You Can't Make This Up: Miracles, Memories, and the Perfect Marriage of Sports and Television (37 page)

After the round, we went into the clubhouse restaurant and sat down. It was in the middle of the 1998 home run chase that had captivated the country and we started talking about Sammy Sosa and Mark McGwire and whether either or both could break Roger Maris’s record. Jordan, remember, was only a few years removed from playing minor-league baseball—the conversation interested him as much as it did Joe and me. Above the bar, there was a small television set—maybe twenty-seven inches—and it was probably fifty feet away from us, a little shorter than the distance from the plate to the pitcher’s mound. It was late afternoon in Hawaii, which meant it was nighttime on the East Coast and
SportsCenter
was on. The screen displayed the results of the Cubs game from earlier in the day and a lot of other information about the game that we would have needed a telescope to decipher.

Morgan and I got up from the table to take a closer look and to see if Sosa had hit a home run. But Michael started reading the information on the screen from his chair.
Cubs won, 5–4, Sosa was two for four with a double and a walk
. He read everything on the screen. Morgan and I looked each other dumbfounded. Later, as we walked out to the parking lot, Joe and I figured that Michael must see in 4-D, not 3-D. The same way they used to talk about Ted Williams’s incredible eyesight, clearly Jordan had something similar going on. With his eyes, just imagine how that rim must have looked from eighteen feet out.

AND FINALLY, IT’S THE
NFL off-season in the early summer of 2012. Peyton and Eli Manning were out in California, and came to Bel-Air as my guests. I invited my buddy Skip Bronson and we played a match: Peyton and Skip against Eli and me. I think we put forty or fifty dollars on the line.

Now, Eli may have his two Super Bowls and Peyton may have his one and numerous MVP awards and both have had magical careers. But that day, the big brother/little brother dynamic was completely in evidence. They absolutely wanted to beat each other and Peyton was squirming as Eli and I got off to a very good start and built a fairly significant lead by the fifteenth hole.

But then the lead began to fray. Still, as we teed off on 17, Eli and I knew we only had to halve one of the final two holes to clinch the win. Then on the seventeenth green, Bronson makes a forty-foot snake for a birdie. And I then proceeded to miss a three-footer for a par, which would have been a net birdie—leaving Eli and me with an even slimmer margin. Then on 18, Bronson sinks another long bomb but I’m still in position to tie the hole and win the match with another three-footer. Which, of course, I lipped out. Choke City.

I had cost Eli the match.

I was distraught and all the more so when I saw how ebullient Peyton was. He was hugging Skip for making the putts and laughing about the fact that he was going to collect from his brother. Eli was gracious and a good sport but I couldn’t blame him if he wanted to kill me. All I could do was put my hat down over my eyes. I didn’t want to look at him.

A few months later, the
Sunday Night Football
opener would be played in New York. We went to meet with the Giants a couple of days before and I put my hat down over my eyes again as soon as Eli walked in the room. I said, “I can’t even look at you.”

He said, “Nah, you got a bad read on that one.”

There’s your perfect teammate.

CHAPTER 20

A New Home

T
ELEVISION BUSINESS DEALS HAVE
always interested me. It started with my father exposing me to the inner workings of the business during his time at MCA and Trans World International, and has continued to this day. I’ve always been fascinated with the backroom intrigue and the deal making.

So I understood almost everything when I wound up with an inside look at one of the landmark deals in the history of sports television.

It’s October 2004. I was in the middle of my nineteenth season on
Monday Night Football
, and my third with John Madden. We were in Cincinnati for a game between the Bengals and the Broncos, and on the afternoon of the game, I had a cup of coffee in the lobby of our hotel with Broncos owner Pat Bowlen. Pat was a longtime friend, and also, at the time, the chairman of the NFL owner’s committee that negotiated television rights. The league’s eight-year deals with its broadcast partners were set to expire after the 2005 season, and already the wheels had been set in motion for negotiations to renew the packages. As it stood, CBS had the rights to AFC games, Fox had the NFC, ABC had
Monday Night Football,
and ESPN had the Sunday night game. CBS and Fox had quickly re-upped with the league, but Disney—the owner of both ABC and ESPN—was slow-playing it, despite having the chance to continue to control both the Sunday and Monday night games. And Bowlen, knowing that I could get the word back to the home office, wanted me to deliver a message.

