SBJ Media: ESPN ready to move on from Venu Sports?

Fubo’s successful blocking of Venu Sports' launch until at least 2025 or beyond was the biggest story over the weekend, but it will likely impact Fox and Warner Bros. Discovery more than ESPN and Disney.

The three parties launching Venu have said they'll appeal, and together they "respectfully disagreed" with U.S. District Court Judge Margaret Garnett's decision, believing Fubo's arguments were "wrong on the facts and the law." WBD, ESPN and Fox also described their product as a “pro-competitive option” targeting customers who don’t subscribe to a sports service.

But sources told SBJ that Disney views Venu as only a small piece of a much larger puzzle of its sports strategy, with ESPN’s upcoming direct-to-consumer flagship product as the company’s No. 1 priority.

ESPN will support the appeals process, but the source said ESPN will be weighing its options as the case moves through the courts.

There’s also no guarantee with how the industry will evolve moving forward and what other bundles or streaming services could emerge over the next several years.

For Fox, the situation looks different. While ESPN may be the driving force behind Venu, the platform leans on Fox’s backend tech (vs. any development of new tech). WBD also recently lost the rights to the NBA starting with the 2025-26 season (a decision it is challenging in court), and while WBD has been snapping up smaller to mid-size deals, Venu would have given the company a little more juice in the sports rights landscape.

How did we get here? And what's next?

How did the court come to this conclusion? Fubo’s main complaint is that Venu could put the vMVPD out of business, with the court finding that Venu would “substantially lessen competition and restrain trade” and therefore granted a preliminary injunction. The judge also wrote that Fubo would be likely to succeed at trial.

Will this platform ever see the light of day? Not likely. Venu hoped to launch its product ahead of college football and the NFL this season, and that looks to be on hold. Plus, this was just one challenge from a competitor.

Venu also raised eyes with its subscription price of $42.99 per month. For sports fans, that's a high price and doesn’t include content from competitors like NBCUniversal, Apple TV+, Prime Video, Paramount/CBS, Netflix or any RSNs. 

Will the networks feel any pinch from lost ad sales dollars? Not really. As I reported earlier this month , Venu's three partners did not plan to split advertising revenue, and Venu was not going to be selling its own inventory (albeit limited inventory), unlike other MVPDs and vMVPDs.

ESPN, Fox, WBD and Fubo all declined to comment beyond their public statements.

The biggest thing to watch for its ESPN’s upcoming flagship DTC product launch, set to launch before football season in 2025. With Bob Iger, Jimmy Pitaro and the rest of the company focused on that product, Venu could be a platform that fades in the annals of history before it ever gets off the ground.

For sports media, it feels a little bit like the eye of the storm right now. We've made it through the gauntlet that was the Paris Olympics, and the mad rush of football is not far behind. But as we wait for kickoff of the regular season (Week 0 is upon us this weekend), here are some other stories that caught my attention: 

• College volleyball's heavy linear TV schedule: I’m looking out for Nebraska-Louisville on Sept. 22 on ABC and Texas vs. Kentucky Oct. 13 on ESPN. Those are some marquee matchups in ESPN's most expansive coverage of the sort yet on linear TV. Big Ten Network also will have nearly 50 linear broadcasts, the most in network history (I'm eyeing Stanford-Nebraska Sept. 18 on BTN, and Wisconsin vs. Texas Sept. 1 on Fox).

• USL Super League debuts: The U.S. officially has two women’s pro soccer leagues. The USL Super League debuted Saturday when Carolina Ascent FC took on DC Power FC and Spokane Zephyr FC faced Fort Lauderdale United FC. Peacock is the league’s streaming partner, expanding NBCU’s partnership with the USL. I’m looking forward to heading to Coney Island to check out Brooklyn FC.

• From the studio to the booth: MLB Network’s “MLB Central” crew is set to call a game together for the first time. Robert Fores, Mark De Rosa and Lauren Shehadi will be on MLB Net's "Showcase” telecast of the week when the Phillies face the Royals on Aug. 24. The broadcast won’t be available in Philly or Kansas City.

Editor’s note: This is the fourth profile in our 2024 Class of Champions: Pioneers & Innovators.

