Those Guys Have All the Fun - James Andrew Miller [72]
BILL GRIMES:
Roger had a fabulous idea. We invited one person from every one of the top cable operators to come down to Australia with us for a two-week junket. The invitation was nontransferable. We chartered a Qantas jumbo jet and took them all down to Perth. There were big advertisers too, like the president of Coca-Cola, whom I knew. We had a great time, and it was a big success.
GEOFF MASON, Executive Producer:
Was it challenging? You bet. Was ESPN used to supporting such a project? God, no. Did we break new ground in terms of how ESPN approached new events by doing that project? Absolutely. What do you do for the viewer who is watching live coverage of a sailboat race for the first time? How do you keep them involved? First, we pegged it on personalities. I had learned that at ABC from Arledge. We didn’t do television about games, sticks, or balls; we did television about people. So we focused our coverage heavily on white hats and black hats: Conner, the Aussies, the French, the Italians, and the Kiwis. We had a ton of stories to tell because the people who were involved in the competition were a wild group. Second, we had to educate viewers on the sport, so we had Gary Jobson—the best who ever lived in terms of articulating what the sport means—get into a pool for an entire day with little model boats and we shot about twenty pieces on the rules of the game.
GARY JOBSON:
I actually sailed in the America’s Cup ten years before, so I looked at America’s Cup that year with very wide eyes. A lot of curves crossed in favor of ESPN on that magic event. By 1987, the country had been dealing with another recession and was just not feeling great at that moment. We had lost the America’s Cup in 1983, a shocking loss to many. You don’t want to lose an American icon after 132 years. At the same time, the movie Crocodile Dundee had just come out, and the Cup was happening in summer in Australia, which is winter in the U.S. You could watch the races live and get onboard the boats, which had never happened before. It was windy and exciting every day. So the combination of patriotic fervor and strong winds matched up perfectly with an outcome very much in doubt.
I had done some racing with Walter Cronkite, and we had become friends. I went to him and asked, “What should I know about commentating for the America’s Cup?” And you can hear Walter’s voice, “Well, Gary, here’s my advice: Make every word count.” Pretty good advice. Then I had one other friend who was in television, Ted Turner, because I had been his tactician in two of my America’s Cup campaigns, and Ted was very helpful to me too. His advice was simple: “Have fun and just do what you normally do. Explain it to others like you explain it to me. You’ll love it.” And U.S.A. won 5–1 in that final’s best-of-nine series. In other words, it was exciting television, it meant something to America, and people were watching.
Steve Bornstein once said that the America’s Cup was “the essence of cable TV. You could find something there that you couldn’t find anyplace else.”
JED DRAKE:
The west coast of Australia was like the Wild, Wild West, and we were in Fremantle and Perth for many months. I was thirty, and we had the time of our lives. It was the best event I’ve ever done. We even got a cable from David Letterman, whom we were going head-to-head with because he had just started doing late night. It said, “I think you’ve really got something with this TV yacht racing. It could be bigger than wrestling. Keep up the good work. All my best, David Letterman.”
DENNIS CONNER:
There was a great group