The Ride of a Lifetime Page 5

  One of the first things they did after taking over was to tell Roone they didn’t want him running both Sports and News. They gave him a choice, and Roone chose News—with the one stipulation, that he would be the executive producer of our ’88 Winter Olympics coverage in Calgary. I assumed they’d replace him with someone from within the division (I thought there was a chance it might even be me), but instead they brought in Dennis Swanson, who, prior to becoming the head of the vaunted ABC Sports division, had managed a half dozen or so local TV stations for ABC. (Dennis’s great—and legitimate—claim to fame was that he was the guy who put Oprah Winfrey on TV in Chicago in 1983.)

  Overnight, I went from working for the most successful sports television executive of all time to working for someone who’d never spent a minute at a network or in sports broadcasting. My former boss, Jim Spence, was one of the people who also got passed over for Roone’s job. When Tom and Dan announced they were bringing in Dennis, Jim quit, and other senior executives followed him out the door. Jim went to the talent agency ICM to start a sports division. I hung around, hoping something might open up for me. After a short time working for Dennis, though, I called Jim to say it seemed like there was nothing for me there anymore and I needed to get out. Jim asked me to come join him at ICM, and we quickly crafted a deal. I was under contract at ABC, but I figured they’d let me out of it, and the next day I went into work planning to give Dennis my notice.

  Before I could set up a time to talk with him, I spoke with Steve Solomon, the head of Human Resources for ABC, whom Dennis had brought in to help him run Sports. I told Steve I was planning to leave. “We need to talk with Dennis,” he said. “He has another idea for you.” When I stepped into Dennis’s office, he said, “I’ve got news for you. I’m going to make you senior vice president for programming. I want you to create a blueprint for all of ABC’s sports programming.”

  I was completely thrown. “I was about to tell you I was leaving,” I finally said.

  “Leaving?”

  “I didn’t really think there was a path for me here anymore.” I explained that Jim Spence was starting a sports business at ICM and that I’d made a decision to join him.

  “I think that’s a mistake,” Dennis said. He wasn’t so sure the company would let me out of my contract, for one. “This is a big opportunity for you, Bob. I don’t think you should just let it go.” He gave me twenty-four hours to give him an answer.

  I went home that night and had a long conversation with my then wife, Susan. We weighed my misgivings about working for Dennis against the potential of this new job. We talked about our two daughters, and the security of being in a place I knew well, versus taking a risk on a new venture. Ultimately I decided to stay where I was because ABC Sports had been such a good place for me over the years, and I still wasn’t ready to give up on it.

  There are moments in our careers, in our lives, that are inflection points, but they’re often not the most obvious or dramatic ones. I wasn’t sure I was making the right decision. It was probably the safer one, really, to stay at the place I knew. But I also didn’t want to leave too impulsively, because my ego had been bruised or because I had some feeling of superiority when it came to Dennis. If I was ultimately going to leave, it had to be because there was an opportunity that was too great to say no, and the ICM job wasn’t that.

  Taking Dennis up on his offer proved to be one of the best career decisions I ever made. I’d soon learn that I had been totally wrong in my assessment of him. He was an amiable, funny guy; his energy and optimism were infectious; and, crucially, he knew what he didn’t know. This is a rare trait in a boss. It’s easy to imagine another person in Dennis’s shoes overcompensating for the fact that he’d never worked at a network by exuding a kind of fake authority or knowledge, but that wasn’t how Dennis was wired. We would sit in meetings and something would come up and rather than bluffing his way through it, Dennis would say he didn’t know, and then he’d turn to me and others for help. He regularly asked me to take the lead in conversations with higher-ups while he sat back, and he took every opportunity to extol my virtues to Tom and Dan. In the lead-up to the Winter Olympics, Dennis asked me to present our plans to them and the highest-ranking executives in the company. It was an enormous opportunity for me, and a perfect example of how Dennis never put himself ahead of anyone else.

  It was who he was, a naturally generous man, but it was also a function of the culture that Tom and Dan created. They were two of the most authentic people I’ve ever met, genuinely themselves at all times. No airs, no big egos that needed to be managed, no false sincerity. They comported themselves with the same honesty and forthrightness no matter who they were talking to. They were shrewd businesspeople (Warren Buffett later called them “probably the greatest two-person combination in management that the world has ever seen or maybe ever will see”), but it was more than that. I learned from them that genuine decency and professional competitiveness weren’t mutually exclusive. In fact, true integrity—a sense of knowing who you are and being guided by your own clear sense of right and wrong—is a kind of secret weapon. They trusted in their own instincts, they treated people with respect, and over time the company came to represent the values they lived by. A lot of us were getting paid less than we would have been paid if we went to a competitor. We knew they were cheap. But we stayed because we felt so loyal to these two men.

  Their business strategy was fairly simple. They were hypervigilant about controlling costs, and they believed in a decentralized corporate structure. Meaning: They didn’t think every key decision should be made by the two of them or by a small group of strategists in corporate headquarters. They hired people who were smart and decent and hardworking, they put those people in positions of big responsibility, and they gave them the support and autonomy needed to do the job. They were also tremendously generous with their time and always accessible. Because of this, executives working for them always had a clear sense of what their priorities were, and their focus enabled us all to be focused, too.

