Those Guys Have All the Fun - James Andrew Miller [259]
I had been at ESPN for fourteen years. I didn’t know if I had enough in me to make a last stand, and I really didn’t want to be doing SportsCenter much anymore. I’d done about 2,500 of them—from godawful in the beginning to reasonably decent at the end. Bob Ley and I were the antithesis of glitz and glamour. In our own little way, I suppose, we were kind of like a Woodward and Bernstein. Bob was a Catholic guy; I was a Jewish guy. He was a straight Republican, and I was off there on the left somewhere. But together we had a pretty good ride. And we were grown-ups. To Shapiro’s credit, SportsCentury was terrific stuff, but he was a guy who had answers to everything and very few questions. How do you fight that? I simply chose not to. I was worn out by then—by then and by them.
DAN PATRICK:
You have to remember that Mark Shapiro had told me that I was over the hill, that I was making too much, and that I wouldn’t get a job anywhere else. I’ll admit it, part of me believed what Shapiro was saying, but at the same time, he motivated me because I was thinking, “Fuck you, you’re not going to get me.” So I agreed to a schedule that I think was the worst in ESPN history. I’d come in in the morning and get ready for the radio show and have an early SportsCenter meeting, then I would be on the radio from one to four. After that, I would go back to my office, where I had a sleeping bag, and take a nap for an hour until five, then begin writing the eleven o’clock SportsCenter. I left the building after midnight. When I look back on my career, doing that schedule was my biggest regret. It meant that I didn’t see my kids Monday through Friday, and that was awful. But it all comes back to what people say about the place—they don’t care about talent. Couldn’t care less. “We don’t need you, fuck you, we’ve got NFL games.”
Mark Shapiro had dramatic, eventful relationships with virtually all the league commissioners and with the ruling chieftains of most other sports. But his association with NBA commissioner David Stern was the most “it’s complicated” of them all. Stern, very protective of his product and progeny, may well have expected Shapiro to look up to him for guidance or wisdom. Good luck with that, David.
MARK SHAPIRO:
I always knew the NBA would be a game changer for ESPN. I was a big fan of the game, and one only had to look at the success Turner had with the league to know what it could do for us. We had more men and younger men [in our audience], so I figured if it was good for them it would be even better for us. The NBA deal provided us with tonnage—forty to fifty games—plus playoffs, and, most important, it would enhance our credibility. Taking it off NBC would also be a major coup. Once again, we relied on the 360-degree approach in order to convince the league that we were the place to be in the post-Jordan era, when they needed exposure in the worst way: the finals on ABC, games on ESPN2, vintage games for ESPN Classic, footage across our other platforms, and a monster marketing campaign.
The league had a lot of options, as both NBC and Turner wanted to stay in the game. But we stole it from NBC. They simply couldn’t compete with the dual revenue stream we had, which gave us the ability to pay more. I’d like to think that our multiplatform strategy also had something to do with it. It was the right time for the league to make such a move to cable. And it did bring us happy days on the ratings front. It was a big game changer.
ADAM SILVER, NBA Deputy Commissioner:
It was Mark who crafted the strategy of co-partnering with Turner, because historically we had a network partner and we had a cable partner—NBC and Turner. And the belief in the industry