Those Guys Have All the Fun - James Andrew Miller [212]
The presentation video combined the spectacle of Ben-Hur with the nail-biting tension of a Hitchcock thriller. If this didn’t bring Eisner and the board around, Bornstein must have thought, nothing could. But Eisner was less interested in what happened with professional football players and more focused on what was going on with cable operators.
STEVE BORNSTEIN:
As soon as Disney acquired CapCities/ABC, I wrote a pretty detailed memorandum to Michael Eisner at his request, telling him what he had just bought with ESPN. It was one of my best memos ever, nine pages, and I identified for him all our assets, and also took the opportunity to let him know where I thought ESPN could grow and prosper in the future, with a particular heads-up on the renegotiations for the NFL rights deal which was coming soon. I believed that deal was critical to our future and needed him to get on board as soon as possible.
MICHAEL EISNER:
Steve Bornstein stressed to me the importance to ESPN of getting a full season of NFL. When we made the deal to acquire CapCites/ABC, we immediately gave ourselves a two-to-three-hundred-million-dollar loss on Monday Night Football. Not surprisingly, there was a general feeling that Monday Night Football couldn’t be renewed because it was too expensive and would cause the network to lose more money, probably another two-to-three-hundred-million-dollar loss per year. The financial analysts would kill me. The press would kill me. And they did, somewhat. But then there was ESPN. If we agreed to Monday Night Football at a loss to ABC, we could acquire Sunday Night Football for ESPN and build that company for the future.
STEVE BORNSTEIN:
I had been competing with Ted Turner for high-profile sports rights since early 1980, and he could always outbid me whenever he wanted to, and often did. He had just basically sold his company to Time Warner, and he was the major shareholder. Turner had the right of first negotiation for their half of the season and they had the opportunity to extend their package. If we were going to get a full season, I had to outbid him, which wasn’t going to be easy with a guy with that kind of authority. Time Warner was a big company if not the biggest media company in the world. We would have to pay significantly more than what he was willing to do.
I will forever be indebted to the movie Waterworld, which was Kevin Costner’s Time Warner movie that went grossly over budget and tanked. I don’t know if it came out a week before or a month before the negotiations, but it was very much in their consciousness. When Turner’s boys came in, they had those losses in their minds and were very disciplined. That was all I needed to know. Now I had to get Eisner to come up with the money.
MICHAEL EISNER:
I was wandering around, looking at ESPN, when I met this young salesman, George Bodenheimer, who knew all about the cable operator deals and also had gone to the same college I went to, Denison, except that he went about eight hundred decades later. I said to George, “Explain to me what you think you can do if we get a full season.” He said, “I think if we can get the other games away from Turner, I can get a 20 percent increase in rates.” I said, “That’s okay, but I don’t know if that really does it. Can you get 20 percent every year?” He said, “I’ll get back to you on that.”
George calls me back and says, “Yes, they