Those Guys Have All the Fun - James Andrew Miller [223]
Predicting a career in communications for Mark Shapiro wouldn’t have been hard even when he was a smart-alecky tyke running through the corridors of power at Time Inc. His divorced mother, Judith, worked there, and though young Mark lived with Dad, his regular visits to Mom in Manhattan invariably found him hanging out at Time’s corporate headquarters and rubbing elbows with Time managing editor Walter Isaacson and other luminaries. He even got to sit in on story meetings, layout meetings, cover meetings—all kinds of meetings, few of which would have interested a “normal” kid. When he boldly told legendary Sports Illustrated editor Ray Cave that he thought the magazine had too many ads, he was invited in for an hour-long chat instead of being tossed out on his ear.
Definitely a go-getter from the get-go, Shapiro knew even in high school that he yearned for a career in sports broadcasting; in fact, he started and hosted a cable-access sports show while still a student. Not wanting to wait for a mere formality like graduating from college (though he did—in 1992), he applied for an internship at NBC while still a sophomore at the University of Iowa. Only three internships were available and only one of those full-time, but Shapiro brushed aside six hundred other applicants and walked away with it. To make ends meet, he had to take a part-time job selling the New York Times over the telephone at night.
When the internship was over and Shapiro returned to school full-time, NBC kept him on as a weekend production assistant. On weekends he commuted to Notre Dame football games and, for his first major traveling event, got to go to Wimbledon (which would make a huge impression on him) and, later, the Barcelona Olympics in 1992, and a Super Bowl or two—all this before leaving college. His first job after graduating was with NBC Sports—a job that gave him the chance to work with producer David Michaels, brother of sportscaster Al Michaels.
Michaels soon moved Shapiro to Los Angeles, where, six months after Shapiro’s arrival, he got a call from ESPN2 about a new sports talk show it was starting with the incendiary Jim Rome as host. The salary was $20,000 a year, not the stuff with which dreams are paid for. Plus, Shapiro was told, the job was temporary, and ESPN could guarantee him nothing beyond six months.
Meanwhile, Shapiro was still in demand at NBC, where he had worked his way up to associate producer at double the salary ESPN was offering—though there was no certainty that if he stayed at NBC he would be working in sports. In a way, he had too many opportunities staring him in his youthful face. Confused, he asked his father what he should do, and Dad came through with a pithy and potent five-word response:
“The future is in cable.”
This made a much bigger impression on Mark Shapiro than the middle-aged man uttering “one word: plastics” did for Dustin Hoffman in The Graduate. Shapiro even took a pay cut from $40,000 to $20,000 to join ESPN. Mark Shapiro, who celebrated his ninth birthday the year ESPN went on the air, figured his future was in cable too.
MARK SHAPIRO:
John Walsh knew I had a real passion for sports history, so I got a call from him. He told me, “We’re going to start this project, Looking Back Through 100 Years of Sports. We’re going to do ancillary things, magazine supplements, a book, all these hours of programming, radio—you name it. Twenty-five million dollars is the budget for this project. You’d be the number-two guy. I said, “What do you mean ‘number two’?!