Name: Keith Olbermann on Late Late Show with Tom Snyder, May 23, 1997
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Description: Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Keith Olbermann on Late Late Show with Tom Snyder, May 23, 1997' from Don Giller on Comedy Buff. Published 2021-02-20. Transcript available.

Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Keith Olbermann on Late Late Show with Tom Snyder, May 23, 1997' from Don Giller on Comedy Buff. Published 2021-02-20. Transcript available.

Anybody who follows sports knows all about the tag team of Keith Olbermann and
Dan Patrick on their award-winning show called The Big Show ESPN Sports Center.
They have taken their vast sports knowledge now and put this all into a brand
new book, which is called The Big Show, available with pages or with tape on
audio cassette.
Keith Olbermann is with us live from our studios in New York.
Please welcome one of the few sportscasters in America who is not in trouble
this week.
Keith, it's good to have you on our program, and thanks for coming on tonight.
It's good not to be in trouble, Tom, although we have, what, 25 minutes left in
the show?
I can get myself in plenty of trouble in that amount of time, as you know.
Listen, all of us love this program that you call The Big Show, and we wonder
where it got its name.
Who first named it The Big Show?
I was working with Dan Patrick on this show for about three days, and I had
been used to local sportscasts in Los Angeles and Boston and New York.
And there was so much to do in this hour, so much to write, and then we were on
the air, we were doing so many highlights,
and I turned to him on one of the breaks, and I went, hmm, Dan, this is one big
show, and it stuck.
And that's really the origin of it.
We left out the obscenities and kept the title, and now we have a book out of
it, God Help Us All.
Now, let me ask you here about Frank and Marv, and the fallout within the
sports broadcasting community,
you know, with Frank Gifford in this incident in the hotel and Marv Alpert and
the allegations against him.
Well, touching on Frank first, Tom, I, you know, the scarlet letter, I believe,
was removed from statute in this country about 1720.
So I don't know how that happens to be anybody's business, honestly.
True, very true.
And in the case of Marv, I can't be objective about it.
The only person I know as Marv Alpert was the definition of sports in New York
when I was growing up here,
and who was a hero to me growing up, and a man I used to watch on a broadcast
called News Center 4, I think,
with some guy named Snyder as the anchor.
That would be the one, yeah.
I used to sit there and watch that, and you know what I remember out of that
was the humanity that the two of you showed to each other,
and that was an inspiration to me about being yourself on television.
And when I got to meet Marv, when I was a 20-year-old sportscaster in this town,
he treated me like an equal, and I was not his equal.
I would shake in his presence, and he was always kind, considerate, supportive,
and, you know, nobody knows what the truth is of the story.
Obviously, if you have a witness or a victim who has threatened to kill two
people and a dog, perhaps the story is less credible than it would have been
otherwise.
But, you know, the Marv Alpert I know, regardless of what he did or did not do,
I will always have great respect for, admiration, thanks, and love for,
because he has been an inspiration and a help to so many broadcasters that it's
a tragedy one way or the other.
It's especially a tragedy if there's nothing to it, and his name has been
dragged through the mud.
I think back on those days at NewsCenter 4 with great fondness, because I met
Marv and Frank Field and some other good friends in New York at the time,
and I noticed Marv at his press conference, and I watched, you know, the
basketball, the NBA on NBC,
and I'm thinking back to that time, you know, Marv and I both had big hair, but
now only Marv still has big hair.
Well, yeah, I think, honest to goodness, if they wanted to really convict him
on something, they could get him on the hair.
I think that would be, that's been true for a long time, and Marv will, if
pressed, will probably confess to any charges on that.
You've had your own little moment in the glare of publicity here involving this
thing with the Comedy Central,
and I don't understand what all the ruckus was about, because as I read about
it, you went on there to promote an ESPN program.
Yeah, I join you in that not really knowing exactly what happened.
As I said, it was an extraordinary feeling to be the snowball going down the
hill while everybody watched.
