Those Guys Have All the Fun - James Andrew Miller [400]
STAN VERRETT:
Neil [Everett] and I carried the SportsCenter flag to the West Coast. And Chris Berman left both of us a voice mail that said, “I watched the whole SportsCenter last night for the first time in I don’t know how long, and I really enjoyed it ’cause you guys took me back to the old days when guys just got out there, did the stories, and had fun with it. It was really good to see. You guys are doing it the right way. Keep up the good work.” That was a wide-eyed moment for me, like, wow. Neil had the same look. I’m keeping that message forever.
I was raised by a couple that’s been married for almost fifty years, so I see how it works and it works when both people want it to work, when they’re both invested not just in the “I’s” but in the “we’s.” They look at it as joint ownership of something that’s bigger than both of them. And that’s how I’ve always looked at SportsCenter. “Hey, look, I have my little chair over here and you have your little chair over there, but when we come together at this table, this table’s bigger than either chair separately, and it’s bigger than both chairs together ultimately. So we have to respect that.”
RUSSELL WOLFF, Executive Vice President and Managing Director, ESPN International:
Our first attempt at SportsCenter outside the U.S. was one of our least best moments. We were a struggling international division that wasn’t doing great, but we knew we wanted to have a SportsCenter and so we created a SportsCenter produced out of London that we used around the world. We had the music and the graphics, but since we were trying to use it across the whole world, it had the NFL in it, cricket, ice hockey, soccer, and rugby. It was meant to be for everybody, but it didn’t hew to the origins and DNA of SportsCenter, which is sports authority and personality. And because we had to dub it into nine languages, we couldn’t put any person, any faces, on it. So you had a faceless, nameless SportsCenter, which really didn’t work. It was so not what SportsCenter is here and so not what SportsCenter should have been around the world.
With forty-six networks, you can’t micromanage each network. I think the most important thing for us to focus on is the ESPN mission statement; when you do that, you almost never get it wrong. We’re hardly going to be doing a great SportsCenter in Argentina if we’re trying to force-feed something the American way. And so over the last nine years, we have created local versions of SportsCenter, and if you watch SportsCenter in Argentina or if you watch SportsCenter out of Mexico or you watch SportsCenter out of Singapore or India or Malaysia, they’re local SportsCenters and they’re speaking to fans in their language about their sports with personality. It still has the same music, and it still has the same set and still has the same look and feel as SportsCenter, but now you’ve got a SportsCenter show that remembers its roots, which is actually talking to fans and having a personality.
In the earliest days of ESPN—in fact, in the earliest years of ESPN—not many people wanted to go to Bristol. It might well have been among the “Least Likely Places from Which to Run an Empire” if such a list were ever compiled. But Bristol is the seat of an empire now, and it has seemed to undergo a miracle cure for its undesirability: success.
Part of the change could probably be traced to the ingenious and star-studded promotional spots created for the network and SportsCenter by Wieden + Kennedy, creating a mock myth: that ESPN’s Bristol headquarters serves as some sort of centralized high-tech playground, a sprawling twenty-first-century playhouse, a manly Mecca where athletes and even mascots meet, romp, and roughhouse with the journalists and technicians who cover them—all part of one big happy prank-playing family. The Sports Community.
In addition to that mythic image, there’s the simple respectability that tremendous