Rock solid

Sporting News, The, Dec 30, 1996 by Michael Knisley, Paul Attner, Donna Lopiano, Richard Lapchick, Steve Marantz

What next? At this particular point in time, I can't think of a better question for Dick Ebersol, the president of NBC Sports. We're nearly four hours into gabfest in his surprisingly modest office at 30 Rockefeller Plaza, NBC's midtown Manhattan high-rise. We've yakked through lunch, salads all around. He's eating a salad because a February heart attack (I'd rail it mild, except there's no such thing as a mild heart attack) announced a cholesterol count high enough to contend for a batting championship. My salad? Because ... well, the scales at home are starting to announce a poundage count in the same range.

So we're winding down a half-day interview, and it occurs to me that Ebersol has had all the answers so far. Starting with NBC's thoroughly modern marriage with the Olympics (a match he made), and continuing through his rock-solid relationship with the NBA's David Stern, and on into his relationship-on-the-rocks with Major League Baseball, and finally to the soon-to-be-negotiated next television contract with the NFL--through all of it, Ebersol has had the answers, sometimes even before I can get the questions out. And finally, because these really do appear to be his salad days, I want to know: What next?

Where does a mango from here? How are you going to keep him down on the farm of a non-Olympics year, after he has seen ... Atlanta? This, after all, is the man who did more to shape the public's perception of the 1996 Summer Olympics than Juan Antonio Samaranch or Billy Payne or Michael Johnson or Kerri Strug or anyone else who weathered the Georgia heat last summer. Whenever we switched on the tube, we saw what Ebersol wanted us to see, when he wanted us to see it. He manipulated us, and, for better or worse he manipulated the Games, the single biggest sporting event in the world. And in doing it, he took sheer, pure delight in it. Whether we liked it, we watched. But we weren't watching the Olympics; we were watching Ebersol's vision of the Olympics.

A quick case in point. Until International Olympic Committee vice president Dick Pound mentioned this, I hadn't realized it watching the Games as I did from the safe haven of home in Colorado: NBC didn't broadcast a single image of the city of Atlanta during daylight hours. The only cityscapes Ebersol showed us were night scenes, which is in clear contrast to what we had come to expect from other Olympics telecasts--the boulevards of Barcelona,the skyscrapers of Seoul, the snow-capped backdrops to the lovely burgs of Lillehammer and Albertville.

But from Atlanta, nothing until night fell, a decision that belonged solely to Ebersol. Pushed for an explanation, he becomes an Olympics romantic, calling forth the sanctity of the Games. The image people ought to take away from any Olympics, he says, is too pristine to have been sullied by scenes of downtown traffic jams and street-corner junk vendors. So he issued an edict: On NBC, at least,Atlanta will be seen only at night. The standing order was in effect for the entire 17 days between the Games' ceremonial bookends: Opening and Closing.

"He did that on his own," Pound says. "He just thought Atlanta had trashed itself, so he didn't show a single shot of the city. The result was that half of America didn't know what all the fuss was about in the written media, because they never saw it. I will say this: Bill Campbell (Atlanta's mayor) should get down on his knees every night of his remaining elected life and thank Dick Ebersol because he kept the United States from seeing what Bill Campbell did to his city."

That is a power very few of us of us will enjoy in our lifetimes. Nor will Ebersol get to enjoy it again. at least to that degree. in the near future. He has a long wait until Sydney. the site of the 2000 Summer Olympics and NBC's next shot at the Games. (CBS and TNT have the rights to the 1998 Winter Olympics in Nagano. Japan.) Ebersol keeps his hand in the production of most of his network's other sports broadcasts, but he keeps his arm shoulder, neck, head, torso, legs and feet in the creative process of NBC's Olympic telecasts, which are his roots and his first love.

So until Sydney rolls around, Ebersol may not feel that kick-ass tingle again that he-felt as executive producer of last summer's Atlanta Olympics.

"When I was in Sydney last week," Ebersol says, "I was miserable, knowing I was going to have to wait almost four years to actually do the Games again."

If the jazz in his job, then, is the production of the broadcasts (and Ebersol swears to me that's where the personal buzz is loudest in his professional life), he will be into the next century (Sydney) before he can duplicate the Atlanta experience.

If the jazz in his job also is the art of the deals that make NBC the best-positioned sports programming network in North America, then Ebersol might be expected to need a fresh frontier in that province, too. His deals are in place. Have been for more than a year, and apparently will be for years to come. It isn't as if he can rip up his current contracts with the IOC, the NBA, the NFL, Major league Baseball, Notre Dame, Wimbledon and others, mix up the pieces and start over again. He'll get the chance to renew a couple of them in the next year or so, but those deals will be slam dunks.