The Great Communicator

Love, loyalty and affection are the words most often used by Dick Ebersol's friends when describing their relationship with him. Photo by: PATRICK E. MCCARTHY

Dick Ebersol owns a home that is about 900 yards from the house where he lived as a boy. His current home in historic Litchfield, Conn., is the same house where, as a 12-year-old, he took dancing lessons to learn the waltz. He went to college down the road at Yale — his freshman dorm literally is 40 miles down the same street that runs from his childhood home to New Haven. Ebersol still keeps in regular touch with his college and high school buddies, and he sees some of them nearly every day that he spends in Litchfield.

When people talk about Ebersol’s knack for cultivating relationships, it’s easy to point to the powerful bonds he established in the sports and media worlds. But the deep roots and long-standing friendships he developed more than half a century ago in a small Connecticut town have defined the career for one of the most accomplished executives in U.S. television history.

The creative spark behind hit shows like “Saturday Night Live” and “Sunday Night Football,” Ebersol spent his career befriending the most powerful people in sports and media. Some have described his deal-making prowess as a seduction, one where Ebersol actively sought out personal connections to make people more comfortable with the moves he ultimately wanted to make.

Ebersol was a demanding boss — a hardcore negotiator who inspired fear among people who were not part of his inner circle — but his closest friends use words to describe their friendship with Ebersol that they would use to describe their marriage: love, loyalty, affection.

Former NBA Commissioner David Stern describes their first meeting as “love at first sight.” Former MLB Commissioner Bud Selig, who still sees Ebersol a few times a year, says, “I cannot tell you my enormous affection and respect for him.” Even Vince McMahon, the rugged chairman and CEO of WWE who first met Ebersol in the mid-1980s, sounds smitten when talking about Ebersol. “I just love the guy,” McMahon says. “It’s funny when men say that about other men. But he’s the kind of guy you can say that about.”

These types of comments don’t surprise anyone who has spent time with Ebersol. Former colleagues and clients say the bulk of Ebersol’s conversations never had anything to do with business. Instead, Ebersol takes the time to learn about what makes people tick and has the ability to retain much of that information for future conversations, according to nearly everyone interviewed for this story.

“The foundation of all of those relationships had little to do with his business accomplishments,” said longtime NBC Sports colleague Ken Schanzer. “The bulk of the time we spent together was talking about all of the things that make the rest of your life meaningful. I suspect that is the baseline of most of his relationships.”

Ebersol’s talent for cultivating relationships may not have been as important during rights negotiations, where the highest bidder almost always wins. But once he acquired a property’s rights, those relationships helped ensure success.

Take “Sunday Night Football,” for example — something Ebersol considers “my favorite baby of all the stuff I ever did.” This week, when the 2014-15 television season ends, “Sunday Night Football” will be TV’s top prime-time show for the fourth year in a row.

Much of that success can be attributed to Ebersol’s vision, for sure, but also to his closeness with NFL media executive Howard Katz.

Most Mondays — around 35 times a year — Ebersol and Katz reserve a table for dinner at the Manhattan restaurant Isle of Capri, on the corner of 61st Street and 3rd Avenue. The two have known each other for 44 years, dating to when Katz interviewed for a job at ABC, and Ebersol was one of the people conducting the interview.

Nowadays, Katz just so happens to be the executive in charge of creating the NFL’s schedule.

At their near-weekly dinners, the two sit at a table in the window and watch the hustle and bustle of New York. Ebersol recalls seeing people like New England Patriots owner Robert Kraft stroll by on his way to a dinner or former NBC executive producer Michael Weisman walking through the neighborhood.

Ebersol and Katz have been going to these nearly weekly dinners since 2004, many months before NBC picked up the Sunday night NFL rights. They talk about everything from their families to football.

It was at this regular dinner in 2004 where Ebersol pushed his plan to make sure that the best games end up on Sunday nights. With the rights to the NFL’s third TV window on Sunday following the two afternoon games on other networks, Ebersol needed to make sure that the league allocated the best possible matchups for Sunday night. That would allow Ebersol to convince his bosses to invest money in a package that had become known for relatively lackluster games on ESPN.

“Dick made a crusade out of the schedule,” said John Madden, a former analyst on “Sunday Night Football.” “He always had a schedule in his pocket. He was working on what we’re going to do at the end of the season to get the best games — and then what we’re going to do next year to get the best games. … He was a genius at working on getting the best games.”

Once the schedules were set, Ebersol had to make sure people tuned in. He did that by producing the game like a Super Bowl, giving it a big-event feel. The game came with a 90-minute pregame show, an exclusive highlights package that was part of NBC’s rights deal, and a marketing campaign that declared “Sunday night is football night.”

The point was to make casual fans pay attention to the game even when their team was not involved. Thanks to both the schedule and the promotion — as well as the increasing popularity of NFL games — NBC’s “Sunday Night Football” has never dipped below the ratings for the final season of ABC’s “Monday Night Football” from 10 years ago.

“Even the name of it — ‘Football Night in America’ — think of the ambition,” said Discovery Communications President and CEO David Zaslav, who ran NBC’s cable networks when “Sunday Night Football” launched. “If you’re going to say that, you better deliver.”

