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it wasn’t more transparent to people who reviewed it when it came out: It’s Rolling Stone crossed with Sports Illustrated. It’s a biweekly magazine, oversize, printed in the same plant as Rolling Stone, started by two people, John [Walsh] and I, who grew up reading Sports Illustrated and had been at Rolling Stone. But the SI audience was getting older, and we felt there was a publishing flaw to it, which was they were still trying to do news in a weekly format when you didn’t need news weeklies anymore. ESPN was the company that ruined that. Everything we wanted to do was a clear delineation with that’s them and that’s old, and that’s last generation, and that’s the thing that happened yesterday, and we’re today and we’re looking forward and we’re young and hip. Publicly we were of the damn-with-faint-praise school. I had a patter I used every time I got interviewed: I love Sports Illustrated. I grew up with it. I’m forty-two, it’s my magazine, I grew up with it, it’s beautiful, it’s great. Gee, in the days when you needed to get your news, it was great. So it’s past tense, things have changed.

Jann [Wenner] has always been quite complimentary of ESPN. He has never been anything but generous with counsel, including his praise of the magazine. I think he once told me that the type was too small, and I think I told him he was not the target demo. But I’ve never heard a peep from him that “Gee, you took something.” I think if anything, Jann was proud.

JANN WENNER:

I’m not an ESPN magazine reader. Every time I pick it up, I can’t read it. To me, it’s badly designed. I mean, it made its name with its cool design, and it’s youthful and zippy and has big graphics, but I just find it impossible to read. I don’t find it satisfying; I throw it away.

JOHN SKIPPER:

We were asking for over $100 million. We had wanted it to be under one hundred, but the strategic planning guys kept taking it up. They were trying to get the price tag higher and higher so Michael would kill it. We had several knockdown, drag-out fights where they said to us, “You need more money.” They hired three New York publishing consultants, three experts, and all three looked at the plan and said, “Generally, good plan, we like it,” but one of them said, “I don’t think you’re going to get those ad CPMs [costs per thousand], I think it’s a little aggressive.” Another said, “Your editorial budget’s not high enough, everything else is pretty much okay.” And one of them said, “Your production costs aren’t high enough.” So we just kept going up and up and up.

Then again, maybe it wasn’t all the analysis, presentations, conference calls, and pleading that convinced Eisner to go ahead with the magazine.

MICHAEL EISNER:

Ted Turner started a sports channel, CNN Sports, which really pissed me off. And as only Ted Turner could, he’s saying to me, “I’m going to bury you, ESPN is shit, I know cable, you guys don’t know cable!” And I said—taking a note from [former chairman of MCA Universal] Lew Wasserman—“Don’t get angry, get even.” I knew our strategic planning division didn’t want to go into the magazine business—after all, we were selling off our magazines that we owned—but I walked into Disney the next day and said, “We are going to kick Time Warner’s ass. We are going to bury Sports Illustrated. And I’m going to call Ted Turner and tell him.” I called him that afternoon and said, “You’re going to do CNN Sports? Well, we’re going to bury your flagship. Sports Illustrated is old, and it is boring. Ted, you’ve got six hours to get out of town!” And we never stepped back. I could’ve cared less about the economics.

I will say, the combination of John Skipper, John Walsh, Steve Bornstein, and George Bodenheimer gave me the ability to compete with this very arrogant, terrific guy who actually invented cable, Ted Turner. And I thought doing the magazine would make us cool in the magazine world and make Time Warner uncool in the magazine world. While the magazine turned out not to be a giant economic driver, it’s been very good for the brand. I believe in brands.

JOHN WALSH: