Those Guys Have All the Fun - James Andrew Miller [133]
I said to Steve, “Look, I got a little credibility in this demographic. I think we can do ESPN2 with extreme sports, with hockey—we thought it was going to be the first major sport we could put on ESPN2 because it was men, eighteen to thirty-four—and music videos. Then I brought in the sales department and asked them if they could sell that. They said, “Absolutely.”
JOHN WALSH:
We had an off-site in Greenwich with all of Steve’s senior people—there were probably a dozen of us there—Steve, Creasy, Lack, Dick Glover, myself, and some others. Steve said we basically were not going to be able to exist and compete with just one network. We’re going to have to do other things. So we went around the table and the big idea was to do a twenty-four-hour SportsCenter channel—basically ESPN news. There was vigorous debate over two days and then it came time for a vote and it was that we should do ESPN News or SportsCenter or whatever you wanted to call it. But Steve said, “No, we could do that anytime. We’ll keep that in our back pocket for when anyone else decides to do that, then we can beat them to the punch. It might be our third or fourth channel.”
SEAN BRATCHES, Executive Vice President:
We had a big sales meeting at the Sheraton in Hartford and gave out paper airline tickets to the team. Our objective at the time was to pitch a product that we called Sport TV, because the marketplace didn’t want more ESPN; they wanted a differentiated product. One of the most salient learnings that I’ve had in my twenty-one years at the company came out of that time. In a two- or three-week period I was on the road to a lot of operators, and when I made my presentations they said, “Listen, we love what you’re doing, we think it’s great, we want the product, we want the content, but please put ESPN in the name—it’s the brand.” We were all hearing the same message from the marketplace, and it’s a great example of why the creative side is in many cases driven by the sales side. And ever since that point in time, we’ve never launched another product without ESPN branding.
STEVE BORNSTEIN:
Those were the biggest balls I ever had at ESPN and the biggest move I ever made there. I bet my entire career on ESPN2. It was either going to work or not work, and the results would be on me. This was make-or-break for my career. It was fucking scary.
Had we not launched ESPN2, any one of these pretenders could take us on and be successful—a Fox, a TCI back then, a banding together of regionals, any other guy with a hundred million bucks that wanted to get into television sports business. There was just too much content out there.
But no one else wanted a second network. No one else believed in it. CapCities certainly wasn’t saying, “Let’s do a second network.” They all thought programs on ESPN2 were going to be a bunch of beach volleyball games, but I knew better. I saw college basketball growing. I saw college football growing. I saw motor sports growing.
Emboldened by the success of launching ESPN Radio, Steve Bornstein reasoned—or just decided—that retransmission held the key to getting ESPN’s new channel, ESPN2, not just on the air but into millions of homes. The Deuce, as No. 2 was soon known inside and outside the empire, was conceived as a hot and hip supplement to the still-young ESPN.
In the murky gray miasma of federal communications rules, bedeviling the broadcasting industry since 1934, the interrelated Retransmission Consent and must-carry policies of the eighties and nineties were among the most confounding. They had to do with the money that cable operators could charge broadcast stations for relaying their signals and thus expanding the stations