The deep brown paneled office off the entry hall of Steve Bornstein’s Beverly Hills home bears trappings befitting a man who led ESPN’s breakneck growth through one decade and reshaped the NFL’s media strategy in the next.

There are familiar photos from two Muhammad Ali fights, numbered and signed by famed photographer Neil Leifer, an old friend. And of a particularly cranky looking Winston Churchill, who Bornstein hails as the greatest of all leaders because he “drank, smoked and saved Western Civilization.”

Floor-to-ceiling shelves are crammed with books, but also memories.

Above one TV and beside another is the first of more than 50 Emmys Bornstein was awarded while at ESPN, which he joined as a programmer four months after its launch and helmed from 1990 to 1999. Next to it is the first that NFL Network won, 58 days after he launched it in 2003.

There are commemorative plates and acrylic cubes, photos of family and friends, two small busts of Churchill and a framed congratulatory note that financial savant and ESPN parent investor Warren Buffet sent when Bornstein was promoted to CEO.

On this July afternoon, a few hours after enduring a physical therapy session meant to hasten his recovery from knee replacement surgery, Bornstein has found a new source of amusement in one of the photos from Leifer.

In it, an aerial view from an Astrodome catwalk shows long-forgotten Ali opponent Cleveland Williams flat on his back, arms and legs splayed like the chalk outline of a homicide victim. Ali stands nearby, fists raised in triumph. Along one edge is an inscription, signed by Leifer:

“For Steve, who I know will do to NBC and CBS what Ali did to Cleveland Williams!”

Leifer gave him the print when he was elevated from chairman and CEO of ESPN to president of ABC Television 1999, a role Bornstein held for only six months before reluctantly agreeing to lead an ill-fated attempt to spin off all the company’s internet assets. It failed spectacularly, effectively derailing what had been a steady corporate rise.

In 2002, he resigned, convinced he’d been squeezed out.

But in a twist worthy of Greek theater, Bornstein soon found himself across the table from his former employers. He signed on as a consultant with the NFL, hired to negotiate a Sunday Ticket renewal with DirecTV. The deal included an option to launch a league-owned network, with guaranteed distribution.

When then-Commissioner Paul Tagliabue told Bornstein the league planned to do so and pushed him to come on full time to run it, Bornstein agreed — a natural fit for a man who’d championed and presided over the launch of ESPN2 and ESPNews, as well as ESPN Radio, ESPN The Magazine and the website that would become ESPN.com.  

As the NFL’s EVP of media, Bornstein also would be charged with crafting strategy and leading negotiations on the most valuable TV rights package in sports, which was up for renewal after the 2004 season.

When it was done, Bornstein had delivered a then-staggering $4.4 billion package that yielded 20%-plus increases from CBS and Fox, brought NBC back after an eight-year hiatus, switched “Monday Night Football” from ABC to ESPN at double the fee and left ABC out entirely.

Reminded of the impeccably orchestrated machinations that both fulfilled his new bosses’ goals and salved his still open wound, Bornstein looked up at the photo of Williams, laid out flat, and chuckled at the parallel.

“I didn’t have the power to make that happen, [because] I don’t own an NFL franchise,” Bornstein said. “But I could not have had a better outcome. I got my retribution. To a broadcast network at that time, losing ‘Monday Night Football’ was like losing your entire mail delivery system. That is a body blow. That’s a knockout. That’s Cleveland Williams, right there. That’s what that is.

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“The satisfaction I got of just knifing Disney in the heart but maintaining ESPN and getting the best deal for the NFL, which was my priority — that’s a pretty good parlay.”

Though he confessed he still wishes he’d been given an unfettered chance to run ABC, Bornstein has long since gotten over the sting of his departure from Disney. He said he harbors no bitterness. Bob Iger, then president of the company and its eventual CEO, told him he’d be “fine” when he left, and he was.

“I did better than fine,” said Bornstein, whose L.A. home once belonged to Fred Astaire.

He left the NFL after a decade in 2014, satisfied that the league’s channel and its media business were in good hands and ready to slow his pace. Though he kept an apartment in New York and his wife, Carol, and twin sons spent time there, the commute wore on him.

