Those Guys Have All the Fun - James Andrew Miller [391]
IAN DARKE:
I got the feeling that it was a breakthrough moment for the game of soccer in the United States. Because people who had watched it for years and said, “Well, this is all dull. Nothing happens. There are no goals, it goes on for ninety minutes,” maybe now have got the idea that you can sit and watch, and it comes to a boil, and it can produce a moment like that, and that the great joy is because of the rarity of the goals. I’d like to think that now that a generation of kids in America have played the game, they’re getting it, and I just got the feeling that a penny dropped, as we say in the U.K., at that moment with a lot of the audience, and that this is quite a big thing.
JOHN SKIPPER:
One of the biggest surprises in South Africa was that our ability to succeed had almost nothing to do with legacy and almost everything to do with enterprise and energy. I’ll give you a really funny example: We had the best hosts’ set and the best location up on a hill. I went the year before, and Geoff Mason, Jed Drake, and Tim Scanlon walked me up to the top of a hill and said, “What do you think about this place for where we’ll do all our studio work from?”
And I’m like, ”Wow, this is great, we’re right here, we’re overlooking the stadium, it’s the closest set to the broadcast center so we’ll have the least distance to cover,” as you go back and forth a lot. “How do we claim this ground?” And the answer from Geoff Mason was “If we go ask now, we’ll get it, ’cause we’re the first ones here.” There was none of that “You guys have to be in the back because you haven’t been here before” stuff.
This was something grander for us. Everybody else in the world was there. It was most like the Olympics, of course, but it was just immense. The other thing that struck me was, as a company, our level of ambition was probably higher than anybody else’s there. We did more cultural programming than anybody, like when we talked with Edgar Peterson about the student riots and Soweto, and the apartheid museum.
I’ve been asked this a lot: “Was the World Cup an audition for ESPN to carry the Olympics?” I mean it completely sincerely when I say, “This is not an audition. We are fine with this in and of itself.” However, the fact that we brought all those people to South Africa—not the easiest of locations to move things in and out of in terms of infrastructure and technology—was proof that we can do a big international event. I’ll be quite surprised if some powers that be don’t notice that.
As John Skipper and the company basked in the global glow of the World Cup triumph, another little piece of programming was being put together. Hastily dubbed “The Decision,” it would, incredibly enough, soon overwhelm the $100 million investment in the soccer epic and carry through to the ESPYs in Hollywood the following week and well beyond.
Although the two periods are commonly considered opposites, some facets of the old three-network era have been held over for the age of the 500-channel universe. One of the most common: forced to choose between ratings success and critical praise, media executives will not—surprisingly—pick being a big fat hit every time.
In the aftermath of “The Decision,” the ESPN special on which LeBron James announced in an exclusive interview that he was moving from the Cleveland Cavaliers to the Miami Heat, ESPN officials may have felt as if they were dodging brickbats and rotten tomatoes hurled by an angry mob. Seldom had an ESPN program produced such unanimity of response: everybody