Those Guys Have All the Fun - James Andrew Miller [178]
LESLEY VISSER:
My husband and I were in the Far East, this had to be in the mid-’90s when I was working for ESPN, and I remember we were taking the Star Ferry from Kowloon to Hong Kong, and we looked up at the TV and they had ESPN playing! It was already becoming a global player, and their penetration was getting enormous.
JODI MARKLEY, Senior Vice President of Operations:
In 1995, I was in Brazil, where we were working to launch a new ESPN network. It was a big, complicated project, and it took several years to get it really going right. As ESPN was not a known entity in any manner in Brazil, the logistics of hiring top-notch talent both in front of and behind the camera, while having to explain what ESPN actually was, turned out to be quite an adventure. We cobbled together a pretty good team, crossed our fingers, and went for it. Fast-forward a few years after we started, and I was getting off a plane in the small city of Curitiba, Brazil, and all of a sudden I see this kid wearing an ESPN T-shirt. None of us had given it to him to wear, so he must have gotten it from somewhere else. And I don’t know why this image meant so much to me at the time, but it was one of the most fulfilling moments I’ve ever had.
JEFF ISRAEL:
In ’95, we were going to do a pregame show and a SportsCenter the morning of a Giants game at the Meadowlands. When we pulled up to the stadium, it was almost as if the game wasn’t going to be played, because no one had cleared the snow. I immediately said, “This is going to be a problem.” So we did our stand-ups and reports from the stands, where the snow was up at your ankles. I couldn’t imagine fans coming there and sitting in snow, but they did. This turned out to be the infamous snowball game where everyone was throwing snowballs. I noticed that people in the end zone were firing snowballs at people along the sideline, and then people on the sideline were firing snowballs at people that were near the end zone. My crew and I walked across the end zone figuring no one would fire at us, but we were really pelted. I couldn’t keep my shots steady because I didn’t have my camera on a tripod; it was on my shoulder. There was a still photographer from a newspaper standing next to me, and he got hit with a snowball at the top of his head. He went to his knees and I looked down. I said, “Are you all right?” And the next thing I know he was just folding over. They had to take him away from the game because he was knocked unconscious.
Steve Bornstein’s epiphany upon becoming CEO in 1990 was that ESPN shouldn’t be just one single TV network; it needed to be a brand that branched out and communicated on a variety of channels and platforms. He had first put the theory to use with ESPN’s expansion into radio, then with the creation of ESPN2. At the same time, ESPN was becoming more aggressive internationally. But now a new big juicy world was starting to open up—the Internet—and the ultracompetitive Bornstein was not about to lag behind others in the broadcasting business. He wanted to establish an online beachhead for ESPN as soon as possible.
STEVE BORNSTEIN:
By the mid-nineties, we were making serious money, but we weren’t the only game in town. We were just getting started on the Internet, so I was buying a bunch of data businesses like Sports Ticker, which to me was all about the digitizing of the assets. That was our next big opportunity, and that’s why I hired a guy named Dick Glover to head up our exploration into the Internet area.
DICK GLOVER, Vice President of Acquisitions:
Steve never said much to me in terms of direction, he was just very encouraging. I did a lot of research and met with the folks who were running Prodigy, CompuServe, and AOL. I would go to a cable show, sit with Steve Case, who was there trying to meet people, and