Espn Commentator That Wears Funny Button Down Shirts
BOYS WILL BE PIGS: Recent embarrassments include a peeper videotaping ESPN frat-boy fave Erin Andrews (pictured) nude in her hotel room and the firing of baseball analyst Steve Phillips. (Frederick Breedon/WireImage.com)
Steve Phillips (pictured) in 2009 after his extramarital affair with 22-year-old production assistant Brooke Hundley. (Lorenzo Bevilaqua; Marcus Santos)
(Marcus Santos)
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Andy Brilliant was thrilled — he had the sexiest secretary in the office.
She was drop-dead gorgeous, fun-loving, and propelled him to the top of an informal contest among his fellow executives over who had the hottest help, he recalled. That is, until she began arriving late, looking disheveled and — worst of all — sporting tacky sweatpants.
Her work suffered so much that he eventually let her go. Months later, she invited him out to lunch and finally admitted what was wrong. Her life was spiraling out of control because of cocaine.
"How the hell could you afford [cocaine] on your salary?" Brilliant asked her.
Turning tricks, she answered. To maintain her coke habit, she, along with several other secretaries, were being pimped out of the Manhattan office by the company's mailroom guys.
"The receptionist was a really good-looking girl, and she was b—ing FedEx guys in the bathroom after work hours," Brilliant said.
This sleazy story of workplace wantonness doesn't come from the halls of Playboy or the International Monetary Fund. It's from the Disney-owned ESPN, according to a new opus on the sports network titled "Those Guys Have All the Fun: Inside the World of ESPN."
The network's motto should be "The Worldwide Leader in Smut," instead of "Sports," according to interviews conducted by authors James Andrew Miller and Tom Shales, who penned a similarly dense tell-all about "Saturday Night Live."
The book, an oral history that tells how ESPN grew from a pipe dream to a multibillion-dollar conglomerate worth more than the NBA, MLB and NHL combined, contains 700-pages of frat-boy antics, sexcapades, back-stabbing and inflated egos that continue on to this day.
Mad men
Cable was in its infancy when ESPN joined the game in 1978. Only 14 million homes had it. HBO had just joined the scene three years before, and only reached a little over a million customers.
Bill Rasmussen and his son Scott developed the idea for a sports-centered network called ESP for Entertainment Sports Programming. The "N" for Network was added later.
They were largely ignored until Getty Oil, headed by Stuart Evey, ponied up $15 million, and big-time brands like Anheuser-Busch bought up ad space.
But it was Evey's leadership style, or lack thereof, that was the stuff of legend.
His apartment, on 47th Street in Manhattan, was where he and his "entourage" would "destroy the place with liquor, drugs, hookers," Brilliant told the authors.
Board meetings at 7 a.m. began with screwdrivers with "three fingers of Stoli," followed by three-martini lunches, and then trips to the nearest country clubs, where the "real drinking would start."
Evey insisted on chartering a chopper to ESPN headquarters, located in a sleepy suburb of Bristol, Conn. One time, when he was out-of-his-mind drunk, he made the helicopter emergency-land at least three times because he kept trying to open the door midair.
Evey's example was aped by underlings from top executives to the production assistants — more than 95 percent of whom were men, the book says.
The Christmas parties were particularly wild.
"A couple of them were drunken orgies, but who could blame these people in the middle of nowhere? It became like a big frat party. There were a lot of drugs being done in the bathroom. There was quite a bit of screwing going on afterward, a lot of it extramarital," Brilliant, a top ESPN executive at the time, told the authors.
Even without a lot of women, the men misbehaved.
"There was a lusty sex life there. There was screwing in the hallways. OK, maybe not in the hallways, but there were a couple of stairwell stories," said former reporter Sal Marchiano.
It got so wild in the 1980s that then-CEO Roger Werner reportedly tried to shut down the company-owned apartment where Brilliant's secretary and others were allegedly hooking.
"The mail boys got a couple of our secretaries hooking over there . . . They're making money after work when no one's there," Bill Grimes, another CEO, quoted Werner as saying, according to the authors. "It's getting out of control."
Inside the frat house
For ESPN, the 1980s were filled with game-changing moments: they began broadcasting 24 hours, aired football, and ABC took a share. By the late '80s, ESPN became the first cable network to surpass 50 million subscribers. The network was thriving, but women's roles in the workplace still recalled ad agencies in the 1950s.
Reporter Karie Ross recalled noticing the monitor above her head was tuned to the Playboy Channel. A dozen men gathered around her to gauge her reaction. That was on her first day.
