Those Guys Have All the Fun - James Andrew Miller [91]
BILL GRIMES:
It all began to deflate me after five years. Things began to slowly disintegrate, mostly because of Granath. He gave me a lot of autonomy most of the time, but he was a guy who looks out totally for himself. He doesn’t support his people. I almost lost my job twice by going over his head. He didn’t fight for anything we needed.
My biggest frustration was that Granath was not supportive within ABC of my requests for compensation increases for those of us at ESPN. I was tired of feeling we weren’t properly compensated for the value we created. Look, I grew up in West Virginia. My father left home and then my mother decided she didn’t want to raise children, so I was raised by my grandmother. I didn’t grow up around a lot of money, and when Getty hired me, I thought I was so lucky to be making $150,000, but I had no equity.
My attitude at ESPN from the start was “I’m going to support my guys and we’re going to do what we think is right. If any of that gets me fired, so be it.” Very quickly I began to feel we weren’t getting paid what we should. When I got to ESPN, we lost like seven or eight million that first year; when I left we had $300 million in revenues and $100 million in profit. And after many years of creating a couple billion dollars’ worth of wealth for CapCities shareholders, I think I had a net of a million and a half bucks worth of CapCities stock. When the Hallmark Channel called and offered me the job of president, I thought it was a better chance to make some real money.
They gave me a wonderful going-away dinner party at 21. Roger and Steve arranged to have a note sent to me from more than fifty employees who had something that they remembered, and they put it together in a book. I still have it.
STEVE BORNSTEIN:
I was thirty-six when Bill left. I knew what I knew—programming strategies and production, particularly in our reinventing of SportsCenter—and knew what I didn’t know—the revenue side—either ad sales or affiliates. I was really unfamiliar with much of the business end. So I knew they weren’t going to give me Bill’s job and felt pretty comfortable when I heard Roger was coming back. Christ, he couldn’t wait to come back.
ROGER WERNER:
When Bill called to tell me he was leaving, it was quite unexpected. He said he had a terrific offer from Hallmark and thought he could make some real money. I didn’t blame him. Bill Grimes was an extremely visionary guy in terms of seeing the potential future of the cable industry. He saw that big-league programming was going to produce big games for cable, and his decision to go to the cable operators when he did and ask for fees was incredibly important. He had a huge impact on ESPN.
As soon as management heard about Bill’s departure, Tom Murphy asked me if I was interested in going back to ESPN, and I couldn’t say yes fast enough. At ABC, I had felt like I was an alien microbe in that organization and they were throwing antibodies at me as fast as they could. Nobody in that place really wanted to change the way they did business; frankly, even Tom and Dan had such a personal connection to the broadcasting industry—after all, these were business models they helped build—that they didn’t want to rock the boat that hard either.
It was real exciting. I came back in the fall of 1988, and from the start I told Steve that I would develop a succession plan for him. We had a solid game plan going forward. You know, I thought I had crossed a bridge and left my baby behind, but here I was, going right back.
I was in Bristol one day a week, sometimes two, but I felt I had a pretty decent handle on what was going on up there. My door was open when I was there, and the guys knew they could call me any time day or night or, if needed, come and see me in New York. But I relied a lot on Steve for programming and production issues. My involvement in those areas was more strategic. I was not focused