Those Guys Have All the Fun - James Andrew Miller [53]
After the meeting, we put Evey and the Getty guys on the chopper to take them back to New York. Evey was, of course, drunk as a fuckin’ skunk, and he opened up the helicopter door while it was flying. The pilots then had to do an emergency landing, which is, I guess, the regulation. Needless to say, they reamed out Evey. He was just basically being Evey at five o’clock on any given day. So they go up again, and sure enough, Evey starts fucking around and opens up the goddamn door again, and they have to make another emergency landing. They totally ream him out again and go up a third time. And here’s where my facts get blurred. I don’t know how many times they did it, but it was more than two; it could have been three or four times that Evey opened it up. Needless to say, the next day I get an irate fuckin’ phone call from my counterpart at Timex: “The fuckin’ deal is off! You can never use the helicopter again.”
STUART EVEY:
Ted Turner came to me in ’81 or ’82 at a cable convention and said he wanted to meet with me privately, so we went to his hotel room, where he had all these papers spread out about how great CNN and ESPN would be together. I knew he had a reputation as a character, a very bombastic guy, and he was planning some ridiculous moves—offering bids on rights to college football games that were just sky-high and things like that. He just threw money away because he didn’t care about debt—all he had was debt. The cable companies were supporting him along the way to keep his programming, but I knew I couldn’t sell his plan at Getty.
In 1982, ESPN found itself with the chance to finally air live football, when a previously unavailable package came to the market from the NCAA. Even though the games were only from Division II schools, Simmons was desperate to buy them. But Ted Turner, among others, was salivating as well, and he had deeper pockets—plus a willingness to empty them.
BOB GUTKOWSKI:
The only college football we had was on next-day delay. It was never live. Chet had a very good relationship with Walter Byers, who ran the NCAA, and this was going to be an important bid for us. We worked really hard on our presentation—NCAA football, Division II, Saturday night. There were three of us bidding: USA Network, ESPN, and TBS, which was Turner’s Superstation. Now, Chet, because of his relationship with Byers, had an agreement with Walter that if it wasn’t going our way, Walter would call us and give us a heads-up. So we give our presentations, and we sit in a suite, and Chet gets the call, hangs up, and says, “Walter said you’re not even close, you got to come back.” So we worked up our numbers, and we wound up eventually bidding $7 million for the two-year package. But this is how crazy the cable business was: USA bid $900,000 and TBS bid $17 million! They outbid us by $10 million for no rhyme or reason. We believed Turner bid seventeen because in Atlanta he was Channel 17. Regardless, they outbid us by $10 million, which back then was like $250 to $300 million. It made no sense. We later heard they lost $10 to $12 million on it.
STUART EVEY:
Fast-forward to a party at the Playboy mansion that I was at with my daughter. We were waiting for our car, and Ted came up to us. I guess we’d both had a couple drinks. Ted motioned to the woman he was with and said, “I’d like you to meet my wife.” I knew it wasn’t his wife, and he gave me a chuckle. I said, “Well, it’s nice to meet you, and I’d like you to meet my daughter.” Now, my daughter was very good-looking, and Ted