The joke that my old friend Craig Kilborn, who worked with us at ESPN and then
went on to Comedy Central, asked me to be on his show,
and we had a deal with ESPN where we could promote the book in any way we
needed to,
but there was also a rule that said you had to have written permission to be on
another network.
Well, there's two conflicting rules.
I went on to do a pre-tape with him.
His guest canceled that day.
He put me on that day.
We were on, and ESPN didn't know about it in advance.
So it's like being too many men on the ice in hockey.
It was a procedural problem.
And the next thing I knew, America exploded.
All of a sudden, it's Olbermann suspended by ESPN for book or for appearance or
for joke or whatever.
And it wasn't like that.
It didn't get that.
It wasn't nasty.
It was resolved very easily.
And all I know is Craig said, come back on the show and hold up a cue card or
something.
Just stand in the corner, and we'll do this again.
And I said, Craig, you and I went up in the plane, and we got over the cloud,
and we dropped the pellet into the publicity cloud.
We got 38 feet of snow for ourselves.
Everybody knows what your show is now, and everybody knows about this blasted
book.
Let's leave it alone.
Leave it alone for God's sake.
We don't have to do it anymore.
Tom, somebody in the New York Daily News accused, sort of jokingly, accused us
of planning this.
And I said, there is no intelligent life form that we know of that could have
come up with this.
Only mistakes and stupidity could produce this kind of windfall of publicity.
So, I don't know.
It sold a lot of books.
We're the fifth best-selling sports book in America, which just proves that
sometimes controversy can be fine.
Well, thank God for that, man.
I'll light a candle to that.
We'll be right back here with Keith Olbermann and you on the toll-free.
He is the co-anchor of ESPN SportsCenter, better known as The Big Show.
Which, the bug show.
My idol, Tom Snyder, everybody.
I try so hard out here.
Better known as The Big Show, which is now available on tape and on paper.
We'll be right back after.
Don't be shameless.
Well, there's a little Howard Stern in all of us.
We'll be right back after these messages.
We are back with Keith Olbermann from ESPN.
Here is Cole on the toll-free in Richmond, Virginia.
Hi, Cole, and welcome to CBS.
Hey, thank you very much.
Appreciate it, Tom.
My pleasure, Cole.
Keith, you are an idol.
You are a pleasure to watch every night I can on SportsCenter.
I wanted to ask you a quick question on the situation at Comedy Central.
I'm not going to delve into this too much, but I believe question number four
was,
what is the most godforsaken place on the planet?
And your answer was...
Question number one.
Yeah, my answer was Bristol, Connecticut.
And I was curious how serious you were and what you really meant by that.
No, I understand.
Now, this is one thing that I had to point out to several, not the people I
worked for
who understood this completely and got a good laugh, and even the people of
Bristol are
used to being abused that way in a comic sense.
But I've had to point out to some television critics that this was a comedy
show that I
was appearing on.
When Craig left ESPN, one of the reasons was he was not too fond of the area.
He was a big city guy and he wanted to go to New York.
And when his last, his departure from ESPN, Comedy Central put out a press
release that
said, the last line was, Mr. Kilbourne hopes to maintain a summer home in the
Bristol area,
which is a real inside joke.
And what I was, you know, you're on this show and you play to the host, just
like I'm doing
now.
And so I said, Bristol, Connecticut.
Of course, that would have to be the answer if you're on a show with Craig Kilbourne.
So it was really, it's not a bad place.
It's not Paris.
We sort of summarized the place thusly.
There is a, in the area around Bristol, there's the Metroplex there, Plainville
and Southington
and Bristol.
There is a strip joint, but it closes at 10 p.m.
I hope that answers your question.
I appreciate it.
Sir, I just want to let you know, your cynicism and wit just make sports a
little bit more
bearable in these trying times.
Thank you, kindly.
All right.
Thanks for calling, Cole, and thanks for watching.
Appreciate it, Tom.
All right.
Bye-bye.
And what is life like for Keith in Bristol, Connecticut?
