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At NBC Sports, for the Olympics, there is an expression: plausibly live. It means that what the viewer is seeing on the screen may be live. Then again, it may actually have happened 10 minutes ago, or this morning, whenever. Because the choice NBC makes will be, of course, a plausible one, it won't bother to inform the innocent people watching that time itself is out of joint. To air is human; to air plausibly live is hubris. Or, even more apt, for Dick Ebersol, the man in charge of NBC Sports, the Greeks had another word. They used it for Alexander the Great; it means a passionate desire for things just out of reach, never previously attained. So if, like Alexander, you have conquered your known world (even exceeded what your famous father took), then what is left, plausibly, but to try and rule -- to negotiate -- something like time itself?
Such is the pothos of Duncan Dickie Ebersol, the president of NBC Sports, the most powerful figure ever in sports TV, whose network holds dominion over the televised universe of fun and games as no one ever had before him, the man who has paid some $4 billion for six of the next seven Olympics through 2008.
Ebersol is an especially intriguing figure in this estate, for whereas, by appearance, he is tall and athletic and attractive, a most prepossessing creature, he was, in fact, bumbling and myopic as a child, all thumbs, unable to compete well in the games he adored. Always, though, he was precocious, always charming to his elders. ""Dick works up beautifully,'' a rival ruefully observes.
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And now, he is in command and another deal is on the table, and with the might of NBC behind him Ebersol can be stubborn and unwavering. Like some Aykroydian character from ""Saturday Night Live'' -- which Ebersol conceived as a kid not long out of Yale -- there he is at a break in a negotiating session, tilting his cigar up, eyes aglow, saying out loud, unrepentant: ""God, how I love making decisions!''
Yet it is a dearer gratification he finds. When someone with him outlines the Whole Earth Catalog of NBC Sports properties -- all those Olympics; the NBA; Wimbledon; major parts of major-league baseball and the NFL, World Series and Super Bowls included; the U.S. Open golf; the racing Breeders' Cup; Notre Dame football -- the interrogator makes the mistake of employing the verb ""run'' to link Ebersol's actions to these prizes.
He throws up his hands. ""Run? No, no! I don't want to run these things,'' he cries out, laughing at the foolishness of ancient ephemeral power. ""You see, I have it better. Run? No, I get to be the one to arrange how all these things are perceived in the world.''
Always on the make -- that was the jacket put on young Dickie Ebersol. The WASP Sammy Glick, he was tagged. A wunderkind, he wasoriginally hired by Roone Arledge while he moonlighted to a Yale degree. Yet still in college, the kid Ebersol was seated at the right hand of the fabled Arledge, serving as his French translator, as his confidant and (it was said) his favorite son.
Ebersol pauses, qualifying: ""I know everyone says Roone was my second father and I do have an abiding love for him, but he was much more a teacher.'' He reaches over and holds up a photograph. There are three men in it -- Arledge and Ebersol and Don Ohlmeyer, who is now the head of NBC's thriving entertainment division, but who is also referred to as Arledge's other TV son. ""All you have to do is look at this picture,'' Ebersol says. ""NBC has not so much prospered because of Don and myself, but because we learned our lessons from Roone and brought them here.''
Yet soon enough would the young Dickie leave Arledge at ABC for greater opportunity at NBC. He conjured up ""Saturday Night Live'' and, by 28, was the youngest vice president in NBC history. A brief Hollywood marriage (the wedding barefoot, on the beach at Malibu) to Vanna White's letter-turning predecessor failed, but little else did. Ebersol was ordered back to New York to restore sense and order to ""SNL,'' and there he met the actress Susan St. James, when she hosted an episode. They married. When her show, ""Kate and Allie,'' prospered, Ebersol moved to bucolic Litchfield County, Conn., to raise their children and to manage his new production company, which programmed wrestling and music for youthful insomniacs. Now, laugh -- sure. But of all the wise things Ebersol has done, that was the wisest, the most creative -- catching wrestling at the precise moment when it became a cult divertissement for a new generation. Sitting up there in Litchfield County, peddling Hulk Hogan and music videos, middleman Ebersol made a bloody fortune.
He sighs now, reminiscing fondly: ""God, the wrestling was wonderful! You see, you could just make up the stories. You want the wrestler's mother to be a tragic hero? OK, that's her story this week. Or you want her to be a gorgeous 25-year-old when her son, the wrestler, is obviously 22? No problem.'' Indeed, in an ideal Ebersolian plausible world, the Olympics would be just like wrestling. But we're getting ahead of ourselves.
One day, in the spring of '89, with St. James home again because ""Kate and Allie'' had been canceled, Ebersol was lured back to NBC. Primarily, he was to assume control of Sports, but he would also be given oversight of the ""Today'' show. The staff of NBC Sports was ordered to assemble in Studio 8H, where, fortuitously, Ebersol had first put on ""Saturday Night Live'' and where he had met his wife.
