Hey, Sioux. If you haven't seen this from Keith Olbermann, i thought you might like it ~
Dick Ebersol (Keith Olbermann)
NEW YORK - It could’ve been a scene out of The Great Gatsby.
Dick Ebersol, my new boss at NBC Sports, was going to explain to me my rookie’s role on the network’s upcoming telecasts of the 1997 World Series. But first he had to direct producer David Neal on a few details.
“No, no,” he said, without a touch of reproach to his voice. “The first pitch Saturday can’t be at 8:07, it has to be at 8:37.” His eyes focused further down the slip of paper in his hands. “And Sunday’s backwards, too. It should be at 8:07, not 8:37. I’ll tell Buddy.”
“Buddy” was Bud Selig, Commissioner of Major League Baseball, and what Dick was going to do, in that same even, smooth, FM voice of his, was tell Bud Selig that the starting times of all the World Series games were going to have to be altered.
It had never occurred to me that one man actually just did that, just as it had never occurred to Fitzgerald’s characters that one man might have fixed the 1919 World Series. And here I was, watching it happen in front of me with ease and grace. And while it was unfolding with not a touch of the nefariousness connected with “fixing” a World Series, it reflected exactly the same degree of power and influence. I had to check to see if I was wet behind the ears, or had hay falling out of my bumpkin’s suit, or both.
This is, to some degree, Dick Ebersol’s public persona as the President, later Chairman, of NBC Sports and Olympics. It is that of the ultimate deal-maker, the man who broke precedent and locked up Olympic coverage for NBC for more than a decade, the man who walked away from the NFL and baseball when the money no longer made sense - the man who decided what time the World Series games would start.
But Dick Ebersol’s secret is far more important than all the deals he ever put together and all the influence he ever wielded. Of all the individuals I’ve met in 25 years in broadcasting, he is the one who most often put people ahead of business.
I know. I was one of them - three times.
As I write this, Dick Ebersol is in a hospital in Colorado, having survived a chartered-plane crash that killed both pilots. Two other passengers, including his son Charley, are known to have survived. His younger son Teddy was reported missing. Their mother, the actress Susan Saint James, was not on the flight.
Dick Ebersol brought me to NBC, pulling strings behind the scenes, ones that didn’t necessarily make total financial sense, just so I could work occasionally for him on baseball and football, and work nightly on my first MSNBC program, “The Big Show.” But it was a year later that I discovered that Dick Ebersol wasn’t just a great businessman, but more importantly, a great man. A confluence of events made continuing “The Big Show” impossible. NBC was justifiably mad at me. I was justifiably mad at them. The situation seemed irredeemable, possibly cataclysmic. There were lawyers. There were frayed friendships. But not in Dick Ebersol’s office. One day, at the nadir of the crisis, Dick called up and said “I think I know a way out of this. You’re too good a person, your bosses are too good people, that this should end badly. Just stay calm and let me work on it.”
Two months later he’d convinced everybody at NBC to simply sell my contract to Fox. He pulled me out of a potential career-ending situation, and saved NBC’s public face, and recouped nearly every penny of the company’s investment in me. It was with a mixture of pride in the accomplishment, and pride in the absurdity of the thing, that he announced he was the first television honcho ever to deserve Major League Baseball’s “General Manager of the Year” award.
Dick had stayed in touch during my adventures at Fox. But I had no idea why, in October, 2002, he wanted me to come to his office for lunch. After an hour’s worth of the kind of open, trusting, hilarious conversation that had made working with him a pleasure for all of us, he just casually mentioned he’d like me to be the primary cable host for the Olympics in Athens. After I recovered from my shock, I pointed out to him that I hadn’t left NBC under the best of circumstances - that there were clearly still hard feelings.
“Not from here,” he said, matter-of-factly.
With that, I was back at NBC. Simply because Dick Ebersol values people as much as he values the wheeling and dealing. He even smoothed the way for my return to MSNBC the following February, an event that would have been considered far less likely than Napoleon’s return from Elba - until he intervened.
The third time Dick Ebersol put a person (me) ahead of business came this past summer. It was evident that for a month, I had to be in two places at once: in Athens to broadcast the Olympics, and at MSNBC to continue “Countdown” as the presidential campaign heated up. With the greatest possible reluctance, I was voting for the latter. He wasn’t. He wanted me in Greece. And then one day he said “I understand. We’ll get through it.”
This is no time to list all the executives I’ve worked for, or with, who wouldn’t, or couldn’t, have done any of those things, taken those steps which reflected the essence of humanity in a business where humanity is not always a factor. Suffice to say, Dick Ebersol took all those steps, and countless more with other people.
And while he takes his job very seriously, he has never taken himself very seriously - another almost unique characteristic in this field. Propriety requires that I cannot write here his ribald self-effacing pun on his own latest corporate title, nor the identity of the newspaperman who will never know that one of his best interviews with the Chairman of NBC Sports was partially conducted by said Chairman from said Chairman’s private washroom while the rest of us tried to stifle the giggles he provided us.
That’s why all of us who have, or who have had, the privilege of working for and with him, are in such shock and grief now. I have often joked that I’d like to be Dick Ebersol when and if I grew up. I still do.
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