I mean, you're a single guy in your mid-30s.
There probably isn't an awful lot for you to do there socially.
I clean my swimming pool a lot, Tom.
I spend a lot of time traveling to other locations.
It's a tough place to be single, and it's a place that if you want to stay
single and ensure
that you're going to remain single, it's probably a good place to be.
There isn't that much to do.
But, I mean, we're two hours away from New York and two hours away from Boston.
So, if you've got a couple of days off, you can go and live the party life and
then go
back and, you know, look at the cows.
And, of course, what you've just said, I'm sure, has endeared you to all the
available
single women who happen to live in the fair city of Bristol, Connecticut.
By the way, why did ESPN pick Bristol to be in?
The story, as it has gone down through the generations of ESPN-ites is that, or
ESP-ons,
if you prefer, is that the, it was originally intended to be a small local
cable outfit to
relay University of Connecticut basketball games around the state of
Connecticut.
And the fellow who was running it, who founded it, Rasmussen, found out that he
could bid
for the small company transponder on one of the new satellites that was going
up in 78
or 79.
And you had to be a company worth less than a million dollars to get it.
That's the way I understood it.
And he put the bid in and won.
And all of a sudden, he had no money, but he had this land in his hometown,
Bristol, Connecticut,
and he was a national cable network, even though he had no money to move
anywhere else.
So it stayed there, and it has stayed there ever since.
And because it was so long where it was not in great financial health, by the
time it became
that way in the late 80s, everybody who worked there had a house.
And it would be too tough to just uproot everybody.
So that's why it's there.
Wasn't Getty Oil a major player in the founding of ESPN?
I don't think they were in on the founding, but they did come in shortly
thereafter, and
they managed to get out just before it became financially viable.
One of the great business moves of all time.
Is it also not true that ESPN stands for the Entertainment and Sports Programming
Network?
It did officially.
At the beginning.
Yeah, I'm the corporate spokesman now.
And, of course, like CBS, it used to be officially the Columbia Broadcasting
System, but it's
now a corporate identity CBS.
It is ESPN.
And now the joke is that that's sports in Spanish or something like that.
We use that in a commercial.
But it just stands for ESPN.
That's what it is.
And you need to know anything more about it.
Well, you know, we'll just start another network, so watch out.
Why does Bill Murray call ESPN all the time?
He is a good friend of my partner, Dan Patrick's.
Okay.
And he just, Dan met him doing one of our Sunday Conversation features, and
Bill just decided
that Dan was his conduit in the world of sports.
And every time he had a question about it or a comment about it or didn't like
something
he saw on ESPN, which he watches an awful lot, he would call Dan.
And this just sort of got out of hand, and Dan regularly gets phone calls from
him, summoning
him to Pebble Beach to play in the Pro-Am at the golf tournament there, things
like that.
So that's Bill's connection to it.
And then they wound up holding hands during the ESPN Awards.
And that's really a story I don't want to get into in light of the Frank Gifford
and
Marv Alberts.
And then at the ESPN Awards, isn't that where you first met David Letterman?
Yeah, I met David actually, surprisingly enough, at Rockefeller Center.
I missed him because he used to come into ESPN to watch the auto races, the
Formula One
stuff from Europe.
He used to, we used to tape delay those, and he liked to see them live at like
8 o'clock
on a Sunday morning.
And they'd have to sign, he'd have to sign in and put a name down, and they'd
give him
a room, and he'd go smoke a cigar and watch the auto race.
Well, he signed in Joey Budifuco and guests.
That was the great story from like 1992.
When I met him at Rockefeller Center, I was there doing the Today Show, and he
was just
smoking his cigar in the corner of that hermetically sealed building, and it
was 9 o'clock
in the morning.
He was there to do a bit with Gumbel for the late show.
And I'm obviously like everybody else in broadcasting of a certain age in
absolute awe of David and
his stamina.
And I went up to him and he's smoking the cigar furiously, and I just said, we
had obviously
no smoking place at ESPN.
