Those Guys Have All the Fun - James Andrew Miller [135]
We schedule a meeting for the next morning. John comes, looks at me, and says, “You’re going to ruin the journalistic integrity of this network, which we’ve built up all these years. We’re finally getting to a point where we are the real deal in sports journalism, and this guy’s going to blow it all in a week on the air.”
And I said, “We’re not impinging on the journalistic values of ESPN, the mother ship; this guy’s not going to appear on ESPN, he’s going to do a show in the afternoon on ESPN2, where our audience is very young—the main audience I want.” Now Steve agreed with me as a programmer, but John was getting so heated up about it, Steve doesn’t know what to do. So the meeting ends, Steve asks me to stick around, and says to me, “Can’t we just find some other guy? It’s not worth this fight with John.” I said, “This is a guy who’s going to cost us fifteen or twenty grand who could do a point-three or a point-four rating, which means we could make a couple of hundred thousand dollars on this show alone.” So he says, “Okay. I’ll tell John.” I was told by Vince Doria, who was with Steve at the time, that Walsh said, “If Rome comes here, and Lack has the right to do that, then I’m quitting.”
JOHN WALSH:
I never threatened to quit on the basis of any one decision. Throughout my career, I have always tried to make sure that I agreed with the vision, spirit, and collegiality of whatever enterprise I was involved with, and if I didn’t, that became my breaking point. I doubted Lack’s vision, style, and experience. I, along with many of my colleagues at the time, knew he wasn’t right for the company in so many ways, even though from time to time he would have a good thought or recommend a winning person, as he did with Harriet Seitler.
I trusted Jim Allegro’s wisdom and guidance, so I went to him and asked if Lack’s ways were going to become the pattern around here, and said if they were, I wouldn’t find that comfortable. Jim assured me things would not continue like this, and the culture he and I endorsed would win the day.
DAVID ZUCKER, Vice President of Programming:
Was there contentiousness between Walsh and Lack? Of course. There was contentiousness between Lack and everybody. Lack is a brilliant, smart, creative guy, but just a loose cannon—a bull in a china shop. I don’t know that he ever understood ESPN the way the old guard did.
In March 1993, things were definitely going Don Ohlmeyer’s way. Scarcely had he been named to a new job as West Coast President of NBC—the top programming position at that time—than it was announced that ESPN was buying the sports programming and sales interests of his Ohlmeyer Communications Company, producers of sports and entertainment shows.
Terms weren’t disclosed, but the selling price was north of $24 million—a nice piece of change for Ohlmeyer, who had bought out RJR’s interest in ESPN after the sale to Hearst. Howard Katz, who had served as chairman of Ohlmeyer’s ten-year-old company, was part of the sale to ESPN and got a well-deserved bonus from Ohlmeyer as well.
Also part of the deal: ESPN got The Skins Game, a made-for-television event that Ohlmeyer had concocted and produced for ABC. It was part of some two hundred hours of sports programming that his company produced annually for various networks.
VINCE DORIA:
Al Jaffe and I went out west to hire a small staff for the Rome show. The last hire was for a production assistant who was going to be the low man on the totem