Those Guys Have All the Fun - James Andrew Miller [33]
We kept publicizing that we had these games, and alumni, along with a lot of students, wanted to see their teams play, so they rented out hotel rooms that advertised, “We have HBO and ESPN.”
BOB LEY:
After our coverage of the early rounds, Jeff Israel, David Shepherd, and I went to cover the Final Four tournament in Indianapolis. Jeff had a huge Hitachi camera with tubes; he had taken an ESPN bumper sticker and used a razor blade to cut the logo out so he could put it on the side of his camera. We were at the open practice that Friday, Iowa was getting ready for their game against Purdue, and I hear, “Hey, ESPN, we watch you guys!” We looked over and three guys who went to school at Iowa had come down to the top of the steps. We just looked at them and said, “You watch us?” Shortly thereafter, we began to hear stories of people who had actually rented out hotel rooms that had cable so they could watch our games.
CHET SIMMONS, ESPN President:
We created college basketball. The attention we gave to the early rounds changed the tournament. Nobody else was televising those early rounds, and nobody else had the time to do what we did. Word even got around to the coaching community that we were doing all these games, and we became a very important part of coaches’ scouting.
ESPN was still bleeding money by the millions, and Simmons, desperate for more resources and better programming, was unable to spend lavishly, as he’d done at NBC and ABC. The ESPN president found himself pressured by company owner Getty on the inside and mocked by many colleagues in the sports business.
If anyone needed to be reminded that Simmons’s stature in the business was still lofty, they’d only need to hear him dealing with longtime NFL commissioner Pete Rozelle. The two were buddies from way back, and yet if Simmons hadn’t had such an enviable track record, Rozelle might have laughed him out the door—especially when he heard his old friend’s latest, and wildest, idea: live, protracted TV coverage of the NFL draft.
The NFL draft was hardly considered spectator material. Just the opposite: it was a particularly insular affair, generating interest about the top picks but little if any about all the others. Some years, the draft was barely reported, much less covered. Simmons knew that as a TV show, it could be hobbled by long waits between selections and many a less-than-riveting moment when general managers and scouts huddled together in sessions of top-secret analysis. But he envisioned an NFL draft liberated from backstage cloisters and thrust into the open air of national spectacle—and of course, it would fill the hours. When Rozelle asked Simmons why in the world people would want to watch the damn thing, Simmons just smiled a wily smile and said, “Let that be my problem.”
And so, on April 29, 1980, it happened: the first televised NFL draft, live on ESPN.
BILL FITTS:
It was February when Chet told me he wanted to do the draft in
April. I said, “Chet, there’s nothing there, there’s just some people on the phone, and they’re not even football people, they’re just relatives—relatives of relatives! How can I do an all-day television show?” And he says, “Well, if you have to sign off early, that’s okay,” and I started to say, “But, Chet,” and he stops me and says, “Look, you don’t understand something. It’s the NFL. Figure it out.”
So I got some production assistants and said, “We’ve got to get some highlights.” Fortunately, I knew Frank Ross from the NFL. He rubbed a lot of people the wrong way, but he was very helpful. I said, “Frankie, you got to help me here,” and he started calling some general managers and getting some information for me. It was pretty damn good. I had background on everybody in the first two rounds. Then we called the universities, and said, “Look, we need highlights on these guys, and we don’t want to spend a lot of time editing. Just send me the best forty-five seconds.” Some of these schools had their own production crews so it was real easy.
BOB LEY:
Once it became apparent we were going to be able