Those Guys Have All the Fun - James Andrew Miller [63]
That was in the days before he was professionally medicated. He was modulating his bipolar problem with Wild Turkey. So you’d get very strange behavior out of the guy from time to time. Sometimes he’d be as nice a guy as you’d want to meet, and sometimes he’d just be weird. But we listened to him, had a few laughs, and said, “Hey thanks for the turkey sandwich,” got on a plane, and went home.
In January of 1984, ABC upped its stake in ESPN to 15 percent of the company—with house bean counters predicting the sports network would reach the break-even point in the first quarter of 1985. Getty’s stake sank to 70 percent, with 15 percent still in the Rasmussen camp, mostly Bill’s. Meanwhile, though, the natives at Getty Oil were more than restless. Heirs to the Getty family fortune and managers of the company squabbled endlessly, and with takeover predators Pennzoil and Texaco circling, Getty’s directors sought to lighten the debt load by trying to dump part or all of ESPN, still considering it a liability and a nuisance.
Before 1984 was a month old, Texaco bought Getty Oil for $10 billion, and since Texaco had no more interest in nurturing a sports network than Getty did, it happily sold ABC the 85 percent of the company it didn’t yet own for $188 million, with ABC in turn selling 20 percent to RJR Nabisco (based on Don Ohlmeyer’s recommendation to honcho Ross Johnson).
STUART EVEY:
My involvement with Getty came to a close with the Texaco takeover. We would not have sold ESPN had Getty Oil not been sold. But one of the younger Getty sons put the company in play and it was sold. Never in our history would anybody have ever thought this would happen. But it did. ABC exercised its option to buy ESPN, and that was that.
ROGER WERNER:
Ross Johnson’s point man on the ESPN investment was Don Ohlmeyer, who had worked for Roone at ABC Sports, and Don had a production company that operated basically inside Nabisco. At that time, Nabisco had a tremendous number of sports sponsorships—it seemed liked everybody from Arnold Palmer to Billie Jean King to A. J. Foyt. Everybody was on the payroll of Team Nabisco. They were basically Ross’s traveling companions and goodwill ambassadors. He’d go to the Masters or he’d go to the Indy 500 or he’d go somewhere else, and he’d have half a dozen of those guys on the plane. And Don was the point guy running that sports marketing, sponsorship stuff.
Because of Don’s background in sports production, he became Ross’s surrogate on our board. So we basically interfaced with Don and his number-two guy, John Martin, who was also an ex-ABC Sports guy and Arledge protégé. They ultimately got paid by ABC for consulting services as a part of ABC’s sale of 15 percent to Ross and Nabisco. They ultimately made a lot of dollars with very little effort, honestly, very little. But those were the times, and the ESPN acquisition, a $230 million deal, was at that time the biggest deal in the history of ABC. It seemed Leonard Goldenson was quite nervous about it, and so being able to lay off 20 percent at a profit reduced his risk. I’m sure that having Don and John on board reduced his perception of that risk even more.
HERB GRANATH, Chairman of the Board:
ESPN wasn’t my first involvement with sports. I was the field executive in charge of Monday Night Football. If something went wrong, I was the one who fixed it. Monday Night Football was a traveling freak show, like the circus coming to town. One night, Howard [Cosell] called, and said, “I just got a call from the chairman of the board!” I said, “[ABC chairman] Leonard [Goldenson]?” He said, “No, no, Frank! Sinatra! He wants to sit in the booth.” I said, “Howard, you know we have a rule, nobody inside the booth except for our announcing team and statistician.” He says, “For God’s sake, it’s Frank!” I said, “All right, but no entourage, it’s just him alone.” So I had nothing to do and wound up sitting with Frank Sinatra for two and a half, three hours, yapping away. Afterward, because we were on