Those Guys Have All the Fun - James Andrew Miller [144]
Feeling no pain, once he got sufficiently sloshed, was ESPN president Steve Bornstein, who expected the Deuce to be another feather in his crowded cap. He drank with abandon—but “abandon ship” is what Rosa Gatti from PR urged him to do once things started getting wilder than expected. After at least one amorous encounter, Bornstein, reportedly so blitzed he collapsed into a clump of bushes, was said to have given at least two women the impression they’d be going home with him. Instead, he took his adviser’s advice and called it a night—solo!
STUART SCOTT:
We did a three-hour show and had a big party. If you ask most people working the show that night, one of the things they will remember was that M.C. Hammer was there. I don’t remember the show, I just remember M.C. Hammer being in a tiny little green room in Bristol, Connecticut. I think he was wearing some shiny big pants. But it was just past Hammertime, I think. Hammertime was ’89 and ’90; this was ’93.
JOHN LACK:
I don’t know how many buses there were that night leaving Manhattan, plus all the limousines for the ad agencies. So in that sense, it was a whole new experience for ESPN. They had never done any of that stuff before. No one had ever come to Bristol, including advertisers. It was a chance for the first time that I remember at ESPN for the people in New York and the people in Bristol who really lived in different worlds, I mean the employees, to really join hands as a family and to launch something they were both proud of that was kind of fun.
Sales secretaries from New York were kissing Dan Patrick hello; traffic ladies were hanging out with production managers. It was all stuff that this company didn’t do because Bristol was ninety miles away. So it was a joyous family occasion. And the ad community kind of got into it with us because they had been to lots of launch parties for other networks but had never been out of town in the middle of the woods at the sports place, where we were doing pop culture for the first time. So it was a great night. It really took ESPN from this sports journalism, the sports nobody wanted, to finally getting a couple of sports, to now “We are American sports culture.” When I introduced Steve—and I worked hard to make it all look like his idea that night—he made mention of the fact that we were expanding our horizons and that it was the beginning of a larger ESPN culture that we all should be proud of. It was now sports as a metaphor for culture, not just a reflection of what goes on Saturdays and Sundays. From that standpoint, I think we were all very proud and everybody got a little bigger. We kind of moved from the pages of Sports Illustrated a little into the pages of People magazine that night.
RON SEMIAO:
Hell, yeah, I was at the ESPN2 launch party! I was with my buddies out there getting hammered—but not with M.C. Hammer, though I did see him around in a big limo out there. It was a good old ESPN party. You’re working your ass off without any sleep for like two weeks and at the end you have a wrap party where everybody blows off steam and everybody tries to get laid. That’s exactly what was going on. I started in ’85 so I was at the Christmas parties where you knew 95 percent of the people there and things were totally crazy. But this was a hell of a lot more people. People at ESPN know how to party—or, I should say, knew how to party.
I did hear that Bornstein was hammered in the control room, and he and a couple others called like Dan Burke and Tom Murphy, the guys who run CapCities, and were yelling: “Yeah, we’re on the air, whaddaya think?” Those guys were probably in their fucking pj’s at home, having a cup of tea.
STEVE BORNSTEIN:
The party was legendary. There had been so much stress built up. We had started on July Fourth and ended on October 1, and we had done one thousand different contracts. Literally, you were doing ESPN2 distribution deals