Those Guys Have All the Fun - James Andrew Miller [229]
JED DRAKE:
In 1998, we got into business with Sportvision, a technology start-up with venture-capital funding. Some of the principals had worked for News Corp., so they knew TV, and they approached us with the concept of a 1st and Ten Line, which would appear on the screen during our coverage of football games. As soon as we heard it, Howard Katz and I knew this was something of great interest. Now, whenever there’s a new technological development, we always try to negotiate a position of exclusivity; we don’t want our competitors to have what we’ve developed, and we like as much distinction as possible for our brand. We made a big preseason announcement that we had something really cool coming along but didn’t provide any details. Then we showed it to Commissioner Tagliabue to give him a heads-up, and we were very pleased when he liked what he saw. Make no mistake: this was a big deal for us.
When we launched it, I remember telling myself, “Okay, there’s no turning back now.” At first, it didn’t work as well as it should have—it moved around and jittered a lot—but we stuck with it and continued to make improvements with Sportvision. We were hearing that the other networks thought it was a stupid gimmick, but then Sportvision came to us and asked, “Would you be willing to release your exclusivity so that Fox could use the 1st and Ten system on the Super Bowl?” We had a lot of internal discussions here and ultimately came to the conclusion that we were not willing to release our exclusivity. Then I found out that Fox was claiming they had come up with the idea in the first place. I wound up telling a reporter for the Miami Herald that I wanted to congratulate David Hill. I said, “He can add the yard-marker device to his long list of accomplishments, including color TV, instant replay, and the handheld camera. Like my father once said, there’s a big difference between saying you had an idea and actually making it happen.” Fox had no further comment, and we won an Emmy for 1st and Ten. We were incredibly proud.
MICHAEL EISNER:
When we bought Infoseek [in 1998], it was the number-two search engine, behind Yahoo. Google was in its infancy then. The Internet was a big priority for us, and Steve Bornstein was the biggest star CEO in the Walt Disney Company, so I made him run this Internet company. He didn’t want to do it, and he knew nothing about it. That wasn’t good for them and it wasn’t good for him. It also took him out of ESPN.
STEVE BORNSTEIN:
I turned down the ABC job twice. I thought Michael was making a big mistake, because the big driver of the business was ESPN, and those kind of things don’t manage themselves. Then Eisner deployed Tom Murphy, the chairman of CapCities, probably the greatest media company ever, saying to me, “Steve, your chairman has asked you to do something that’s important to him. You cannot say no. You really don’t have a choice here.” And so I took the job and moved to the West Coast.
Faced with a vacancy at the top of the organizational chart as ESPN was in 1998, most companies would immediately summon a big headhunting firm and cast a wide net for intriguing executive talent. Not ESPN. Bristol breeds its own. Not since Chet Simmons’s arrival in 1979 had an outsider ever snatched the presidency, and that was before the network had even made it onto the air. This partly had to do with the hermetic nature of the ESPN culture, and with being headquartered not in just another New York skyscraper but spread horizontally over a one-of-a-kind campus. It would’ve taken most new arrivals a year merely to figure out who was who, what