I am the ideal reader for this book. In January or February of 1981, I read about a miracle -- a new cable television station that would carry all of the early-round games of the NCAA tournament. I couldn't believe it -- back then you could only see a few games on the weekend. The idea of basketball on Thursday and Friday night, and the chance to see schools like Lamar and Louisiana Tech, caused me to plead with my parents to sign up for cable for my 15th birthday. They did, and I've been watching ESPN ever since. The network had only started in September 1979, so I was in pretty much on the ground floor.
Now it's 30 years later, and ESPN is one of the most successful media franchises of all time. And so James Miller and Tom Shales have put together a 750-page oral history of ESPN that begins with the original idea to start a cable station in Bristol, Connecticut, and takes us up to the 2010 World Cup. I have to say that I enjoyed this book enormously. The authors have talked to almost everyone, including top executives at Disney and the other networks, as well as folks like Rush Limbaugh and Barack Obama. And they achieved a remarkable level of candor in their interviews. Numerous interviewees are quite blunt in their criticism of ESPN or at least some of the people who work there. Legendary feuds -- like the one between Chris Berman and Tony Kornheiser -- explode from the page. The authors are also careful not to limit themselves to the history of ESPN television; they cover the many outposts of the network as well, including ESPN the Magazine and ESPN.com. Nor do they limit themselves to the sports angle; much of the book consists of detailed discussions of key business deals -- from ESPN's initial source of funding (Getty Oil) to the most recent NFL contract that saw NBC take Sunday Night Football (and Al Michaels) from Disney. In short, this is an ambitious, professional effort that will be thoroughly enjoyed by anyone who is interested in the history of ESPN.
Having said that, however, I must state that I think structuring the book as an oral history was a mistake. Oral histories work best when the subjects being interviewed have little or nothing to hide. We trust Studs Terkel's oral history of working-class people in World War II because we believe that the folks being interviewed are probably telling the truth about their experience. But the history of ESPN is dominated by very successful media types and businessmen who are no strangers to controversy and who have a great deal of experience at spinning things in their favor.
As a result, while the stories and quotes are wonderful, the analysis is very thin. The few conclusions the book draws will be seen as remarkably non-controversial and unsurprising to anyone who has followed ESPN's history: College Gameday is great, Keith Olbermann was a genius who drove people nuts, Stephen A. Smith was overexposed, the ESPN phone was a disaster, and so forth. But more vital questions tend to disappear in a big pool of he-said he-said mush. Was Mark Shapiro's controversial tenure in the early 2000's a success? Why didn't the Tony Kornheiser/Monday Night Football experiment work? Why did ESPN lose NASCAR in 1999? Should the network have done more to keep guys like Keith Olbermann, Dan Patrick, and Charlie Steiner? Were the ESPY's a mistake? On these and many other questions, the book simply gives you the spin placed on the issue by the parties involved, and then you have to judge for yourself.
The oral history format also leaves us with a very narrow focus on the lives of people in Bristol to the exclusion of arguably more important matters. We learn a great deal, for example, about which ESPN folk were suspended for sexual harassment and why, but we read very little about how ESPN actually makes its money, which shows have been the most lucrative, or why ESPN pursues some sports and drops others. Furthermore, it is clear that throughout much of its history, ESPN's actions have been heavily influenced by the actions of other networks. I would like to know more about how ESPN fought off potential rivals like TBS and the USA Network.
Still, all in all, the book is enjoyable on its own, and it will certainly be a useful research for anyone seeking to write a more detailed history of the company in the future.
Highly recommended for anyone who cares deeply about ESPN.
The idea of there existing an all-sports network was so novel that well into the 1990s it was still being used in comic strips and sitcoms as an indication that some character was just obsessed with sports. You'd have some strip where Henry Lockhorn would be sitting off to the side, bug-eyed in front of a TV, with Loretta in the foreground making a crack about how much he watches the all-sports network. Or Everybody Loves Ray's dad would miss some emotional family conversation going on in the room around him while he was absorbed in the all-sports network.
ReplyDeleteI can imagine your point about the oral-history setup. Is there much in there about why Bristol, whether ESPN beat some other people to the punch of an all-sports network or whether some big network ever considered rolling out a higher-financed competitor (as opposed to simply purchasing ESPN)?
The best of the oral-history sports books that I know of is Terry Pluto's Loose Balls, about the American Basketball Association. It works because it reads exactly how people talked about the ABA, as some sort of underground, I-know-a-guy movement. So this book becomes this collection of myths--the myth of Dr. J, the myth of stripper cheerleaders, the myth of Connie Hawkins, the myth of "Bad News" Barnes, etc. The style really jibed with the subject at the time. In fact, I'm not sure it would be as effective now that we can actually again watch the ABA and see for ourselves.
According to the book, Bristol was chosen because that was where the original guy who came up with the idea for ESPN found land for offices. His name was Bill Rasmussen, and he came up with the idea after he lost his job as a PR guy for the Hartford Whalers. The Rasmussens were squeezed out pretty quickly -- although Bill Rasmussen did walk away with $3.4 million on a $39,000 investment -- and ESPN fell under the control of larger companies. But each of these companies -- Getty Oil, then Cap Cities, then Disney -- all thought that it made sense to stay in Bristol to hold down costs.
ReplyDeleteThere is very little about what the other media companies were doing with regard to sports in the early years of ESPN. I think one thing that really protected ESPN from competition is that for most of the 1980s, it was losing money -- so the other networks didn't see it as a viable business model. The breakthrough for ESPN came when it was able to get an NFL package for the 1987 season. They took that package, and used it to squeeze huge amounts of money out of the cable companies. To this day, $4 out of every monthly cable bill goes straight to ESPN.
I didn't know any of that. Thanks!
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