Overview

It began, in 1979, as a mad idea of starting a cable channel to televise local sporting events throughout the state of Connecticut. Today, ESPN is arguably the most successful network in modern television history, spanning eight channels in the Unites States and around the world. But the inside story of its rise has never been fully told-until now. Drawing upon over five hundred interviews with the greatest names in ESPN's history and an all-star collection of some of the world's finest athletes, bestselling authors James Miller and Tom Shales take us behind the cameras. Now, in their own words, the men and women who made ESPN great reveal the secrets behind its success-as well as the many scandals, rivalries, off-screen battles and triumphs that have accompanied that ascent. From the unknown producers and business visionaries to the most famous faces on television, it's all here.

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9781611136616

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Reviews

ESPN fans will love hearing all the inside stories, told with emotion and candor, and will savor the book as much as they enjoy a sudden-death playoff. -- AudioFile A championship effort by two men who can rightfully lay claim to having written the book on ESPN. -- Kirkus Reviews Sports fans have hours of fun listening ahead. -- Booklist Packed with entertaining stories of unpleasant people and awful behavior...offers a nuanced look at ESPN, does some top-notch TV-biz reporting on the early days of the cable industry, and offers compelling behind-the-scenes stories...a serious, impressive, piece of work. -- Entertainment Weekly This treat for sports fans has a cast of characters that is huge and varied. -- New York Times Fascinating and compulsively readable. -- Wall Street Journal Miller and Shales must be extraordinarily talented interviewers, because their subjects are surprisingly uninhibited and frank and willing to dish and slag...by the end of the book you're amazed at the disconnect between the chaos behind the scenes and the relatively slick end product. -- Time

ESPN fans will love hearing all the inside stories, told with emotion and candor, and will savor the book as much as they enjoy a sudden-death playoff. -- AudioFile This treat for sports fans has a cast of characters that is huge and varied. -- New York Times Miller and Shales must be extraordinarily talented interviewers, because their subjects are surprisingly uninhibited and frank and willing to dish and slag...by the end of the book you're amazed at the disconnect between the chaos behind the scenes and the relatively slick end product. -- Time A championship effort by two men who can rightfully lay claim to having written the book on ESPN. -- Kirkus Reviews Sports fans have hours of fun listening ahead. -- Booklist Packed with entertaining stories of unpleasant people and awful behavior...offers a nuanced look at ESPN, does some top-notch TV-biz reporting on the early days of the cable industry, and offers compelling behind-the-scenes stories...a serious, impressive, piece of work. -- Entertainment Weekly Fascinating and compulsively readable. -- Wall Street Journal

A championship effort by two men who can rightfully lay claim to having written the book on ESPN. -- Kirkus Reviews ESPN fans will love hearing all the inside stories, told with emotion and candor, and will savor the book as much as they enjoy a sudden-death playoff. -- AudioFile Fascinating and compulsively readable. -- Wall Street Journal Miller and Shales must be extraordinarily talented interviewers, because their subjects are surprisingly uninhibited and frank and willing to dish and slag...by the end of the book you're amazed at the disconnect between the chaos behind the scenes and the relatively slick end product. -- Time Packed with entertaining stories of unpleasant people and awful behavior...offers a nuanced look at ESPN, does some top-notch TV-biz reporting on the early days of the cable industry, and offers compelling behind-the-scenes stories...a serious, impressive, piece of work. -- Entertainment Weekly Sports fans have hours of fun listening ahead. -- Booklist This treat for sports fans has a cast of characters that is huge and varied. -- New York Times

Author Information

James Andrew Miller is an award-winning journalist and coauthor of the #1 New York Times bestseller Those Guys Have All the Fun: Inside the World of ESPN; Live from New York: The Complete, Uncensored History of Saturday Night Live as Told by Its Stars, Writers, and Guests, which spent four months on the New York Times bestseller list; and Running in Place: Inside the Senate. He has written for the Washington Post, the New York Times, Vanity Fair, and others. He is a graduate of Occidental College, Oxford University, and Harvard Business School. Tom Shales served as TV critic of The Washington Post for twenty-five years, winning the Pulitzer Prize for criticism in 1989. Shales also spent two decades reviewing movies for NPR's Morning Edition and is the coauthor of two bestsellers: Live from New York and Those Guys Have All the Fun. MATT MCCARTHY is an assistant professor of medicine at Cornell and a staff physician at Weill Cornell Medical Center. His work has appeared in Sports Illustrated, Slate, The New England Journal of Medicine, and Deadspin, where he writes the Medspin column. His first book, Odd Man Out, was a New York Times bestseller.

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