Those Guys Have All the Fun - James Andrew Miller [62]
BILL GRIMES:
One day I get a call from Sid Peterson, who was running Getty at the time, and he said, “I have to tell you something in confidence. Things are happening here, things that you are going to read about. There’s going to be a big change here at Getty.” I found out they were going to be bought by Texaco. I knew the general counsel of Texaco—he lived in my town, and our kids were at the same school—so I called him and said I knew they were buying Getty and that there was this little thing called ESPN, and I’d like to come with one of my guys and tell you guys why you ought to keep it. Roger and I felt if Texaco kept ESPN, we would get better compensation and maybe a piece of the action. So we go to Texaco. There were fifty people in the room, and they listened and asked some questions, but I got a call from them later, saying they couldn’t keep us, the fit was wrong, and they were going to sell us. That day, I got a hold of the Texaco annual report and looked at the list of directors, and I see Tom Murphy’s name, the head of CapCities. So I went and saw Murphy. For three hours over lunch I outlined the entire ESPN business plan, what our prospects were, why we thought we were going to make it, and kept pointing out to him that because they owned cable systems, this would be a terrific fit. Murphy said to me—I remember this very specifically—that although he trusted us, he couldn’t buy ESPN because they were thinking about larger acquisitions at the time. Of course, shortly after that it was announced that CapCities was buying ABC.
Anyway, so Evey came to town not knowing that I had spoken to anybody at Texaco, not knowing that Roger and I had met people there, not even knowing I had talked with Murphy. He said, I’m going to try and set up a contract with you at Texaco—for you, Roger, and Steve. I told him it wasn’t necessary, and that I had already talked to Texaco, and that he didn’t own us anymore. We were sitting real close, and Stu had big hands. And he took his big finger and pointed it right at my face, real close, and said, “You will never work in this industry again.” With that, I got up, ran out, and made the 10:05 train to Connecticut. That was the last time I saw or spoke to Stu Evey until ESPN’s twenty-fifth anniversary.
J. B. DOHERTY:
Our venture-capital firm still had a piece of ESPN from our initial investment with Bill Rasmussen back in 1978. Getty was trying to screw us out of the deal from day one. We heard about the CapCities deal and thought it was sort of an inside job. We had to hire Skadden, Arps to represent our interests as minority shareholders. We were concerned that such a deal wasn’t going to deliver fair market value. In fact, we were actually instrumental in getting competitive bidding going between Ted Turner and ABC. We called up Turner’s vice president of corporate development and said, “Aren’t you interested?”
ROGER WERNER:
We had one meeting with Ted Turner in Atlanta. Ted just sort of sat Bill and me down and proceeded to wander all over the room, screaming and hollering about how he was going to put us out of business if we didn’t sell to him—the usual bullshit. Typical Turner; he figured we were just a couple of middle-management corporate suits, and he’d bring us down to his inner sanctum and threaten and cajole us for an hour or two and we’d divulge