Those Guys Have All the Fun - James Andrew Miller [125]
There was more. As COO of Warner-Amex Satellite Entertainment from 1979 to 1984, Lack oversaw the birth not only of MTV but also of the Movie Channel—cable’s first twenty-four-hour pay network—and the groundbreaking Nickelodeon children’s channel as well.
From the moment Lack arrived at ESPN—he had offices in Bristol and New York—he became a major blip on the company radar screen. Tall, aristocratic in demeanor, and fascinated with such lofty concepts as “sports as a metaphor for culture,” Lack never really did assimilate the Bristol milieu or the ESPN way of thinking, but then again, he didn’t try. While George Bodenheimer (who reported to Lack) and others in New York spent many a lunch hour brown-bagging it at their desks, Lack had a table perpetually reserved in his name at 21. When he went to L.A., he could be found making poolside calls from the plush Peninsula Hotel in Beverly Hills.
Two things were clear as Lack settled into his new role at ESPN: first, he would actively try to dismantle the Bristol culture; and second, he wanted Steve Bornstein’s job.
JOHN LACK, Executive Vice President:
I get a call from Bornstein one day who said, “I really could use some help over here.” I said, “What kind of help?” He said, “You know the place is getting a little frayed and we don’t really have an image. We’re the sports guys, but it’s like we’re just sports fanatics. We’re not broad enough. We’re just not attracting a big enough audience. And SportsCenter really hasn’t grown like I want it to. We think we should be marketing it but we don’t know what to do.” So he and I talked for a while and I said, “Well, I’ll consult for you.” I consulted with him for a month or two, then he said, “I’d really love you to come inside.” I said, “And what?” He said, “We’ll make a job for you. Why don’t I give you all the operating units? We’ll make you executive vice president of Programming and Marketing—you’ll have all the revenue and programming. Finance, administration, and legal will still report to me, and you’ll report directly to me.” I said, “It sounds like fun.” Then he said he thought we really ought to do a second network because the “must carry” regulation [FCC rule requiring cable systems to carry all local channels] was upon us and we needed to take advantage of it. So I had this double mandate. To clean up what we got, and then do the best I could to raise our profile, including adding a new network.
As soon as I got there, I was known as the MTV guy. That was my fame and fortune. Forget that I was a journalist at CNN, that I went to Northwestern and had a PhD in communications at Penn. When I got to ESPN in early ’93, they just didn’t have enough personality—besides Berman—to grow the ratings. Women weren’t going to watch and young people were watching MTV. So I had a strategy to create more personalities. Make talent more visible. Now this wasn’t Walsh’s strategy. Walsh was a guy where journalists had bylines and you never knew who they were. I said, “This is not journalism. This is television journalism. We need to have people be big and real and fun.” I was the Antichrist, especially to Walsh. He knew why I was there and he knew that my charge was to make this thing more popular and less about sports fanatics. But he fought me all the way. Walsh was not a fan of mine.
JOHN WALSH:
Steve was always looking to see if there was somebody from the outside who would give the place a jolt, and he thought Lack was that guy. We were told he was going to be the guy to pull things together from the business side. He would have an interest in what the content was, but he was mainly going to focus on advertising and the affiliates.
Lack did change the culture. We had been through all the sexual harassment stuff and part of it was we had to have a dress code. Lack destroyed the dress code that we established and came in and said everything’s casual, nobody has to wear a tie. Well, one day there was a twenty-seven-year-old