You suspend -- no, let's be exact about this, I suspended -- the whole human part of the equation. It never occurred to me that most of the problems were the result of mere events. Even the chaos that surrounded the entire launch of the experimental show "SportsNight" was merely the inevitable result of the fact that it was experimental.

And it never, ever occurred to me that if it failed, I wouldn't be found out, fired, banished, finished.

The oddest thing about all this, is that even when I left -- and in six weeks I will have been gone longer than I was there -- executives like Walsh and Howard Katz underscored that I was welcome to return at some distant future date, despite all the Sturm und Drang. And, man, I was usually producing both the Sturm and the Drang. Months later, Katz even approached me about contributing to ESPN Classic, shortly after the company had bought that network.

Of course, I could not know that the major bone of contention, the veritable sixth lumbar vertebra of contention, still awaited: Freeman's book. I should herein point out that none of this should reflect on Mike: He did an exhaustively thorough job, and more to this point, he didn't misquote me, not once, nor did he use anything I said out of context. Nor did he cajole or sweet-talk me into discussing topics I didn't want to discuss. Also, this isn't some kind of loudspeaker confession from George Orwell's "1984." I'm not going to renounce most of my criticisms of the place. I did not consort with Goldstein. I don't think I was wrong on the issues -- I think my methodology was wrong. Outstandingly wrong.

My answers to Freeman constituted the ultimate act of somebody who lived in terror of being blamed. After I left for NBC in 1997, I was unprepared for a question I would literally hear daily -- on the street, at events, even on the air on MSNBC: "Why'd you leave 'SportsCenter'?" If you make a decision in your life, even one as eminently logical and self-improving as "Why'd you start washing your hair every day?" and you start getting questioned hourly about it, you're going to start second-guessing yourself. I eventually got up to about my millionth guess.

So. The logic was impeccable. To answer that question, I couldn't take the blame (responsibility) for the disaster (career growth) about which I was being persecuted (sympathetically asked about). Why did I leave "SportsCenter"? Obviously, because it was a medieval torture chamber (fairly typical television workplace providing a high level of ego gratification and creative freedom).

There's a lot in Freeman's book that I regret. I won't inundate you with details, but a few require specificity. Referring to ESPN's executives, I told Freeman that "other than Steve Anderson, I don't think any of them are any good." Well, that was ridiculous then and it is ridiculous now. Without even judging how good they were, just to keep a monolith like ESPN on the air every day requires as many good executives as they have at NORAD.

As suggested earlier, I don't regret my stances on the work environment there, but to say that some actions management took were merely "covering their ass legally" was to subtract the humanity from the equation. It never dawned on me that some of these guys had been thrown in at the deep end of the pool, or would have to expose, prosecute and fire friends and colleagues who themselves had done things that until a decade before had been standard operating procedure at every corporation in America.

I now read with horror of my ESPN2 co-host, Ms. Kolber, sequestering herself in the women's bathroom and weeping over how I treated her. She told Freeman that as things deteriorated, I wouldn't talk to her. She's wrong: I couldn't talk to her. I pumped up some small-scale complaints into a scenario in which she was at fault for everything ESPN2 hadn't become. I wasn't completely obtuse back then, and if anything would have cut through my neuroses, it would've been a colleague's tears. If I had known, I think I could've jumped over the fence I'd built around myself and said what the inner guy always knew: No TV show is worth crying over. Suzy: I'm sorry.

There are lots of little gratuitous shots in there that also reflect an insensibility to parts of reality. I get queasy at all of them, but one stands out as representative. Freeman accurately quotes me as complaining about how a labor-intensive participatory field piece I did in 1996 about what the first-base coach does and says during a game, got little airtime. A year later, ESPN ran a similar piece in which the coaches of the Anaheim Angels wore microphones. I complained to the relevant coordinating producer, Jeff Schneider, and he replied that the new ESPN-Disney-Angels connection explained why one piece ran and the other didn't. It is almost certain that Schneider was joking, or tweaking me, or, most probably, protecting me from a fact I could never have admitted to myself or have survived hearing from him or anybody else: My coaching piece just wasn't that good.

Several ESPN folks suggested to Freeman that I was trying deliberately to violate the rules -- appearing on other networks and writing for publications without notifying them just to tweak management. That was almost right on the money. But it wasn't as simple as merely trying to annoy ESPN or John Walsh or whoever else. It was me trying to give myself an excuse to get out from under the pressure of working in an environment of my own creation in which I daily expected the blame ax to fall. It was prepackaged sour grapes.

Oddly, I did figure some of this out then, which is why, even after we'd finalized my departure I went back and proposed to them that I do one show a week. That really was instinct cutting through all of these neuroses. That was, should've been, and remains my ideal TV schedule: one or two days a week, and the other five or six to remember that I'm not going to be blamed for everything by anybody -- even myself.

So, I'm sorry. It should have been done differently. It wasn't. Then again, I'm only finding out now about that extra vertebra and the extra steps I have to take to learn how to be, well, flexible.

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