On his last day at 30 Rock, Dick Ebersol walked into NBCUniversal President and CEO Steve Burke’s office around 9:45 a.m. for a five-minute meeting.
It was May 19, 2011, and Ebersol left an interview with Sports Illustrated’s Joe Posnanski after 45 minutes to go upstairs and see Burke. Burke and Ebersol were trying to negotiate a new deal that would keep Ebersol at NBC for several more years. Ebersol had been with NBC off and on since 1974 and been head of NBC Sports for 22 years.
The two were cordial, Ebersol said, but they had reached an impasse over salary. They had been talking about a new deal for months beforehand, and Ebersol believes that they verbally agreed on a higher salary than the contract that Burke was asking him to sign.
Ebersol, who has never previously discussed his final day at NBC publicly, recalls how Burke opened the short meeting by saying that he had been up all night thinking about how the contract details became messed up.
“You look like you’ve been up all night,” Ebersol teased.
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From his home in Connecticut, Ebersol opens up about what led to his departure from NBC.
Photo by: PATTRICK E. MCCARTHY
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Burke reiterated his position and offered an olive branch: He suggested that they split the difference.
“As soon as he said that, I said, ‘Why don’t we call it a day?’” Ebersol said. “It was all very amicable. That was pretty much the end of that.”
Burke could not be reached for comment for this story.
The salary dispute proved to be the linchpin that convinced Ebersol to leave, but he said the decision was eased by the fact that his old NBC cronies — executives like Jack Welch, Bob Wright and Jeff Zucker — were gone. Plus, he realized that new owner Comcast’s management style would be different from GE’s, and he wasn’t sure he wanted to adapt.
“It’s a totally different kind of company,” Ebersol said. “When you are the largest cable company in the world, everything — financial transactions — are much more complicated. There are many more reports. There are many more meetings. At 64, I could smell it.”
In the weeks before he resigned, Ebersol walked on a beach in Ponte Vedra, Fla., with his wife, Susan Saint James. She told him to focus on how he would feel two years from now if he didn’t have the job that he had loved since 1989.
Ebersol responded to her, “That job as it was for all those years will never, ever exist again. It doesn’t exist anywhere in this entire business anymore except for one guy — Les Moonves. That’s the way he runs CBS. That’s not going to happen anywhere else ever again.”
About 10 days after he resigned, Ebersol met with Burke again. Burke reached out to Ebersol and asked if he’d sign a one-year deal as a consultant to help with the transition. Ebersol agreed.
Four years later, Ebersol says he’s proud that the NBC Sports Group that he ran has remained mostly intact, without the kind of turnover some might expect when an executive as well-known as Ebersol leaves.
“Just give me the little bit of credit for the fact that I realize that my way of doing things was not going to be necessarily the way of the future,” he said. “I could not allow it to make me a sour or bitter person. I didn’t own the company. I felt this was a signal and I acted on it.”