“Your company is asleep at the switch,” he told me. “The number is $1.5 billion.” That was the number it was going to take, per year, to lock up the rights to both of the prime-time games.

Then Bowlen gave me one more piece of information to pass along: “Despite what your people might think, the NFL does have another bidder.”

Fifteen minutes later, I was back upstairs in my hotel room and on the phone with Bob Iger, who was months away from succeeding Michael Eisner as the head of Disney. When I passed along what Bowlen had said, he told me he thought the NFL was most likely bluffing, setting up a stalking horse to drive up the price. I agreed. Neither of us could identify a serious bidder. NBC was totally in the dumps and hemorrhaging money—to us, they didn’t figure—and Turner Broadcasting seemed like too much of a long shot. No well-run company wants to be fooled into bidding against itself. We hung up but one thing was still gnawing at me; I’d known Pat Bowlen to be gruff and to be tough, but also to be a straight shooter.

With a deadline approaching, Disney decided to pass on paying the $1.5 billion. So the league pulled the offer off the table and set a rebid for the spring of 2005. And when Disney returned to the negotiating table, sure enough there was another player—hungry to make a deal, and get back in business with the NFL. It was, in fact, NBC.

In 2005, NBC was a last-place network with a struggling prime-time lineup. But they did have a legendary executive running their sports department, Dick Ebersol. Dick had first worked for Roone Arledge as a researcher on ABC Sports’ Olympic coverage. Then he helped create
Saturday Night Live
and later became the head of NBC Sports. But on Thanksgiving weekend of 2004, Dick’s life changed in an instant. He had been flying out of Montrose, Colorado, when his private plane crashed on takeoff. Dick had to be pulled from the wreckage by his son Charlie, but his youngest son, thirteen-year-old Teddy, was killed. Dick sustained serious injuries and recuperated for months but continued to work on the NBC deal.

Before the tragedy, Ebersol had been quietly talking with the league’s most powerful owners—among them, Bowlen, Robert Kraft of the Patriots, and Jerry Jones of the Cowboys, as well as others in the NFL office—as a forerunner to putting together an offer to bring the Sunday night games to NBC. Clearly, NBC had been that “other” bidder. Ebersol wanted to make
Sunday Night Football
a cornerstone of NBC’s prime-time programming. And he was terrific at selling his vision to the league. Sunday nights on NBC would look and feel special. It was a continuation of the philosophy Dick had first learned from Arledge. The show would be for everyone—hard-core fans and casual viewers, men and women, young and old, any and all demographics. Come one, come all.

So, in April 2005, after a final meeting in New York City, the packages for Sunday and Monday nights were split. Ebersol and NBC won the rights to
Sunday Night Football
for $3.6 billion over six years, which included two playoff games each season, and two Super Bowls, as well as something else innovative: scheduling flexibility—the ability to move bad matchups late in the season out of prime time and replace them with better games. Disney, meanwhile, retained
Monday Night
for almost twice that—$1.1 billion per season (with no playoff games, no Super Bowls, and no scheduling flexibility), and proudly announced the package would, after thirty-six seasons, be moving from ABC to ESPN.

How could ESPN be happy with that deal? It all went back to the dual revenue stream: cable fees and advertising. Adding
Monday Night Football
continued to give ESPN more leverage with cable companies to jack its fees up even higher. And, by the way, someone who knew that better than anyone was now a key executive for the NFL—Steve Bornstein. My onetime boss and the former president of ESPN had been fired by Disney and then had landed with the league, where he’d be put in charge of the new NFL Network. Now, in an imperfect storm for Disney, he was on the other side of the negotiating table from his old employer, understanding how to suck every Disney dollar out of the ESPN pipe.