Men propositioned women, offering up editing-room time for "dates." They also allegedly groped and cajoled the women relentlessly. When Ross spoke out against this treatment, her contract was not renewed.
The next decade was worse.
When a mission statement against sexual harassment was posted on a wall, the night staff plastered it with tomatoes. By the mid-'90s, 50 cases of sexual harassment were reported by women on the staff.
Among the complaints was one against well-liked anchor Mike Tirico, who continues to host several ESPN shows, in-
cluding "Monday Night Football."
At a 1992 staff party, the then-married Tirico began coming on to a co-worker, the authors claim. When she rebuffed him and left the party, he followed her and "reached in through the car window and thrust his hand between her legs as she attempted to start the engine," the book says. He was suspended for three months without pay.
The big
show
Meanwhile, the network was bolstered by on-air stars like Chris "Boomer" Berman, Bob Ley and, most contentiously, Keith Olbermann.
Olbermann joined the network in 1992 as an anchor for the popular 11 p.m. highlights show. Many staffers credited Olbermann and "SportsCenter" with making ESPN a household name. He was known for writing hourlong scripts in minutes, typing with one hand.
His genius, however, didn't mean he was particularly well liked. He frequently butted heads with the help and management.
ESPN chairman Herb Granath summed it up: "I was enraged by Olbermann. Guys like that just piss me off, you know, because there's no loyalty. It's just me, me, me."
Olbermann responded to this quote on Twitter last week saying, "I never heard from him, never knew he worked there. 'Herb Granath?' What was he? A ninja?"
Olbermann left in 1997. Many staff members were relieved, to say the least.
When fellow ESPN anchor Ley heard the news, he was thrilled. "Our long national nightmare is over, huh?" he said. "We felt not so much relief when Keith left as unrestrained f–king joy."
One producer commented after he heard false rumors that Olbermann would return to "SportsCenter": "He first has to stand in the reception area, and everyone who wants to gets to come up and punch him in the stomach."
Still scandalous
ESPN was now reaching 75 million US households, and twice that internationally. Yet they still couldn't contain the antics of their talent.
In 2006, NFL commentator Sean Salisbury sent pictures of his "junk" from his phone while at a gambling table. Later, his contract was not renewed.
"ESPN basically has to have one of their talent talk about Hitler or put a picture of their d–k on a phone — which is what the Salisbury guy did — before [they won't] do anything about any of these various crazies, because they don't have to. Nobody can touch them," Dick Ebersol, retiring NBC Sports executive, told the authors.
Then there was the Erin Andrews incident, in which an overzealous fan stalked Andrews and videotaped her naked as she brushed her hair in a hotel room. Andrews was mortified.
"I've got people saying I did this to myself. I mean, it's like, what is happening? It was a nightmare. Every day and every night, every entertainment show covering it. I don't think people realized how damaging and humiliating it was for me."
Matters got worse when fellow ESPN analyst Christine Brennan spoke out against Andrews, saying, she should "rely on her talent and brains" instead of "playing to the frat house."
The Phillips fiasco
Because of the early years of "Animal House" antics, ESPN developed a rulebook, which now clearly forbids office romances — even though there have been more than a dozen marriages between ESPN employees, the book says.
In 2009, ESPN baseball analyst Steve Phillips did just that, allegedly engaging in a fling with 22-year-old production assistant Brooke Hundley, who, after being dumped, began to harass his wife. When the brass found out about the "foul affair," they immediately took him off the air. After a suspension, he was fired in October 2009.
John Lack, a vice president at ESPN, found this hard to swallow, telling the authors: "ESPN suspending Steve Phillips as a commentator because he's a married man having an affair with an employee is like going to Harlem and saying we're going to arrest all black men who cross the street."
This was followed up by Tony Kornheiser's gaffe, when the outspoken on-air commentator said of a female colleague: "Hannah Storm is in a horrifying outfit today."
"She's got on red go-go boots and a Catholic-school plaid skirt way too short for somebody in her 40s — or maybe early 50s by now . . . She's got on her typically very, very tight shirt. She looks like she has sausage-casing wrapping around her upper body," he said.
Kornheiser got a two-week, unpaid suspension.
Storm responded in the book: "To have a discussion away from how good I am at what I do, to what I'm actually wearing and how old I am, was painful."
The behavior problems for the sports network have continued even since the book's completion.
ESPN's NHL analyst and former pro-hockey player Matthew Barnaby was arrested last week for domestic disturbances that allegedly involved berating his wife and shouting racial slurs.
scahalan@nypost.com
Source: https://nypost.com/2011/05/22/new-book-reveals-hookers-coke-and-xmas-orgies-at-espn/
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