Straight talk about the Warren Sapp story

While I've been enjoying the beef between Billy and Warren Sapp over the past couple weeks, I think it's time to interject with a few facts.

First of all, we did not pay a single person for an interview for The U.  Plain and simple.  I know, because I sign the checks.  It's ridiculous to think otherwise because we interviewed 41 people for the documentary, including players, coaches, support staff and media.  The UM football fraternity is so small and connected that if we paid one, every single person would know within hours.

As outsiders, and especially after UM refused to cooperate, Billy and I had to hustle to book the interviews.  We could've asked for help from ESPN, but we wanted to do it ourselves and we thought that one guy would lead us to another.  The first guy I spoke to was Melvin Bratton and he became the first interview we shot.  Melvin gave us Alonzo Highsmith's number and we booked him.  I called Art Kehoe and we brought him to Miami to do his interview.  We linked up with Rosenhaus Sports and Drew, Robert Bailey and Danny Martoe helped us out, too.

Soon after we started, Evans began spearheading the interview bookings.  Of course Michael Irvin was always near the top of our list and Evans emailed his agent to arrange an interview.  The response came back with a request to be paid, which we declined.  We continued to shoot interviews in Spring 2009 and began hammering out a rough cut over the summer.

As we started refining the cut in September, we realized we'd have a more complete film with Irvin.  We finally asked our friends at ESPN to reach out to Michael about doing an interview, because at that time Irvin was working for ESPN, hosting a daily radio show in Dallas.

A couple weeks later, Irvin called Billy on a Sunday afternoon and they discussed the documentary, who we interviewed, what the perspective was, etc.  Irvin agreed to do the interview, ESPN arranged for it to be shot in Los Angeles at its studio, and Billy flew out and did the interview on October 29th.

Bottom line: we didn't pay Irvin for the interview.  

One more thought: I do know over the last couple weeks that a lot of people (Sapp, Irvin, Billy, Gino Torretta) have been interviewed on Sid Rosenberg's show, without being paid, to debate whether someone should get paid for interviews.  All I know is Sid got paid.