Those Guys Have All the Fun - James Andrew Miller [71]
Of all the sports that could make a difference in the profile and identity of a sports network, most were bread-and-butter: football, baseball, basketball, hockey, tennis, and soccer would all likely make the grade. Yacht racing, if it made the list at all, would probably tag along after, say, poker or bowling. But not at ESPN.
GARY JOBSON, Yacht Racing Analyst:
I went to Dennis and said, “Look, we want to put this onboard camera on the boat,” and Dennis said, “I don’t know about this. I don’t want to give up my secrets. The competition is going to watch and know how we do everything. But I’m a fair man. Come back at seven and you can present your camera, tell the crew what you want to do, and then we’ll take a vote of the crew.” Now, these were guys I knew really well, went to college with, and raced with in the ocean. And no one in the crew voted yes! I was crushed, and the only thing that came out of my mouth was “Okay, Dennis, I guess you’re the swing vote on this.” He kind of laughed and he said, “I’ll tell you what; we’ll do this for one day and if we don’t like it, we’re done. We won’t do it again.” And to his credit, two days later for the race, he put in the onboard camera.
DENNIS CONNER:
I knew TV would help us raise money in the future. Make no mistake, though, it certainly wasn’t going to help us win the America’s Cup.
GARY JOBSON:
After the race, the crew had the next day off, and every one of those guys on that boat heard from girls—old girlfriends, new girlfriends, and wannabe girlfriends. They suddenly realized they were heroes being on live television. So the next crew meeting I got invited to, the vote was unanimous in favor of the camera. They told me, “We like this camera. This is going to work out just fine.”
BILL GRIMES:
About a week before the races were going to start, I got a call from Geoff Mason, who was down there producing the America’s Cup for us. He said, “We got a little problem. We want to put a camera on board and Dennis Conner wants $50,000 for it.” We were already over our production budget, so I said, “Is this really, really going to make things better?” and he said, “Yes.” I paused for a minute, then told him to go ahead and do it. Then I quickly called the guy who was in charge of spending for Anheuser-Busch and got him to spend the extra fifty grand. We got some great shots and great publicity from that camera.
On the afternoon of the final race for the 1983 America’s Cup, ESPN was airing an old tape-delayed football game when phone calls from viewers pleading or demanding that ESPN air the race began to flood the switchboard. With a responsiveness unusual for any American TV network, ESPN ditched the football game and switched to live coverage of the race, taking a split from a local Rhode Island TV station.
That year, the longest winning streak in international sports history was broken. Having held on to the America’s Cup for more than twenty challenges spanning an amazing 132 years, the New York Yacht Club lost the race—and thus the Cup—to the Australia II, owned by Aussie business tycoon Alan Bond. Even though sailing could hardly be labeled “America’s Pastime” or the country’s most popular sport, the loss resonated throughout the land, as if some foreign interloper had marched in and somehow managed to win the World Series or the Super Bowl.
With the Cup in new hands, many in the TV sports business saw the America’s Cup of 1987, the next time the event would take place, as a huge opportunity for new challengers that would radically heighten popular interest in the event.
ESPN’s top trio of Grimes, Werner, and Bornstein looked at the spectacle from a practical point of view. They believed strongly that corporate America would solidly support the race, that this epic underdog story would attract unprecedented millions of American viewers, and that national pride was clearly and dramatically at stake.
ROGER WERNER:
We had to go to our parent company, CapCities,