The Essential Dick Ebersol’s Excellent ‘From Saturday Night to Sunday Night’

On November 30, 1974 I attended my first college football game. It was Notre Dame vs. USC at the Los Angeles Coliseum. Notre Dame was up 24-6 early, only for USC to storm back and crush the Fighting Irish. While the mind at times remembers what it wants to remember, history is unequivocal that the final score was 55-24. What’s not clear is if my memory is correct about the Coliseum being one of the loudest stadiums ever on that day. Four years old, I begged my dad to take my sister and me home so loud was it, only for my generally compassionate father to turn us around as we exited the tunnel. There was no way he was missing the drubbing! Since then, I’ve seen countless matchups between the two schools in both Los Angeles and South Bend.

All this came to mind after Thanksgiving in 2004, and in particular the day after Notre Dame vs. USC on November 27, 2004. A private plane carrying television legend Dick Ebersol and other family members had departed Los Angeles the day after the game, only for it to crash. One of Ebersol’s sons, Charlie, was a Notre Dame student, while another, Willie, was a freshman at USC. When I read about the accident at the time, I knew they’d been at the game. Tragically, younger brother Teddy Ebersol died in the crash.

What happened so horrifyingly in 2004 is not solely why I purchased Dick Ebersol’s excellent new memoir, From Saturday Night to Sunday Night: My Forty Years of Laughter, Tears and Touchdowns In TV, but what happened then was on my mind for years after. I didn’t and don’t know Ebersol, but it was hard not to think about it. Beyond that, Ebersol was once again a legend. As readers will soon see, he was impossible not to know about and think highly of for sports fans, but also fans of televised entertainment in general. Ebersol shaped or produced a lot of the television that I watched quite a bit in my younger days. I had to know more about him. I’m glad I do. He’s very compelling.

At the same time, the book starts out brutally for those familiar with Ebersol’s story, simply because it begins out in Los Angeles. You read about the two-bedroom suite at the Century Plaza, about a series of planned stops in their Challenger CL-600, one in Telluride to drop off Ebersol’s wife Susan, one in South Bend to drop off Charlie, and one at the Gunnery in Hartford to drop off 14-year old Teddy, but you know it won’t happen as planned. Which is awful on its face, and it’s even more arresting if you’re a parent. Ebersol addresses what happened in more detailed fashion toward book’s end, and it’s gut-wrenching. I’ll leave it there.

So while there’s tragedy in Dick Ebersol’s life, it remains a remarkable one. A television producer extraordinaire (more on that in a bit), Ebersol is arguably most famous for running NBC Sports, and leading it to unprecedented heights. At various times while at NBC, Ebersol’s division produced winter and summer Olympic games, Wimbledon, the French Open, golf’s U.S. Open, Major League Baseball, NBA basketball, the NFL, plus various Super Bowls including one I attended in 1993 at Pasadena’s Rose Bowl. There’s a story there perhaps related to Ebersol, and it’s in this review.

No less than former President Bill Clinton once told Ebersol “You have the best job in the world.” See above if you doubt Clinton, or his sincerity. About the mention of Clinton, one of the book’s many merits is that it doesn’t get too political, or more important, it doesn’t get partisan. There are pictures of Ebersol with Clinton in the book, but there’s also one of him with George W. Bush. After Ronald Reagan’s presidency Ebersol secured a meeting with him, only to convince him to call a few innings of the MLB All Star Game with Vin Scully. Reagan couldn’t say no to Scully, and about his interactions with the 40^th president, Ebersol writes that Reagan “couldn’t have been more charming.”

What about Jack Welch? This most brilliant of CEOs who embodied the endless possibilities of capitalism was most recently attacked in despicable fashion by always “obvious” New York Times reporter David Gelles, which is why Ebersol’s recollections of Welch are a major breath of fresh air. Ebersol greatly admired Welch, and thought the world of how he hired division heads he trusted, only to let them do their jobs. The sports fan in Welch once commented to Ebersol that he wasn’t a fan of golf announcer Johnny Miller, to which Ebersol responded that he wasn’t too keen on the head of GE’s locomotives division. Welch got the point, and as golf fans know, Miller wound up one of the greats of golf on television.

