It was a strange site to see
Fox Sports President
Eric Shanks on Cincinnati’s Great American Ball Park field — standing at the edge of the dugout — as baseball’s all-time best living players took the field during pregame introductions at the MLB All-Star Game earlier this month.
It was odder, still, to see Shanks sitting in the stands during the game’s first few innings, and meeting with MLB brass in the middle innings.
“I was not wearing a tie, though,” Shanks joked.
It was an unfamiliar setting for the longtime network executive. Over the years, I’ve seen Shanks at several big events. Each time, he has been planted in the production truck, keeping close tabs on what goes over the air under the Fox Sports brand. In fact, I can’t ever recall actually seeing him inside a stadium during a Fox-produced game.
Top TV sports executives fall into two camps. Some, like
Dick Ebersol and
David Hill, stayed in the production truck during big events that their networks produced; others, like
George Bodenheimer and
David Levy, rarely ventured into the production trucks.
As Fox Sports produced a month’s worth of big sports events — the U.S. Open, Women’s World Cup and baseball’s Midsummer Classic — Shanks has started venturing outside of the production truck much more frequently.
This hands-off approach marks how Shanks is running Fox’s sports division: hiring experienced producers and letting them do their jobs. He hired Mark Loomis to produce the network’s golf coverage and David Neal to handle the World Cup. Fox has Brad Zager and John Entz overseeing its baseball coverage.
“I feel like I need to get out of people’s hair,” Shanks said. “You can only have so many people making comments at one time and pushing buttons to get in people’s ear. At some point, you have to let people do their jobs.”
Baseball’s All-Star Game is a big event — one that usually posts the biggest TV viewership of the summer. This year, for example, Shanks said he had goosebumps during the All-Star Game’s pregame ceremony, showing that the game still has that big-event feel.
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Fox Sports President Eric Shanks (third from right) poses with MLB All-Star Game on-air talent and production crew from Great American Ball Park in Cincinnati.
Photo by: RICK NORTON / FOX SPORTS
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Still, it’s a big event that Fox has produced for close to two decades. What made the last month unique for Fox Sports was the fact that it produced two big events for the first time — two events that were going on at the same time — the Women’s World Cup from Canada and the U.S. Open near Tacoma, Wash. Fox Sports had to assemble two teams of producers and directors to handle the events.
“It’s a new era, at least for this sports division, having these two big events,” Shanks said. “It really changes the cycle of the year for us.”
Fox Sports largely was hailed for its coverage of the monthlong Women’s World Cup, which brought huge ratings and a storybook result for Fox with the U.S. team winning.
To help drive viewer interest, Shanks said Fox Sports mirrored the marketing strategy that 20th Century Fox Studios uses for its summer blockbusters.
“You have the launch of opening weekend to drive interest and get people to the TV sets; then you have to sustain the blockbuster in the theaters for a month,” Shanks said. “We put together a side-by-side: here is the pace and rhythm of a summer blockbuster marketing campaign.”
Fox, of course, was helped by the U.S. team’s performance, which kept interest and ratings high. Shanks said he did not breathe a sigh of relief until the U.S. women’s national team beat Germany in the semis.
“Winning the final is what builds for the next event,” Shanks said. “If you were just looking at the final in a vacuum, then you would say we got what we needed. But that’s not the investment that we made. We didn’t just make the investment in the Women’s World Cup final. We made not only the investments in World Cup. We made it in soccer in general and women’s sports in general. Our investment is in women’s soccer — not only FIFA, but the NWSL. Then we look at your soccer in general. We’ve already seen a halo effect in the Gold Cup. We hope that’s a sustaining effect in soccer in general.”
Similarly, Shanks described Fox’s U.S. Golf Association investment as one that still has 11 months left on it.
Fox’s U.S. Open coverage received plenty of criticism for several glitches during the tournament. The Chambers Bay course did Fox no favors. For example, the course’s brown grass made it difficult for Fox’s cameras to pick up balls in flight.
Despite the critics, Shanks sounded comfortable with coverage that he knows will only improve over time.
“With U.S. Open golf, the venues change every year,” he said. “You keep getting better. Your relationship with the USGA keeps getting better.”
Fox will wait until after the U.S. Amateur tournament next month to sit down and assess its first year of golf coverage in total. But one area that pleased Shanks was the announcing duo of Joe Buck and Greg Norman, who he thought had good chemistry together.
“There’s one thing you can’t fix or tweak over the course of a contract: Did your lead talent have chemistry?” Shanks said. “You can’t teach chemistry. The first box that you needed to check was if Joe and Greg were going to be informative and entertaining. You check that box with all of the USGA events that we’ve done so far.”
Other areas where Shanks believed Fox excelled was in the tournament’s commercial-free final hour, where the announcers kept relatively quiet, letting the tournament’s natural sounds take over.
Shanks said he is most proud of the coverage at the end when Fox’s microphones picked up a golf-focused conversation on the 18th green between Dustin Johnson and Jason Day.
“That was a conversation that I’ve heard when I play golf,” Shanks said. “That’s the kind of conversation that happened in the last 60 minutes that we were really, really proud of.
“When you get down to something like that, everybody knows you just get out of the way. We had the audio to back it up and we had the pictures to back it up. When it came down to the great moment, getting out of the way is the most important thing you can do.”
John Ourand can be reached at jourand@sportsbusinessjournal.com. Follow him on Twitter @Ourand_SBJ.
