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By Root 2445 0

’s because there are only four or five houses on Maywood Road that are in Darien, and I lived in one of those houses; the rest of the houses—it’s a street about a mile long—are in Norwalk. So I said, well, what house are you in? We must be across the street. Oh, he says, “Oh, I’m at number such and such,” and I just said, “Oh, yeah, you’re in Norwalk.” So he looked at me really, really annoyed, cold, angered, embarrassed that, on a simple thing like where he lived, he had to say he lived in Darien because it was more prestigious. The chances of me living on the same street and knowing that he really lived in Norwalk were ten thousand to one. But he knew that he had told the tiniest lie and he knew I knew it. It was a little thing. For all I know, I may have done the same thing myself. I’m not so much knocking what he did, but he told a little bit of a lie, and I think that caused him discomfort. I never ever brought it up again but that moment kind of established the tone of our relationship from then on.

Many of ESPN’s initial contracts with cable operators were about to end, and a big game of chicken was about to begin.

ROGER WERNER:

Early on, some of the cable operators did have a nominal fee in the neighborhood of one or two cents that they paid to ESPN. Rasmussen’s right when he says there were some of those. The problem was, those contracts also included other payments going the other way. So net, the essence of the contract, was we were paying them to carry the service. We ran the business as an ad-sales-only business for all the rest of 1980, ’81, and ’82.

BILL GRIMES:

Whenever I would look ahead, I would say, we’re not going to be able to get enough ad revenue to make this thing profitable. We were buying more programming, and the ad revenues weren’t coming. Then we’re paying more nickels as every new cable subscriber came on in America. It won’t work. Getty is not going to be patient forever.

ROGER WERNER:

The failure of CBS Cable was one of those watershed dates that opened a big window of opportunity for us. Cable stocks fell dramatically within one or two weeks. It was an obvious reaction, and the press was almost universally negative and predicting bad things for the cable industry. If CBS can’t make it as a cable network programmer, how could anybody else like ESPN hope to succeed?

So a number of our affiliates, I think, were worried that another failure by another leading cable programming network in 1983 or ’84 would be a terrible thing.

GEORGE BODENHEIMER:

About fourteen months after I started, this position was open for an account executive in Dallas, and much to my benefit, I was the only person inside the company who applied for the job. I had no sales experience, and on the flight down to Texas for the interview, I was reading trade magazines to try to pick up a few buzzwords and learn about the business. I guess I came off reasonably well at the interview, and I got the position. A week later, I’m driving around Texas, Arkansas, Oklahoma, Louisiana, Mississippi, selling this new crazy cable channel’s twenty-four-hour sports to mom-and-pop cable operators in the Southwest.

I was the negotiator for hundreds of contracts throughout those five states, but we were still basically giving it away for free. But we were establishing the precedence of paying on a per-subscriber basis. If you were a cable operator with five thousand subscribers, we would say, “Pay us on a hundred subscribers at four cents a subscriber a month,” which times twelve months is $48 a year times five years—we’d do a five-year deal—was how we got the $240.

Obviously that’s not a significant amount of money, so we were still giving it away, but we were establishing the precedent, which was new at the time, of pay us a per-subscriber fee. Who wouldn’t sign a contract for $48 a year for five years? It’s like buying a shirt.

ROGER WERNER:

We went to the market with this sort of survival pitch essentially as follows: If you come in voluntarily and do a new deal with us, we’ll start your rate at four cents in 1983 or ’84 and