Those Guys Have All the Fun - James Andrew Miller [290]
We bitched and complained all we could. Everybody did. But nothing changed. Basically, you had frustration and pride manifesting themselves—our pride in our sport and our frustration at other people not loving it as much as we did.
GARY BETTMAN:
In that environment, if you’re being trashed publicly, and they’re not paying you what they had agreed the asking price was, why stay? People say, “It’s ESPN; you had to be on ESPN.” You know what? I was also the first commissioner to shut down a sports league for an entire year. We weren’t going to be treated the way we were being treated. And I believed that if they got us too cheap, they would never treat us the way we needed to be treated.
Putting aside what Mark was saying publicly, I didn’t put as much stock into it because I knew what he was doing. If we had agreed to a date for a meeting, I knew when I would read in the newspapers some negative comment. I viewed it a little bit differently, in the context of how we were being treated. And that’s when I said, “I will not do a package with you, even if I have nowhere else to go, at less than the option price.” I then took a drive down to Philadelphia and met my new best friends, Comcast. Brian Roberts and Steve Burke, who had recently gone there, decided that they wanted to make us their team number-one most important program on OLN, soon to be Versus. They paid us more money than even the option price that we had with ESPN, they had promised us treatment, but we understood that they needed to increase their distribution. So I decided it was time to break out and do something new and different. I believed that we could come back from the work stoppage undamaged—and, interestingly enough, we had record attendance that first year back after a year off, and record revenues. No business in the history of business, any industry, has ever done that, having been shut down for an entire year, okay? Never been done. And I didn’t want my broadcast partner, my TV partner, to bring us down, and that’s what ESPN, I felt, was going to do. I think they had a right to match, and when we came in with numbers even higher than the option price, they decided not to match. And George told me in a late-night conversation that they were disappointed, but they weren’t going to match.
BARRY MELROSE, Hockey Analyst:
Shapiro and Bettman came to hate each other. And Gary is a lawyer and a tough negotiator, and I think he felt that ESPN was trying to take advantage of the NHL and lowball them with the price.
LINDA COHN:
I wasn’t in the room during the negotiations, but it just sounds like two egos going at it and no one looking at the big picture. There were mistakes on both sides. I was angry and so were the people who were passionate about hockey.
STEVE LEVY:
I can tell you from inside the building, people love the hockey and the day we lost the rights it was like people had lost their dog. I don’t know if I would say people were openly sobbing, but people were moved. There was a lot of emotion in the building. It seems like hockey grips the building in a different way from the other sports, and it’s not just the on-air people and the producers. It’s the camera people and the audio guys. Everybody behind the scenes seems to be a big hockey fan, and I think it really hurt the morale in the building when we lost the sport.
FRED GAUDELLI:
What they did to the National Hockey League was insane. From the time that I got to ESPN to the time that I left, our philosophy was that we wanted to be known as people who you want to be in business with; we wanted to be good partners, and have good relationships with the leagues. We didn’t want to thump our chests at them, and we didn’t want to thump our chests at the media. As a result, ESPN for a long time had a reputation for being really good guys who do good work.
When Mark came in, he brought an arrogance. His regime or style, however you want to put it, was basically the turning point for ESPN going