WORLDWIDE LEADER? ESPN LEADS ONLY IN BLOOD, TEARS, GREED AND LOST VIEWERS
Call it The Disney Dirge, a day that never could happen in the peak years, with brutal layoffs of on-air talent — including the great Jeff Van Gundy — leaving the media company significantly weakened
It might be time to dump the slogan, that arrogant splash of self-endearment. ESPN no longer is “The Worldwide Leader in Sports.” Any media company committed to retaining wandering eyeballs — cable subscribers and cord-cutters, Gen Zers and millennials and the rest of us with disposable dollars — doesn’t lay off TV’s best game analyst because: (a) he offended NBA commissioner Adam Silver once too often with cutting criticism; and (b) he’s a 61-year-old white male when a female analyst, Doris Burke, would satisfy the woke mobs.
Somehow, Jeff Van Gundy is looking for work today with about 20 other on-air network personalities, in a bloody gutting of talent that only can be called The Disney Dirge. Years ago, in the era when I worked there as a regular “Around The Horn” panelist, the place became much too full of itself. Salaries exploded. Egos swelled. A little old lady in Pasadena would see an ESPN charge of $9.42 on her monthly cable bill, among tens of millions of customers held hostage even if they never flipped to the company’s “family of networks.”
That bloated whale has been harpooned, probably forever. The Bristol lifeline is being snipped by streaming evolution that has turned the previously untouchable Disney boss, Sir Robert Iger, into a struggling, old executive charged with cutting 7,000 jobs and saving $5.5 billion in costs. This was a startling acknowledgment of ESPN’s demise, a caution flag waved by chairman Jimmy Pitaro, conceding that the broadcast empire is downsizing dramatically — and that no one’s job is safe unless his name is Joe Buck or Stephen A. Smith.
Or Pat McAfee, who will make $17 million annually for a daily three-hour talk show only because the gambling sleazes at FanDuel were paying him about $30 million a year for the same YouTube show. The massive investment might prove to be a disastrous overpayment if McAfee doesn’t attract the same bro-dude crowd, from noon to 3 p.m. Eastern time, that has been loyal to him as a freak-flag-flying independent. Pitaro, whose teenagers at home love Potty Mouth Pat, had to find ways to pay his new acquisition.
So he served his kids and Wall Street — but only weakened perceptions of his kingdom among America’s sports consumers — by cutting Van Gundy, Jalen Rose, Max Kellerman, Keyshawn Johnson, Jay Williams, Steve Young, Suzy Kolber, Matt Hasselbeck, Todd McShay, Ashley Brewer, David Pollack and LaPhonso Ellis, among others, who joined the great Neil Everett, Rob Ninkovich and numerous behind-the-scenes workers in job exile, some of whom had worked there for decades. Pitaro is cleaning up the overextended shitshow created by his hippie-dippie predecessor, John Skipper, who appropriately was fired in late 2017 after a cocaine dealer extorted him in New York City, or so he said. In the process, management leaves wounds from which Bristol never will recover. These have become evil places, Disney and ESPN, filled with cold executives who now will flee to their summer mansions for a long holiday weekend.
“Today I join the many hard-working colleagues who have been laid off," Kolber wrote on Twitter. “Heartbreaking — but 27 years at ESPN was a good run. So grateful for a 38 yr career! Longevity for a woman in this business is something I’m especially proud of.”
She was classier than her bosses, who said in a Friday memo: “Given the current environment, ESPN has determined it necessary to identify some additional cost savings in the area of public-facing commentator salaries, and that process has begun. This exercise will include a small group of job cuts in the short-term and an ongoing focus on managing costs when we negotiate individual contract renewals in the months ahead. This is an extremely challenging process, involving individuals who have had tremendous impact on our company. These difficult decisions, based more on overall efficiency than merit, will help us meet our financial targets and ensure future growth.”
Say what? Based “more on overall efficiency than merit,” they said? Try explaining that to a 19-year-old communications major in college. A female network executive once told me, “You have to be perfect to work at ESPN.” Rather, you have to wear a coat of armor. Coming soon to Bristol: AI.
Once the one and only aspirational place for sports media types — and a place that changed my life for better and worse, during eight years and 1,700 “ATH” tapings and many more TV and radio shows — ESPN now is an unapologetic bedfellow with the leagues, conferences and events it has showered with billions in rights fees: the NFL, the NBA, the NHL, the SEC, MLB, UFC, tennis, golf, you name it. Journalism? If some of the industry’s better investigative reporters are still on the payroll, such as Don Van Natta Jr., they won’t be for long. Bristol doesn’t do much journalism anymore, not when many of the probes — gambling scandals, for one — would involve those business partners and a filthy sportsbook industry that ESPN is embracing. Jeremy Schaap does too many soft features. Wait, better check to see if he’s still employed.
