Those Guys Have All the Fun - James Andrew Miller [35]
BILL CREASY:
When I got to ESPN, I offered Steve a job right away as one of my guys in the Programming department. I said, “You gotta come with me.” But it was a tough sell. It wasn’t easy getting people to go to Bristol, no matter who Chet, Scotty, and Crease were. But Steve finally agreed. I got him for something like twenty-five thousand bucks and he started in January of 1980.
CHET SIMMONS:
Steve was hired by Creasy. He needed an assistant in programming, and here came Steve. It’s a perfect example of how a senior guy can take a junior guy and teach him the industry, teach him the business, and have him be successful. Steve learned very quickly. He was the kind of guy you could turn loose and know he’ll be very good.
Steve Bornstein hoped to attend Berkeley after graduating from Fair Lawn High School in New Jersey, but his father, insisting on driving his son to college, refused to take him any farther west than the Mississippi. So Steve wound up at the University of Wisconsin, which he had decided was the most “fun” school within Dad’s borders.
He was certainly at home among the liberals of Madison. Back in Fair Lawn, his parents had long been prominent political activists, especially Mom, a legend in those parts. She was, by all accounts, a most formidable presence, and Steve inherited that quality, as well as the bonhomie of his indefatigable dad, a venerable life-of-the-party businessman who owned a textile manufacturing plant that kept the Bornsteins comfy.
Little wonder, considering his heritage, that Bornstein wasn’t intimidated by the fabled Allie Sherman when their paths crossed. With his gruff manner, big Raymond Burr eyes, and a bass voice known to boom, Bornstein bespoke formidability himself. He could hardly bark or bluff his way through his new set of challenges, however; Bornstein was entering a programming department at ESPN that was struggling for survival.
ANDY BRILLIANT:
I had been at HBO for four years, and when I got to ESPN in January of 1980, it was just a mess. There was no organization; they had no idea what business they were in. There were a lot of horrible programming deals. The NCAA had a stranglehold over us. Yes, we got the early rounds of the men’s basketball tournament, but we paid a lot for them and the agreement also said the NCAA could put all these secondary sports on ESPN. The only rights we had for football were for two- or three-day delays, and from conferences that no one really cared about. The deal was onerous and expensive, and it kept us from accessing the kind of content we needed to drive the business. One of the first things I did when I arrived was to go out to Kansas City to try to renegotiate the deal with the head of the NCAA, Walter Byers.
We used to have meetings almost every weekend in Chet’s basement, and his wife would serve coffee and danishes, and Chet would be saying, “Well, should I pick up the phone now and just tell Evey it’s all over? We can’t run this business—this is just not going to work.” And we’d all have to give him enough encouragement to keep it going another week. Week after week we had these silly meetings. And he would bemoan the state we’re in and say, “I’m used to doing the Olympics and now I’m running Ping-Pong tournaments and slow-pitch softball games. The cable operators just don’t have any respect for us. We’re running out of dough. Should we call Evey? Should we just end it? Shall I pull the plug?” This happened almost as soon as I got there. So it was a bit discouraging at first.
STEVE BORNSTEIN:
I thought it was crazy to always be in commercial at fifty-eight after the hour. It drove me up the wall! So pretty soon after I arrived, I came up with the idea that we wouldn’t do commercials in between shows. Nobody else was making those kinds of decisions. It wasn’t all “I-I-I” by any stretch of the imagination, but you made up the