I said, could you come back up, David, to our studios and smoke a cigar so I
can smoke
a cigar in our studios?
And he just looked at me and he said, what the hell are you doing here?
And he shook hands, and he was very nice about it.
And I said, well, I was just here with Bryant Gumbel doing the Today Show, the
year in review,
and he went, you're making that up to try to impress me.
And I don't know why that would have impressed him, but that was, then Letterman
has been
involved in some of the ESPYs and is a big sports fan.
Well, the reason that drew Dave's reaction as you describe it is that Dave
stands in awe
of Bryant Gumbel.
Yeah.
Yeah.
No, that's absolutely true.
It is.
It's absolutely true.
Yeah, it is.
I've seen it happen.
I've seen it.
It's an ugly sight.
We will continue here with Keith Olbermann, who is the host of The Big Show,
better known
as ESPN SportsCenter.
The Big Show is now available on cassette or on paper.
We'll be right back after these messages.
The reason that I'm cracking myself up here is I'm wondering if I am the only
one who thinks
it's now 5.30 in the morning.
Forgive me, Keith.
I'm sorry.
It just, it seems like we've done five hours here tonight.
I've noticed in watching you over the years that your mustache has come and
gone.
Those of us who remember you from Channel 2 here in Los Angeles and Channel 5,
you had
a very fine mustache.
Well, as you know, with age and hair comes grayness.
And if you have holes or you have gray in your mustache, they appear as holes
on bad cameras.
So I had to shave the whole thing off.
That's the latest incarnation of it.
But I actually, when I went out to Los Angeles for the first time to audition
for KTLA, a
familiar set of call writers to you, I know.
Yes, sir.
They asked me to come out and do an audition with a different set of glasses.
I had the mustache.
And they said, use it.
Use your wire rims.
Use your horn rims.
We'll truck the camera in real close.
Do it without the glasses.
And then we'd like you to shave off your mustache and do the same auditions
again.
And I said, shave off what?
Shave off my mustache?
This is for an audition, for heaven's sake.
Now, I had a pretty good shot at the job.
I knew that.
And I said, well, I don't really want to.
And they said, we'd also like to see you in a blue blazer.
I said, I don't have one with me.
And they said, we'll buy you one.
And then I put two and two together.
I said, okay, I can grow a mustache back, but I cannot grow a blazer or jacket
of any kind.
So I'll take the free jacket, shave the mustache.
And, of course, after we did six takes, three with me with the mustache, three
without, they
preferred me with the mustache.
So now I'm going down the street on Sunset Boulevard from Channel 5 to Channel
2 in 1988, and I've
shaved off the mustache because I didn't like it, because I can't make up my
mind, because
I'm a guy.
I can't make up my mind about this mustache, and I shave it off.
And my new boss at KCBS says, you know, our research shows that people identify
you with
that mustache and really don't know who you are without it.
Is there any way you could grow it back?
So now I'm wise to this process, and I say to the guy, well, what was that
signing bonus
we talked about in the new contract?
And he said, these two things could be linked.
I got $25,000 to grow the mustache back.
And I said, how many do you want?
I'll put one here and a couple coming out of the ears.
And it'll be great.
And he said, no, one will suffice.
So that's my mustache coming and going.
I think it's gone now.
That's the absolute truth.
If you could categorize sports interviews as the best and the worst by the
sport involved,
how would they rank?
Hockey is the best.
Really?
Hockey players, for some reason, I don't know what this is.
Hockey players, for some reason, seem to maintain the most memory of their
childhoods, which
are usually spent on snowy Alberta ponds.
Right.
For some reason, I guess getting your teeth knocked out and having bridge work
at age 13 makes
you more humble or something.
But hockey players are convivial.
They will blame themselves.
They don't blame you.
And if they're not in the mood to talk, they'll just say, I don't want to do an
interview
and they'll move on.
And you can just go sliding down the list.
Most baseball players, except for the stars, are very congenial.
