Wait, What…the bathroom…

…so meeting in the bathroom…

…hey just being accurate, it was in the 2nd floor bathroom in Building 1 (or possibly 3) Bob was adjusting his tie I was adjusting my…something else…and he looked into the mirror at me and said exactly this, “I hear we are going to be working on a story together,” I nodded my head, dried my hands and walked out the door thinking, “Who was that.”

I was new at ESPN, employee #000425 in 1993, I think. Bob was employee #0003 way back in 1979 (40 years @ the mothership) when I was in broadcast TV sort of looking at this thing called “cable” and predicting it had no shot of making it.

I also made the same prediction the first time I saw a little Japanese car called, Datsun, “No chance anyone is going to buy a Japanese car…”

I do as well at the slot machines.

That’s Bob being inducted into a Sports Hall Of Fame…

…I got to be his inductor/conductor/introducer into the hall, it was quite and honor to be asked so I said mainly nice things about him and he is hugging me and thanking me for not saying all the things I know about him in our quarter century of friendship/doing stories and adventures together including the time I almost got him shot by by a shotgun. I was telling him here how much he deserved to be inducted and that the red light on my Krispy Kreme app just came on so keep the speech short.

By the way Bob in a couple of weeks is being inducted in NYC into another sports Hall of Fame, he’s invited me to that special occasion as well but this time I don’t have to say anything nice about him in public….he did tie my shoes one time after my hip replacement surgery when I couldn’t bend down to do it…so the dude is really nice maybe 80/20 of the time.

This is his normal look my way…

…usually when I ask questions like, “Who did Derek Jeter play for,” or after sitting for an hour in an Outside The Lines production meeting next to whom I thought was our new intern only to find out the “intern” next to me whom I asked if he could get coffee or something was actually Tennis Star Roger Federer (who knew).

Bob and I have worked lots of stories together for Outside The Lines and Sportscenter, worked on all sorts of cheating in sports stories, crime in sports, illegal this and that over the years (I’m a bit vague because I’m not allowed to talk about the investigative stuff because while many of the people we did stories on did dumb things, some of them have guns and GPS).

I did take Bob fishing once on a big charter boat out in the Long Island Sound, my 2 favorite memories of that story are (1) seeing a submarine from the sub base come up out of nowhere in the water, and (2) watching someone offer Bob a beer on board the charter boat at 7am…priceless.

We may do some fishing adventures together, fly fishing maybe, maybe bass, or just give up now before we get all stuck up in our fingers with hooks and build a Koi pond out back.

So that’s both Bob as Bob Ley @ ESPN and Bob @ retired Bob now.

You good, you all caught up…

Good because look for our pretty cool almost excellent adventure story to go up about this time next week right in the time after your big turkey dinner and just before you fall asleep on your relative’s couch and everyone in the room takes a selfie with you and your mouth open and drooling and then puts it up for the world to see.

And this is how our adventure story begins…

“So Don how’s your wood…”

“…ummm.”