Those Guys Have All the Fun - James Andrew Miller [10]
Stu Evey was not your typical conservative oil company executive. He was Hollywood. You’d be in his office and our senior secretary would come in and say, “Mr. Evey, Mr. Hope’s on the phone.” Stu would hit the speaker button so everyone could hear and it would be Bob Hope. He ran with that crowd.
STUART EVEY:
I was a big-time person down in Acapulco because I represented Getty. I’d come walking into the hotel after arriving and the band would switch to play my favorite song. The jet-set people always wanted to buy me drinks and stuff like that because they wanted to get close to the owner, you know. So I played that pretty good. I spent six years in and out of there, building the hotel and building the golf course, and I would make deals with foreign photographers who wanted to come and use our facilities for free. Well, they’d bring all of these gals, and I got brochures for our hotel free. The women part of it is kind of interesting. I mean, it’s hard for me.
I had a trusting relationship with the family. I helped George with a lot of problems, even with his kids in their younger ages. And I kept it all quiet. He did some damage around the house with his first wife—he got upset with her during their turmoil, so I quietly had some doors put back on.
J. B. DOHERTY:
My take is Stu was sort of this jock sniffer or wannabe. This sports venture satisfied his ego to the point where I think he got himself one of those jackets like the on-air guys wore back in the early days. He was the kind of manager that could only survive in a fairly unprofessional corporate environment, and Getty Oil at that time was still run like a family business.
STUART EVEY:
J.B. asked me if I’d meet with this guy who had been everywhere trying to sell his idea, and would I have any interest at all in talking to him because they were no longer going to finance him. He had run completely out of money and struck out everywhere. I told him I’d meet with him because I believed “you never know.”
Bill came to my office very disgruntled because he knew, in his mind apparently, that there’s no way an oil company would ever be interested in what he had in mind.
GEORGE CONNER:
In December of 1978, I was in my office in Los Angeles, and Stu calls me up to his office and says, “George, I have something I want you to look at.” This was pretty early in the morning, maybe nine-ish. He said, “Bill Rasmussen just left my office”—of course I didn’t know who Bill Rasmussen was at that time—and he said, “George, why don’t you take a look at this business plan and I’ll call you in the middle of the afternoon.” It was maybe ten or fifteen pages in a clear plastic folder. I told Janet, my secretary, Stu must be pretty excited about this to want an answer so fast. Sure enough, at 11:30 he calls and says, “George, I’ll meet you at the L.A. Club,” which was a private club on top of our Getty Oil building at Wilshire and Western in Los Angeles. So we go up to the bar. He has a Scotch and water and I have a rum and Coke, and he said, “George, what do you think?” I said, “Stu, I think it looks pretty interesting. Let’s look at it.” He says okay. And about five minutes later, he said, “George, only one problem. Bill has to have a yes or no answer by December 31,” which was three weeks away. And I said, “Stu, you know as well as I do that Getty can’t say yes to a project of this magnitude in three weeks.” He says, “Okay, just start on it.” So I went back to my office and the only thing I worked on from that point until the end of December was the ESP Network project.
STUART EVEY:
I liked the prospect of it for about two weeks. Then I saw the stumbling blocks and recognized that we hadn’t spent nearly enough time researching it. Most of my investigations about ESPN came from people