Those Guys Have All the Fun - James Andrew Miller [7]
The second time he challenged me resulted in a lawsuit over ESPN.
BILL RASMUSSEN:
When we were growing up, Don was always the third brother and it was tough for him. He was five years younger, so there’s no way he could compete—but he wanted to. And more power to him. But we’ve always had a most distant relationship.
DON RASMUSSEN:
Now, during the time that he was at our house, Bill said, “The reason we’ve come to you is simply because we want the family involved.” I didn’t really know him all that well anymore, but my dad did and my sister did, and he told me, “Dad has committed to give us $10,000, Vivian, our sister, has given us $15,000, and we need another $10,000 from you to give us a little bit of a bridge until the big money starts rolling in. This way you’ll be a part of it, and for your $10,000, you’ll get 2 percent of the company.”
I said, “Bill, I’ve got four kids I’m raising, I’m a junior high school principal, and I don’t have $10,000 to just give you,” and he said, “Well, can you get it before Monday?” And I said, “Yeah, I’ve got some friends I could probably talk to and they’d give me $10,000, but I’m not sure I want to do it.” Then he went back to the big story about it being a family business and so forth, and I said, “Okay, I’ll get you $10,000 by Monday.” He said, “Okay, but we have to have it as soon as the bank opens on Monday.”
I told him okay, but “if I get you some money, I want to join the company” and reminded him that I did have a background in play-by-play, radio, and I could learn other things. So he agreed that if I got the money, I could join the company. No specified duties were discussed, except he said, “You will never, ever be on television with us.” I said, “Okay, that’s no big deal.” I just thought, well, he’s the TV guy, and if that’s the way he wants it to be, that’s okay with me. I should have suspected some personality conflicts at that point, but I didn’t.
So I talked to a friend who had a lot of money and he turned it down. Then I talked to the number two on my list and he said, “Sure I’ll give you $10,000 and whatever comes out of it, half of it’s yours and half of it’s mine.” He wrote me the checks and said he would cover them first thing Monday morning so I could wire them to Bill. And that’s what I did.
BILL RASMUSSEN:
I jokingly say that ESPN was built on a dump, but that’s what the Bristol redevelopment was, they took a dump, put fresh grass over it, and called it prime real estate. It was pure luck that we ended up on that spot. They couldn’t give these parcels away, and we agreed to buy one right then. We started in Plainville. They could have had ESPN there. We had an address, 319 Fifth Avenue. But they had an ordinance against satellite dishes, and they successfully kept us out. I think things turned out okay for Bristol.
Since we had no knowledge of how satellites worked and what kinds of specifications we would need, we called Scientific Atlanta, the supplier of satellite installations, to see if we could put a signal up to a satellite from there. We had to be careful because there are certain angles that prevent the signals from getting through. They told us we could not have picked a better place. The signal is supposed to be ten and a quarter degrees above the earth to hit the satellite, and we were right there. If it had been another quarter degree off, we would have been out of luck. You know what we paid for that first piece of land, that acre plus? $18,000.
We still needed more money, and a friend I knew told me to call a guy named J. B. Doherty, who had an investment firm named K. S. Sweet outside Philadelphia. He listened to my story and asked me if I could come down to his office the next day to talk with me some more.
J. B. DOHERTY, Venture Capitalist:
We took a security interest in the transponder rights and were comfortable with the fact that if the business was not going to get further financing, we