Someone who should be eliminated, and might be soon enough, is late-night host Scott Van Pelt. A company man and obnoxious jock-sniffer, through and through, he had the audacity to tell Sports Illustrated last month that he doesn’t feel like hosting “SportsCenter” much longer. It might not be his decision after he told writer Jimmy Traina, who asked if he’d still be there in three years: “Nah. I don’t think so. My contract doesn’t run that long, and there are conversations to be had about what all is part of it. At some point you just gotta step aside and let somebody else have it.” Why? Seems the gig bores him too much, with Van Pelt saying, “At some point, it’s Tuesday night and you're following the White Sox and it’s like, that’s fun, too, but it’s just not the same level of juice as a night (when a championship is won). Or you’re following taped programming, it's a `30 for 30,’ and here you come. Coming off a game, at least there’s a game.”
Then he dropped some whiny truth. He sees the monstrous amounts given to McAfee and the “Monday Night Football” booth tandem of Buck and Troy Aikman, who make more than $30 million combined each year. Sounds like Van Pelt wants some of that insane money himself — a demand, of course, that would be insane in itself. He said: “Listen, they have re-established the market and they can come to me with LIV (Golf) numbers and say to me, ‘Van Pelt, we really like this thing you do’ and they’d get you caught up to some of the numbers they’ve thrown around and you (think), they can roll people out there and I’ll be sitting out there going (in old man voice), ‘Let me tell you about the game tonight.’ ”
The clever, tone-versatile Everett is gone. And Van Pelt is still there? While Adam Schefter and Adrian Wojnarowski, who each make more than $7 million annually, pose as reporting “insiders” when they’re actually complicit shills for agents and leagues? While gambling “experts” are playing with ethical fire in the Las Vegas studios?
What’s wrong with this world?
ESPN exists to serve its masters: Silver, Roger Goodell, Rob Manfred, Gary Bettman, Greg Sankey, Dana White (even if he slaps his wife on New Year’s Eve), the Augusta National green jackets, the Wimbledon and U.S. Open lords. Everyone else who works there is expected to smile, love sports 24/7 and never, ever anger a sports commissioner or influential team owner. I’m still shocked I was employed there for so long — day after day, year after year — while bringing my same fiercely independent backbone to the studio. I didn’t care who I angered, even Snoop Dogg one day. Our ratings grew steadily, quarter after quarter. But I definitely pissed off someone, because when I attended a pre-ESPYs party in Beverly Hills one summer night, an executive in a pressed suit whispered in my ear, “I’ll see to it that you aren’t here much longer.” Wait, what about those 970,000 “ATH” viewers a day? Built over eight years?
He didn’t care. Someone got to him. And them. The suits might care more now, long since my departure, as the ratings number has shrunk to 300,000 on a good day, less on many other days.
The only programming that matters are the game broadcasts, the pre-game shows and, perhaps, specific shoulder shows like “NFL Live” and “NBA Today.” Everything else is discardable. Radio? With the dumping of the entire morning lineup — Johnson, Kellerman and Williams — a network that once ruled with the “Mike and Mike” colossus obviously doesn’t care who fills show slots anymore. The only requisite: The hosts don’t cost much.
Speaking of Kellerman, who won’t be landing at Fox Sports after jumping from ESPN to Fox and back to ESPN in a ping-pong blur, I remember when he dropped this anti-gentile bombshell on me. “Don’t you know the Jews run the media?” said Mad Max, our original host on “ATH,” who was the one who needed the mute button instead of using it to quiet us.
Guess that isn’t the case anymore, if it ever was. The only element in play now is how much the meter moves commensurate with your salary. Unless your name is Jeff Van Gundy, who moved the meter and didn’t make all that much money.
ESPN will continue to function. But “The Worldwide Leader in Sports” is dead. Cue The Disney Dirge, and may the freshly unemployed try to enjoy the Fourth of July weekend, their lives already rocked by rude and greedy fireworks.
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Jay Mariotti, called “without question the most impacting Chicago sportswriter of the past quarter-century,’’ writes general sports columns for Substack while appearing on some of the 1,678,498 podcasts and shows in production today. He is an accomplished columnist, TV panelist and talk/podcast host. Living in Los Angeles, he gravitated by osmosis to film projects.