Those Guys Have All the Fun - James Andrew Miller [280]
Pagano, who got a bachelor of science degree in electrical engineering from the University of Hartford in 1984, quickly became known around ESPN not only for his talent but for his ability to get along with virtually everybody. Giant but nimble, he covers a lot of ground each day walking briskly through the campus, so affable and hard to provoke that he became known as the unofficial “mayor of ESPN.” He did not shrink from that title; he welcomed it.
CHUCK PAGANO:
Mark Shapiro had a very charismatic style to his leadership. I’m sure there were other parts in the organization that didn’t get along with him, but I sort of enjoyed his clarity. The key was gaining his respect. If you did that, he would basically let you do your job and do it well.
I remember in my very first meeting with him, he goes, “I just want you to know one thing. I yell at people, so get used to it.” I said, “Okay, but in the openness of this conversation, I should warn you about one thing about me, Mark.” And he goes, “What’s that?” I said, “If you yell at me, I will respond accordingly and aggressively; it’s as simple as that. I don’t accept anybody yelling at me. So be forewarned, I don’t accept that behavior. You yell at me, you better run for the door.” He came back to me later and goes, “Thank you. I was waiting for someone to stand up to me.”
When we launched SportsCenter from the new digital center, you couldn’t tell at home, but the control room that handled SportsCenter basically imploded that night. It was as close to a thermonuclear disruption as anything I’d experienced in my life. We were trying to do too much and we just overloaded every system. And luckily—I’m being sarcastic here—Shapiro was there with a significant number of his guests for the launch, so that made it even more intriguing. He was a little agitated, but to his credit, he got my message, which was “Get the fuck out of the control room, we gotta fix this.” And he did. He left right away and that was really appreciated. I really just wanted him to let us do our job; we could worry about the shrapnel later.
BILL LAMB:
Yup, forty-five minutes into the first SportsCenter that we did in high-def, all of the servers failed. They had all of the content, and all of the highlights, on them, and one by one, they went down—just a catastrophic cascade of failure. Once the director noticed, he started running videotaped versions of the pieces that had been made, so there was an absolutely instantaneous, seamless transition; the audience saw no evidence whatsoever of any problems.
But there were probably forty people outside the control room, including the press, and they were all staring at what was going on, and you had the director’s PL, which is the director’s private line, intercommed and amplified on a PA system in the hallway, so it was all incredibly evident. When I heard the director say, “Okay, we’re going to videotape,” I thought my life was over right there. That was the nice-to-know-you-Bill moment. When they came out, I thought, “Well, I’m dead.” Instead, they said, “Eh! Figure it out later.” I’ve been here half my adult life, and it was reinforcement and incredible testimony to the character that this place is all about, even under tough circumstances. We went right downstairs and had champagne to celebrate the first show we had done out of that control room. There were no grudges, and no anger. It was just like, “Okay—we lost this game; we’ll win the next one.” Phenomenal!
The digital center proved to be our crowning moment. That was the point at which ESPN leapfrogged over all our competition by about five years. And once we got on that track and got good at doing that, we’ve been in the lead position ever since.
She may have a musical and alliterative name, but there’s very little about Maura Mandt that friends or colleagues