Or, as Katz put it, “‘Sunday Night Football’ is what it is today because of Dick Ebersol.”

One the biggest coups of Ebersol’s career came as a result of his deftness at understanding what makes people tick. The move to hold Beijing’s Olympic swimming finals in the morning so they could be aired live during U.S. prime time was the result of a secret plan hatched between Ebersol and Jacques Rogge, then head of the International Olympic Committee.

Ebersol first broached the idea in 2001. NBC was coming off the much maligned Sydney Olympic Games, which he said was “the only Summer Olympics that I ever did that wasn’t really successful from a ratings standpoint.” The main reason: The U.S. swimming team did not live up to expectations. Making matters worse, swimming was relegated to tape delay thanks to the 14-hour time difference between Sydney and the U.S. East Coast.

Any Summer Olympics is heavily dependent on swimming during the first week. Together, swimming and gymnastics — two of the most popular Summer Olympic events — make up two-thirds of NBC’s prime-time schedule through the first eight to 10 nights of an Olympic Games. With the U.S. swim team not winning some marquee events, and those results being known before NBC’s prime-time coverage, Sydney’s ratings plummeted relative to past Games.

Beijing was selected as the 2008 Summer Games host in July 2001. Facing a 12-hour time difference similar to Sydney’s, Ebersol knew he needed the Beijing swimming finals to be moved to the morning.

He got his plan in motion in the summer of 2001, just after Rogge was elected IOC president. Early in his tenure, Rogge flew to Martha’s Vineyard and stayed with Ebersol.

The Belgian-born Rogge had an air of Western European stiffness, especially compared to his predecessor, longtime IOC leader Juan Antonio Samaranch, who was from Spain and more gregarious.

“Dick had a great relationship with Samaranch,” said Jim Bell, NBC Olympics’ executive producer. “Rogge was trickier to get to know.”

That’s when Ebersol’s seduction began.

Ebersol knew that Rogge was a sailing champion who participated in the 1968, 1972 and 1976 Olympics. Ebersol borrowed a big sailing boat from a neighbor, and Rogge spent his first afternoon on the Vineyard commanding a sailboat off the coast of Martha’s Vineyard with Ebersol and several of his kids.

The next morning, Ebersol and Rogge walked the streets of the old New England town, when Ebersol felt the time was right to make his pitch.

“Jacques,” Ebersol remembers saying, “this is the only major thing I’ll ask you in these next seven or eight years of your presidency that I really, really have to have. … I really need the swimming finals in Beijing to be live.”

The top U.S. sports commissioners at the time — (from left) Roger Goodell (NFL), Gary Bettman (NHL), David Stern (NBA), Tim Finchem (PGA Tour), Bud Selig (MLB) and Brian France (NASCAR), with Ebersol in the middle — honor Ebersol during the 2009 Sports Emmy awards. Photo by: GETTY IMAGES

Rogge understood the reasons why Ebersol was making the request. He also recognized that China did not have a strong swimming program, which meant that the host country would not be a road block. Rogge told Ebersol that it would be hard, but that he would try his best to make it happen.

The two spent the next six years quietly lobbying to make the change, keeping a tight circle to prevent the plan from leaking out.

Between 2002 and 2004, Ebersol made about four trips to Beijing, with the main purpose of developing relationships with the Chinese and making sure that they would not fight the move to stage the swimming finals in the morning. Per Chinese culture, business dinners were celebrated with a drinking competition at the end of it. On several occasions, the Chinese tried to engage Ebersol in a drinking contest with a Chinese liquor called Maotai, which Ebersol described as akin to aviation fuel. Ebersol got out of the contest by telling the group that an American custom was to have a designated drinker represent the group. That turned out to be the Olympic scheduler Peter Diamond, an executive handpicked by Ebersol.

“This old Chinese political leader drank against Peter,” Ebersol said. “He became the designated drinker. He won some of these drinking competitions. I was always totally sober and able to really soak up stuff during these things.”

Finally, in 2006, Ebersol felt comfortable enough to broach the idea with USA Swimming. He called Chuck Wielgus, USA Swimming’s executive director, who began to tell U.S. coaches about it. The U.S. team bought into it.

The secret stayed safe for another year before leaking out.

“There are all kinds of stories that I did this for Michael,” Ebersol said of Michael Phelps, who went on to win eight gold medals in Beijing. “I didn’t do this for Michael. Michael in 2001 had only been in one Olympics. He swam in a butterfly final as a 15-year-old and finished fifth. He would develop very quickly during this period of time. But in the summer of 2001, he wasn’t thought to be a guy who might win eight gold medals.”

As with any career that spans more than four decades, Ebersol’s had his share of missteps. The XFL, the football league he launched with Vince McMahon, lost upward of $50 million. He played a big role in The Baseball Network, the broadcasting joint production between ABC, NBC and MLB that lasted a little over a year. And he initially resisted using on-screen graphics, such as score bugs, during games, even as they became hugely popular.

