Those Guys Have All the Fun - James Andrew Miller [132]
ROBIN ROBERTS, Anchor:
I’m backstage, and while Jim was giving his great speech, I was looking out and seeing people in the audience crying. You realize it’s an unforgettable moment. After he was done, I was the next one to have to walk out onstage, and I was thinking, “What do I do? What can I possibly say?” I wound up saying something like, “I’ve never been more proud of ESPN than I am at this moment.” I think that was the night as a network that we realized, “Yeah, we can actually do something else, not just fun and games. This thing can be bigger than that.” We found our heart in ’93 at the ESPYs.
The glow of the ESPYs didn’t last long for Bornstein. He was worried about competition from the outside—and rightfully so. Liberty Media was proceeding with its scheme to build a sportscasting empire of its own and mount a challenge to “the worldwide leader in sports.” It started by buying out its largest partner, Bill Daniels, and increasing its ownership of Daniels’s Prime Network regional sports channels by acquiring more of Prime’s parent company, Affiliated Regional Communications Ltd.
As the sole general partner of Prime Network, Liberty snared the country’s largest regional sports network—fifteen affiliates serving 26 million subscribers. Coming up in second place among regional networks was Sports Channel America, co-owned by GE through NBC and Cablevision Systems Ltd., reaching 18 million subscribers via ten affiliates. If you combined the two big regional holdings, you had 44 million subscribers, not far off the 60 million that belonged to ESPN.
Although the regionals had fewer households in the aggregate, they had higher viewership and higher fees than ESPN because of powerful local Major League Baseball and NBA games that they televised. Bornstein feared that if the regionals ever launched a competitive product, they would have a huge audience, particularly as a lead-in opposite what had by now become the greatest cash cow of ESPN—SportsCenter.
So it was that Liberty then set about the next logical step up its imagined ladder of success: attempting to acquire Sports Channel America and consolidate all those subscribers. ESPN, meanwhile, wasn’t just dangling its toes in the water. It was already looking beyond its domestic success to make “worldwide leader” a literally true slogan. ESPN agreed to merge its partly owned European sports network, TESN, with that network’s chief rival, Eurosport, thus creating the largest sports network on the European continent—a trilingual operation with a reach of nearly 40 million English-, French-, and German-speaking households.
But back in the United States, Bornstein was reminding Lack that one of his biggest charges was to mount a second network. Bornstein was adamant about digging the moat deeper around ESPN, and not letting competitors grab what he believed to be a ton of sports content that couldn’t fit on ESPN. He declared that the debut of ESPN2 would take place on October 1, 1993, and for Bornstein, now obsessed with fighting off the competition, it couldn’t come fast enough.
JOHN LACK:
Steve says to me, “Now what are we going to do with this thing? What’s this second network going to be?” So we did a lot of research and I came back to him and said, “Look, we can’t do another ESPN. These cable operators aren’t going to carry it. They’re bridling at the fact that they’re paying us fifty cents for this product today; they’ll never give us another nickel more for the same stuff.” Now at this time, MTV had started this division there called