Those Guys Have All the Fun - James Andrew Miller [54]
In February 1982, Stuart Evey made a play to acquire TV rights to the new USFL football league. New league plus still-new network; it sounded like a natural fit, and Evey would look brilliant if the USFL eventually posed a serious challenge to the mighty NFL. But the USFL’s asking price was $6 million, with apparently no wiggle room, and the Getty board had approved only $5 million for Evey to make the buy. In search of $1 million, Evey turned back to Anheuser-Busch.
In thinly veiled desperation, Evey made the call. He talked Anheuser-Busch into pitching in half a million, but he had to make concessions. Among them: he agreed to guarantee that ESPN announcers would mention Budweiser every five minutes during USFL telecasts—in addition to running regular paid commercials. Buoyed by this near-success, Evey went back to the USFL and told them they had a deal, even though he was still half a million short.
Although the board let his little discrepancy ride, Evey was increasingly paranoid about the millions of Gettybucks he was spending—and losing. ESPN was becoming a sinkhole. Getty had already gone $50 million beyond its original $10 million investment. Then there was something called a “burn rate”—$8 million per month going out that was not covered by revenue coming in. At this pace, Evey calculated, losses could reach $150 million by the end of the year. Meanwhile, Chet Simmons was interested in the new football league for non-Bristol reasons.
CHET SIMMONS:
I got a phone call from my friend Mike Trager, and he told me about a new football league that was being put together. Then we talked about my discomfort with Evey; it was something that was beginning to gnaw at me. I still didn’t have control of the thing the way I wanted.
STUART EVEY:
Chet never quite understood the pressure I had at Getty. When he was at NBC Sports, he was just responsible for the on-air look at NBC. But at ESPN, he was responsible for everything: human resources, contracts, purchasing of programming, hiring and firing, on and on. I represented the parent company, with me as head of ESPN. Chet never appreciated that. He was told a number of times that my people could not get timely information from him in which to incorporate our budgets and planning. He was very difficult to get ahold of when we called him, and he did not like his people talking directly to Getty. So it became a major problem.
CHET SIMMONS:
I got a package one day and there were these portraits of Evey and the president of Getty. So I told my assistant, “Get Evey on the phone.” I said, “Stuart, I got these lovely, lovely portraits, what do I do with them?” He said, “Well, you hang them in the lobby.” And I said, “Why?” And he said, “Well, every part of the company hangs these two pictures—the guy who’s the chairman of the company and the guy who runs that division.” I said, “So I should take down the picture of the great shortstop and put you up?” “Well,” he said, “everybody has it.” When I hung up, I turned to my assistant and said, “Please put them in the closet.”
We were in Vegas at one of those industry shows, and we had a room where we invited advertisers and other buyers to come have a drink and hear about ESPN. We even had a mock layout of what ESPN was going to look like in a couple years. I saw Stu across the room, and he looked really angry. I went up to him and asked, “Hey Stu, what’s the matter? You look like you’re pissed off.” And he said, “Arrrgh,” turned around, and left! I jogged after him and said, “What’s going on?” Then he said to me, “Well, you’re introducing everybody to everybody else and you haven’t paid one bit of attention to me.”
He just couldn’t keep his hands off things. I began to realize that this toy he had was so important to him that he would do what he wanted to do, irrespective