That very night after the deal was completed, I ran into an ABC executive at a restaurant in Los Angeles. ESPN was celebrating—but this executive was flipped off. The deal would mean that the entertainment division would be losing its number-one-rated prime-time show and would now have to program an entire night of prime time against
Monday Night Football
on ESPN. “I can’t believe it,” he said to me. “Most of ESPN’s shows are howling jackasses braying at the moon, but it doesn’t matter—because a chimpanzee could run that operation. With those cable fees, they can’t fail. And now they think they’re creative geniuses. Un-fucking-believable!”

In that new television landscape, the NFL on TV had been transformed. And for me personally, the drama was just beginning.

THE DAY THE DEAL
was finalized in April 2005, I got a call from my boss, George Bodenheimer, who was heading both ABC Sports and ESPN. He wanted to personally talk to me about the deal and the future now that Disney had only one package. He told me that he wasn’t sure what the company was going to do with regard to the broadcasting teams, because as he saw it, “we have two very good teams—John Madden and you on Monday night, and the Sunday night team of Mike Patrick, Joe Theismann, and Paul Maguire on ESPN.” By the end of the call, I was already developing an ulcer.

Then George made the same call to John Madden. An hour later, I called John and he was angry. He related to me the same thing that Bodenheimer had told me about “not being sure” and “the two good broadcast teams.” Madden then said he’d already called his agent, Sandy Montag, to tell him to make a deal with NBC. That wouldn’t be hard, as Ebersol loved Madden and would have put a full-court press on to begin with. Madden also knew ESPN wasn’t going to fight his departure—because he knew that Mark Shapiro, who had been given full autonomy by Bodenheimer to oversee the new
Monday Night,
wanted him out the door anyway—the sooner the better. Now I was really getting sick. I’d spent four great years with the most iconic analyst ever and had been looking forward to many more when a grenade had been tossed in.

I’ve never been a big fan of Internet or newspaper polls about sports announcers, but over the years, there was one thing consistent about the polls that dealt with football analysts. John Madden was
always
the runaway winner. By a huge margin. And now he’s being pushed out? Insane!

So, in June 2005, two months after the NBC deal was announced, John Madden signed a deal to move to
Sunday Night Football
for the 2006 season. And not long thereafter, when it appeared I’d remain on
Monday Night Football
after it moved to ESPN, Shapiro announced the hiring of Joe Theismann for the
Monday Night
analyst role
.
I got a call from the owner of the Patriots, Bob Kraft, a good friend and, as a key member of the NFL broadcast committee, a man I spoke with regularly. He asked me to explain what was going on. I said it’s simple—it’s like you trading Tom Brady for a seventh-round draft choice.

Around that time, ESPN also announced that its Sunday night production team would be taking over
Monday Night Football
when it moved to cable the following season. Now it wasn’t just John leaving—Fred Gaudelli and Drew Esocoff were being shoved out by Shapiro as well. Upset, I called Bodenheimer. He said that much of the decision had to do with “loyalty.” I told him I didn’t understand. Fred and Drew had been longtime ESPN employees who had been
promoted
to work on Monday nights on ABC. They’d been under the same umbrella longer than the current ESPN guys who were now being named to take their places. So how in hell did replacing them have anything to do with loyalty?! That move told me all I needed to know. It was never clearer that, to the people running things from Bristol, Connecticut, if you were an ABC character, you might as well be wearing a scarlet letter.

I was no fan of Mark Shapiro, a self-promoting and self-anointed wunderkind, and the feeling was mutual. But he was told by people above him that, like it or not, I was going to remain as the play-by-play announcer on
Monday Night Football
. Along the way, months earlier, when there had been an unflattering article written about me in the
New York Post
that included the exact details of my NBA contract, I asked a colleague in the ABC PR department to look into it, and he traced the leak directly to Shapiro’s office. Nothing like the enemy within.

Of course, right after naming Theismann the new analyst, and pushing Fred and Drew (and indirectly, John) out, guess who walked away from ESPN in the fall of 2005? Shapiro. He’d taken a job with Redskins owner Dan Snyder to run the Six Flags amusement parks operation. So he’d never even be around for a single ESPN
Monday Night Football
telecast. As one colleague so adroitly put it, “Bodenheimer gave Shapiro the keys to a shiny, brand-new Ferrari and the kid crashed it into the wall. And then walked away from the scene.” Some business, huh?