Those Guys Have All the Fun - James Andrew Miller [283]
NORBY WILLIAMSON:
This was 2004, in Kuwait, right on the border of Iraq. They had scares and missiles; it wasn’t like hanging out with whatever, but I felt good enough that we weren’t going to put people in danger.
Every SportsCenter that we did for a week had an audience. It was fantastic. You thought you were doing something good going over there. When you were over there, you knew you were doing something good. I mean it was off the charts. We probably played to four hundred a show, maybe more. There was no truck we could roll in there, so we had to basically ship boxes of control-room pieces from Europe and then assemble them there. It was like the first time we’d really done that; we didn’t know if it was going to work. The satellite was the real test: could we really get the signal out of there and back here and ultimately into people’s homes? We had trouble because we’re in the Middle East and the pitch was too low: we had to get the dish on top of the barracks to get a better shot at the satellite. Then a dust storm came in. We eventually got up, got it, and we were on TV. It was amazing.
STUART SCOTT:
Before the first show, they introduced us, and the applause we got from the troops was thunderous. I mean, we get cheered places sometimes, but I had never experienced anything like this. And I remember thinking, “This should be reversed. It should be us cheering for them.” I’ve never experienced anything else like it in my professional career.
STEVE LEVY:
It was 120 degrees, sandy and dusty, and we had the hot television lights besides, but the executives made us wear suits and ties. I tend to perspire, and after the first day I was just drenched. And so the next day I come back, and the troops—the servicemen and servicewomen—had built a huge air-conditioning vent positioned right between my legs, under the desk so nobody could see it, blowing very cold air right to that critical area. Of course, in the military, everything is “Operation Something,” so they called this “Operation Cool Nuts.”
NORBY WILLIAMSON:
It was the most humbling thing ever. It was like we were giving the soldiers a ticket home. It’s still one of the top five experiences of my life.
Less than a decade after the Walt Disney Company bought Capital Cities/ABC (for only $19 billion) and became ESPN’s owner, it looked as though the sports network might be getting new corporate parents yet again. Comcast, the nation’s biggest cable operator, made a surprise $54 million bid for Disney in 2004. Some analysts said the most attractive part of the deal for Comcast was that it included the acquisition of ESPN, which would make Comcast both buyer and seller when it came to sports programming. It would also, presumably, bring an end to Comcast’s complaints about the high cost of ESPN’s prodigious output.
Michael Eisner was under fire from Roy Disney and others for, among other things, losing distribution rights to products from the highly praised and highly valued Pixar company, creators of Toy Story. Stanley Gold, a Disney board member, said he hoped the board would handle the deal with the best interests of Disney shareholders—“and not the best interest of Michael Eisner”—in mind. If the Disney board voted to accept the proposition, the combined enterprise would become the world’s biggest media company, unseating Time Warner. But the board rejected Comcast’s offer, and the deal fell through.
STEVE BURKE:
The majority of the value when we bid for Disney was ESPN. Our model actually put no value on the ABC network; ESPN, we felt, was almost priceless.