In the years just previous, I had worked for NBC, doing pro-football essays, and, although I had left the network, I joined the throng in 8H. Introducing himself, Ebersol explained what this place meant to him and how he hoped it would be lucky for NBC Sports, too. However, everybody walked away, scared to death. NBC had just lost baseball, which it had considered its birthright. The Final Four was likewise gone to CBS. The presentation of the Seoul Olympics the autumn before had been a distinct disappointment. Before us assembled, Ebersol actually proposed that NBC might put on flag football games with former NFL players in order merely to survive. It was that bad.
Well, there was one spot he could fill immediately. After all, I would not be returning to the football show.
So, the first thing Ebersol did at NBC Sports, he hired O. J. Simpson.
Ebersol's office is maybe a bit too cutesy, dominated as it is by large stuffed Disney animals. More recently, though, as Dick Pound, of the International Olympic Committee, says, it was ""like a Welsh coal mine.'' Ebersol not only smoked cigars, but fiendishly seduced others into his vice. After all, it was a health upgrade, inasmuch as not that long ago, he had smoked three to four packs of cigarettes a day. ""Also,'' he reports, ""I personally knew the location of 10,000 McDonald's around the world.''
So it was that this February, at 48, in San Antonio for the NBA All-Star Game, Ebersol suffered chest pains; he would need an angioplasty to clear a coronary artery. Now, as glib and facile as Ebersol may be professionally, it is indisputable that he establishes the closest -- even dearest -- friendships with his colleagues. He is The Great Male Bonder. Says Josiah Bunting III, the novelist and superintendent of Virginia Military Institute, who is Ebersol's half brother: ""I've heard how tough Dickie can be in business, but that's really a contradiction. He was always the sunniest boy, cozy and warm. He just adores people.''
And so it was that even before Ebersol had returned to his office after the angioplasty, all ashtrays and humidors from his office and the contiguous territory had been summarily removed. This had been personally taken care of by Ken Schanzer, Ebersol's number two, the executive vice president of NBC Sports.
The two men enjoy the most curiously sweet relationship. Ebersol, you see, was handed the job that Schanzer thought was his for future delivery. And yet, instinctively, Ebersol made the decision to keep Schanzer, and they drew closer together. The two executives -- Ebersol in his Ivy crewnecks and loafers, Schanzer in his everyday Turnbull & Asser poster-boy outfit -- embrace whenever one is about to set off on an extended business trip.
""You've got to understand,'' Schanzer says. ""Dick has the gift. Dick absorbs life. He watches everything, he reads everything, and yet, somehow, he appears to have unlimited quantities of time left over for the people he cares about.'' Once a day now, Schanzer permits his boss to enter his office and make off with one cigar.
Not surprisingly, not everyone in the industry believes that Ebersol will long be sat- isfied with this idyllic little world, where sweetness reigns within, even as NBC Sports leaves no prisoners without. But it is surely revealing that, for all I talked to Ebersol, although he occasionally got defensive or prickly (about, for example, the bitter contretemps he forced with Jane Pauley and Deborah Norville when he commanded the ""Today'' show), only once did he really appear to get put out. That was when I said that I had read that he had been upset not to have gotten the NBC entertainment-division position that went to his Arledge-brother, Don Ohlmeyer.
""Listen,'' he snapped. ""If I'm vain about anything, it's that I'm pretty goddam smart, and I can tell what's best for me. Jobs I would've kissed their feet for 15 years ago, I wouldn't even answer the phone. I never even thought about Don's job. In fact, it amazes me that somehow I wandered away for 15 years from what I loved the most -- sports. I wasn't back in this job long before I asked myself: How? How did I ever live without this?''
""Absolutely,'' Bob Costas, Ebersol's star announcer, says. ""I believe that. I believe that all Dick wants is to stay where he is and establish a legacy for this business that can never be approached.'' Also convinced, NBC has given Ebersol an unprecedented eight-year contract to keep running its sports.
Ebersol is dead right about one thing. Although he hired Simpson only a few months after he was arrested for beating up Nicole, no one in the media raised a complaint at that time. In fact, within the industry, as the years passed, it was not so much that Ebersol had hired one wife-beater, but that he kept hiring boring, bland big names one after another. Keep in mind that the very reason O.J. was wearing those famous gloves in the first place was because he was so inept in the studio that he had to be exiled to the freezing sidelines where he only had to be trusted to say, ""Coach told the team at half time to show more intensity.''
