Those Guys Have All the Fun - James Andrew Miller [180]
These were busy times. Less than three months after the Internet launch, ESPN began a new venture, and this time there wouldn’t be any need for a partnership, other than advertisers. ESPN gave birth to the Extreme Games (later shortened to the “X Games”), which were almost entirely based in Newport, Rhode Island. The event was an ad sales department’s dream, with seven major sponsors: Advil, Mountain Dew, Taco Bell, Chevy Trucks, AT&T, Nike, and Miller Lite. Nearly 200,000 fans would attend the first games.
Athletes would compete in twenty-seven events in a variety of warm-weather sport categories: the Eco-Challenge, a weeklong, multistage endurance race, mountain biking, in-line skating, skateboarding, BMX, sky surfing, sport climbing, street luge, windsurfing, kite skiing, and bungee jumping.
The Extreme Games had no real blueprint, but ESPN once again became the ultimate “What if” company: “What if we tried this? What if we tried that?” The network placed cameras on participants’ helmets, on the walls of ramps, and throughout the racecourses. And a lot of other ideas passed through gatekeepers who would have shut them down at other companies.
RON SEMIAO:
When I got hired in programming, all I heard about was how much they wanted ESPN2 to be different, and to focus on younger audiences, particularly those with interests in “extreme” or “action” sports. So I went to the Barnes and Noble in West Hartford and found out there was no such thing as a Sports Illustrated for extreme sports. But there were all these individual magazines for skateboarding, snowboarding, climbing, BMX, and I bought ’em all. Here’s what stuck out to me: Tony Hawk was as good at his sport as Michael Jordan was at his, and all these guys had their own look, their own wardrobes, their own music, and were having big influences on the culture. Mainstream companies were using images from these sports in their commercials because they wanted to associate their product with something cool. I thought they would attract the exact audience we were all going after for ESPN2, but it became clear to me that while these sports were doing okay vertically, there was nothing going on horizontally, nothing bringing them all together. So I started to think that the whole would be greater than the individual parts, and rather than program them all separately, we should bring them all together under one umbrella. So I came up with the idea to create the Olympics of Extreme Sports, an event that would showcase both the lifestyle and the abilities of these athletes. It would be like creating a Superbowl for ESPN2.
PETER ENGLEHART:
It was Ronnie’s idea. I told him I thought it was fantastic, and that he had my one hundred percent backing, because I thought it would really help differentiate ESPN2, and the sales guys would be excited to sell it. He said to me, “Well, what do you think we should call it?” I said, “I don’t know; I’ll schedule it, I’ll help you get it through, we’ll budget for it, and we’ll get some meetings going.” Then he asked me, “What are you going to put it on the schedule as?” I said, “Right now I’ll just put it down as X Games,” and that’s how the name came about.
RON SEMIAO:
The pitch made its way up to Steve Bornstein, and he took a straw poll among his senior executives and it was quite polarizing. I was told there were a lot of senior executives at this company who didn’t think we should do it, but perhaps most importantly of all, Creasy