He took a run at what he thought might be the next big thing as Activision Blizzard’s esports chairman. In August 2021, he was hired as president of North America by London-based streaming data distributor Genius Sports, which had acquired NFL rights four months earlier and wanted to firm up its U.S. presence.

“The role is consigliere,” said Bornstein, who turned 72 in April. “That’s basically what I think old guys do when they don’t want to work full-time jobs.”

RELATED: Bornstein looks to what's next for Genius

A reflection on Bornstein’s 20 years at ESPN is as head-spinning as the brand’s rise to ubiquity.

Hired as a programming manager four months after the network’s 1979 launch, he immediately got to work building and innovating, embracing flag-to-flag coverage of NASCAR to fill time on weekends, airing Thursday and Friday rounds from PGA Tour events and introducing a “SportsCenter”-styled update of scores and news that ran at 28 and 58 minutes past each hour.

When Bornstein was promoted to president in 1990, ESPN was a cable television channel — singular. In a dizzying span of six years and two months, he launched, in order, ESPN Radio, the ESPYs, ESPN2, ESPN.com, ESPNews and ESPN The Magazine.

Distribution and profits soared.

Those who were there point to Bornstein as the accelerant.

“He took ESPN from being the scrappy challenger to the colossus that stood astride the sports media business,” said John Skipper, who launched ESPN The Magazine for Bornstein and later became ESPN’s president. “And Steve had that attitude and arrogance about it. George [Bodenheimer, who succeeded Bornstein at ESPN] was more of a steady hand at the tiller, let’s keep growing. But you probably needed Steve’s brash energy and intellect.”

“He saw a future for ESPN when many of us were just doing our jobs and hoping the place was going to stay afloat,” said Steve Anderson, who joined the network as a production assistant in the same month that Bornstein was hired and retired as an EVP after 35 years. “ESPN is so fortunate that he was the leader at the time he was the leader. There are times I don’t think he gets enough credit. But I was there. I saw it. I worked with him closely enough to know ESPN would never have achieved what it did without Steve.”

“I did three tours of duty with Steve,” said Howard Katz, who was hired by Bornstein as EVP of production shortly before the launch of ESPN2 in 1993, headed ABC Sports for him and later joined him at the NFL. “There are people who tell me it’s an IQ test. And I keep telling them, you don’t understand the man. Working for Steve, I don’t look at it as a test. I look at it as an opportunity. If you enjoy making a difference, doing things that involve risk and doing things that are really big deals within the industry, hitch your wagon to Steve Bornstein. At least that’s what I found for 30 years.”

■  ■  ■  ■

Bornstein had no area of study in mind when he left his New Jersey home for the University of Wisconsin in the fall of 1970. Mostly, he was there to stay out of Vietnam.

He took a few broadcast classes and found he preferred it behind the camera. He got experience at the campus station, then landed a job as a cameraman on Milwaukee Bucks and Brewers games. That led to a job as a director at a public television station in Columbus, which aired Ohio State football on tape delay on Saturday nights.

When a lawsuit settlement cleared the way for a small cable outlet to air five games a year on pay-per-view, Bornstein was the natural choice to produce and direct them. To make sure his work was up to snuff, the cable operator hired Bill Creasy, the producer of the first two Super Bowls, to supervise him.

When Creasy took a job in programming at a Bristol, Conn.-based startup that planned to be the nation’s first 24-hour sports channel, he hired Bornstein as a programming manager.

“ESPN was this pipe dream,” Bornstein said. “I’ll never forget that they paid me my age, which was a big deal at that time. It was a startup. It was total chaos. It was the inmates running the asylum.

“I loved it.”

He was in the room when NFL Commissioner Pete Rozelle laughed at then-president Chet Simmons’ suggestion that the network air the draft, asserting that it was “not entertainment.” He hashed out the details after ABC Sports boss Roone Arledge struck a landmark college football deal in 1983, which delivered ESPN the first major college football double-header: BYU at Pitt and Miami at Florida State.

Bornstein had risen to be the head of programming by the time the network became the first cable channel to secure NFL rights in 1987, signing a three-year, $160 million deal to carry eight Sunday night games and the Pro Bowl, which it planned to pay for through an 8-cent-per-subscriber surcharge passed on to cable operators who opted to carry the games. Advertising would cover the cost of production.

