Those Guys Have All the Fun - James Andrew Miller [44]
J. B. DOHERTY:
I have warm feelings for Bill and Scott, but it’s a good thing for ESPN that it sort of evolved as it did, and I think it’s arguably a miracle that it survived the Rasmussens—and Evey.
STUART EVEY:
I admire Bill, but ESPN became more than he ever envisioned because of the efforts of a lot of other people. It still gripes me when people say, “Wasn’t Rasmussen the guy who started it all?” He was to the extent that he brought it to me, but it’s different from what he brought. And thank God I got the guys in there that made it different. I guess that’s all I can tell you.
BILL RASMUSSEN:
Some people had gotten a pretty heavy-duty plaque with my name on it, with “Founder.” It was going to be a surprise for me. They were coming to put it up, but Stu intercepted it—“No way is that going up, get it out of here.” They said to take it to the dump! That was extremely petty on Stu’s part. So I put it in the trunk of my car. Probably five or six years later, I had some guy in Florida make it into a coffee table. It’s an interesting conversation piece.
There are two things you can do when something like that happens: you can be bitter the rest of your life, or you can say, okay, this is just part of a new day, let’s start over. Because of ESPN, I’ve had a pleasant thirty years. I speak at a lot of places; people still want to hear the story.
DON RASMUSSEN:
The company announced on September 30, 1980, that Bill was leaving. He called me earlier that day and said, “I didn’t want you to hear it through the grapevine, I wanted to call and tell you myself—I’m leaving ESPN.” Then he said, “And you start preparing yourself because they’re going to get rid of you, too.” I said, “Uh, okay.” A little while later—I don’t remember where we were going, but Chet and I were going someplace—Chet said to me, “Don, just know, in our eyes, you are not connected with Bill. Bill has no impact on you.” When Bill called me the next time, I told him, “Chet talked to me about my position at ESPN, and he says I’m okay.” Bill said, “Don, you are so naive. That vote of confidence means he’s getting ready to fire you. It’s like the baseball manager who gets a vote of confidence from the GM and then two months later, he’s fired.”
So about a month later, Bill calls up and tells me he and Scott were founding something called Enterprise Radio—an all-sports radio network. He then says, “Don, they’re going to fire you, you need to resign before they fire you, and we’ve got a job for you. Come to work for Enterprise Radio.” I said, “Well, I’ve got a good friend I’ve worked with at ESPN and I want to talk with him.” He said, “Are you talking about Jim Bates? We’ll hire him too.” So I talked to Jim and we both submitted our resignations to go work at Enterprise Radio in mid-January. We were due at ESPN for a bonus, but as soon as we resigned, that bonus was canceled. I wasn’t real happy that Chet canceled my bonus, but I figured he was going to cancel it anyway, since Bill said he was the one that supposedly was going to fire me.
Well, I wasn’t gone more than a couple of weeks when I got the word through the grapevine that ESPN had planned to move me to Connecticut with a big raise and put me in charge of affiliate relations. And I thought, “Oh, boy, Bill led me down the primrose path.” I had this thing ingrained in me since I was a kid, that Bill is 100 percent honest and trustworthy, and if Bill says it, that’s the truth. I took Bill at his word. I went to Enterprise Radio, and within five months Enterprise Radio was bankrupt and out of business. So I was up the creek without a paddle. I had been had. I’d been had by my brother.
I called Stu after the Enterprise Radio