  * * *

  —

  IN FEBRUARY 1988, we went to Calgary to cover the Winter Games. As agreed, Roone was executive producer, and I was the senior program executive. Which meant that in the long run-up to the Olympics I was in charge of the intricate scheduling of all televised events, communicating and negotiating with the Olympic Organizing Committee and the various governing bodies around the world, and helping to plan our coverage in advance of the games. A couple of days before the games began, Roone showed up in Calgary and called me to his suite. “Okay,” he said. “What are we doing?”

  It had been two years since we’d worked together, but right away it was like nothing had changed—in good ways and bad. We were scheduled to air a three-hour Olympics preview the night before the opening ceremonies, and for weeks I’d been trying to get Roone to focus on it. He finally watched it after arriving in Calgary, the night before it was scheduled to air. “It’s all wrong,” he said. “There’s no excitement. No tension.” A team of people worked through the night to execute all of his changes in time to get it on the air. He was right, of course. His storytelling instincts were as sharp as ever. But it was such a stressful way to kick things off, and a reminder of how one person’s unwillingness to give a timely response can cause so much unnecessary strain and inefficiency.

  We set up our operations in a cavernous warehouse on the outskirts of Calgary. There were several trailers and smaller buildings inside the warehouse that housed various production and tech crews. Our control room was in there, too, with Roone in the captain’s chair and me in the back row dealing with logistics. Behind the control room was a glass-enclosed observation booth for VIPs. Throughout the games, Tom and Dan and several board members and guests would spend time in the booth, watching us work.

  The first few days went off without a hitch, and then everything changed overnight. Strong chin
ook winds rolled in and the temperature shot up into the sixties. The snow on the alpine course and the ice on the bobsled runs melted. Event after event got canceled, and even those that took place proved to be a challenge because our cameras couldn’t see anything through the fog.

  Every morning for the next several days, I’d arrive at the control room having almost no idea what we were going to put on the air that night. It was a perfect example of the need for optimism. Things were dire, for sure, but I needed to look at the situation not as a catastrophe but as a puzzle we needed to solve, and to communicate to our team that we were talented and nimble enough to solve these problems and make something wonderful on the fly.

  The big challenge was finding programming to fill our prime-time hours, which were now filled with gaping holes where big-ticket Olympic events used to be. This meant dealing with an Olympic committee that was struggling to solve its own scheduling crises. Even before the games began, I’d pushed my luck with them. The original draw for the hockey tournament had the United States playing two of the toughest teams in the world in the first two games. I assumed they would lose both contests, and viewer interest would drop off a cliff after they were eliminated. So I’d traveled all over the world meeting with national hockey federations and Olympic committees to convince them to redraw the bracket. Now I was on the phone with the Calgary Olympic committee several times a day, begging them to change the schedule of events so that we’d have something to show in prime time.

  The meetings with Roone before each night’s telecast were almost comical. He’d come into the booth every afternoon and say, “What are we gonna do tonight?” And I’d reply, “Well, we’ve got Romania versus Sweden in hockey” or some such thing, and then I’d walk him through the rescheduled events, which were often lacking. Since we didn’t have the competitions we needed, each day a team of producers was sent out to uncover compelling human-interest stories. Then they’d pull the features together and slot them into that night’s telecast. The Jamaican bobsled team was a godsend. As was Eddie “The Eagle” Edwards, the quixotic British ski jumper who finished last in both 70- and 90-meter events. It was a high-wire act, but it was fun, too. And it was satisfying to face the challenge of each day knowing that the only way through was to stay laser-focused and to exude as much calmness as possible to the people around me.

  Somehow it all worked. The ratings were historically high. Tom and Dan were pleased. The added drama of having to improvise so much of it was a fitting end to Roone’s reign over sports television. It was also the last Olympics ABC would televise, after a forty-two-year run. We no longer held the rights after those games. On the final night of coverage, after we signed off, several of us hung around in the control room and drank champagne, toasting our efforts and laughing about how closely we’d averted disaster. One by one people filed out and headed back to the hotel. I was the last one left in the control room and stayed there for a while taking in the silence and stillness after so much action. Then I turned out the lights and headed home.

  * * *

  —

  A FEW WEEKS LATER, I got called into a meeting with Tom and Dan. “We want to get to know you better,” Tom said. He told me they’d watched me closely in Calgary, and they were impressed with how I’d handled myself under pressure. “Some things might be opening up,” Dan said, and they wanted me to know they had their eyes on me. My first thought was that maybe I had a chance at the top job at ESPN, but shortly after that meeting they gave it to the guy who was executive vice president of ABC Television at the time. There I was, frustrated at being passed over again, when they called me back in and gave me his job. “We want to park you there for a little while,” Dan said. “But we have bigger plans.”

  I didn’t know what those plans were, but the job they’d just given me—number two at ABC TV—felt like a pretty far reach. I was thirty-seven years old, I’d primarily worked in sports, and now I would be running daytime and late-night and Saturday morning television, as well as managing business affairs for the entire network. I knew precisely nothing about how any of that was done, but Tom and Dan seemed confident I could learn on the job.

