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way he would phrase things. It seemed sometimes like he was actually really hurt that my father, as he saw it, had turned on him. There was obviously some unresolved history between them. But then he called my father “a typical Jewish snake,” I remember those exact words. It was the last straw. I decided I couldn’t stand there anymore. I didn’t give a shit about his answers anymore. He was telling everyone that my father had written that he didn’t have a sane bone in his body and asked me if I read it. I told him I wasn’t sure if I had but added, “You’ve done nothing here to disprove anything he said.” Then I walked out. The room was silent. He didn’t say a word for a good twenty seconds.

I was shaken and called Vince Doria to tell him what happened. He wanted the tape and we had to go through seventy different paths to get it fed back to the U.S. They ran the piece and then a couple weeks later, I did a bigger piece which ran on World News Tonight, and that piece made an even bigger impact.

On June 23, 2005, in an announcement that did nothing to alleviate stress levels, ABC Sports employees were summoned to an important meeting in the thirteenth-floor conference room at ABC corporate headquarters in New York. Word of the meeting heightened anxiety, already rampant, among the ABC Sports staff about the rapidly encroaching dominance of ESPN, moving like lava from a volcano over their work and, they feared, their futures.

Fortunately, George Bodenheimer was there to calm them, reassure them, and promote cooperation—even though, as he knew, the message flew in the face of history.

MICHAEL EISNER:

We had decided that we were going to get rid of ABC Sports, and ESPN would be on ABC. ESPN was “The Brand!”

MARK MANDEL, VP of Media Relations:

All of us from ABC Sports knew that we would have to adapt to new business realities once ESPN took over. Like many of my colleagues at ABC, we believed our brand was valuable and could have thrived under ESPN. But we soon came to recognize that merging the two under the ESPN brand was the right business decision, even if that was difficult for us personally. So we were on board and eager to contribute to ESPN, and I along with others expressed this to George.

We were told at the beginning that we would be welcomed onto the ESPN team and that the process to combine the two entities would be an “integration.” On June 23, George came to the ABC Sports offices to make it official. The entire ABC sports staff was assembled in the thirteenth-floor conference room. I was traveling but listened in on the conference call. George’s point that day was, this was going to be a great thing for everybody in the room because it would create more opportunities, and the combined company would make us all even stronger.

I wasn’t in the room, so I couldn’t smell anything, but what I heard was sheer mendacity. This was not an integration; this was a hostile takeover.

Immediately after returning to his office from that meeting, at least one longtime ABC executive was issued his walking papers. That very day. Within months, many others learned their fates, and the process of eliminating ABCers continued methodically. In 2005, there were approximately seventy-five to ninety full-time people working at ABC. By 2008, there were about forty who survived to work at ESPN. By 2010, there were about ten. And any of us who were “lucky” enough to have employment at ESPN had to accept diminished roles. You would have thought at least a few people from ABC would get top jobs within ESPN—it’s the law of averages that some people at ABC would have been better than their counterparts at ESPN. Every single ABC Sports employee had their responsibilities diminished. We either lost our jobs or had to accept lesser roles. I was even told by an ESPN senior vice president that the people of ESPN didn’t believe that the people of ABC Sports worked very hard. Perhaps it was inevitable that the big Bristol bureaucracy would clash with the small, efficient ABC Sports team that produced a lot of the most memorable sports television