Last night, I checked out 'Those Guys Have All the Fun - Inside the World of ESPN' by James Miller and Tom Shales from my local library. As of this post I'm up to page 125 (with 620 more pages to go). So what have I learned already?
1. Those with the money to fund your idea are the same soulless monsters that will take your "baby" away if you don't follow them. .
One side will say that you need "venture capitalists" to search out and support those ideas that are deemed (by who?) the best suited for "us." That is how ESPN went from an idea by Bill & Scott Rasmussen to an actual entity in the late 70s.
The other side would say if everyone had equal financial support, then you can support your own dreams and not be subjected to the whims and desires of third parties.
Getty Oil was the primary financier for ESPN's early years. They help start the Rasmussen's dream and almost immediately tried to take it away from them (The Rasmussen's were bought out of ESPN by 1983). When Texaco bought out Getty Oil in 1985, they sold their share of ESPN to RJR Nabisco and ABC/CapCities.
Money talks, and bean counters always win over the creators, especially in entertainment.
2. Those who have will never willingly share with those who don't....especially in athletics.
I'm going to quote directly from the book here:
In 1977, sixty-two NCAA football powerhouse programs from five conferences - including the Southeastern Conference (SEC) and the Big Eight (now the Big 12), plus a few independent teams, joined forces to form a college football association (CFA) to challenge the NCAA and cash in on rights deals from broadcast networks. By 1981, CFA members were chafing under the NCAA's tight grip on TV rights. According to NCAA policy, teams like Oklahoma, Alabama, Texas, and Penn State (pre Big 10) received the same revenue from a televised game as did teams with little national prominence. In addition, broadcast networks were required to schedule games in which at least eighty-two different NCAA teams appeared during a two-year period, but no team could appear nationally more than four times, and those appearances had to be divided equally among the networks. The whole point of the CFA was to wriggle free of NCAA restraints. It found a potential ally in NBC, which offered the CFA a four-year $180 millin rights contract. Ever anxious about threats to its power, the NCAA threatened sanctions that would affect other sports in addition to football, and squashed CFA's efforts to cash in.
By 1984, increasingly apoplectic over what it saw as the NCAA's unreasonable restraint on trade, the CFA - led by Oklahoma University's Board of Regents - Filed suit against the NCAA in a case that would go all the way to the Supreme Court.
The Court ultimately determined that the NCAA was in violation of the Sherman Antitrust Act and affirmed a Court of Apeals' judgement that the NCAA plan was "an unreasonable restraint of trade" because of the plan's "price-fixing and output-limiting aspects." The ruling held that the NCAA could no longer "limit the number of games that are broadcast on television" or contract for an overall price that has the effect of setting the price for individual game broadcast rights."
Thus freed from NCAA shackles, teams and conferences were able to negotiate their own TV contracts. Now there were better games and more money to go around. So it would be that ESPN, boosted by its association with ABC Sports, landed the rights to broadcast forty-eight games in the 1984 season.
--Miller & Shales, pp 124-125
Now I don't know if the current college sports humbug of conference realignment is covered in this book (I'm only at 1984). But money has been driving "amateur" sports for thirty years (at least). It's not going stop tomorrow either.
No comments:
Post a Comment