Those Guys Have All the Fun - James Andrew Miller [90]
ESPN was now on a pretty nice trajectory, and I knew Bill would have Steve there for him. There were still a lot of challenges, but they had bigger problems at ABC. I started almost right away. For a young guy learning the network business, we had a fun development season that year. We launched a couple hit shows—the Roseanne Barr show, Coach with Craig Nelson. But the fundamentals of the network business had huge structural problems: out-of-control costs, declining ratings, declining ad sales, all kinds of legacy problems. Tom had asked me to go in and change all that—essentially, I think he saw me as the guy who could help create a new paradigm for broadcast television, a new business model, if you will. He saw what I did at ESPN and thought maybe I could apply that kind of McKinsey logic and managerial skill to this big battleship. I had three divisions reporting through to me. Dennis Swanson was running the sports division—where a guy named Bob Iger was working for him; Brandon Stoddard was running entertainment; and Roone Arledge was running news. You would have thought Roone and I would be close, given that I was coming from ESPN, but he was a little distant.
The ESPN era in television sports followed another: the Age of Roone. For a quarter century, Roone Pickney Arledge Jr. was the dominant figure in electronic sports coverage, a dazzlingly prodigious pioneer who revolutionized the medium with such shows as Monday Night Football and Wide World of Sports (“the thrill of victory, the agony of defeat”), and who personally produced ten marathon Olympic broadcasts. He was mentor to such key figures as Dick Ebersol, Don Ohlmeyer, legendary reporter Jim McKay, and the indefatigable, the incorrigible, Howard Cosell.
ESPN grew up in Roone’s shadow and, once it became connected to ABC, within his grasp. Since he wielded such immense power, many expected him to be all over ESPN, obsessing about every detail of production and programming. He did sit for a time on the ESPN board. And yet, mysteriously enough, ESPN was for Arledge mostly a hands-off deal. Why? On the surface, it just didn’t make sense. One had to look closely, and dig down, to learn the reasons.
DON OHLMEYER:
Roone and I had often talked about the notion that if somebody’s really busting their balls on something, after a certain period of time, all the good new ideas they have in that area are pretty much drained. And I think that’s how Roone came to feel about sports. He felt he’d accomplished just about everything he could. Roone wasn’t a normal person motivated by the things that drive most people. He was truly a renaissance man with a really brilliant mind that was constantly curious about new things. He knew all about cooking, was fascinated by plants—he could even sit and talk about Middle Eastern philosophy. For him, sports had become a little too much “been there, done that.” Most of the time, he would have an excuse for not coming to the ESPN board meetings. Even when he did come, I could see he wasn’t really interested, and so could everybody else. I think he made it a point to let everybody know, “Don’t count on me—my plate’s already full fixing news…. I’ve moved on.”
Bristol was revving up, but in New York, ESPN president Bill Grimes was grinding down, feeling hassled by his boss, ABC honcho Herb Granath, and chafing at the knowledge that while he was producing beaucoup bucks for the network and for corporate parent ABC, he personally wasn’t becoming as rich as he felt he deserved to be. In the five years of his presidency, this rough-and-tumble swashbuckler from West Virginia had gone from reporting to Stu Evey at Getty, to Granath and other ABC executives, and then to the CapCities crowd. In addition, he was clearly expected to heed the counsel of board member Ohlmeyer. Of the entire gallery, Grimes really respected only Murphy and Burke. If he could have reported