When NBC Sports had the opportunity to bid $1.25 billion for the Sydney Olympics in 2000 and Salt Lake City’s winter games in 2002, Welch asked Ebersol what he thought was the most NBC could lose. Ebersol answered “fifty million apiece for each one.” Welch responded with “Fifty million? Fifty million? That’s a pimple on the ass of GE! Go get this done!” Ebersol did get it done, and eventually acquired the winter and summer Olympics right up to 2008 for $2.3 billion. This was BIG news at the time. And it further explains why I was so interested in Ebersol’s story. You see, USA Today was truly “America’s Newspaper” when Ebersol was at the top of NBC Sports, and the newspaper’s sports media columnist (Rudy Martzke) would regularly report on the doings of Ebersol.

More on Welch, as much as Ebersol rightly admired him, credit should be given that it wasn’t hagiography. Welch famously promoted Six Sigma throughout GE. Ebersol describes it as “arcane,” and that “it never made sense to me.” Welch once spied Ebersol sitting outside an executives’ retreat doing work he actually found useful. What was he missing? A seminar on Six Sigma. My sense is that Ebersol is right about the management philosophy. I’ll wager that Welch’s true genius wasn’t Six Sigma as much as he possessed an incredibly rare ability to put the right people into the right positions to succeed. Figure that Jeffrey Immelt followed Welch into the CEO’s chair (Ebersol cites GE’s retirement age of 65 – talk about arcane!), surely learned Six Sigma from the master, but he presided over wholly different results. Bringing it back to sports, Bill Belichick and Nick Saban have former assistants running teams throughout the NFL and college football. So far only Georgia coach Kirby Smart (Saban) can point to any major success. Genius can’t be taught, or transferred. In Ebersol’s case, no reasonable person would claim he learned management and finance at Yale, yet obviously he knows both very well.

From the title of Ebersol’s book, readers can probably guess that he had something to do with what became Saturday Night Live. And he surely did. But we’re in a sense getting ahead of ourselves. Ebersol got his start in television as a Yale undergrad in a job at ABC under the similarly legendary Roone Arledge. Arledge proclaimed that “we are going to add show business to sports.” Ebersol worked in a researcher’s role given ABC Wide World of Sports/Olympics host Jim McKay’s view that people who didn’t know Olympic sports would be interested in them if they knew the stories of the athletes.

More on show business and sports, “complaints flooded the switchboard” when Howard Cosell was in the announcer’s booth for ABC’s Monday Night Football. Ebersol reports that even Henry Ford II, Chairman of MNF’s biggest advertiser, wanted Cosell off the show. Arledge stood firm. He “understood that while millions of people hated Howard, they also loved to hate him – and wouldn’t turn off blowout games late, just to hear him continue to spar with [Don] Meredith, perfectly cast as America’s surrogate.” Ebersol learned so much from Arledge, including Arledge’s relentless desire to expose “himself to as many good ideas and as much intelligence as he could to stretch his mind.” Yes! There’s no such thing as bad reading, and surely Arledge “was always the most well-read, well-informed person in any room.”

About what you’ve read so far, one guesses some are interested and some are mystified by names they’ve never heard of. This pause is worthwhile simply because the names mentioned were certainly of the “household” variety for those who came up in the 1970s and beyond. To learn more about Arledge, Cosell, McKay, and other famous personages of that era on its own makes Ebersol’s book a joy. Yet there’s more.

Indeed, it’s so easy to forget that right through much of the 1980s, cable television was a distant object for many of us. In my case, I grew up in Pasadena, CA where cable hadn’t yet arrived; it’s non-arrival surely the result of regulatory error. Enter Ebersol. For the 80 percent of the country that didn’t have MTV, Ebersol created Friday Night Videos. To explain to younger readers how different the world was back then, the show in a more monoculture era had event qualities to it. It’s hard for readers to imagine today, but music couldn’t just be purchased with a click. Friday Night Videos quite literally “premiered” music videos. I watched it regularly. At 12:30 am each Friday. It was part of life. Ebersol reports that it ran right up to the early 2000s on NBC. I’d long since moved on, but this was a revelation. It was once so much a part of my life. I would even tape music videos from the show on my parents’ Betamax. Wait, Betamax? Look it up.

