Those Guys Have All the Fun - James Andrew Miller [294]
MARK SHAPIRO:
Chris doesn’t negotiate at all. I would never bring her into a negotiating room with me on any deal. Do the background stuff; get me prepared to do what I need to do; work with me, help me; let’s run a P&L; let’s think about this; what are we missing? I mean, on the crap work for NFL negotiations her team does a really good job. But you’ve got to keep her out of the negotiating room.
CHRISTINE DRIESSEN:
The large important programming deals that were done under Mark when he was head of programming were driven by George Bodenheimer. Sometimes people lose sight of that because Mark was very vocal about his contributions and very visible. George is visible when he needs to be, but he isn’t concerned with getting credit for himself; he’d rather give credit to the team. George made the final call. Under George’s leadership, the big change here is that he has a negotiating style of being very honest and straightforward. When George says something, he has credibility.
At the end of the day, a lot of people talk passionately about the emotions driving these kinds of decisions, but a lot of that is overblown.
HOWARD KATZ:
The people who worked for Mark swore by him; the people he negotiated with swore at him. Watching him and Steve Bornstein negotiating with each other, the teacher and the student, you could sell tickets. Mark was brilliant and had incredible command of a room; he had an incredible ability to motivate people who worked for him, but he also had an incredible ability to piss people off. He may not have appreciated the sensitivity of the relationship between certain rights holders and ESPN, because he was a ruthless negotiator.
GEORGE BODENHEIMER:
ABC was losing $150 million or more a year on Monday Night Football, and the clock had just run out on ABC’s interest in continuing to do that. They were ready to move into a profitable, entertainment-based schedule. At the same time, you had a burgeoning ESPN always looking for more, always looking to improve itself, all of a sudden having an opportunity to step up to Monday Night Football. That’s an opportunity that we gladly embraced. Everybody in the United States knows when Monday Night Football is on. It’s the preeminent sport property. Having been at ESPN since 1981, you tell me I’ve got an opportunity to program Monday Night Football on ESPN, you better believe we’re going to take advantage of that opportunity.
There were never any serious discussions, however, to acquire two packages, both Sunday and Monday.
MARK SHAPIRO:
I wanted both. I wanted to keep Sunday night on ESPN and Monday night on ABC as long as the price was reasonable, say $1.5 billion a year. I thought we could have gotten it at one point, but Iger passed. What can I do? What you need to realize is, no matter how big one thinks I might have been in that job, when it came to Monday Night Football or the NFL in general, and spending that kind of money, I had input, George had input, and our voices were heard, but we couldn’t make the decision. Michael Eisner and Bob Iger were running the ship.
But were Eisner and Iger really “running the ship”? Was anyone truly in a position to lead and make timely decisions for Disney during such critical negotiations? With Eisner clearly on his way out, Bob Iger felt the time had come at last for him to take control of Disney and save the day. His executive dexterity had been on display throughout his career but was never as evident as when he navigated the tightrope he had been walking under Eisner. Somehow, he had managed to serve under an increasingly controversial