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Those Guys Have All The Fun: Inside The World Of ESPN (2011)

by James Andrew Miller(Favorite Author)

3.64 of 5 Votes: 4

ISBN

0316043001 (ISBN13: 9780316043007)

languge

English

genre

Memoir & Autobiography

publisher

Little, Brown and Company

review 1: If there is one channel I absolutely need in order to be a happy man, particularly on fall Saturdays, it's ESPN. My predilection for spending an obscene number of hours camped out in front of my television watching ESPN compelled me to read this book; it was a damn fine decision on my part.At first I was struck by the format of the book, but it only took me a few pages to see how wise a choice it was on the authors' part to write this book as an oral history rather than a conventional third person omniscient narrative. The folks who built ESPN are gifted storytellers, and it was a smart idea to let them tell much of their own story. It helps that the story of how this crazy idea to have sports on television 24/7 became a multimedia, international phenomenon is an incredibl... moree one. If you have ever watched ESPN and wondered how it became the most powerful name in sports, this is an engrossing read. Indeed, you are always welcome to my copy.
review 2: An excellent Christmas gift from my brother, I started to read this oral history of ESPN while sipping a freshly made margarita and overlooking the beautiful bay of Zihuatanejo. While that may be proof that Those Guys left some of the Fun for the rest of us, I will forgive the publisher for that bit of sensationalism if for no other reason than Those Guys Have All the Fun: Inside the World of ESPN is a fantastic title. Fortunately for us readers, it was also followed by a fantastic book. As I mentioned, this book was arranged as an oral history. The author will occasionally serve as the narrator to provide context, or fill in details, but beyond that, the story is told through quotes from hundreds of interviews arranged in a way that creates the narrative. It's a wonderful way to tell a complex story (though I marvel at how it was put together -- what an undertaking) and this is no exception. The contributors were amazingly open, and willing to discuss both their successes and failures. It's funny, going into this I was most looking forward to hearing the opinions of my favorite ESPN personalities (Charlie Steiner, Dan Patrick and now Bill Simmons) but as I read on, I found myself fascinated by the executives. I'm not quite sure what this says about me, but I think it means I'm old. Anyway, their perspective was new to me, and it was nice to get some insight into the corner-office reasoning that determined what I saw on TV. Like what in the hell was Stump the Schwab all about? Spoiler alert: mistakes were made.The stories are all great, and while ESPN's rise to super power seems inevitable in hindsight, the mechanisms of its success make for a wild ride. I won't discuss any anecdotes from the book (and that's only partly because I finished it so long ago I've forgotten them), but one of my favorite factoids is that ESPN's first real funding came from Getty Oil. I loved that, and only partly because Stu Evey was such a stereotypical 80s excess-hound. The oil business is absolutely everywhere! In my review of The Prize a couple years ago I said something like "reading a history of the oil business is reading the history of our modern world," and I'm pretty sure that is somehow an understatement of that industry's influence. Anyway, great job on that, Getty Oil.As a sports fan, this borders on "must read" just because of ESPN's influence in the sports world, but beyond that, it's an engaging story start to finish. Of course, there are some things I wanted to learn more about (I'm ashamed to say it, but I really enjoyed hearing ESPN personalities talk complain about one another) and other things I cared less about (the NASCAR material was rough), but on the whole it's very well done. Would it have been 5 stars is my first impression was formed somewhere other than a beautiful beach in Mexico? I don't know, would Chris Berman be a star if he didn't happen to be at ESPN from the start? I contend it doesn't matter, because that's just the way it went. However, you might want to take a trip to Zihua just in case. less

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