Those Guys Have All the Fun - James Andrew Miller [295]
Many assumed Iger had the inside track and would effortlessly get Eisner’s job, but others, including at least one member of the Disney board, believed that the company needed a totally fresh start. They wanted to make a clean break from everything Eisner. Either way, Iger was never one to suffer from hubris, and he had received no assurances that the job was to be his. Indeed, eBay’s Meg Whitman had already been mentioned as a possible candidate.
Arguably the last thing that Iger wanted at this precarious moment was for Disney to throw billions of dollars at an NFL package that had lost the company tens of millions in the past, so for the second half of 2004 and the first few months of 2005, Iger decided the best course of action was to sit tight and do nothing with the NFL.
Critical to Iger’s wait-it-out strategy was his belief that he wouldn’t have to worry about competition from NBC, which had walked away from the NFL in 1998. NBC was slogging through tough economic times, and NBC Sports chairman Dick Ebersol hadn’t voiced any interest in returning to the NFL.
Steve Bornstein had figured out from the start of negotiations that, as he put it, Disney was in “disarray,” that Eisner didn’t have the clout anymore to make such a huge decision, and that Iger would be hard-pressed to make a move. Sensing Iger’s reluctance to act, Bornstein decided to box him in.
Bornstein spent over a year romancing NBC’s Dick Ebersol; together the two developed a new Sunday night concept of a prime-time game, including a highlight show before, and “flex” scheduling, which would give Ebersol the opportunity to pick his choice of game during the critical second half of the season. The strategy was clear: If Bornstein could convince Fox and CBS to renew Sunday afternoons, and get NBC to step up for Sunday nights, that would leave Disney with only Monday Night Football—and no bargaining position whatever.
Bornstein was ready with his first big message to Iger. When George Bodenheimer was inducted into the Broadcasting Hall of Fame in the fall of 2004, Bornstein took the opportunity to tell Iger that CBS and Fox had already renewed their deals for Sunday afternoons. Iger instantly understood what this meant: the number of remaining bidders had been drastically reduced. The second big message Bornstein sent was that Disney shouldn’t consider its position unassailable, and what better way to convey that than a very public lunch with NBC—the same NBC that Iger was convinced wouldn’t get back into football?
DICK EBERSOL:
We had a very famous lunch with the NFL at 21. It was Paul Tagliabue, Roger Goodell, and Steve Bornstein from their side, and they invited me, Jeff Zucker [President, NBC Universal], and Randy Falco. I said, we’ve got a private dining room, why not have it here? But I should have seen it coming, because we opened up the New York Post the next day, and there it was on Page Six.
They asked us if we would take over the Monday night schedule, because Eisner was desperate to get out of it, and we told them—as we had about a year and a half before—that the answer was no. We had done our due diligence and said, “Guys, we could never afford to pay you as much as they’re paying you, because the losses are so extraordinary and our losses would be so much bigger because we would be cutting into our late-night show on Monday night by doing it.” But we also said, “If you’re ever interested in Sunday night, we’d love to do Sunday night. We would take that over from ESPN, and we’d want the highlight package, so we’d have the game and fill four hours of prime time.”
STEVE BORNSTEIN:
Bob’s position was tenuous, and it was difficult for them to act. This was going to be a very big deal—a big transaction. Other than when Disney bought CapCities, this was the largest deal