Those Guys Have All the Fun - James Andrew Miller [218]
We had a big meeting in New York, and the first thing Eisner said was, “Let’s make one thing clear here: the magazine is going to be called ESPN. If anybody here disagrees with that, they can leave right now.” And that’s the only demand he ever made. Because of the pride/arrogance of all magazine editors, they wouldn’t settle for ESPN, it had to be ESPN: The Magazine—which prompted Gregg Easterbrook to say we lived on “Earth, the Planet.”
NEIL FINE, Executive Editor:
The tone really came from Gary Hoenig, who had this whole sports bar idea; he wanted the magazine to sound like guys hanging out and watching a game and having a beer. I think he hired me because I had never worked at a mainstream magazine before. My previous job was at Diabetes Self-Management [magazine], so to be honest, he saved me from a life of medical publishing. I had none of the stuff in my head about how sportswriting was supposed to sound. But I’m a big sports fan, so when I started writing and editing stuff, it just came out naturally.
GARY BELSKY, Editor in Chief:
The philosophy was clear when I got here: half the people being hired had conventional sports journalism backgrounds and the other half didn’t.
FRANK DeFORD, Columnist:
They made a real big push for me at ESPN: The Magazine when they first started up. It came at a time when my contract at Newsweek was running out, and there had been personnel changes at Sports Illustrated, and so they wanted me back. So I was in the enviable position of having three magazines fighting over me. I was like a free agent on the market. It was wonderful. I can’t remember all the money details, but it wasn’t that different between the three magazines. That wasn’t the determining factor. It was art rather than substance which was the issue. I just felt that the ESPN audience was probably not best for me. I was a man in my late fifties, and the ESPN audience was much younger, so I just felt it was bad casting, to use a theatrical word. It was a bad part for me. And I think I made the right decision.
DAVE EGGERS, Author:
Gary Hoenig reached out to me after seeing a little cult magazine I used to publish called Might magazine out here in San Francisco. ESPN had just gotten the go-ahead to incubate their magazine and called a few of us that night, just to try to bring in young magazine editor people. I’m a medium sports fan. I always know generally what’s going on, and I read the sports page every day, and I went to a Big Ten college and went to all the games there. I know generally enough about every sport, but I’ve never been a rabid, watching-tons-of-games-on-TV sort of a guy. I know enough to get by, and I think that they liked the fact that I wasn’t so inside the machine. I think they wanted an outsider’s perspective to bring the magazine maybe a slightly more casual audience and a different flavor.
I had just moved to New York to work at Esquire, and I had sort of a loosely defined role there, so I could take on some freelance stuff as well. So I went to meet with them, and they were working out of what seemed like a storage closet at the time. I remember getting off the elevator and their office was kind of an elevator lobby next to brooms and cleaning supplies. This was during the very early stages and I worked with Jeff Fohl, another one of our editors at Might, who also came in, and we sort of hashed out ideas for what the magazine could do and what hadn’t been done before with sports magazines, and in particular the front section.
We wrote probably a hundred different ideas, and a lot of them ended up in there—like the “Betting Line” and “The Answer Guys”—probably at least a dozen or more things that came and went at different times. But “The Answer Guys” was my thing for a couple years, where I would just take some seemingly obvious thing—you know, why a checkerboard design is on a soccer ball—and try to trace it back to the origins of that shape. And the same thing with like a backboard for basketball; that’s such a bizarre shape that we don’t really examine it that much, and it could’ve been