Those Guys Have All the Fun - James Andrew Miller [191]
By the way, I didn’t put it on, and I turned out to be right about that one.
MICHAEL EISNER:
The fact that ESPN was in Connecticut led to a more stable executive pool. At Paramount or Disney, you’d have a hot executive and next thing you know, twelve companies would be competing for him, so his price went up. At ESPN, you either lived in Bristol or you didn’t.
I liked the culture in Bristol, and I liked the economic model. They were in a Days Inn mode. They were not chained by seventy-five years of Hollywood labor practices—not only unions, but the New York and L.A. cost of living. They weren’t on the star system because there was no star system.
Steve Bornstein had never forgotten his idea for an ESPN news channel—he had put it in a back pocket to save for another day. That day came in March of 1996, when Time Warner’s CNN and Sports Illustrated joined forces to announce that their awkwardly named CNN SI channel would launch on December 12 of that year—all sports news, all the time. ESPN was not about to sit back and let anybody else blaze a trail in TV sports.
JOHN WALSH:
A couple hours after the CNN SI announcement, Bornstein gathered everyone in the newsroom and said, “Okay, here’s the drill: they’re going on in December, and I want us on the air by the end of October, so get your asses in gear.”
Usually Steve was obsessed with graphics and sets, but ESPNews had to be done on a shoestring budget and be done fast. He kept telling us, “Just get the goddamn thing on the air. I want us to beat those sons of bitches.”
For our first broadcast, we decided to go with Don Barone’s great investigative piece on the Russian Mafia. We wanted to show CNN SI that we could do any and all of the stuff they were planning on doing.
Few reasonable people would expect to find the Walt Disney Company, ESPN, the National Hockey League, and the Russian Mafia all in the same sentence, or even on the same page. But there they were, soon after the Disney takeover, strange bedfellows indeed, with NHL star Pavel Bure, “the Russian Rocket,” prominent in the controversy.
His story was produced in conjunction with an Outside the Lines hourlong special on Russian Olympic sports five years after the collapse of the USSR. Since its premiere in 1990, Outside the Lines had established itself by mid-decade as the network’s version of 60 Minutes and a perfect vehicle for Bob Ley, who brought gravitas and estimable journalistic skills to the program, and investigative reporter Don Barone. Their work, and that of others on the show, had helped Outside the Lines win six Sports Emmys by 1995.
ESPN launched an eight-month investigation into Bure’s life off the ice as a corporate officer for the so-called 21st Century Association, considered a front for the notorious Russian mob. Head of the company was Bure’s longtime pal Anzor Kikalichvili, described in FBI documents as a “major Russian Mafia kingpin,” reputedly into money laundering, extortion, and drugs. Asked to respond, Bure said vaguely, “I heard about this. But I don’t think that’s true.”
The story attracted more than casual interest from the NHL, which tried to get it killed outright, but it was more complicated than that. Potential conflicts of interest for ESPN included TV rights to part of the NHL season and Disney’s ownership of the Mighty Ducks hockey team of Anaheim, California, home of Disneyland.
Nevertheless, Ley and Barone were determined to pursue the story.
DON BARONE, Investigative Producer:
There was a whole backstory that the Russian mob was somehow involved with players in the NHL. What would happen is that Russian players would come over to America, they’d make all sorts of money, and the Russian mob back in the Soviet Union would say, “Listen, we want 10 percent of your money