Those Guys Have All The Fun – James Andrew Miller & Tom Shales, 2011 ★★★

Those Guys Play Rough

ESPN started out a good idea, but quickly became subsumed by ego, hubris, and testosterone.

To figure that out, you don’t need Those Guys Have All The Fun – an hour of their live coverage of any sports event reveals this well enough – but it certainly helps connect the dots. To succeed at ESPN takes a certain kind of mentality, James Andrew Miller and Tom Shales reveal in this 2011 book, where cutthroat tactics and crass individualism hold sway.

Written in the form of an oral history, Those Guys takes in the long-form testimony of hundreds of people connected in some way with the network from its late-1970s beginnings to the then-present. It’s not very long into this history that you are reading about how some man managed to push out some other man intimately connected with the network’s origins, beginning with ESPN founder Bill Rasmussen and his son, Scott, and continuing on through decades of backstabs and power plays like something out of Network meets I, Claudius. It’s one of the book’s recurring themes; sometimes someone even says something about it.

“The number-one thing that surprised me about ESPN was how little team spirit there was for a place that said its business was sports,” says Jack Edwards, a sportscaster who for years anchored ESPN’s centerpiece highlights show, SportsCenter. “If I said, ‘I think you’re wrong’ to someone who was higher in the organizational chart than I was, what I would get back was ‘you’re not a team player.’ … There are a lot of people in the administration at ESPN who throw around phrases like ‘be a team player’ and they’ve never really been part of a team.”

A more circumspect comment along the same lines is offered by a producer who still works at the network, Michael Mandt, who started out at ESPN as a production assistant:

“ESPN is really a mentality, and unlike any other place I’ve ever seen. People are very competitive, and it starts at the beginning. As soon as you start out, you have to make it, either you’re good enough or you don’t have a job. So right out of the womb, you’re taught to compete, and do everything you can possibly do. Competitiveness and drive exist from the bottom up, and that’s part of the culture.”

So whether it’s the prosecution or the defense, both sides seem to agree that ESPN is a deliberately harrowing work environment. Is this a good thing or not? Those Guys doesn’t try to take sides in the argument, yet the takeaway one gets is decidedly negative.

The tone was set from the very beginning, when Bill Rasmussen, a Connecticut-based sports executive, got a phone call on Memorial Day weekend, 1978. It was the wife of hockey legend Gordie Howe, who was firing him from her husband’s foundation while on her way to catch a plane. Rasmussen found himself with time on his hands, time he spent with his son Scott hatching an idea they had for using the new medium of cable television to create a channel devoted to sports in Connecticut. The name they came up with was Entertainment and Sports Programming Network, shortened in those days to ESP Network.

Rasmussen had a sound idea, and followed it up with some genius moves like buying space on a satellite transponder and some land in Bristol, Connecticut that came pretty cheap and allowed for a quality signal to be beamed up. Soon, the idea morphed into covering all sports, not just those originating in the Nutmeg State.

These good ideas did the Rasmussens themselves little good when they brought aboard a funding partner in a Getty Oil executive named Stuart Evey who quickly saw the Rasmussens as expendable supercargo. Thus a pattern emerged that would hold sway at ESPN throughout its existence: Take someone else’s good idea, then find a way of cutting the originator out of the picture.

These early days are where Miller and Shales’ book is most fascinating. The accounts given by various participants are alternately harrowing and amusing. On the first day of broadcasting, September 7, 1979, ESPN started things off by televising a softball championship, with one camera positioned directly behind the chain-link backstop.

“The two teams competing were the Kentucky Bourbons and the Milwaukee Schlitz,” Miller and Shales write. “Unfortunately, it wasn’t Schlitz but Budweiser with whom ESPN had signed its first monster sponsorship deal.”

But despite the reservations of many – “There’s no way anybody will ever watch sports twenty-four hours a day,” was Evey’s own take as he tells it – not to mention a lot of dicey sports properties like Australian Rules Football, ESPN took off. By 1983, ESPN was already America’s largest cable network, bigger even than Cable News Network and MTV. And it kept growing, quickly.

The positives of These Guys include a year-by-year account of how it all went down. Miller and Shales tick off the various milestones, including how the network went about creating a dual-revenue stream, of advertising and subscription fees, which helped channel the network’s broadening reach into enormous profitability.

“It was a little like selling cake and getting paid to eat it too,” Miller and Shales relate.

ESPN's Bristol campus as it appears more or less today. Constantly expanding in size even as the network continues a long run of staffing cutbacks, it looks much like the formless monster of cinderblock and antennae that insiders say it really is. Image from www.careerbliss.com.

But as the network grew, it also became defined by its personalities. This became in short order a problem for ESPN, and becomes an issue for this book, too. There are too many spotlight moments, long and rambling passages of text, devoted to the first-person accounts of the people in front of and behind the camera. Ego service too often seems the book’s principal function, much like it does for ESPN.

Writing about the toothsome Erin Andrews, the authors liken her to Farrah Fawcett (kids, ask your parents) and talk up her beauty as if it were something really important, rather than a sideshow element to the story. “Who needed a poster when you could see and hear the living goddess in person holding forth with effortless expertise?” they write.

John Lack was one of the creators of MTV, and saw in ESPN a similar stage for star-making. He talks to Miller and Shales about working the ESPN leadership into seeing things his way. “We need to have people be big and real and fun,” was how he remembers his message.

Big, yes. Real, maybe sometimes. But fun? Well, if you didn’t have to deal with a Keith Olbermann tantrum, or Tony Kornheiser’s vitriol, both of which get much play here, maybe it could have fun watching from the sidelines. That competitive aspect Mandt speaks of so appreciatively clearly made for more than its share of transponder-fueled monsters.

My big disappointment reading this book was how badly Chris Berman comes off. He’s so genial on television, you want to believe he’s a little bit real that way, but it’s not so, according to nearly everyone interviewed, including, in a roundabout way, Berman himself, who comes off in these pages as humorless and obsessed with getting respect. Even when he clashes with the kooky and unpleasant Kornheiser, Berman comes off as the bad guy, telling Miller and Shales how “Mr. Kornheiser” doesn’t rate in his world.

Not everyone comes off badly; ironically given his reputation Jim Rome strikes a self-reflective and repentant note relating his side of a famous incident with quarterback Jim Everett where Rome wound up getting knocked down on air. Too often, Those Guys plays up these incidents in a sort of “Greatest Hits” fashion, rather than asking a legitimate question about how such an acrid environment became ESPN’s worst enemy.

The closest the book comes to asking hard questions is in regard to ESPN’s famously poor treatment of women. In the early days, females on staff were subjected to routine sexual harassment, both overt and otherwise, like when various key figures got the cute idea of tuning the office television monitors to the Playboy Channel. But even here, the story too quickly devolves into tales of self-actualization through work, and giving various women anchors like Robin Roberts and Hannah Storm long turns to tick off their various accomplishments. It’s just more ego-stroking in the guise of journalism, and after 700 pages gets quite dull.

The biggest fault I found with Those Guys were the chapters themselves, seven mammoth slabs of running commentary which go off on long tangents before being cut off and replaced, like a Monty Python sketch, into something completely different. Shorter chapters would have been much better, but would have required the kind of content management that Miller and Shales seem unwilling to expend on their subject.

The result is big and messy, occasionally fascinating, often depressing, and thoroughly deflating if one signs on to the notion of people being made bigger by the big ideas they work to transform into reality. It’s sure busy up in Bristol, like the world’s biggest anthill, and just as icky to look at up close.