  My instinct throughout my career has always been to say yes to every opportunity. In part this is just garden-variety ambition. I wanted to move up and learn and do more, and I wasn’t going to forgo any chance to do that, but I also wanted to prove to myself that I was capable of doing things that I was unfamiliar with.

  Tom and Dan were the perfect bosses in this regard. They would talk about valuing ability more than experience, and they believed in putting people in roles that required more of them than they knew they had in them. It wasn’t that experience wasn’t important, but they “bet on brains,” as they put it, and trusted that things would work out if they put talented people in positions where they could grow, even if they were in unfamiliar territory.

  Tom and Dan brought me into their inner circle. They let me in on their decision-making and confided in me about people, including Brandon Stoddard, who ran prime time as president of ABC Entertainment. Brandon was a talented executive who had great taste in television, but like a lot of others who’d come up in entertainment, he didn’t have the temperament for working in a corporate structure. Brandon had Hollywood figured out, and to him Tom and Dan were “station guys” who had no clue about his business. He was unable to hide his disdain for them and unwilling to adapt to their way of doing things, or even make an effort to understand where they were coming from. Tom and Dan, unsurprisingly, grew increasingly frustrated in return, and over time a mutual distrust and low-level animosity took hold.

  Early one Friday morning, Dan sat down across from me in the cafeteria at ABC’s headquarters on West Sixty-sixth Street. Most days, he and I arrived at the office before everyone else, and we’d often meet in the cafeteria and catch each other up on what was going on. He set his breakfast tray down and said, “Tom is flying out to L.A. today. Do you know why?”

  “No,” I said. “What’s up?”

  “He’s going to fire Brandon Stoddard.”

  It didn’t completely shock me, but I was surprised that I hadn’t heard anything about their plans for replacing him. It was going to be big news in Hollywood that they’d fired the head of ABC Entertainment. “What are you going to do?” I asked.

  “I don’t know,” Dan said. “We’re just going to have to figure it out.”

  Tom fired Brandon on that Friday. Dan flew out to meet him over the weekend, and on Monday evening I got a call from him at home. “Bob, what are you doing?”

  “Making dinner for my girls,” I said.

  “We want you to fly out here tomorrow morning. Can you do that?”

  I told him I could, and then he said, “Before you get on the plane, there’s something you should know. We want you to run Entertainment.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “We want you to be president of ABC Entertainment. Come out here and we’ll talk about it.”

  I flew out to L.A. the next morning and went straight to meet with them. The struggles with Brandon had become too much, they said. They’d spent the weekend canvassing various people about who should replace him. One thought was to give the job to our head of research, Alan Wurtzel, whom they liked and respected. They raised this possibility with Stu Bloomberg, who had been the head of comedy and whom they’d just made head of drama at the network, as well. “You can’t do that,” Stu told them. “This is a creative job. You can’t give it to the head of research!” They then asked Stu, “What do you think of Bob Iger?” He didn’t know me well, Stu said, but everyone had been impressed with how I’d handled the Olympic coverage, and from what he knew people liked and respected me.

  Stu also told them he would gladly work for me, and that was enough for them. “We want you to do this,” Tom said. I was flattered, but I also knew this was a big risk for them. This would be the first time in
the history of the company that the person running ABC Entertainment wasn’t from the entertainment world. I wasn’t sure anyone from outside Hollywood had held that job at any of the networks. “Look, I appreciate your faith in me,” I told them. “But I haven’t read a script since my TV-writing course in college. I don’t know this part of the business.”

  They responded in their usual fatherly way. “Aw, Bob, you’ll be great,” Tom said.

  Dan added, “We want you to survive here, Bob. We hope when you’re done you’ll be carrying your shield and not being carried out on it!”

  I had dinner that night with Stu Bloomberg and Ted Harbert, the two men who, along with Brandon, were responsible for ABC’s prime-time lineup. The plan was that I would run the department and Stu and Ted would split the number two job beneath me. Ted would run programming and scheduling; Stu would run development. They were both seasoned entertainment veterans, and Stu, in particular, had been responsible for a lot of ABC’s recent success, including The Wonder Years and Roseanne. They would have been completely justified in their disdain for the guy who knew nothing about their business but was about to be their boss. Instead, they were two of the most supportive people I’ve ever worked with, and their support started that first night. I told them over dinner that I needed their help. They knew the business, and I didn’t, but our fates were intertwined now, and I hoped they would be willing to be patient with me as I learned on the job. “Don’t worry, Bob. We’ll teach you,” Stu said. “It’ll be great. Trust us.”

  I flew back to New York and sat down with my wife. We’d agreed before I went out there that I wouldn’t make any final decision without our talking it through first. This job meant living in L.A., and we had a life we loved in New York. We’d just renovated our apartment; our girls were at a great school; our closest friends were in New York. Susan was an executive producer of news at WNBC and one of those New Yorkers who never want to live anywhere else. I knew this would be hard for her and that in her heart she wouldn’t want to go. She was incredibly supportive. “Life’s an adventure,” she said. “If you don’t choose the adventurous path, then you’re not really living.”