Those Guys Have All the Fun - James Andrew Miller [289]
It wasn’t long, however, before some team owners were complaining to the commissioner that he should have taken the ESPN deal, insulting or not.
GARY BETTMAN:
I always like to stay with my partners. I’m a relationship kind of guy. I try to be low-maintenance. I try to make clear what I think we need. So we’ve never looked to move for the sake of moving. That was the five-year, $600 million deal that we, the NHL, made with ABC/ESPN. And if you go back and you check, the response to some press report said I wasn’t wearing a mask and I didn’t have a gun, because they had stepped up big-time.
There’s always been a connection between ESPN and hockey. If you were working in Bristol, you went to see the Hartford Whalers play—that was their professional team. The earliest hockey programming at a professional level was the Whalers, and ESPN2 was built on the NHL and all the tonnage we gave them. But when the NBA moved to ESPN, my immediate reaction was that I knew the NHL was going to have a problem with the next negotiation because I had reason to believe that when they were doing the NBA deal, they budgeted what they could pay them based on the fact that they thought they could drive a tougher bargain with us. This is a small world that we live in; I knew what was coming.
I believed that if they weren’t paying us a fair rate, paying us what we were worth relative to other sports and everything else, then they’d never have an incentive to grow our games. We wouldn’t get the type of priority treatment that we need—first of all coming back from the work stoppage and secondly that I thought we were entitled to as one of the four major sports.
We’d been partners all those years; they’d built ESPN2 into this behemoth on our back for virtually no cost for our programming. We had just come through one of the most difficult and extraordinary times that a sports league had ever been through, and their answer, instead of embracing us and trying to make it right, was “We’re going to take another pound of flesh.” Unlike when Dick Ebersol came to the board meeting during the work stoppage and said, “We know you guys have business to take care of. Do what you have to do and we’ll be there when you get done.”
BILL CLEMENT:
Well, ESPN had NHL rights in 1985 all the way to 2004 with the exception of three years. There were three or four years when SportsChannel America had it, but when ESPN lost it in ’04, it was a bad day for all of us who are hockey lovers. There’s a certain loyalty that borderlines addiction to the sport of hockey. Just ask fans. It’s a connective kind of sport. There were a lot of people who had a lot of emotion invested and time, effort, everything else. But more than that emotion invested is their attachment to their sport.
It bothered all of the hockey people, including producers and people at ESPN, that hockey was always one of the last items to make air on SportsCenter. And it bothered people within the industry that the stepchild status, that redheaded stepchild thing, was always confirmed based on the pecking order that hockey fell into on SportsCenter, which is way down on the rundown. But SportsCenter is an autonomous entity at ESPN that has to cater to its viewers. And there were enough hockey people to warrant putting great hockey highlights at