Those Guys Have All the Fun

A television station dedicated entirely to sports?  While we take it for granted today, in the 1970’s many people in television thought this was a crazy idea that would never work.  Luckily for us sports fanatics, several risk takers decided to launch ESPN anyway.  In Those Guys Have All the Fun: Inside the World of ESPN, James Andrew Miller and Tom Shales trace the rise of the ESPN empire, from struggling start-up to eventual domination of sports entertainment (TV, film, internet, restaurants, magazines . . . well pretty much everything).  The authors spent hours and hours interviewing ESPN insiders, from current and former executives, to anchors, writers, reporters, and even athletes.  The book is told almost exclusively through those first hand interviews, so the reader gets to experience the stories straight from the speakers’ mouths.

While it started out a bit slow, I found myself liking the book quite a bit.  The detail on the start of the company, all of the different things that had to come together to make it work, and all of the luck that was involved was fascinating.  As someone who didn’t watch the network in the 1980’s or even early 90’s, it was fun to get a little background on how it all started and how some of the shows and events we enjoy today came to be on ESPN.  It was also cool to read the firsthand accounts from some of the writers and TV personalities that I’ve read and watched for years, from Bill Simmons to Dan Patrick and Keith Olbermann.  And best of all, it wasn’t just a puff piece on ESPN and included quite a bit of scandal and gossip.  As you would expect when interviewing both people still at the network and those who no longer work there, there was plenty of verbal jabs and differences of opinion on the same topic.  There were plenty of tales of potential sexual harassment and constant bickering and fighting among the staff.  Not all is golden within the walls of ESPN. 

Two things did make it a frustrating read at times.  The first quarter of the book, which dealt with the start of the company in the late 1970’s and early 80’s sort of jumped around a bit from topic to topic and person to person with little structure.  I think because it was so long ago there was less material or hazier memories, so some of the excerpts weren’t that cohesive.  So the early part of the book was a little hard to get through, but it improved on that throughout with the interviews and topics in the middle and end tying together better.  The other thing was that a lot of the interviewees used first names and nicknames, which in some cases made it hard to follow who they were referring to.  It could get confusing when there are 10 different Steves and 8 different Bills involved in the network.

It might have been a gamble at first, but the network has become one of the most valuable brands in the world.  All sports all the time on TV?  Obviously not so crazy after all.  If, like me, you’re a sports fan and more specifically an ESPN fan, it’s certainly a recommended read, but those like my wife who couldn’t care less about sports, you might want to look elsewhere. 

Next up:  The Book Thief by Markus Zusak