The profit center, as Bornstein saw it, would reside in expanded rights to air highlights from the day’s games during “Sports Center” and, more importantly, in a first-of-its-kind, hourlong wrap-up show the network intended to air on Sunday evenings.

To make sure ESPN could cram its shows with as many highlights as it could fit, Bornstein had a production assistant review a season of games, logging how many seconds each play took. Told that the average was about 12 minutes per game, Bornstein asked for 13.

When “SportsCenter” anchor Chris Berman expressed interest in the new NFL play-by-play job, Bornstein convinced him to host the highlights show instead, arguing that it was the more important role.

“This is every week, not nine weeks,” Bornstein told him. “And it’s going to be must-see television.”

“NFL PrimeTime” was born.

As coordinating producer of “PrimeTime” and ESPN’s NFL telecasts, Anderson quickly realized Bornstein’s frenetic vision for the show.

“Steve just said — ‘It’s got to be highlight, highlight, highlight.’ I don’t want any talk,’” Anderson said. “And Chris likes to talk.”

Midway through the debut show, and on many other nights, Bornstein would call the control room to chide Anderson, demanding to see more action.

“No matter how many highlights we showed, Steve would tell me it wasn’t enough,” Anderson recalled. “It was never enough. I would get that phone call, it seemed like every Sunday evening.”

Bornstein was convinced viewers would stay glued for as long as he fed them. And that it was the viewership for shows like “PrimeTime” that drove profits.

“Lo and behold, the rights to those highlights became the crown jewel of that package,” Bornstein said. “People watched the nine games, but every week, all season, ‘PrimeTime’ was there.

“All the games we bought for ESPN were basically to get people to come to our store. We made all our money on the ancillary programming around the games. That’s why ‘SportsCenter’ is so important. That’s why ‘GameDay’ is important. So, yeah, we paid $53 million for nine games. But we made our bread and butter on 20 hours of ‘NFL PrimeTime.’”

Though the math penciled out, that assumed that the cable operators would pay the surcharge. Those who didn’t want to could black the games out. That didn’t seem likely, but there was no guarantee.

“Don’t get me wrong. We were shitting bricks,” Bornstein said. “The early days of cable, you weren’t dealing with necessarily the most sophisticated programmers. They weren’t making money, and we made it easy for them to opt out. So it was certainly no layup.”

The next time the NFL’s rights deal came up, Bornstein was ESPN’s president. Pleased with the results from its first cycle on cable, the league offered ESPN a full season of Sunday nights. Bornstein was game, but the cable operators balked at the cost.

“When he came in the door and wanted to work with us I said, let’s do it. People would say, how can you pay him? I’d say I don’t care if he makes more money than I make, his distribution schemes work and this will be good for everybody.”
— Paul Tagliabue, former NFL commissioner

The NFL found another buyer for the package — Turner Entertainment, which had the nation’s larger cable operators as investors.

“I felt really abused,” Bornstein said. “They just lied to me. Don’t do it. We don’t need the inventory. We don’t want the expense. We don’t want to pass it on to the consumer. Yeah. They want to put it on their network. And TNT grew from 40 million to 50 million homes. So it worked for them. But then I knew they weren’t trustworthy. They wanted the games. They just wanted them on an entity that they owned.

“I don’t begrudge them that, but they just lied to me, and I never forgot it.”

That perceived act of deceit was on Bornstein’s mind when ESPN and Turner both renewed their half-year deals. This time, after paying a relatively modest increase, ESPN offered the operators a deal. There would be no increase of ESPN’s carriage fee for operators who would relinquish the à la carte option, which allowed them to pay a lower rate if they blacked out the games.

Importantly, they also agreed to an annual increase of 20%, compounded each year, if ESPN ever secured the rights to a full NFL season.

At the time, Bornstein thought ESPN was underpriced. While the 75 or so cents per subscriber it was getting was in line with other popular cable channels, such as CNN, it was far short of the $2 per sub that MSG Network collected in and around New York.