Football players are okay.
Basketball players and college basketball players, college football players,
are much
too much into the third-person thing, which is, you know, a Keith Olbermann
would never
do what a Keith Olbermann wouldn't do and nor would a Tom Snyder.
And then the worst, of course, are the owners, because they're never telling
you the truth
and you know that and they know you know that and they tell you anyway and they
can get
away with it.
So, you know, that's the worst.
But hockey players are the best, I've found.
They'll buy you a beer, too.
I wish you were here because if you were, I would buy you one and more.
I admire your work greatly and I thank you for coming on.
I am an enormous fan and I hope your new best friend.
Thanks, Keith.
Thank you, Tom, and thank you not only for having me here, but also for the
inspiration
you provided in my career.
Oh, stop.
No, absolutely, seriously, because bottom line, when I was growing up with
these eyebrows,
I knew that there was a future for me in broadcasting if you were there.
But seriously, thank you, Tom.
It's been a pleasure watching you all these years and thanks for having me.
All right, thanks, Keith.
Have a great weekend and thanks again for joining us.
We will continue in just a couple of seconds.
Oh, Keith Olbermann, ESPN SportsCenter, and the book, The Big Show, on tape and
on paper.
Now, these messages.
We will continue in just a few minutes.
We will continue in just a few minutes.
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We will continue in just a few minutes.
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Keith Olbermann on Late Late Show with Tom Snyder, May 23, 1997

Anybody who follows sports knows all about the tag team of Keith Olbermann and
Dan Patrick on their award-winning show called The Big Show ESPN Sports Center.
They have taken their vast sports knowledge now and put this all into a brand
new book, which is called The Big Show, available with pages or with tape on
audio cassette.
Keith Olbermann is with us live from our studios in New York.
Please welcome one of the few sportscasters in America who is not in trouble
this week.
Keith, it's good to have you on our program, and thanks for coming on tonight.
It's good not to be in trouble, Tom, although we have, what, 25 minutes left in
the show?
I can get myself in plenty of trouble in that amount of time, as you know.
Listen, all of us love this program that you call The Big Show, and we wonder
where it got its name.
Who first named it The Big Show?
I was working with Dan Patrick on this show for about three days, and I had
been used to local sportscasts in Los Angeles and Boston and New York.
And there was so much to do in this hour, so much to write, and then we were on
the air, we were doing so many highlights,
and I turned to him on one of the breaks, and I went, hmm, Dan, this is one big
show, and it stuck.
And that's really the origin of it.
We left out the obscenities and kept the title, and now we have a book out of
it, God Help Us All.
Now, let me ask you here about Frank and Marv, and the fallout within the
sports broadcasting community,
you know, with Frank Gifford in this incident in the hotel and Marv Alpert and
the allegations against him.
Well, touching on Frank first, Tom, I, you know, the scarlet letter, I believe,
was removed from statute in this country about 1720.
So I don't know how that happens to be anybody's business, honestly.
True, very true.
And in the case of Marv, I can't be objective about it.
The only person I know as Marv Alpert was the definition of sports in New York
when I was growing up here,
and who was a hero to me growing up, and a man I used to watch on a broadcast
called News Center 4, I think,
with some guy named Snyder as the anchor.
That would be the one, yeah.
I used to sit there and watch that, and you know what I remember out of that
was the humanity that the two of you showed to each other,
and that was an inspiration to me about being yourself on television.
And when I got to meet Marv, when I was a 20-year-old sportscaster in this town,
he treated me like an equal, and I was not his equal.
I would shake in his presence, and he was always kind, considerate, supportive,
and, you know, nobody knows what the truth is of the story.
Obviously, if you have a witness or a victim who has threatened to kill two
people and a dog, perhaps the story is less credible than it would have been
otherwise.
But, you know, the Marv Alpert I know, regardless of what he did or did not do,
I will always have great respect for, admiration, thanks, and love for,
because he has been an inspiration and a help to so many broadcasters that it's
a tragedy one way or the other.
