Those Guys Have All the Fun - James Andrew Miller [64]
Another time, Howard called and said, “I just heard from John Lennon. He wants to sit in the booth. He’s an American-football fan.” So he sat in the booth. Afterward, we went back to the Beverly Wilshire, to a little bar there called Hernando’s Hideway. Hernando saw us coming, shoo’s everybody else out, closes it, we sat there until one or two in the morning talking, whatever. I had to admit to John that I had been a Beatles fan when I was younger, and when I went back to New York, there was a case waiting for me from him with every record the Beatles had ever made. He was a terrific guy.
Ted Turner knew how to overpay for TV rights, but he also realized just how effectively he could help drive costs up for other stations—like ESPN—for TV rights he allegedly had no legitimate interest in acquiring. Turner had outbid ESPN by an absurd $10 million for rights to Division II football in 1982, and whether or not it truly was due to an arbitrary and incomprehensible bid by Turner, the bidding for the second USFL deal in June of 1984 featured a Turner who was dead set on making ESPN pay dearly for the USFL. And so ESPN did.
Turner believed ESPN needed professional football for its programming and would be willing to top any bid he could make. When bidding began for the United States Football League’s new three-year cable contract, Turner kept raising his bid, offering the league $62 million for the next three years. By the end, Turner had forced ESPN and ABC to bid $70 million on a three-year package with an estimated worth closer to $50 million. ABC exercised its option for 1985 at $14 million. and when it came time to negotiate for the next contract, ABC, having experienced high ratings with the league, offered the USFL $175 million over four years in addition to ESPN’s $70 million. The league, however, because of mergers and shutdowns, turned down the money.
LOREN MATTHEWS:
Chet had always been adamant about not having professional wrestling on ESPN. He would say, “We’re a legitimate sports network, we’re not going to do that.” But Grimes came in and decided we needed to get into the pro-wrestling business ASAP because it was the highest-rated sports product on cable. USA and Turner were getting huge numbers. Remember, back then, the NFL wasn’t on cable yet. So Grimes calls me one day and says, “Tell me about wrestling,” which I actually knew something about because I had the typical eighty-year-old grandmother who watched it three times a week when I was a kid.
I told him there were three federations and Bornstein had actually met with Vince McMahon a while back and had used us to sweeten his USA Network deal, so that was out. And I told him Turner was in bed with Jim Crockett, so we can’t get in there. He asked what the third-best federation was. That had to be the AWA out of Minneapolis. Bill told me to set up a meeting with them, and it turned out they were coming to do a show at the Meadowlands. Bill got very excited and asked me when the meeting was. I told him, Tuesday night, and he said, “Perfect. I got a board meeting Wednesday morning. I want you to get a deal done, and I don’t care how late it is, just let me know the deal is done so I can announce it at the board meeting. And oh, by the way, assuming you’ll get this done, send me a little cheat sheet with their famous wrestlers that I can use to tell the board.” Now this is the ABC board here. We’re talking about Roone Arledge and a bunch of heavyweights. So no pressure there.
My meeting lasted for hours and hours, but we got a deal. I called Grimes that night around ten o’clock at home and said it was done. Signed and sealed. He said, “That’s just great.