Those Guys Have All the Fun - James Andrew Miller [211]
We made a deal to plead no contest and contribute some money to the Ronald McDonald House, and it just sort of went away.
KARL RAVECH:
Early in the afternoon of November 3, 1998, I was playing a pickup basketball game with a bunch of guys from ESPN when I began to experience pain in my chest. I thought it was indigestion or a stomachache, but once the pain was accompanied by a tingling in my forearm, I was smart enough to realize that it could be more than that. I sat down for a while to see if the pain would subside, and when it didn’t, I asked [ESPN news anchor] Bill Pidto to drive me to the hospital where my wife, Diane, was employed in the planning and marketing department. My hope was that once I was checked out, the doctors would allow me to get a ride home with her. I blacked out for a few seconds on the ride to the hospital and told Bill, “I think we should hurry.” In the emergency room, the doctor told me that I was having a heart attack and I remember thinking to myself, “At least I’m in the right place.” Never once did I understand the severity of the situation and always believed I would be fine. A couple of days later, I was released with virtually undetectable muscle damage. I came to understand that my poor eating habits (at the time, my weight was 173), lack of regular exercise, heredity (my grandfather suffered three heart attacks), and my elevated level of homocysteine and slightly elevated levels of cholesterol all contributed to the attack.
I believe anyone who correlates the stress of my job with my heart attack would be clinically inaccurate. One month after suffering the heart attack I was running every day and I even flew—my choice—to Australia to cover the President’s Cup.
CHARLEY STEINER:
In ’98, John [Walsh] was working us to the bone. We had meetings in the morning, we had meetings to schedule meetings, and we had what they called postmortem meetings after shows. I used to call those the PMS. And we were just running ragged, working ten to twelve hours a day every day. Howard [Katz] wanted to know why people wanted off SportsCenter, and we told him, all these meetings are killing us. Keith, Robin, and I were kind of the spokesmen for talent. Of our little group, Keith was the real anarchist, I was a moderate anarchist, and Robin, of course, was Switzerland. Then Howard, John, and Norby Williamson ran a meeting where we had a discussion of why people were wearing out. John was a big proponent of meetings, and we said, “An editorial meeting every day, terrific, but we don’t need to have a 10:30 a.m. meeting for a show that goes on the air at six or seven o’clock that night. And if we did, that’s why they have squawk boxes.” But, no, we had to be there. He felt the whole group had to be there so there’s not going to be any caste system. We said, “Well, that’s why people want off the show. You’re killing us.” And I remember Howard telling John, “You got a problem here. Fix it.”
For ESPN, a full season of the NFL remained an elusive holy grail. As of 1987, the most ESPN could get was a split season, and if the network really wanted to reach a higher level—to become the “Worldwide Leader” and not just use the term as a slogan—only a full NFL season would do.
Two big, stubborn roadblocks remained. First, Ted Turner: in the early eighties, when college football first became available, Turner outbid ESPN and walked off with the rights to the first-round package that ESPN had basically created. Later, when ESPN had seemingly wrapped up a big pro-basketball deal, Turner waved more money in the NBA’s face and ESPN again experienced the agony of you know what. It reached a point where many in the cable community felt that neither ESPN nor any other contender would ever be able to outbid Turner for anything.
The second major obstacle was dollars: Bornstein knew the price for a full season would be so high that he would have to get Michael Eisner to approve any deal that would satisfy the league. Bornstein quickly got to work on a presentation tape designed to excite Eisner and