The fastest way for ESPN to make up that ground, Bornstein calculated, was to increase rates 20% per year. And the only way to do that was on the back of the only sports programming no operator would forego — the NFL, delivered as a full season of Sunday nights.

“That was the math,” Bornstein said. “That’s basically where I have a skill set. I can think five to eight years out. And that’s how we were able to make the NFL deal happen.”

When the NFL package next came up at the close of 1997, Bornstein was prepared to place the largest bet of his career, knowing that ESPN’s subscriber fees would double over the first five years of the deal. Now also serving as president of ABC Sports, he was determined not to lose its familial jewel, “Monday Night Foorball.”

“I’ve had some tough deals in my life, but that was the holy grail for me,” Bornstein said. “There were two career makers or breakers for me in my ESPN career. The first one was the launch of ESPN2, and the second was getting the full season of NFL for ESPN.”

■  ■ ■ ■

When Bornstein pushed ESPN into radio, the internet and the magazine business, he was acting on an epiphany he had early in his tenure as CEO, when he realized that the network’s mission of serving sports fans could reach well beyond their TV screens.

But when he launched ESPN2, by far the largest bet of any of them, he was playing defense.

With leagues, tours and college conferences warming to cable, ESPN had acquired rights to about 20,000 hours a year of programming. There are 8,760 hours in a year. Bornstein worried that if he didn’t find a home for the excess, a competitor would.

Few at the network saw it that way. When he convened a meeting of senior staff to determine whether their next step would be a spinoff that aired games or a news channel that built on the popularity of “SportsCenter,” the majority favored the latter.

“You look back at that, and it’s a no-brainer, like, of course ESPN had to do ESPN2,” Anderson said. “But that was a very difficult and internally controversial decision at the time. There were people who thought ESPN2 was going to cannibalize ESPN. Why would we do that?

“Steve listened to everybody and basically said — we’re doing ESPN2.”

Katz joined ESPN shortly before the launch of the second channel, signing on when the network acquired the production company that he led. Hired as EVP of production, he quickly realized Bornstein favored blurred lines to organizational hierarchy.

“He didn’t necessarily like to appoint people to roles,” Katz said. “He wanted to see who would rise up to fill voids. So it was almost management by chaos. There were a lot of people who thought they were going to lead the charge of launching ESPN2, but it ended up being a collective joint effort. Steve never really said, ‘Here is your lane and stay in it.’ It was, ‘Who wants to rise up and do what needs to be done?’”

When Bornstein hired John A. Walsh to revamp the news operation as ESPN’s first managing editor in 1988, Walsh got a phone call the night before he was to start telling him to “lay low” in his hotel room rather than coming in, because Bornstein hadn’t told his predecessor he was getting a new boss.

“Some people really disliked his manner and were intimidated by him,” Walsh said. “But those who stuck it out understood what he was about and that he was good for them. Once you said what you believed and he agreed with it — which, he usually did — then he gave you everything you needed to succeed.”

To launch ESPN2, he’d need to cover $500 million to $600 million in startup costs. To hasten its distribution, he planned to package its carriage with ABC affiliates operated by parent company Capital Cities, which reached about a quarter of U.S. households. Warren Buffet, who held substantial sway as an investor and board member, said he’d rather have cash from subscriber fees. But Bornstein was able to sway him.

“I got to launch ESPN2 because I made a compelling argument,” Bornstein said. “I like doing that.”

Debuting on Oct. 1, 1993, and nicknamed “The Deuce,” ESPN2 met its initial distribution goal of 10 million households. Though a “hip” look meant to distinguish the new channel from the flagship flopped badly, the launch was a commercial success, in part because Bornstein was willing to move the occasional must-see game there to spur demand.

Four months in, with rivals Duke and North Carolina ranked 1 and 2, Bornstein put the basketball game on ESPN2, a move that he said brought at least six irate calls from the the state’s governor.

“Steve insisted on doing that,” Katz said, “because he said, until we do, people aren’t going to take ESPN2 seriously.”

On the night of the launch, after three months of frenzied deal-striking with hundreds of cable operators, they celebrated with an epic bash that bused hundreds from Manhattan to Bristol.