It's especially a tragedy if there's nothing to it, and his name has been
dragged through the mud.
I think back on those days at NewsCenter 4 with great fondness, because I met
Marv and Frank Field and some other good friends in New York at the time,
and I noticed Marv at his press conference, and I watched, you know, the
basketball, the NBA on NBC,
and I'm thinking back to that time, you know, Marv and I both had big hair, but
now only Marv still has big hair.
Well, yeah, I think, honest to goodness, if they wanted to really convict him
on something, they could get him on the hair.
I think that would be, that's been true for a long time, and Marv will, if
pressed, will probably confess to any charges on that.
You've had your own little moment in the glare of publicity here involving this
thing with the Comedy Central,
and I don't understand what all the ruckus was about, because as I read about
it, you went on there to promote an ESPN program.
Yeah, I join you in that not really knowing exactly what happened.
As I said, it was an extraordinary feeling to be the snowball going down the
hill while everybody watched.
The joke that my old friend Craig Kilborn, who worked with us at ESPN and then
went on to Comedy Central, asked me to be on his show,
and we had a deal with ESPN where we could promote the book in any way we
needed to,
but there was also a rule that said you had to have written permission to be on
another network.
Well, there's two conflicting rules.
I went on to do a pre-tape with him.
His guest canceled that day.
He put me on that day.
We were on, and ESPN didn't know about it in advance.
So it's like being too many men on the ice in hockey.
It was a procedural problem.
And the next thing I knew, America exploded.
All of a sudden, it's Olbermann suspended by ESPN for book or for appearance or
for joke or whatever.
And it wasn't like that.
It didn't get that.
It wasn't nasty.
It was resolved very easily.
And all I know is Craig said, come back on the show and hold up a cue card or
something.
Just stand in the corner, and we'll do this again.
And I said, Craig, you and I went up in the plane, and we got over the cloud,
and we dropped the pellet into the publicity cloud.
We got 38 feet of snow for ourselves.
Everybody knows what your show is now, and everybody knows about this blasted
book.
Let's leave it alone.
Leave it alone for God's sake.
We don't have to do it anymore.
Tom, somebody in the New York Daily News accused, sort of jokingly, accused us
of planning this.
And I said, there is no intelligent life form that we know of that could have
come up with this.
Only mistakes and stupidity could produce this kind of windfall of publicity.
So, I don't know.
It sold a lot of books.
We're the fifth best-selling sports book in America, which just proves that
sometimes controversy can be fine.
Well, thank God for that, man.
I'll light a candle to that.
We'll be right back here with Keith Olbermann and you on the toll-free.
He is the co-anchor of ESPN SportsCenter, better known as The Big Show.
Which, the bug show.
My idol, Tom Snyder, everybody.
I try so hard out here.
Better known as The Big Show, which is now available on tape and on paper.
We'll be right back after.
Don't be shameless.
Well, there's a little Howard Stern in all of us.
We'll be right back after these messages.
We are back with Keith Olbermann from ESPN.
Here is Cole on the toll-free in Richmond, Virginia.
Hi, Cole, and welcome to CBS.
Hey, thank you very much.
Appreciate it, Tom.
My pleasure, Cole.
Keith, you are an idol.
You are a pleasure to watch every night I can on SportsCenter.
I wanted to ask you a quick question on the situation at Comedy Central.
I'm not going to delve into this too much, but I believe question number four
was,
what is the most godforsaken place on the planet?
And your answer was...
Question number one.
Yeah, my answer was Bristol, Connecticut.
And I was curious how serious you were and what you really meant by that.
No, I understand.
Now, this is one thing that I had to point out to several, not the people I
worked for
who understood this completely and got a good laugh, and even the people of
Bristol are
used to being abused that way in a comic sense.
But I've had to point out to some television critics that this was a comedy
show that I
was appearing on.
When Craig left ESPN, one of the reasons was he was not too fond of the area.
He was a big city guy and he wanted to go to New York.
