Those Guys Have All the Fun - James Andrew Miller [268]
JOHN WALSH:
Mark liked introducing new programs. Playmakers was his baby and it was a big hit for a season, and would still probably be on the air if not for the fact that it pissed off the NFL.
JOHN EISENDRATH:
Once the show was on, I think the NFL probably felt it couldn’t totally ignore it, which I’m sure would have been their preferred course of action, but this was clearly not going to go away. It got the double whammy too, because television critics were writing about it, and so were sportswriters. It was getting twice the amount of notoriety that a show might otherwise get. I’m very certain that about two-thirds of the way through the season, under pressure from the NFL, Gatorade dropped their sponsorship.
MICHAEL EISNER:
During the weekend, NFL team owners watch their own games, but every owner in football watches Monday Night Football. They’re all home. So on a Monday night they actually put up a promotion for Playmakers, and what do they put in the promotion? Everything you would not want an owner to see: drinking, driving while drinking, homosexuality, drugs, steroids, all of this crammed into a thirty-second promo. As soon as I saw it on the air, I called George at home and I said, “George, are you guys insane?! What are you doing? It’s like throwing meat to a starving dog!”
PAUL TAGLIABUE, NFL Commissioner:
Over the summer I started to see promos on ESPN for Playmakers. I didn’t know anything about it. I think I learned later that there were some discussions with ESPN about using the uniforms or NFL colors and marks and logos, but I didn’t know anything about the program until I started to see those promos. And I thought they were very negative, that they traded in racial stereotypes that were very unfair to NFL players and, for that matter, to African Americans generally. So I asked someone in our broadcasting group to get me a tape of one or more of the actual episodes because I didn’t want to draw any conclusions just based on the promos. But when I looked at a couple of the episodes, they confirmed my worst fears—the way the players were cast was demeaning to African Americans and really the worst of racial stereotypes about black athletes and young black males generally.
I decided just to call Eisner directly. I didn’t see any reason to talk to anybody at ESPN because the way I viewed it, it was the kind of issue that he would be interested in just in terms of how the Walt Disney Company viewed itself and how he viewed ESPN. I called him and told him I thought the programming was a terrible disservice to athletes and to society. He said, “Well, you know, I understand what you’re saying, but there’ve been things that are not exactly positive published about, or presented on television about NFL players before, such as Pete Gent’s book North Dallas Forty.”
I said, “North Dallas Forty, are you kidding me? It’s got nothing to do with this issue. The author of North Dallas Forty did not have a contractual relationship with the NFL. He was an independent author, a former player, who was not under an obligation to present NFL football, NFL players, NFL teams in a way that makes it a valuable, credible, respected product. You have that obligation, and I think what you’re doing here is directly undercutting that. People want to watch sports when they can respect the athletes. This program leads them to have a view of the athletes that leads them to disrespect the athletes.” I said, “Expectations as to how professional athletes conduct themselves are much higher today than they were twenty-five years ago. We at the NFL have tried to do a lot to raise those expectations of the players and demonstrate to the public that these athletes are responsible individuals, and that they do manage their lives—not just on the field but off the field—in mature ways. And what you’re presenting is so one-sided, it directly undercuts all of that, and that’s a big issue for us.” I then told Eisner, “It’s ridiculous, I don’t see why you’re doing it, and I don