Those Guys Have All the Fun - James Andrew Miller [0]
ALL THE FUN
INSIDE THE WORLD OF ESPN
JAMES ANDREW MILLER
AND TOM SHALES
LITTLE, BROWN AND COMPANY
New York Boston London
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Table of Contents
Photo Insert
Copyright Page
For Elizabeth Miller (1959–2010)
with love
“To love what you do and feel that it matters—how could anything be more fun?”
—Katharine Graham
Introduction
It is the 27th day of August 2009, and a happy horde has gathered in remote Bristol, Connecticut, to celebrate—with equal parts sentimentality and pride—the thirtieth birthday of a television network. Not many broadcasting companies inspire this level of devotion, but this one is different.
The sun smiles down obligingly on ESPN’s sixty-four-acre “campus”—the rolling, semiverdant site on which ESPN’s buildings sit and from which its twenty-seven treasured satellite dishes suck signals from the sky, spewing others back into the ionosphere and out through much of the world. The grass all but glows green, something that couldn’t have happened thirty years ago, when this place had less in common with a university than with the LaBrea Tar Pits, except that Bristol’s primordial ooze was just plain miserable mud.
The thirtieth-birthday festivities are going to be much more understated than celebrations for the twenty-fifth. Then, cars full of ESPN stars motorcaded through Disney World, and even if you couldn’t get to Florida, you could probably score one of the 1.3 million bottles of Gatorade produced in a special flavor called “ESPN”—or grab one of 300 million Bud Light cans with ESPN’s twenty-fifth anniversary logo printed on the label. In the weeks leading up to the celebration, network nabobs chose what they thought were the top sports moments of the previous twenty-five years and aired a series of specials keyed to the anniversary—all the hoopla climaxing in one of the hottest tickets in the company’s history: a blowout at the ESPN Zone restaurant in Times Square.
Because 2009 is turning out to be a brutally cruel recession year, ESPN’s president, the unflappable George Bodenheimer, wisely elects to tone things down this time around. In a brief state-of-the-clubhouse speech, he looks to a rosy future before an audience that includes many of the company’s senior executives and about fifty members of both old and new media.
So self-confident are the leaders of ESPN at this point in their history that they have even invited the head raccoon of Deadspin, the maverick and sometimes mean-spirited blog that has long considered the merciless ongoing examination of ESPN to be one of its public duties.
Deadspin editor A. J. Daulerio felt he couldn’t handle spending the entire day cozying up to ESPN’s big kahunas, so he dispatched “Blazer Girl,” the blog’s answer to Lois Lane, to cover the event. If Daulerio is hoping she will go all Woodward and Bernstein on ESPN, however, he’s going to be disappointed; Blazer Girl goes soft among the ESPN cognoscenti, especially when she gets to pose for a photo with the network’s longest-reigning superstar, Chris Berman.
After lunch comes a celebration within the celebration: homage paid to forty-three people who, like Berman, started with ESPN in the first year of its existence—and are still on the payroll as the first decade of a new century ends.
It’s part of the mythology of the place that many an ESPN employee doesn’t just date the company but marries it. Longevity is the norm. Over the years, occasional employees leave because they don’t fit in; some leave because they simply can’t take so-called life in lonely Bristol; and still others leave for better pay and more ego stroking elsewhere. Lastly, though there have been notorious examples to the contrary, it usually takes a lot to get fired by ESPN.
Of the forty-three stalwarts being honored with their own stars on the ESPN “Walk of Fame” on this super summer afternoon, Berman, practically the network’s avatar, and Bob “The General” Ley (pronounced Lee), the network’s best journalist, are not only the most recognizable ESPN personalities but among