Those Guys Have All the Fun - James Andrew Miller [116]
When I was at CNN, we used to look at ESPN as our comic relief because, for a long time, the first three or four years that both of these networks were on, in terms of sports news, CNN was a ten-times-better product than ESPN. I used to look at my old friend Berman sweating away in the studio without a teleprompter trying to read his notes—one night at 1:45 a.m. and the next night at 9:30 p.m., and it was never the same thing twice. I thought, “Thank God that there’s somebody on the air in worse shape than we are.” And then I finally figured out how they survived for nearly a decade with basically no funding: they were in the middle of nowhere. Across the street was a McDonald’s, what was always reputed to be a toxic waste area, and cows. So, unless you’re clearly a freelance dairyman, there was no place else to go. If you committed to them, you committed to them. There was no chance you were going to jump to some other television outfit across the street.
STEVE BORNSTEIN:
By the time Walsh and Anderson told me they had closed a deal with Olbermann, I had become familiar with his work. He was really good and really legendary. I remember telling them, “Be careful what you wish for. He’s pure genius, but he will be a bucketful to handle.” And he was, from the day he got there to the day he left.
BOB LEY:
I still remember the lunch when John and Steve were deciding whether they were going to hire Keith. I said, “You’re aware of his reputation, aren’t you?” They said, “Oh, it’s not going to be like that. He’s not making all that much money.” I said, “It’s not a function of money. Know what you’re buying.” When he arrived, Keith had one thing in mind: it was Keith. That’s fine. Nothing wrong with that.
STEVE BORNSTEIN:
I had an epiphany shortly after I got to be the CEO. I had been number two under Roger Werner for two years, and number two or three for Bill Grimes. In a way, I thought I ran the place because those guys were running off doing what they were doing and I was operating the pedals, right? But now that I was actually formally in charge, I felt this incredible burden for the first time. All of a sudden, I realized I was responsible for my friends’ kids’ college education. I couldn’t screw this up. I didn’t get depressed, but it forced me to really think about what I wanted to do with this job. And I decided that I wanted to make sure ESPN wasn’t just a network anymore. It had to be a way of life for people, with as many angles into their lives as possible. I wanted ESPN to replace the word “sport” in the dictionary. And the only way to do all this was to be everywhere.
Steve Bornstein didn’t wait long to mobilize his expansion plans for ESPN. For his first big move, he decided he would launch in January of 1992 an all-sports national radio network with ESPN as the call letters. If that sounds like a fairly simple proposition, it wasn’t. For one thing, precedent was not on Bornstein’s side; of three previous attempts to start national sports-radio networks, two ended in ignominious belly-flops, and the other was something less than a raging sensation.
As chance would have it, The Enterprise Sports Network had been started and operated by Scott Rasmussen. Despite the pedigree, Rasmussen’s ESN (sound familiar?) lasted only from January to September of 1981. A second sports network, the small-time RTV Sports, had launched from Mashpee, Massachusetts, in 1987; by 1988, it was out of business. Bucking the trend, the Sports Entertainment Network was now managing to survive under the name Sporting News Radio in Houston.
ESPN announced that its new radio network would run in tandem with ABC Radio, the first significant example of synergy with parent company CapCities. The initial agenda was to operate first only on weekends, with a limited schedule of live news, game updates, interviews, and magazine-style