Those Guys Have All the Fun - James Andrew Miller [215]
In 1993, ESPN ventured into the magazine world with something called Total Sports, published in conjunction with Hearst. Teaming with Hearst made sense—Hearst was a minority partner and had been a major name in American publishing for decades—but Total Sports appeared only sporadically, if not erratically, and never developed a faithful following. And as a monthly feature magazine, marginal by nature, it couldn’t lay a glove on Sports Illustrated, the undisputed champion.
MICHAEL MacCAMBRIDGE, Author:
John Walsh was this kind of mythic figure in the sports journalism field. If Mark Mulvoy at Sports Illustrated was Ahab, Walsh was the white whale. Mulvoy was just obsessed with whatever ESPN was doing. A lot of the writers at Sports Illustrated couldn’t understand that and asked, “Why are we so worried about ESPN?” but to Mulvoy’s credit, he saw that the paradigm was changing and the primacy that Sports Illustrated had enjoyed in the media world was being usurped by ESPN. And the reason was not because ESPN was a cable network with x number of viewers; the reason was Walsh had invested SportsCenter with a journalistic authority that had not existed before he got there, and that did not exist anywhere else where people did sports reporting on TV. Mulvoy was scared and, in retrospect, he was right to be.
Gary Hoenig, who had shepherded the joint effort with Hearst, knew it wouldn’t survive but also didn’t want to give up. He had pluck. The arrival of Disney on the ESPN scene, meanwhile, brought new characters into the continuing saga, prominent among them John Skipper, who as senior vice president of Disney Publishing group had overseen all books and magazines published by Disney in the U.S. Prior to his years at Disney, Skipper had logged stints with other magazines—as president and publishing director of Spin, publisher of Us, and far most notably, Rolling Stone.
When he answered the call to take a look at the Hearst-ESPN effort, Skipper wasn’t particularly impressed. But soon enough, he and John Walsh were conspiring to trash Total Sports in its totality and develop an entirely new ESPN magazine, one that aimed a lot higher than Total Sports ever had. Bornstein hated the idea of throwing everything out and starting over—a lot of effort and money had already been sunk into the magazine—but Skipper and Walsh were able to wear him down and wheedle sufficient exploratory funding to see what could be done.
STEVE BORNSTEIN:
To me, the reason for the magazine was that it would go into a space that we couldn’t get into with TV or radio, whether that was a bathroom or a train.
GARY HOENIG, Editorial Director:
We had done a mock-up for Bennack in 1994, but the project was declared dead by Hearst that summer. Mr. Walsh, however, refused to take no for an answer, though Steve was less than enthusiastic, and so my crew scurried around doing test magazines while I tried to convince various ESPN and CapCities execs to come along for the ride. Then Disney bought CapCities, Mr. Skipper met Mr. Walsh, and they decide to junk the Hearst project, which was admittedly more than a little rough around the edges, and fire the bunch of us. We convinced them to do otherwise, a decision I’m sure they’ve had occasion to regret, and most of that crew joined on in 1997 to work on a new launch.
JOHN SKIPPER, Executive Vice President for Content:
How are you going to take on Sports Illustrated with a monthly magazine, a magazine that was so timid in its association with ESPN that they called it Total Sports? You have the best brand name in sports, and you call it Total Sports. So we recommended to Steve something he hated at the time: shut it down and start over. And that’s what we did, and that’s when I moved to ESPN.
FRANK BENNACK:
Not only were we consulted, we did the internal development of the prototype, then handed that back to them and they made decisions which were quite different in many respects from what our people internally saw ought to be the outcome.