This autumn past Joe Montana was Ebersol's prize bore of the year, and it is a standing joke within the community that NBC is a halfway house for any tedious coach who has a name but has lost his job. Even back in his ""Saturday Night Live'' days, Ebersol was mocked as a star-kisser, although that term has been sanitized here for a prime-time audience. ""All right, all right,'' he says, forcing a smile and biting into a banana as part of his new health diet, ""I haven't hired any out-of-work coaches this year.''
Most sports are unique to the network that owns the property, so they need suffer no comparison, but NBC, Fox and ESPN all put on competing pregame NFL Sunday shows, and Ebersol's preference for comatose stars and safety-first content is most exposed here. In this head-to-head competition, where spark and creativity are the determining factors, NBC lost to Fox.
Says the sports TV critic Norman Chad: ""It remains one of the great mysteries of our time why this man known for his charm, this man who created "Saturday Night Live' and who saw the wonderful humor in a thing like wrestling has this contradiction within him that forces him to hire the dullest talent he can find.''
Of course, as all us loyal fans of the Harry Reasoner-Barbara Walters news report will recall, Arledge has always been star-struck, too. Arledge, though, has also been acclaimed for his innovation while Ebersol goes out of his way to boast that his Atlanta Olympic coverage will, as at Barcelona, be derivative. It will hew strictly to the up-close-and-personal furrow that Arledge first hoed decades ago.
There is no gainsaying that Ebersol's record as a negotiator has been nothing short of brilliant. ""The key to Dick is that he has a talent's ego in an executive's body,'' says someone who has worked with him. But in counterpoint to this vanity is his loyalty; the people Ebersol signs contracts with like him and trust him immensely. Ebersol's critics then (of course) turn the fact of his warm, personal relationships upside-down, suggesting that these close man-to-man associations make it impossible for him ever to apply a disinterested journalistic edge to the sports he has bought from some good buddy. Says Costas: ""Look, you don't have to whip it out of Dick that he feels he is a partner to these leagues. He will not ignore journalism if it is called for, but, yes, it is a lesser concern.''
Indeed, Ebersol and NBA Commissioner David Stern are so close that it was the expression of this friendship that, Ebersol thinks, paved the way for the long-term Olympics-NBC association. In 1991, Ebersol and Stern visited Samaranch together at IOC headquarters in Lausanne, Switzerland, and, Ebersol be- lieves now, Samaranch was so impressed by how the NBA chief and the NBC chief got along that he envisioned the same sort of close relationship for himself with a television partner.
There is, in fact, a neat symmetry to the Olympic life of Dickie Ebersol, bracketed as it is by the two older men who have mattered so to him -- Arledge, the father figure, who invented the popular way to bring America the Games, and Samaranch, the rich-uncle figure, who has provided Ebersol with the means to take his father's work to a new level.
What Arledge conceived -- what Ebersol swears by -- was to make the Olympics an athletic Scheherazade, a succession of folk tales about characters mostly unknown. Only wrestling, you see, could be better, because that you could fashion entirely out of whole cloth. ""With storytelling, Roone saw that he could provide viewers with an investment in an event they knew nothing about,'' Ebersol explains. ""That especially appealed to women. Women come at it for the story, the men for the results. You know how it is,men will watch anything.
""The trouble with NBC in '88 at Seoul was they thought they were print journalists. They had to jump all around. That's not what people want out of the Olympics. Why, they had split screens with Louganis diving on one side and a volleyball game on the other. And all the boxing. Even those bandits from Nielsen will show you: the minute boxing comes on, the graph drops like a shot.''
Ebersol's argument that Americans only want a picture-book Olympics is diminished somewhat by the fact that the prime-time ratings for the journalism Olympics of '88 are virtually equal to his neo-Arledge Games of '92.CBS's coverage of Lillehammer in '94, which pretty much followed the Arledge model, convinced him -- as a viewer -- all the more that pure live, real live action is of no consequence to an Olympic audience that is unsophisticated about sport. Life might follow art but live is subsumed by tape delay. The most popular summer attraction is gymnastics, but Ebersol airily dismisses the sport as ""a bad four-ring circus'' when shown as it actually happens. Ah, but plausibly live, it becomes soap opera on a balance beam.
""You see,'' he says, ""the average person still comes to the Olympics with a sense of idealism. Women particularly see something almost spiritual. So, really, we end up paying these billions for idealism.
""And people come to the Olympics to be entertained. It is not a sports event. What it is, is the closest thing we've still got to Ed Sullivan, with the husband and the wife and the kids together, all of them in the same room, watching the same thing. Together! Name me anything else that's still that way. I swear, God forbid, if we ever have another president assassinated, we won't even get everybody together for that. HBO will keep right on showing movies and MTV the music videos.
""No, the Olympics are the last have-to television for every-body.'' It's perfectly plausible. Dickie Ebersol is a particularly plausible guy.
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