Those Guys Have All the Fun - James Andrew Miller [28]
CHET SIMMONS:
All the Rasmussens I could lay my hands on, I fired. I made Stu a part of all that because these are the original guys that he had dealt with. Why take up space with somebody who was there just because they had been there at the beginning, and was the son of the founder? Why should he have the job when he was not really capable of doing it? I wanted experienced people in those roles. So I just brought my case to Evey and said, “Look, I’m going to do this thing and another.” I felt that it was necessary for him to have a say in what I did with them. He never disagreed.
BILL RASMUSSEN:
They just wanted Scott out of there. Chet said to me one day, “If he was my kid, he wouldn’t be driving a Cadillac, he’d be driving a Toyota stick shift.” I wanted Scott around, but I couldn’t do anything about that.
SCOTT RASMUSSEN:
As I think back, I have a different interpretation of Stu’s role now than I did then. As I think back on the meeting I probably wasn’t as jaded as I’d like to think. But Stu began the conversation by saying, you know, I can’t think of what wording he used, but there were some problems between us and he wanted me to know that he always thought highly of me and really wanted me to be a part of the Getty family, and he spent a little bit of time talking about the enormous benefits that someone like me could have staying with Getty Oil forever.
I kind of knew what was coming. In fact, my father was mostly concerned that I not be too hotheaded, that I listen carefully to Stu, and not say anything I’d regret. He offered me the same amount of money to leave as I would get if I stayed, plus I got to keep the car. If I stayed, I gave up the car and got whatever that role was. After he went through and described it all, I played it back to him as best I could understand just to make sure I had understood what he said. Then, thinking about what my father warned me about, I calmly said, “I’ll give you a call and let you know what I decide.” I walked down the hall, went to George Conner’s office, and called my father and said, “I’m out of here.” My father was stunned because he said, “Stu just called and said you had a nice talk and he thought you were going to stay.” I described what happened and that was a little strange, and so then we went back and had a lawyer write a letter to Stu saying neither option was acceptable and that they needed to negotiate something for me and a new contract for my father to stay.
Stu then called my father and said that he better disassociate himself from the lawyers and that I was already fired. Actually, he suspended me from pay while we worked things out, but I knew things were ending. I went from Stu’s office to the beach in Ocean Grove, New Jersey, and hung out there while my lawyers argued with Stu over how much money I was going to get paid. I really enjoyed that stretch because I was suspended but with pay, so I just kept getting a paycheck every couple of weeks and stayed at the beach. It turned out to be a couple months.
I’m much more of a dreamer and an entrepreneur. I like to get it started and move on. The notion of staying with Getty or with ESPN for an entire career would have never in a million years entered my mind. Would there have been better ways to have made the transition or the exit? Probably.
I believe that I am the single biggest beneficiary of the ESPN experience of anybody out there, period. Not financially, but I was a twenty-two-year-old college dropout who learned a lot of hard lessons, who got to walk up to the treasurer of Getty Oil and say, “The Olympic Committee says we need three quarters of a million dollars in deposit if we’re going to put in a bid,” and he said, “Okay.” That’s