A new book called “Those Guys Have All The Fun: Inside the World of ESPN” Â tells all about 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. Read the full story after the jump!!
(NYPost)–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.”
AP
ERRLY DAYS: Ex-host Keith Olbermann (left), with Dan Patrick, was hated in the office and reporter Karie Ross was the butt of lewd pranks.
FREDERICK BREEDON/WIREIMAGE.COM
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.
LORENZO BEVILAQUA; MARCUS SANTOS
Steve Phillips (pictured) in 2009 after his extramarital affair with 22-year-old production assistant Brooke Hundley.
