Dick Ebersol - From Saturday Night to Sunday Night: My Forty Years of Laughter, Tears, and Touchdowns in TV

Dick Ebersol

From Saturday Night to Sunday Night

My Forty Years of Laughter, Tears, and Touchdowns in TV

To Susie

The finish line is only the beginning of a whole new race.

Teddy Ebersol, June 2004

The alarm went off around 6:00 a.m. in our hotel room at the Century Plaza Hotel in Los Angeles. My wife, Susan, and I were in a bedroom on one end of our suite, while our two younger sons, eighteen-year-old Willie and fourteen-year-old Teddy, were sharing the bedroom at the other end. It was the Sunday after Thanksgiving in 2004, and after a terrific week celebrating the holiday in L.A. with all five of our children and a collection of friends, we were heading back east.

As Susan got out of bed to pack the last few things in our suitcases, I went into the bathroom to get ready. Our trip would have a few stops. First, our private plane would land in Colorado and drop off Susan and her friend Rebeccathe wife of Susans ex-husband, Tom (yes, you read that right; to this day, our family happily thrives off our unconventionality). Theyd spend a few days prepping the house we owned in the mountains of Telluride for Christmas. Next, the plane would head to South Bend, Indiana, to drop off our older son Charlie, who was in the middle of his senior year at Notre Dame. Then, by early evening, the plane would land in Hartford, Connecticut, and Id drop Teddy off at the Gunnery, a boarding school where he was a freshman, before I finally drove to our home in Litchfield, a small town in the bucolic northwest corner of the state where Id grown up as a public school kid, never dreaming Id be able to live this kind of life. Then, first thing the next morning, Id take a car into New York City and go to my office at 30 Rockefeller Plaza, to continue working on one of the most exciting deals of my career.

As the head of the sports and Olympics division for NBC since 1989, Id made big deals, taken huge risks, solved difficult problems, and built lasting relationships. Id joined forces with NBA commissioner David Stern to create arguably the most successful partnership between a network and a sports league in history with the NBA on NBC; turned NBC into Americas Olympic network through a series of deals with the International Olympic Committee that ensured the Games would be on our air through 2012; and through Super Bowls, World Series, major golf tournaments, Grand Slam tennis events, and more, lived out a career that I only could have dreamed about as a kid, watching ABCs Wide World of Sports on TV at home.

ABC Sports had in fact been where Id started my career, as the networks first-ever Olympic researcher, working for the legendary Roone Arledge and traveling the world as a twenty-year-old kid whod dropped out of Yale at the height of the Vietnam War to take the job. Not long after, Id get promoted to be Roones assistant, getting a front-row seat to everything he did, from sitting in on executive meetings in his place to delivering files to him at the 21 Club when he met at the restaurant with NFL commissioner Pete Rozelle to iron out the deal to create Monday Night Football. Then Id left sports for a while, taking an offer from NBC to join its entertainment division to start a weekend late night comedy show, and finding an unknown producer named Lorne Michaels and co-creating Saturday Night Live. From there, Id work in worlds as disparate as talk, music, and professional wrestling, but came back to my first love when I took the NBC Sports job in 89.

The full-circle nature of my path had also been on my mind throughout Thanksgiving weekespecially given my tiny role in the creation of Monday Night Football. On my way to Los Angeles, Id made a brief but important stop in Denver. There, my number two, Ken Schanzer, and I had met with the owner of the Broncos, Pat Bowlen, the head of the NFLs television committee, to pitch him on a simple but seismic proposal: to reinvent pro football on prime-time television by moving the leagues top prime-time game every week from Monday to Sundayto essentially replace Monday Night Football on ABC with Sunday Night Football on NBC. Wed been out of football since Id made the decision to walk away from our coverage in 1998but I was excited to try to bring us back, which could be a huge boon to the networks struggling ratings overall. For his part, Pat was definitely intrigued; wed been talking on and off about the idea for months, but that meeting just before Thanksgiving was the first time that money had come up as part of the discussion. Any time ten figures were thrown around with a straight face in a media deal, it was a definite sign that things were serious.

Back in our hotel room in Los Angeles, Susan and I very quietly woke up Teddy to tell him to get ready to head to the airport. Willie, a freshman at USC, was staying in California to finish out the semester. After years of fighting relentlessly as brothers do, Willie and Teddy had matured, and were closer than ever. Theyd stayed up late the night before playing video games. Now Teddy dragged himself out of bed and put on his clothes as we tiptoed out of the room so as not to wake up Willie.

A half hour later, we arrived at the small airport in Van Nuys for private planes. Our plane was a Challenger CL-600, with two pairs of seats facing one another up front on either side, and then a couch and another four facing seats in the back. The pilots and flight attendant boarded the plane and briefly said hello. Wed been told the night before that a severe snowstorm in Telluride made it too difficult to fly there, so our first stop would be another small Colorado airport, at the lower altitude of Montrose, a longer drive for Susan and Rebecca to our house, but otherwise not a concern. Charlie, whod been staying with a girlfriend in Los Angeles, went right to the back of the plane and fell asleep on the couch. Up front, seated facing backward, opposite me, Teddy turned on his personal video player and for roughly the twentieth time since hed gotten the DVD just a few days before, he began watching the highlight video of his beloved Boston Red Soxs improbable journey to their first World Series title in eighty-six years.

Id loved everything about sports for as long as I could remember, and my job took me to stadiums, ballparks, arenas, racetracks, and golf courses across the globe. At one point in the nineties, when President Bill Clinton had said to me, very sincerely, You have the best job in the world, it was hard for me to argue with him. But while Charlie and Willie had always shared my passion, Teddy had only grown interested in sports over the last few years. I suppose part of it was normal childhood rebellionwanting to forge a different identity than his dad. That mightve also been why, when he did get into baseball, he chose the Red Sox as his team rather than the Yankees, who Id rooted for since I was his age. But I didnt mind. Teddys newfound love of baseball had bonded us more deeply than ever before, and as he got the DVD cued up, we talked about the uncertainty surrounding the upcoming free agency market for the Sox.

Pedro just cant leave, Teddy was saying about his teams longtime ace, Pedro Martinez. Not after they finally won!

As Teddy and I analyzed how much money it would take to re-sign Pedro, on the other side of the small aisle, Susan opened her book and began reading. Wed just celebrated our twenty-third anniversary, which gave me another reason to be in a reflective mood. Wed met when she was the host of a