Bornstein remains grateful to longtime ESPN communications head Rosa Gatti for pulling the plug on him in the wee hours, pointing him in the direction of a nearby hotel. He sheepishly recalls phoning Cap Cities boss Dan Burke the next morning with news that they’d closed a large distribution deal at the midnight deadline — only to learn he’d also called Burke with the news the previous night.

“Steve loves to take the tough path and do things people haven’t done before,” Katz said. “ESPN2 is probably the most successful network launch in history. But it was risky. So was starting ESPNews and ESPN The Magazine. Those were all totally new ventures. He loved risk-taking, but he loved smart, intelligent risk-taking.”

“He took ESPN from being the scrappy challenger to the colossus that stood astride the sports media business. And Steve had that attitude and arrogance about it.”
— John Skipper, former ESPN president

ESPNews came along three years after ESPN2, hatched in March 1996, hours after Bornstein learned that Time Warner would launch CNN/SI, a 24-hour network devoted to sports news. He insisted ESPNews be on the air by October, two months ahead of the new competitor. And it was.  

Traced back to its conception, the magazine got a far longer runway.

Skipper was the executive in charge of publishing at Disney when Bornstein approached him in the latter half of ’96, shortly after the company’s purchase of Cap Cities. Bornstein wanted him to review a concept for a magazine they’d been noodling on with Cap Cities investor Hearst.

Initially, Bornstein didn’t like the economics. But if Sports Illustrated was coming to play in his backyard, he was sending his dogs to its.

“It’s sort of like a general saying, ‘We’re going to fight them on all fronts,’” Skipper said. “He’s the one who moved ‘SportsCenter’ into the spotlight as a news organization. He launched ESPN2 so we could buy more sports rights. And he wanted a magazine to compete with Sports Illustrated.”

Skipper and Bornstein remember Disney CEO Michael Eisner being supportive, but they still had to run the gauntlet of the company’s strategic planning unit, which poked holes in it. Eventually, in a meeting with Eisner and his chief strategy officer, Bornstein pushed hard and Eisner sided with him.

Bornstein got Disney to free Skipper up from his other publishing projects to focus on the oversized biweekly that would be known as ESPN The Magazine, a title reflective of his belief that the brand could be ubiquitous. Walsh would work with him.

Though Skipper initially saw it as a reduction of his portfolio, Bornstein convinced him the project deserved his full attention. Through the 10 months leading up to the magazine’s launch in March of 1998, Bornstein reminded him of that with frequent calls to check in. He’d close many of them with a cautionary “Don’t f--- up.”

“We were never bigger than Sports Illustrated was at its height,” Skipper said. “But, man, we made money.”

■  ■ ■ ■

The pitch to launch the magazine wasn’t the first time Bornstein encountered Disney’s vaunted strategic planning unit. He’d also been under its bright lights six months after Disney purchased Cap Cities, when he asked his new bosses to commit $9 billion to expand ESPN’s NFL rights to a full season and keep “Monday Night Football” on ABC.

“You have to remember, Disney spent — what was it, $19 billion to buy Cap Cities?” Bornstein said, scanning a shelf to check the price for a commemorative acrylic block that listed the price. “We walked in literally six months later and said, ‘Michael, all we need is the authorization to give us $9 billion to rent some football games from the NFL.’

“The hardest negotiation is always internal. At Disney, strat planning is a legendary group of analysts, the smartest of the smart. Michael’s technique was you ran this gauntlet of strat planning folks. And all they want to do is say ‘no.’ That is their job. No, no, no. If you can get by them, you can make the pitch to him. And that’s what we did.”

“The NFL did it because they wanted a full season on one network,” Bornstein said. “We didn’t tell them we were going to use it to become the most dominant, financially successful network in the world. But that was essentially the plan.” The plan worked.

Driven by rapidly escalating carriage fees and rising ad rates, ESPN’s profits rose, taking Bornstein’s star along with them.

In hindsight, his promotion to president of ABC was the beginning of his end at Disney. He perceived his shuffling to the internet venture as Iger’s way of eliminating the competition for Eisner’s favor. When Eisner allowed Bornstein to return as head of ABC after scrubbing the dot-com project, it created more friction. Bornstein opted to exit.