Saturday Night Live? Ebersol created it with Lorne Michaels in 1975, after being recruited from ABC to NBC. He was 27, which is really something. Eventually a bad relationship with NBC head Fred Silverman led to him being pushed out, and this is relevant to me simply because when Ebersol came back in the early ‘80s to fill in for a departing Michaels, he produced the seasons of SNL that truly captured my attention. Eddie Murphy was there by then, but most important was Ebersol’s “Steinbrenner year” when then NBC-head Brandon Tartikoff (Ebersol’s all-time great friend in television who sadly died way too early) gave him the go-ahead to bid for top quality talent in order to make up for the departure of Murphy and Joe Piscopo. The “Steinbrenner year” was a classic. You had Billy Crystal playing Fernando Lamas, Martin Short playing Jackie Rogers, Short and Harry Shearer as synchronized swimmers (“Hey you, I know you”), there was Crystal imitating Sammy Davis Jr., Howard Cosell, etc. etc. It was arguably the show’s best year ever, and so many skits taped on the Betamax were watched over and over.

Late night? While it’s still a big deal, it used to be a phenomenon. Or felt that way. I was a David Letterman person. Ebersol probably could have guessed that. He writes that “while Dave would be the favorite of critics on either coast,” Jay Leno was the choice of viewers in “’between Trenton and Reno’” whom Johnny Carson had once told Ebersol were essential to win the eyeballs of for a show to succeed. All of this matters simply because Carson’s retirement set the stage for a battle between Letterman and Leno to fill Carson’s Tonight Show seat. A very interesting book (turned into an HBO movie eventually) by Bill Carter was written about what happened, and it indicated that Leno had eavesdropped on NBC executives out in Burbank in order to find out where he stood. Ebersol, a Letterman partisan too, “has never seen his [Leno’s] story as plausible” about the eavesdropping, but concludes that Leno was the right choice. Leno was tireless when it came to visiting NBC’s top 50 markets across the country, plus his humor was best suited to the audience in between Trenton and Reno.

All of which brings us to Super Bowl XXVIII in 1993 between the Dallas Cowboys and the Buffalo Bills. Living in Houston at the time, I flew out to Los Angeles the Friday before the game, which as mentioned took place at Pasadena’s Rose Bowl. NBC televised the game, and on that Friday I was getting my hair cut at my parents’ golf club. The barber shop was in the men’s locker room, only for me to see NBC football personalities Bob Costas, Mike Ditka and O.J. Simpson getting ready to play. I’ll now forever wonder if Ebersol was with them for golf that day. But that’s a digression. The barber asked me who I thought would win, and I replied “I think Dallas will win, but feel like Marv Levy doesn’t get enough credit for what he’s accomplished.” O.J. Simpson overheard me, only to peek in and tell me “I really agree with you! Marv Levy doesn’t get enough credit. He’s dealing with a lot of egos.” Keep in mind this was 1993. The unspeakable hadn’t happened yet. I’d seen Simpson at Julie’s Trojan Barrel once after a USC game, but to have him notice me. To have him talk to me. This was something.

As Ebersol remembers, Simpson was “far and away the most charismatic person I’ve ever crossed paths with in TV sports.” Without excusing for even a second the horrific acts that I believe Simpson committed, there’s a generational quality to his tragic story in that so many are unaware of just how popular he once was. Ebersol is clear that Simpson’s popularity extended well beyond men and boys who loved sports. Which is why it’s so wrenching to read about Ebersol visiting Simpson in jail to let him know his NBC contract would be terminated, only to look at him “through a glass partition, his hands and forearms cuffed to the table.” The visit was “yet another dose of the surreal.” It all arguably helps explain why it took so many (including me) so long to believe that Simpson could have done what he did.

From a management perspective, it’s interesting and uplifting to read that Ebersol oversaw a meritocracy. It’s uplifting simply because in modern times the certain genius of inequality has been demonized. Ebersol doesn’t go that route. In addition to thankfully and properly writing reverentially about Jack Welch, Ebersol recounts how when he was running NBC Sports, “the best producers were paid the most; I never believed in everyone getting paid the same.” Amen.

Even better, Ebersol instituted a “No Assholes” policy. This forced the clearing out of a lot of mercurial producer types who would needlessly let young up-and-comers have it. He would also “roam the halls of the sports department” to learn about what was going on his division, what was on the minds of employees, what their challenges were, etc. This rates prominent mention given the popular belief that in the aftermath of the hideous lockdowns, work will increasingly be remote. Not for the successful companies. Culture is so crucial as Ebersol plainly alludes, and it’s a reminder that the days of working remotely will be short lived; at least for the workers who want to move up in the world.

