Scott Harves has spent 25 years at ESPN and has worked on a variety of projects. His love of college football keeps him busy, often working on plays for College GameDay and College Football Live and sometimes taking him to Tallahassee for games. A few years ago, Harves spoke to some colleagues from the ACC network and the opportunity was too great to pass up.
“I just remember when I was looking at the list of ACC schools, I just had Charlie Ward at the top of my list,” Harves said. “It was almost like, ‘Have we really never done anything of this magnitude to Charlie before?’ So it was just always there.”
Harves became involved with the Ward documentary, read his book The Athlete, and watched every game of the 1992 Florida State football season, one at a time.
“It really gave me a good sense of what I think the casual viewer might take away from a documentary about Charlie, and that was a better understanding of where he was coming from,” Harves said. “That’s how it started and that’s how my thought process on a project started.”
“Twice As Nice: The Legend of Charlie Ward” debuts Monday at 7 p.m. on the ACC Network. The hour-long show features interviews with Ward and three of his coaches: quarterbacks coach Mark Richt, offense coordinator Brad Scott and basketball coach Pat Kennedy. Ward’s family members are also being questioned, as is full-back William Floyd and guard Sam Cassell. Harves said he and a videographer traveled from city to city in Florida and Georgia over the course of two weeks to conduct all but one of the interviews.
Harves served as director, editor and producer on the project. He dug deep into the ESPN archives for interviews with coaches Bobby Bowden and Ward. There’s also old video footage to add details from interviews, such as police escorts at the Orange Bowl for Ward. The quality and quantity of the interviews made it a challenge to edit it down to a 30-minute broadcast.
“When we started the project, it was supposed to be a half-hour short documentary,” Harves said. “And during editing. I spoke to a couple of our coordinating producers. I said, ‘I know we have more than half an hour.’ I just wasn’t sure if we had all the archive stuff we wanted to fill out. I edited the first 20 minutes and I think we put our heads together. I said, ‘Yeah, let’s do an hour.’ The stories people told us were great. We extended it from half an hour to an hour just because we felt the story was worth it.”
The documentary focuses on Ward’s football and basketball career and not just the 1993 season, when the quarterback threw for 3,032 yards and 27 touchdowns on his way to winning the Heisman Trophy and leading FSU to the national championship. (The Osceola took a look back at the origins of the fast break offense earlier this fall.) There’s also an appreciation for what Ward did in basketball, hanging up his cleats and quickly moving onto the court .
“Are we ever going to see a Heisman Trophy quarterback as a point guard on a team that makes the NCAA Elite Eight?” asks Harves, laughing. “I don’t know if we’ll ever see that again.”
Even after the documentary was stretched from under 30 minutes to just over 53 minutes, Harves admits there were still some good stories that hit the bottom of the editing room. But the project is one he’s proud of, and he believes Ward’s candor over the course of a three-hour seated interview, as well as the time of other interviewees, will resonate with fans.
“It’s really fun to work on a project where everyone you approach for an interview is like, ‘Oh, of course I’ll do that. Of course I’ll sit down and talk about Charlie.’ It really blew my mind how much people love Charlie,” Harves said. “It was hard work but it was so much fun working on this project because everyone loves Charlie.”
Comments are closed.