Those Guys Have All the Fun - James Andrew Miller [1]
In a moment that is somehow pure ESPN, Bob Ley looks down at his star and does a double take when he sees “Rob Lee” spelled out in gold lettering, a double whammy of a blooper that causes colleague Bill Shanahan, standing next to Ley, to explode in guffaws. Some might consider this a perfect reminder that through the years, ESPN management has never liked its personalities to become big names anyway; big names demand big bucks. They prefer keeping the talent humble.
Bodenheimer handles the officiating with presidential aplomb alongside Sage Steele—born seven years before ESPN was—as his mistress of ceremonies. Bodenheimer had rejected the organizing committee’s first suggestion of an emcee and made the outstanding choice of Steele—who represents everything you could ask for in an anchor—himself. Berman and Ley speechify, then join other honorees posing for photos next to their stars and also with Bodenheimer, who on this day seems more benevolently paternalistic than ever.
Then they all adjourn to the ESPN Café and eat cake to commemorate the spectacular growth of the past three decades. ESPN was a funky little seat-of-the-pants operation in 1979 when it started, in a town so dull that employees worked eighteen-hour days to keep from dying of boredom outside. ESPN now encompasses six domestic U.S. cable networks, forty-six international networks, ESPN radio in North America and syndicated radio in eleven other far-flung countries, plus online operations, broadband, magazines, books, interactive media, wireless, CDs and DVDs, video games, and restaurants, all helping to pump coverage of more than sixty-five different sports into television sets, computers, and mobile phones in more than two hundred fifty countries.
Once a bastard stepchild filed, along with “almond groves,” under “other” among the holdings of Getty Oil, ESPN is now the most important component of the Disney empire, worth more than the entire National Football League, worth more than the NBA, MLB, and the NHL put together.
This book pursues the mystery of ESPN’s rise to stratospheric heights from subterranean depths. It reveals how a crazy idea grew into one of the most successful media enterprises of all time.
“Those Guys Have All the Fun.” The men and women you will meet in these pages spend their days and nights talking and thinking about sports. Hard as they work, ESPNers toil in an environment that most folks would consider pure pleasure. And when they aren’t working, ESPNers still have all the fun, or at least most of it. At ESPN, partying is a varsity sport.
What follows is not the history but the story of ESPN. It would take a dozen or more weighty volumes to provide an all-encompassing account of ESPN’s innumerable hours of nonstop broadcasting through more than thirty sports-saturated years. More time and space would be needed to fully chronicle the many thousands who have come and gone—or come and stayed—over the decades. Still, many of those who have entered ESPN’s orbit are here, and here in their own words. To write this book, over five hundred fifty people were interviewed, and the words you read are their own. In some instances, their quotes have been cleaned up (removing, for example, the “umms” and “uhs” that accompany most conversation); and certain discussions for the sake of clarity and exposition have been moved or compacted. But otherwise, what you read is precisely as it was told to us.
One thing that can be stated from the start is that the odds of ESPN happening just the way it did are somewhere in the neighborhood of a zillion to one. All sports, all the time—24/7 and 365 days a year? When the notion was hatched back in 1978, it was liberally ridiculed—even though logic and precedent tell us that eventually, somehow and somewhere, someone would have looked at the tremendous growth of sports and sporting events