Those Guys Have All the Fun - James Andrew Miller [311]
Those who’d regarded Shapiro as a ruthless boss would have this bit of reality to consider: no fewer than sixteen ESPN employees would follow him to Six Flags.
AL MICHAELS:
There was a running gag among the Monday Night Football crew that there should have been bumper stickers made saying, “Honk if you haven’t been told by Shapiro that he’s getting ten million dollars from Snyder.”
MARK SHAPIRO:
When I look back on my final year, it’s with a great sense of satisfaction and accomplishment. I had surrounded myself with an extraordinary team, and we secured ESPN’s position in the marketplace, with the sports fan, and in the industry for years to come. I was so proud. I had worked relentlessly and sacrificed an unbelievable amount of time with my family to accomplish all this.
And then an odd thing happened: some people wanted to just stamp me with the original entertainment label, like that was the headline of my legacy. In a way, I could see how this might have happened, since the shows my regime created, like PTI, Around the Horn, Rome Is Burning, OTL Daily, were such huge hits for the network.
But to characterize it as just entertainment was so wrong. It was the combination of all that incredible development plus the right stick-and-ball properties that gave ESPN brand dominance in the sports world. No one can rewrite that history, and all they have to do is look at what we did. We moved the biggest game in sports, Monday Night Football, to ESPN. We extended our Major League Baseball contract for another seven years, and we brought NASCAR back to ESPN. Add to that, three of the four tennis grand slams, the Belmont and Breeders Cup. We gave birth to the poker craze with the World Series of Poker, and we capitalized on the television reality craze with the hit series Dream Job. And Mike &Mike exploded on the radio. The greatest digital facility in the world opened on our campus, and we launched both HD channels and ESPN Deportes. ESPN2 had serious traction; ESPN Classic was now in over seventy million homes. We had also invested in our journalistic enterprise and had the deepest, most authoritative reporting organization in sports. We were honored with the company’s first two Peabody Awards. And perhaps most importantly, I had to look back at my mandate upon being hired—improve ratings—and in my final two years, they were on fire: eight straight quarters of growth.
So when the offer came in from Dan Snyder, I believed ESPN was now going to be in the driver’s seat with or without me. I looked out at the next three years and really viewed them as maintenance years. Surely ESPN would grow, but not at the speed I had been accustomed to driving. Disney would be more conservative with ESPN, digest the enormous profitability, while they invested in other areas and looked to cut costs. This was the right window for me.
I felt I had accomplished all that I had been charged to do. I was in search of a new challenge. Something more entrepreneurial. Another platform to turn around, fix, and grow.
Look, did we make some mistakes? Of course, who doesn’t? Do I have any regrets? Absolutely not.
Once Shapiro decided to leave for his next challenge and its $10 million signing bonus, he began a series of talks with Bodenheimer about succession plans for ESPN. Shapiro’s choice was Tony Petitti, then the number-two man at CBS Sports under Sean McManus. Shapiro believed Petitti’s prior history at ABC would mitigate any outsider status working against him, and that a breath of “outside air” might actually do the company good. Bodenheimer gave Shapiro the okay to make a play for Petitti, but McManus got wind of it and hurriedly notified CBS boss Les Moonves, who made a counteroffer that Petitti couldn’t refuse. It marked the second time that CBS had to defend its borders against big-game hunters: Shapiro’s first choice