And when his last, his departure from ESPN, Comedy Central put out a press
release that
said, the last line was, Mr. Kilbourne hopes to maintain a summer home in the
Bristol area,
which is a real inside joke.
And what I was, you know, you're on this show and you play to the host, just
like I'm doing
now.
And so I said, Bristol, Connecticut.
Of course, that would have to be the answer if you're on a show with Craig Kilbourne.
So it was really, it's not a bad place.
It's not Paris.
We sort of summarized the place thusly.
There is a, in the area around Bristol, there's the Metroplex there, Plainville
and Southington
and Bristol.
There is a strip joint, but it closes at 10 p.m.
I hope that answers your question.
I appreciate it.
Sir, I just want to let you know, your cynicism and wit just make sports a
little bit more
bearable in these trying times.
Thank you, kindly.
All right.
Thanks for calling, Cole, and thanks for watching.
Appreciate it, Tom.
All right.
Bye-bye.
And what is life like for Keith in Bristol, Connecticut?
I mean, you're a single guy in your mid-30s.
There probably isn't an awful lot for you to do there socially.
I clean my swimming pool a lot, Tom.
I spend a lot of time traveling to other locations.
It's a tough place to be single, and it's a place that if you want to stay
single and ensure
that you're going to remain single, it's probably a good place to be.
There isn't that much to do.
But, I mean, we're two hours away from New York and two hours away from Boston.
So, if you've got a couple of days off, you can go and live the party life and
then go
back and, you know, look at the cows.
And, of course, what you've just said, I'm sure, has endeared you to all the
available
single women who happen to live in the fair city of Bristol, Connecticut.
By the way, why did ESPN pick Bristol to be in?
The story, as it has gone down through the generations of ESPN-ites is that, or
ESP-ons,
if you prefer, is that the, it was originally intended to be a small local
cable outfit to
relay University of Connecticut basketball games around the state of
Connecticut.
And the fellow who was running it, who founded it, Rasmussen, found out that he
could bid
for the small company transponder on one of the new satellites that was going
up in 78
or 79.
And you had to be a company worth less than a million dollars to get it.
That's the way I understood it.
And he put the bid in and won.
And all of a sudden, he had no money, but he had this land in his hometown,
Bristol, Connecticut,
and he was a national cable network, even though he had no money to move
anywhere else.
So it stayed there, and it has stayed there ever since.
And because it was so long where it was not in great financial health, by the
time it became
that way in the late 80s, everybody who worked there had a house.
And it would be too tough to just uproot everybody.
So that's why it's there.
Wasn't Getty Oil a major player in the founding of ESPN?
I don't think they were in on the founding, but they did come in shortly
thereafter, and
they managed to get out just before it became financially viable.
One of the great business moves of all time.
Is it also not true that ESPN stands for the Entertainment and Sports Programming
Network?
It did officially.
At the beginning.
Yeah, I'm the corporate spokesman now.
And, of course, like CBS, it used to be officially the Columbia Broadcasting
System, but it's
now a corporate identity CBS.
It is ESPN.
And now the joke is that that's sports in Spanish or something like that.
We use that in a commercial.
But it just stands for ESPN.
That's what it is.
And you need to know anything more about it.
Well, you know, we'll just start another network, so watch out.
Why does Bill Murray call ESPN all the time?
He is a good friend of my partner, Dan Patrick's.
Okay.
And he just, Dan met him doing one of our Sunday Conversation features, and
Bill just decided
that Dan was his conduit in the world of sports.
And every time he had a question about it or a comment about it or didn't like
something
he saw on ESPN, which he watches an awful lot, he would call Dan.
And this just sort of got out of hand, and Dan regularly gets phone calls from
him, summoning
him to Pebble Beach to play in the Pro-Am at the golf tournament there, things
like that.
So that's Bill's connection to it.
And then they wound up holding hands during the ESPN Awards.
And that's really a story I don't want to get into in light of the Frank Gifford
