
Two books, short reviews this time.
First, ESPN The Company
. This book was written by Dr. Anthony Smith who worked for a number of years as a consultant for ESPN. He lays out the fascinating history of how the company was started in rural Connecticut and how the network was able to develop and sustain the competitive advantages that make it the most profitable cable channel. It was exactly the type of thing I was hoping for when I said I wanted to read more non-fiction that was about creators rather than just business strategy. Only this time, instead of a profile on a person it was a profile on the whole company.
My favorite story about the company involves how it got started broadcasting NASCAR. At the time producers were calling around to every team they could find a number for and trying to get highlight packages or game tapes from them to show. Unlike the ESPN we’re used to, back in those days they would fill up 24 hours of programming with things like tractor pulls or regional bowling tournaments. They got the idea to do flag-to-flag broadcasts of auto races because, according to Steve Bornstein, ESPN’s President at the time, three and half hours of coverage for a 500 mile race was “a hell of a lot easier than coming up with three different one-hour programs.”
That was the kind of risk-taking and forward-thinking that helped grow ESPN into a force so powerful it rebrands the ABC network for sports broadcasts. The number of people who saw the benefits of satellite broadcasting was very small, but those pioneers, people like Ted Turner at TBS, Charles Dolan at HBO, and Bill Rasmussen of HBO, were able to have a huge impact on how we watch TV today. I wondered while reading it who the pioneers are going to be that finally get over-the-internet broadcasting right. Those people will be the next batch of media moguls.
The second book got me was Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
and just about back on track with my 20% fiction requirement. I know this seems ridiculous, but I had never actually read Huck Finn. I’d read portions of it, was familiar with the idea, but had never read the entire story.
There is, of course, the famous quote from Ernest Hemingway on Huck Finn:
All modern American literature comes from one book by Mark Twain called Huckleberry Finn. It’s the best book we’ve had … There was nothing before …
But the version I read also has a great introduction by George Saunders. He spends about 25 pages lauding Twain and his book and there was one passage comparing Huck Finn and Tom Sawyer that I thought was incredible for its simplicity and accuracy. For your benefit, and because I couldn’t find that exact version of the book to link to so you could buy it, I’ve copied it out below.
Tom and Huck, of course, correspond to different parts of their creator. Tom, perhaps, to that part of Twain that longed for acceptance from the Snooty East, and Superior Europe, and distrusted the Huck part – so crude, wild, backwoodsy, and unschooled. Literary characters can come only from their creator’s psyche, but in this case – maybe because Twain’s psyche was such a specimen psyche, and because he had such unfettered access to it – his personal binary was also a critical national one: Huck and Tom represent two viable models of the American Character. They exist side by side in every American and every American action. America is, and always has been, undecided about whether it will be the United States of Tom or the United States of Huck. The United States of Tom looks at misery and says: Hey, I didn’t do it. It looks at inequity and says: All my life I have busted my butt to get where I am, so don’t come crying to me. Tom likes kings, codified nobility, unquestioned privilege. Huck likes people, fair play, spreading the truck around. Whereas Tom knows, Huck wonders. Whereas Huck hopes, Tom presumes. Whereas Huck cares, Tom denies. These two parts of the American Psyche have been at war since the beginning of the nation, and come to think of it, these two parts of the World Psyche have been at war since the beginning of the world, and the hope of the nation and of the world is to embrace the Huck part and send the Tom part back up the river, where it belongs.
I hope he doesn’t mine me copying this, but in reading passages like this I know that I’ll never be able to put words together like that.