Ebersol embraces his mistakes, and the bonds that were formed while making them. Fourteen years after the XFL launched its first and only season, Ebersol still beams when he talks about the league, which he calls “a fantastic failure.” As with many failures, the XFL spawned innovations that still are being used today.

Ebersol mentioned Skycam, which was popularized during NBC’s telecast of XFL games. He recalls hearing that a former NFL executive, the late Val Pinchbeck, said at the time that the NFL would never allow cameras over or onto the field. A few short years later, of course, it did.

Like Ebersol, other executives who were with NBC at the time also remember the XFL’s “fantastic failure” warmly.

“One of the things that I’ve learned from Dick is that you don’t always win,” said Zaslav, who first worked with Ebersol in the mid-’90s. “With the XFL, he put it all out there. That was unbelievably ambitious. He fought like hell. He gave a big part of his heart and soul and sweat and life to it — along with a whole bunch of the sports team. Dick’s proud of that. That’s what life’s about. Everything doesn’t work. It was a great swing. We all loved it. We all had the [XFL] hats. We all were rooting for Dick. But it didn’t work out.”

McMahon said one of the things he most remembers about the XFL is the amount of fun he had doing it with Ebersol, even as the league was going down the tubes. “It was certainly worth the gamble on both our parts,” McMahon said. “It would have been huge if it took off.”

Another blot on Ebersol’s résumé is the short-lived Baseball Network. Toward the end of the venture’s abbreviated run in 1995, Ebersol recalls getting so mad at Selig that his wife, actress Susan Saint James, worried that he would have a heart attack. Ebersol already was mad at baseball for using a loophole to shut down The Baseball Network. He became furious when MLB let ESPN have a game that he believed, by contract, should have been NBC’s.

Ebersol was so upset that he planted a front-page story with USA Today media columnist Rudy Martzke announcing that ABC and NBC were getting out of baseball. Fox picked up the rights in 1996.

But in the end, relationships still mattered, even if it took a while for Ebersol’s anger to abate.

“I was so mad,” Ebersol recalled. “Bud is such a wonderful man and I really liked him. Within a year or two, we healed that.”

Selig remembers the time similarly.

“It isn’t that Dick and I always successfully concluded a deal, because we didn’t,” Selig said. “There was a high level of frustration sometimes. But in my 50-plus career years in baseball, there’s nobody whose integrity I respect more, or whose creativity I respect more.”

It’s impossible to tell Ebersol’s story without talking about the tragic events of November 2004. A Thanksgiving weekend plane crash in Colorado killed three people, including his 14-year-old son, Teddy, and left Ebersol broken physically and emotionally.

Ebersol suffered six broken or fractured vertebrae, a broken pelvis, broken coccyx and a sternum that was cracked in three places. Heavily medicated and confined to a hospital bed, Ebersol recuperated for 3 1/2 months at home. Much of the time was spent responding to the hundreds of handwritten letters and thousands of emails he received during the crash’s aftermath, most from people Ebersol had never met.

Many of the letter writers — more than 100, in fact — had heard from Ebersol previously even though they had never met him. Ebersol had written them letters, even though they were strangers to him — a fact that shocked even his wife when she found out about it from their notes of sorrow to Ebersol.

Ebersol has a habit of regularly reading newspapers’ Metro sections. When he sees a tragic story, he writes a note of condolence to the people involved. “I have always been fascinated by grief and how people deal with it even before we went through this,” he said.

For longtime colleague Schanzer, the letters that Ebersol still writes offer a window into his friend’s belief in relationships, both in developing them and maintaining them. These acts of kindness, Schanzer says, define Ebersol as much as any show he’s produced or series he’s created.

“What does that tell you about the guy?” Schanzer asked. “There’s no repayment for that. You’re not trying to do that for anybody else in the world, other than the person to whom you’re sending the letter.”

Even today, Ebersol’s bonds to business titans remain as strong as ever. Four years removed from running NBC Sports Group, Ebersol stays in close contact with many of the people running the industry today.

He talks to Zaslav two or three times per week, offering advice on how the company should run its Eurosport channel. He does the same with the NFL, regularly talking with NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell, giving his thoughts on the league’s strategy for the U.K. market. CNN Worldwide President Jeff Zucker, another longtime friend, readily admits that he seeks Ebersol’s counsel as often as he can.

“He’s probably the singular guy I’ve asked for advice from professionally more than anybody else,” Zucker said.

Ebersol, 67, wants to help because he is passionate about television and the people who run it. He doesn’t accept a dime for his work — not from the NFL, not from Discovery, nor CNN. He loves retirement — he spent seven weeks in Hawaii this past winter — and has no desire to get back into the business.

“I don’t want any money because I don’t want a job,” he said. “I will give you my view, but I am not going to write reports. I don’t go to meetings. I don’t have an office.”

What Ebersol does have are his roots. And the friendships that he works to maintain. And though he may no longer officially be in the business, his influence and inspiration remain as large as ever.

“There’s not a day that goes by where something doesn’t get filtered through Dick’s legacy,” NBC’s Bell said.

Or, as Zaslav put it: “He stays up at night trying to figure things out. He has a great passion for television, for sports, for storytelling. I miss him.”