“I respect the hell out of what Bob has done,” Bornstein said. “Disney prospered under him. And I bow low in his direction.”

No longer employed by the company he’d worked for since Jimmy Carter was president and admittedly “a little unsteady,” Bornstein went looking for consulting clients, beginning with the NFL, where he called on Commissioner Paul Tagliabue.

His first assignment was on the league’s Sunday Ticket renewal with DirecTV, which ended up tripling its rights payment and agreeing to carry a league-owned channel if it launched one.

After huddling with Denver Broncos owner Pat Bowlen and New England Patriots owner Robert Kraft, who both were deeply engaged on the league’s TV dealings, Tagliabue made a push to convince Bornstein to join the league full time.

“The best understanding of the dynamics of the product and what consumers were willing to pay rested in Steve Bornstein’s brain and in his experience,” Tagliabue said. “So when he came in the door and wanted to work with us I said, ‘Let’s do it.’ People would say, how can you pay him? I’d say I don’t care if he makes more money than I make, his distribution schemes work and this will be good for everybody.”

While Bornstein knew his understanding of the economics at Disney and ESPN brought immense value to the league, it was the chance to launch one more network that attracted him.

“That was the most fun I had,” Bornstein said, recalling the spate of hires and development of programming that got NFL Network on the air in November 2003, only nine months after it was conceived. “ESPN, when I joined them, was in a million homes and nobody knew what it was. The NFL always was coming from a position of strength. So that was completely different. But all the startup action is the same.

“Once we got [distribution on] Time Warner and Cablevision done [in 2012], the thing was just printing money.”

The redefining TV deal that he negotiated had its roots in conversations between NBC Sports Chairman Dick Ebersol and Bowlen, who shared an appetite for bringing NBC back to the NFL. Bornstein spent his first year at the league courting Ebersol, working on a concept that would make the Sunday night game the league’s showcase slot, with a flexible scheduling option that would free the network of matchups that lost their appeal as the season progressed.

It would neuter the Monday night schedule, but Bornstein calculated that Disney would stomach that was the only way to keep the NFL on ESPN, which relied on NFL games to guarantee a chunk of its carriage fees.

“Steve was the one who put the meat on the bone to that,” Tagliabue said. “It was just another example of not just the economic understanding, but the intuition he had about where sports television viewers were. I guess maybe intuition is born of experience. But Steve had unparalleled intuition.”

To set the stage, Bornstein went to each of the incumbents well ahead of their negotiating windows, encouraging them to lock in early to avoid the new competition. One of his calls was to Mark Shapiro, then ESPN’s EVP for programming and production, whom he’d hired and mentored while at the network.

“He called me well in advance of our window and he said, ‘Marco, I’m going to give you the best advice I’ve ever given you,’” said Shapiro, now president and COO of Endeavor. “And there were books of advice he’d given me that had shaped my career at that point. He said, ‘I know the window is not up until later, but we’re going to start negotiating. And you can be the first man in, or you can be the last man and see what’s left for you. I’m giving you advice. Move now.’”

Shapiro said he took that news to Iger, who blanched when told it would likely take at least $1.5 billion to renew both ABC and ESPN.

“You’re going to regret this, Marco,” Bornstein told Shapiro. “‘Go back and try to win that argument.’ Long story short, I lost that argument with Disney. It wasn’t just Bob Iger. And we ended up paying $1.1 billion for just ‘Monday Night Football’ on ESPN, with no scheduling flexibility.

“He laid it out to us,” Shapiro said. “That’s the interesting thing. Here’s the path. Don’t think I’m bluffing. We lost it and our destiny suffered as a result of it.”

Bornstein did what he could to turn the heat up on Disney. He, too, approached Iger, delivering news that CBS and Fox both had renewed their deals. Sensing that Iger was skeptical of there being competition, he orchestrated a highly visible lunch at the famed 21 Club that included Ebersol, NBCUniversal President Jeff Zucker, Tagliabue and future NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell, planting news of the meeting on the New York Post’s gossipy Page 6.

Disney made a late bid to bring both its networks back for $1.5 billion per year, but at that point the die was cast. The NFL accepted NBC’s bid of $600 million for the spruced-up Sunday night slot. It cost Disney $1.1 billion to put “Monday Night Football” on ESPN.

