Those Guys Have All the Fun - James Andrew Miller [246]
NEIL EVERETT, Anchor:
One of the first stories I ever did at ESPNews was when Dale Earnhardt hit the wall, and I had to talk to a lot of people about what his death meant to them. At that moment, I reminded myself that no one was turning on the television to find out what I knew about Dale Earnhardt; they were watching to find out what the guy I was interviewing knew about Dale Earnhardt.
For more than twenty years, William N. Creasy Jr. was, simply put, one of the most influential personalities in the history of ESPN. He found and hired Steve Bornstein, conceived College GameDay, and was involved in more decisions than anyone would imagine, especially since he stayed in the shadows much of the time.
When Bornstein was promoted and transplanted to Burbank, George Bodenheimer kept Creasy on as a consultant and made him part of his kitchen cabinet. A less secure chief executive might well have worried that Creasy would run back to Bornstein with inside information, given their close friendship. But Bodenheimer trusted Creasy, and, perhaps equally important, although Bodenheimer felt he was on terra firma with issues regarding affiliates, marketing, and ad sales, he knew he could benefit from advice on programming matters, which were now in his bailiwick—and stirring up a mess of trouble.
ARTIE BULGRIN, Senior Vice President of Research:
The network’s yearly coverage rating—the percentage of subscribing homes that watch the network in an average minute—peaked at a 0.87 rating in 1990 [488,00 homes], but we were experiencing some softness in the years leading into 2001: a 0.78 in 1998, 0.74 in 1999, and a 0.69 in 2000, which was the lowest that number had ever been up to that time. We had some good reasons to explain these declines: at about this time, digital cable was just launching, and DirecTV and EchoStar were really starting to proliferate. This was the onset of the five-hundred-channel universe.
But as we analyzed the Nielsen data further, we found a disturbing trend leading into 2001: not only were fewer households tuning in to ESPN, they were also spending less time watching. This was a concern in that some of our content was becoming less “engaging” to the audience, forcing them to tune out. For example, in fourth-quarter 1999, the average “viewing” household spent twenty-two hours and forty-five minutes watching ESPN, and by fourth-quarter 2000, that declined to just over twenty hours. This was a disturbing trend and a programming issue that needed to be fixed. George Bodenheimer was adamant about us finding a solution and wouldn’t accept excuses or theories. In retrospect, this represented a turning point for ESPN.
BILL CREASY:
John Walsh and I have considerable respect for each other, but John had it in his mind that after Mark did SportsCentury and [ESPN] Classic, he was moving too fast for his own good. My position was, he couldn’t move fast enough. When you came to ESPN, you went through steps, and that’s what John was thinking when he said the famous line to Mark we all remember: “You gotta go do the B-game, you’re going to produce Boise State playing somebody.” Mark said, “What are you talking about? I don’t do that shit.” I think that irritated John a bit; he’s been in any number of jobs, jumped all over the place, but he was old-school. He said, “You gotta do this for two or three years and then you can move up the ladder.” I was not about to stand for Mark being assigned to some fucking Boise State game somewhere out there. I said, “You can’t do this. It’s ludicrous. This kid has just done