, where he quickly blew through $1,500 on coke
and crack. In Crane’s words: It was “an all-night party.”HOL
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