“When you have these big, really significant rights, you can’t be the last guy in, because you’re going to be getting [screwed],” Bornstein said. “Because that’s what happens. If you’re ESPN, you really don’t want to be sitting around here waiting for them to decide whether you’re in or out, because it’s your lifeblood. And the same thing with ABC.”

In fairness to Iger, ABC, which was in third place at the time, putting a football game on Sunday night would have meant displacing one of the network’s few hits, “Desperate Housewives,” breaking what was then a programming tenet. He determined that to be too great a risk for his broadcast network.

But ESPN could afford to take Monday night.

“They pay. They always pay,” said Bornstein, who still has a “Talk is cheap, let’s go pay,” plaque that Tagliabue had made for him, an homage to Bart Starr’s famed “Talk is cheap, let’s go play.”

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Bornstein’s eyes brighten as he walks a visitor from his office through a tour of the rest of his home, just down the street from the Pickfair mansion (owned by stars Mary Pickford and Douglas Fairbanks), a 1920s celebrity gathering spot that Life magazine once called “only slightly less important than the White House.” He enjoys telling the story of his living room, which had a hole cut in one wall so Astaire could roll in a projector to screen films. Bornstein and wife Carol turned it into a bar.

A wall in the entry hall is lined with black and white prints, including one of Astaire and wife Penny taken by Harry Benson, another acclaimed photographer friend. There’s also one of John F. Kennedy among the many faces in the crowd at the 1961 Orange Bowl, shortly before he was sworn in as president.

“Find Kennedy,” Bornstein challenges. “It’s the original ‘Where’s Waldo?’”

Decades of sports memorabilia that once adorned his ESPN offices has been consigned by his wife to the pool house, where it shares space with the playthings of his now 20-year-old twin sons.

There are a few pieces of art commissioned to hang in now defunct ESPN Zone restaurants. And a mock-up of the first “Total Access” set designed for NFL Network. The “Talk is cheap, let’s go pay” sign is here, as are several framed newspaper clippings, including one about network losses from an MLB deal, “a negative one to keep me humble.”

Both sons are in college; one at Southern Cal, the other at Oregon. Empty nesting has been a difficult adjustment, but they’re considering traveling more, including to London, where Genius is headquartered.

His current job is similar to what he’s done before, but he misses the days when more of his competitors were entrepreneurs, such as Rupert Murdoch and Ted Turner, and his bosses were NFL owners, such as Robert Kraft and Jerry Jones. While different in many ways, they all exhibited what he saw as admirable tolerance for risk.

“I’m much more a professional guy than an entrepreneur,” Bornstein said. “I didn’t risk anything. But I’ll roll the dice.”

Bornstein thought back to his decisions to launch the ESPYs and NFL Honors, an awards show that languished for years because of its projected expense.

“They just needed somebody to say, ‘I will be responsible for the $8 million, and if you lose it you can yell at me,’” Bornstein said. “And most people that work just don’t want to get fired. That has always been eye-opening to me. In my experience, the majority of people don’t want to take the risk because they don’t want to make the mistake.

“I was always willing to take the risk. And, lucky for me, most of them weren’t mistakes.”

• Longtime sports agency and NBC Sports exec Bob Basche, renowned for developing and coining the term “Breakfast at Wimbledon," died recently after a battle with throat cancer, writes SBJ's Terry Lefton in an obit. Basche penned a op-ed for SBJ in 2009 on the 30th anniversary of "Breakfast at Wimbledon," writing in part, "Six months before Wimbledon, our production team ... was running a brainstorming production seminar on how we would change our approach at Wimbledon for a live audience and at the unheard of hour of 9 a.m. on the East Coast. With this early time in mind, I casually mentioned that I guess it would just be 'Breakfast at Wimbledon.' There was silence in the conference room while everyone digested this perfect promotional tag, and the rest is history."

• The end of the Paris Olympics took a bite out of the NFL’s Week 1 preseason audience, with games on NFL Network down 14% from last year and down 12% from two years ago (excluding HOF Game for all years), notes SBJ's Austin Karp.