Those Guys Have All the Fun - James Andrew Miller [389]
DICK EBERSOL:
ESPN basically has to have one of their talent talk about Hitler or put a picture of their dick on a phone—which is what that Salisbury guy did—before they’ll do anything about any of these various crazies, because they don’t have to. Nobody can touch them.
For all the jokes by late-night comics about America’s alleged indifference to soccer—including hoots at the importation by the L.A. Galaxy of international soccer superstar and sex symbol David Beckham for $250 million—soccer’s popularity was growing. It should hardly have been surprising that ESPN was involved.
Now that it had ponied up a fortune for the rights to the 2010 World Cup games from South Africa, ESPN had to prove itself equal to the task. One of the beneficial side effects of its victory was that after years of people saying that ESPN’s coverage did not equal, in quality or class, that of the traditional broadcast networks, parity had been established at last: ESPN was as good as the big boys, maybe better—and, actually, even bigger. Audience levels for the first three games played by the U.S. were up 68 percent compared with the 2006 games. An average 11.1 million viewers caught the English and Spanish-language broadcasts for each of the three U.S. Group C matchups, up from 6.6 million viewers in 2006.
U.S. interest did not even appear to rely entirely on American success at the game, much less dominance of it, as had always been the case with regular-season games on ESPN. History may have repeated itself when, in 2010, Ghana beat the United States 2–1 in extra time, eliminating the Americans from the World Cup on a Saturday, but the weekend match was the most-watched men’s game in FIFA World Cup history in the United States. For more than two hours on a Saturday afternoon, an average 14.9 million viewers tuned in to ABC, 13 percent more than for the highly anticipated U.S.–U.K. World Cup game on June 12, which ended in a 1–1 draw. Combined with viewers from Spanish TV network Univision, the number exceeded 19 million. One million people tried ESPN’s new Mobile TV during the World Cup tournament—more mobile visitors than the next four contenders combined.
An executive at Nielsen Media Research declared that the 2010 ratings “demonstrated the remarkable increase of interest in U.S. soccer over the last four years.” Although “more people than ever chose to watch live streaming video of the games from their computers and mobile devices,” he said, “TV viewing climbed even higher.” And TV comics shifted their joking about soccer, or at least the World Cup, away from the sport’s alleged unpopularity to such topics as the dread vuvuzelas, long cheap horns blown en masse at pivotal moments by hundreds of soccer fans from other countries. (They made such a racket that ESPN, responding to viewer complaints, took measures to lower their volume on the TV sound track.) Philosophically speaking, though, the seemingly plaintive wail of the vuvuzela was sweet music to ESPN, to ABC, and to all those pushing for greater acceptance of soccer in the U.S.—and, naturally, to John Skipper.
Of course, there was always room for the dissenting view in the land of three hundred million opinions. “I don’t get it,” grumped sports vet Beano Smith when confronted with World Cup fever. He was “convinced” that “so many people from Europe came to America because they did not like soccer and wanted to watch football and basketball” instead.
MATT SANDULLI:
It’s like you never leave this place. No matter where you go, ESPN is there. You can see the brand; you can touch the brand. When I went to South Africa before the World Cup for a meeting at a hotel with a host broadcaster,