Those Guys Have All the Fun - James Andrew Miller [19]
And I said yes, but I was really not paying too much attention to him. When he hung up, I told my wife what it was, and she said, “What do you think?” I said, “If ever cable makes something, I’ll consider it, but hell, I’m working for NBC.”
Evey then began a campaign. When I was home, not on the road, every night the phone would ring at 5:30 and the kids would yell, “It’s the Getty man!” He talked to me every night for about three months, I’m not kidding, and sent me all kinds of things from Broadcast Magazine and other magazines about cable, about the possibility of ESPN.
So finally, to be quite frank, all of our kids, we had five, were going to be gone, the last was going off to college. I said to my wife, “We can be like older people and wait for our kids to come home and see us sometime. Or we can do something different.” So I said to Hookstratten, “Let’s look into this.”
I was picked up in Hartford by Bill Rasmussen and driven down to Bristol. When you’ve been at NBC Rockefeller Plaza and you go up to Bristol and see this building still under construction with a parking lot of mud, well, you don’t know what to think. It was not very impressive.
DICK EBERSOL:
ESPN needed an A-level announcer, and Hook got Simpson a three-year, $1 million deal. Can you imagine, a three-year, $1 million deal in 1979 for cable? I don’t think anybody had come close to making that kind of money.
CHET SIMMONS:
Evey had no idea what compensation was like in the television industry.
STUART EVEY:
Jim’s a great guy. He and I worked fairly close. I gave him a lifetime contract. He tell you that? I think it eventually got taken away from him—I don’t know how.
CHET SIMMONS:
It was becoming clearer and clearer to me that I needed help. Scotty Connal had a pretty good-size family that he had to support. He wanted to know if I could get the kind of deal for him that he would need, but also if the challenge would be enough. He had been at NBC forever. What would be the impetus for him to leave? Well, for one, there was the fact that [Don] Ohlmeyer came and got an NBC job title that Scotty very much wanted. The people at NBC were in awe of Ohlmeyer because of his Olympic background. So I felt it was the right time to pounce on Scotty and I did. A lot of hiring Scotty was due to his wife. She had an awful lot to say in the construction of their family, and I finally worked the two of them to the point where this became a very, very appealing job for him. I knew once I got Scotty, I would get a couple of very, very good people to come along with him. And we did. I can’t tell you what I would have done if he hadn’t come.
BRUCE CONNAL, Producer:
My dad started as a page at NBC and was there for thirty-two years. He had done everything there, but the face of NBC Sports was changing. They had brought in a whole new regime for the Olympics under Don Ohlmeyer and Geoff Mason. It was a pretty bold move to leave the stability of an NBC Sports and go with this upstart that nobody heard of, and when people did hear, they said, “It’s impossible. It will never succeed.”
STUART EVEY:
Scotty Connal had a great reputation but he was kind of getting over the hill, and he came on board and brought with him many NBC employees. Bristol, Connecticut, gained the reputation of being the NBC of the North.
CHET SIMMONS:
I remember my first visit to the board of directors at the Getty Oil Company. I was going to give my first financial report. Well, you know, you gulp a few times in this kind of a scene. So I get up and said, “This is what we’re going to do,” and I pass out some papers, “and this is what it’s going to cost,” and it was $12 or $15 million a year. They sat in silence until one of the guys started to chuckle. I said to myself, “Oh, shit, here we go.”
And then one of the other guys chuckles too, and I said, “Excuse me, why are you laughing?” And they said, “What you have just asked for is the cost of one dry hole. Let’s move on.” So that went well, I got my money. But I’m sure it was a setup to some degree with Evey, because he was great at that.