Those Guys Have All the Fun - James Andrew Miller [189]
STEVE BORNSTEIN:
Tom Murphy is a legend and I loved working for him. CapCities was the greatest company to work for because they led by example. They gave you a long leash, they were there when you needed them, and they rarely second-guessed you. But Murphy didn’t want the remaining 20 percent of ESPN, and he’ll tell you that was the biggest business mistake of his career. And there was a bunch of other stuff that he turned down. He would never support me in any of my regional pay businesses that I really wanted ESPN to get into. And CapCities focused on capital expenses like you would not believe. In 1994, when we wanted to buy computers for ESPN, we had to fly to Omaha and explain why to Warren Buffett, because the CapCities guys didn’t want us to buy them. When Disney took over, we were certainly looking for some relief from those types of things.
FRED GAUDELLI:
You were now starting to have Disney people attend your meetings to kind of see what your show was about, who you were reaching, and what you were doing. And they were there, ostensibly, to try to figure out how they could latch on to you and get their initiative promoted. I didn’t consider them to be spies, because some of them were just nice, regular people. But we had to go to movie screenings to figure out how you were going to get this movie into your telecast. I’ll never forget when they said, “We need you to attend an early screening of the animated film Hercules so you can determine how you can get Hercules into all the shows in remote production.” So I went to the screening. The movie was only about 50 percent complete. There were still drawings in a lot of it, but you always knew you had to give them something or else it would only get worse. So we came out of it saying, “You know what? This music is really championshipesque. We’ll play the Hercules theme for a lot of our championships.” That’s kind of the way it went.
BOB LEY:
Early on in the Disney era, there was a decree that we had to announce the results of this yacht race. Somebody there had an interest in this yacht race, whether they knew somebody that was in the race or not, I don’t know, but I distinctly remember we had to report it. We buried it in the show.
FRED GAUDELLI:
I remember at ABC doing Rose Bowls where at halftime you had to do a feature on the teams visiting Disneyland. You know, things that were just blatantly, journalistically wrong, you were forced to do because Disney owned the company and if they wanted a feature on the Trojans and the Buckeyes visiting Disney World they were going to get it. One year there was even talk about moving the Pro Bowl to Disney World. That was an awful idea.
The ESPYs were a better fit because it’s a celebrity night. They like to get in bed with Hollywood.
BOB LEY:
People started wondering if they were going to move us to Orlando, and I said, “We ain’t going anywhere. Look around. We’ve already got millions in the ground here. I don’t think they’re going to jerk us up, move all this to Florida, and turn this into a theme park.”
JACK EDWARDS, Anchor:
There was an effort by Disney to monopolize all intellectual property that came out of everyone’s head while they were working at ESPN, and I’m not sure, but I believe the boilerplate of the contract came out of the Disney Animation Studios, where they’re so afraid that some brilliant young artist working in the sawmill there is going to come up with a tremendous idea and make a gazillion dollars off of it that wouldn’t help the price of Disney stock. They thought that they