Those Guys Have All the Fun - James Andrew Miller [216]
DICK GLOVER:
I assumed Skipper would be some Disney wonk who was attending a meeting they made him take, but in walked the biggest sports fan next to me that I’d ever met, and this was a meeting he was greatly looking forward to. Little did I know at that point in time that Skipper’s dream was to run an ESPN magazine. He told me, “I know publishing, I know magazines, and I know this is a great idea.” So Skipper and I put some things together, and then John Walsh was the third part, but it was 100 percent Skipper’s idea: the magazine was to be oversize and biweekly. So I wrote a big memo as to exactly what it was going to be and why we should do it, and, in the interim, Time Warner launched CNN SI Network. That just made it more compelling that they shouldn’t have a place to attack us from print. We should be attacking them.
JANN WENNER:
When John Walsh was here, he got along great with Hunter Thompson, but as a leader of people, he was a disaster. He was blowing this place apart more than harmonizing and building it up. There’s no way you can call him hip, or of that culture, either. He’s a very square, rigorous guy, kind of like a Jesuit trainee. Everybody liked him, and yet he just didn’t fit. He couldn’t get any traction to work with anybody, because nobody really wanted to work with him. He just didn’t fit in, that’s all. He was here for about six months or so, maybe a little longer.
Skipper was here much longer. He worked at Rolling Stone for three years. In his time, Skipper was very much a part of the Rolling Stone culture and milieu. He had a lot of friends. In those days it was quite the socially intertwined organization, and people had major parts of their social life totally interconnected with the place, you know, free-flowing cocaine, young people intensely involved in their work. And John fit right in with everybody. He was beloved in the editorial department. He was beloved in the circ [circulation] department. We all knew each other, and I enjoyed him tremendously. He was fun to be with, he would sometimes smoke pot with me, and he’s got that wry sense of humor, and that devotion to music. In every way that John Walsh was an outsider and got rejected, you know, because he’s just completely square, John Skipper was an insider, a fun young boy, and I liked that aspect of him. He wound up growing up on the job, from circulation flunky to publisher of Us. I eventually fired him, but to this day, I view John Skipper as part of Rolling Stone. At one or two points I even asked him to come back.
JOHN PAPANEK, Editor:
The first words out of Steve Bornstein’s mouth were “Are you ready to fuck Sports Illustrated?”—knowing that I had worked there. I said, “Yeah.” But then we got into the argument of weekly versus biweekly. They had already agreed to go biweekly, but Steve was still under the assumption that after we got going, we would roll up to weekly. I told him, “Before this magazine ever goes weekly, it’ll go daily, because if you try to be timely on a weekly basis, you will fail miserably. If you’re on a biweekly basis, you don’t have to be timely. You’re only looking ahead; you’re never looking back.
I think that I served ESPN’s purpose. It went in their favor that they got a certain kind of attention when I was announced. SI was already a little nervous about them doing a magazine, and I think they got more nervous when I signed up. They also anticipated, correctly, that some other folks from their camp would join me; that bothered them more than a bit.
GARY HOENIG:
Steve was pretty bitter about the biweekly thing. He was angry. It was Skipper’s idea. I don’t know that he necessarily did it to be like Rolling Stone, but when I heard it, I thought it was perfect. It breaks you out of the news cycle, because the idea is that what already happened is no longer for magazines.
JOHN SKIPPER:
I’m shocked