ESPN’s decision to fire Hank Williams Jr. took the better part of last week – the story broke on a Monday and he ultimately was let go on a Thursday. SportsBusiness Daily’s editorial team sat down with ESPN VP/Communications Mike Soltys to discuss how the company came to its decision.
Q: (The story) blew up on Monday. You decided to pull the open on Monday night. Then it took three days, which is 80 years in Twitter time, to let him go. Why the delay?
Soltys: The difficulty with Twitter and its influence is that there’s an expectation that everyone’s going to react as quickly as the Twitterverse reacts. When you’re dealing with personnel issues or important issues that come up, you want a little more time. The Twittersphere is very unforgiving on the time scale. They want action quickly. With it happening on Monday, and we have “Monday Night Football,” we realized we needed to do something at that point. But he’s been doing this for 22 years, it was a very important part of “Monday Night Football” for a long time, we didn’t want to react too quickly. We wanted to take the time to have a careful decision.
Q: What are you doing going forward with the opening to “MNF”?
Soltys: In the short-term, there will be more of a focus on the game and previewing the game. Next year, we have no idea yet.
For more of this conversation, see today’s issue of THE DAILY.
Meanwhile, Williams has released a song, available temporarily by free download, that takes shots at "ESPN" and "Fox & Friends." The song, titled "Keep The Change," includes the line, "You can keep 'Fox & Friends' and ESPN out of your homes too. 'Cause Bocephus and all his rowdy friends and his song is out of there" (REUTERS, 10/10).
