Those Guys Have All the Fun

For those sports nuts out there (there has to be at least one somewhere who reads this blog!), this is the book for you, sort of. If you spend any time watching ESPN, and have for awhile, you'll find portions of this book interesting. Along the same lines of the "Live from New York" book detailed below, this book is almost entirely a mish-mash of interview quotes from folks who've been intimately involved with ESPN from the beginning of the network.

There's some really funny moments in the interviews - you can tell the folks really knew each other. At times, the author was good at juxtaposing the different views together - for instance you'd get a quote from someone saying "So and So would almost always do this whenever they were working with me." And then, immediately afterwards, the other guy saying something like "I would never have dreamed of doing that when I was working with him." Shows how people can have different views of their history - even if it's shared together.

Reading the book, sometimes you get bogged down in the negotiations over certain "big events" - i.e., NFL contracts, NASCAR contracts, affiliate cable station contracts, etc. As an attorney, I found those parts interesting. However, the average sports nut probably wouldn't care for those parts of the book. There are some other interesting parts about very specific stories that happened during the development of the channel. Overall, it was a good interesting read - helps put some of what they all do in perspective, and makes me want to watch it more now - just to see if I recognize more names.