Very interesting was Ebersol’s description of the television business, and how “it was on the verge of massive change” by the mid-1990s. It’s a reminder of George Will’s quip along the lines of “yesterday is another country.” In Ebersol’s case, the cable TV boxes formerly in 20% of American households gradually filled the vast majority. This proved incredibly remunerative for the ESPNs of the world, only for the NFL and the NBA to cease being good businesses for NBC. While a $50 million loss was per Welch a pimple on GE’s ass, Welch wasn’t willing to purposely lose money. Money would be lost on risks that could, if successful, well exceed potential losses. Think about it. It’s one thing to take a risk and lose money, while it’s quite another to enter into a situation knowing money will be lost.

Were there quibbles? Not many, but there are always little things even with books you really enjoy. With this one it felt like Ebersol pulled lots of punches. Maybe for the best, but with the possible exception of Comcast’s Steve Burke and NBC’s Fred Silverman, everyone came off pretty well in an industry known to be sharp elbowed.

On the matter of football, Ebersol eventually got NBC back into the NFL with Sunday Night Football. It’s been a huge success, eventually reaching #1. Ebersol went to great lengths to get the best of the best to NBC, including the late John Madden. He referred to him as “the smartest, most influential guy in every room he ever walked into.” Madden’s intelligence should first be obvious simply because football is incredibly cerebral. I argue in The End of Work that football should most definitely be a college major. Also, the late Ken Stabler indicated in his own memoir that Madden was the kind of person who would sit down with players in the locker room only to talk all sorts of worldly issues with them. Which means my quibble isn’t with Madden’s obvious intelligence, or with his goodness as a person. Ebersol plainly thought the world of him, as did his wife, Susan.

My pushback is with Madden as a commentator. I found him hard to listen to. Here this wildly intelligent man spent endless time on air talking about steam coming off of players’ heads, and other bombastic stuff. Obviously I’m in the minority, but his commentary (“you know” after “you know” after “you know”) was neither entertaining nor very informative. Notable about my minority opinion is that Cris Collinsworth followed Madden into the commentator’s chair. To me, he was always the best. And remains the best. The opposite of bombastic, Collinsworth relentlessly conveys knowledge. Call this not a quibble, but disagreement about a person Ebersol clearly thought very highly of.

And then China. Ebersol was one of the first to meet Xi Jinping, yet there was little about their interactions. Ebersol can clearly read the proverbial room, so what was his deep sense of him? The Chinese people surely have an affinity for the American people, but what about the higher ups? In Ebersol’s defense, he wasn’t writing a foreign policy book, but the more knowledge the better. Was this a pulled punch? How fascinating to learn what his early impressions were since he met him when he wasn’t yet in control.

Those are the quibbles. Not much, but there were some.

More on China, Ebersol reports that when he first visited in 1990 people were on bikes, while in the 2000s there were Rolls Royce and Maserati dealerships. The transformation is very important. It’s a reminder that China is no longer communist in the collectivist sense. People need to read this simply because there’s a perception about China that doesn’t stand up to its modern reality. Ebersol clearly understands this failed perception intimately, which means it would be interesting to read many more chapters just about his China experiences.

Of note, in the early 2000s when China was still in the bidding process for the 2008 Summer Olympics, Ebersol recalls getting word that some in the Chinese delegation feared that NBC preferred Toronto to Beijing given the greater U.S. ratings that can be had the when the major events are live in prime time. Ebersol is very up front about the latter throughout the book, but points out that GE (NBC’s then parent) would have likely preferred China with an eye on greater access to a rapidly growing market. This read as very important too. Without ignoring for a second the obvious human rights abuses in China (Ebersol acknowledges them), there’s yet again a problem of perception stateside about China. It’s no longer communist. Thank goodness it isn’t. Which means there’s opportunity. While Ebersol as mentioned previously is happily not political in From Saturday Night To Sunday Night, your reviewer is. The view here is that the U.S. should remain engaged with China for political and economic reasons. As anyone who has visited there will see, the people are conducting a passionate love affair with all things American. Let’s not create wedges between the people in each country. The people are forever, Xi Jinping thankfully is not.

As always, my reviews go way too long. But that’s by design. People who write books rate deeper looks into them than 1,000 words. Ebersol’s unputdownable memoir certainly rates a deep read. Readers will find his memoirs a blast, but also very informative about business in general.