Those Guys Have All the Fun - James Andrew Miller [404]
You have to access the special features on the DVD release of Will Ferrell’s Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy to see Ferrell as Burgundy supposedly being interviewed for a job at ESPN in 1979, the year the network signed on. A twenty-four-hour sports network? Burgundy dismisses the whole idea as “ludicrous.”
Well, it’s a big deal. Literally: The total number of different sports now aired by ESPN is 65. The number of countries receiving ESPN is 200. And the number of languages in which ESPN telecasts is 16.
ESPN has more than 6,000 employees and airs roughly 70,000 hours of programming annually, at least 25,000 of those live, on eight networks. ESPN Radio delivers 10,000 audio hours annually in more than 450 markets, and ESPN.com generates more than 600 original pieces each day of sports news, features, columns, video, and blog fare. When ESPN3D signed on in 2010, it was the first full-time 3D network in the country, airing more than 85 live events in 3D its first year.
Not to be forgotten: approximately $4 of every monthly cable bill in the U.S. goes to ESPN, obviously including viewers who’ve never watched a single ESPN telecast in their lives.
Today ESPN is worth more than the entire NFL; worth more than Major League Baseball, the NBA, and the NHL combined.
GEORGE BODENHEIMER:
The biggest tool I have for doing this job is that I am an optimist. I believe in this company’s ability to continue to grow by sticking to our mission of serving sports fans and looking for ways to do that better tomorrow than we do it today. I believe that if we stick to our knitting, as they say, we’ll always find ways to grow because interest in sports continues to grow. Do we have a strategic plan? Sure we do. But what I remind people constantly is that’s only a piece of paper with ink on it. It’s not a guarantee. So we need to be prepared, and we need to be able to try and do things differently all the time. Our announcements about local websites in 2010 were a great example. They didn’t even exist in our strategic plan eight months before that. Were we talking about them? Of course. We’ve been talking about local sports since we discussed developing a regional sports network twenty years ago. Was Bob Iger exhorting me on a regular basis to think about how to expand that local business? Absolutely. So the notion had been here, and now we’ve developed what we think is another excellent opportunity for growth.
As for leading this company, I expect that if we are unsuccessful there will be other managers in here asked to do the job—that’s the name of the game we operate in. Everybody here understands that, relishes it, and thrives on it.
I love it when someone says we’re a niche business, because if sports is a niche business, I’m real happy to be in that niche. Whether you’re watching your kids on the Little League or soccer fields, or watching Tom Watson holding an 8-iron on the 18th fairway challenging for the British Open at age fifty-nine, it’s all self-renewing. And beautiful.
If you don’t belong there, you may resent that one place has such power and influence; you may hate the hubris and self-promotion; you might think that others are more proficient at the same tasks yet make less of a production about them. But chances are, if you love sports and if you had the opportunity to join up, you’d do so. In a heartbeat.
Tour the headquarters of Johnson & Johnson and you probably won’t be able to tell they do drugs; drop in at Sears corporate offices and it won’t be readily evident they’re in retail. But everything here at ESPN’s Bristol campus reeks of sports. Walk from one building to another and you’ll pass over yard markers; near the pizza roster in the café you’ll notice a quip from the oft-quoted Yogi Berra: “Better cut it into six slices, I’m not hungry enough for eight.” Pictures of athletes and games and balls and team logos and trophies are everywhere.
And there’s Karl Ravech and John Kruk walking briskly along together, no doubt discussing a small gem of a baseball idea that will come to life