Those Guys Have All the Fun - James Andrew Miller [59]
BILL GRIMES:
We were thrown out of offices. I flew to Denver once to see a company called United Cable that TCI later bought. It was run by a guy by the name of Gene Schneider. He was a guy about my age who had been in the telephone business and then became one of the early cable founders and made big money. I had made an appointment with his secretary to see him, and I sat in a room for two hours waiting to see him, but he refused to see me.
ROGER WERNER:
J.C. [Sparkman, COO of TCI] kind of told us to get fucked and that TCI would never pay us a penny.
BILL GRIMES:
Cablevision was the first cable operator whose contract had expired that we were trying to get to be the first cable-system company to pay a fee. It was, in many ways, the worst operator to start with because they had some sports programming! Dolan was a tough guy. We had to threaten to turn ESPN off.
ANDY BRILLIANT:
It was an all-day negotiation that Bill, Roger, and I conducted with the Cablevision people on Long Island. They all got really pissed. There was a lot of walking out of the room and throwing stuff around. It got to the point where we really thought that there wasn’t going to be a service.
BILL GRIMES:
There was yelling and screaming. We took quite a beating early on. They had five guys, and all of them were tough. But Andy played our tough ass, and Roger was the smart, brilliant guy. Dolan hadn’t said a word. He kind of sat there. Roger called him the Buddha.
ROGER WERNER:
Essentially we were saying, guys, if you’re not interested in paying a fee and you’re really not interested in stepping up to the plate in the near term, tell us now and we’ll pull the plug.
Nobody really wanted to deal with the idea that they were going to be paying for a product that had been free, but actually my recollection of this is that it was very stress-filled, it was very contentious.
ANDY BRILLIANT:
But at the end of the day, they blinked and agreed to pay us a dime per household. We breathed a massive sigh of relief. It was the first time we actually received validation that our service was worth something to the cable operators. I think that really put us on the map for good.
BILL GRIMES:
I’ll never forget. We got in the car and stopped at the first bar we saw. It was a Mexican place. I know I had at least two margaritas. Then we called Evey on a pay phone. We didn’t have cell phones. I said, “Stu, we got it. We got the toughest one. We got the deal.” And from there it was not easy, but that was the start of it all.
STEVE BORNSTEIN:
Bill recognized we needed to make the change in order to survive, and Roger had the balls to roll up his sleeves and take on the cable operators. I’m telling you right now, it was those two guys who figured out the business. There were no ifs, ands, or buts. ’Cause nobody else was doing it. Nickelodeon wasn’t doing it. MTV wasn’t doing it. Nor was CNN.
They were the Butch and Sundance of cable’s early years. Or maybe the Lewis and Clark. What Bill Grimes and Roger Werner did was a little like the opening of the West in cable terms, because they enabled cable to become a big business. The beauty of it wasn’t in the simple awareness that two revenue streams are better than one. A smart junior high school student could probably have figured that one out. No, the beauty was their realization that without the second stream, there was no business. Just a money-losing ego trip. ESPN would never have survived if it had been forced to rely only on ad sales for revenue. Several colleagues—among them Andy Brilliant and Roger Williams—contributed to the effort, but the whole enterprise would have crashed on the rocks and sunk without the inspired work of Grimes and Werner,