King George Steinbrenner’s lasting legacy may have been changing how teams televise sports
Eric Deggans |
July 20, 2010 12:15 p.m.
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It’s a notion that connects everything from the recent corruption of ESPN by LeBron James’ free agency to the not-yet-approved-but-we-know-govenrment’s-going-to-go-along-with-it purchase of a controlling interest in NBC-Universal by cable giant Comcast.
In a world where everyone has a channel, whoever owns the best content is king.
Steinbrenner realized that sooner than most, after earning nearly $500-million in a TV deal to telecast Yankee games through the 90s. Back then, his decision to pay Cablevision $30-million, get out of his TV deal in 2002 and start the Yankee Entertainment and Sports network was considered one of the most revolutionary ideas to transform sports.
Mostly because it turned on a simple idea. If you own the content, why not cut out the middleman?
Once YES was up and running, Steinbrenner could choose the announcers, choose the camera angles, and choose the storylines depicting his billion-dollar franchise during game telecasts, while earning ad revenue he could keep inside the family.
Under King George, the kinds of squabbles over carriage agreements which seem an annual event these days blossomed, as The Boss pushed cable systems to give him every penny his world famous franchise was worth and more. Because an audience wanted to watch the Yankees win. And that was power.
Other team owners would assemble the MLB Network or the NFL Network, but Steinbrenner did it first. Consciously or not, he tapped the value in using the content he controlled to take over as much of the media game as he could manage.
So don’t blame LeBron James or his people too much for pushing ESPN into selling its journalistic soul (feel free, however, to blame the Worldwide Sports Leader for giving in).
He was simply learning a lesson taught first by The Boss; when you own something, make sure you’re the one who exploits it the most, and the best.
This is why the coming union of Comcast and NBC Universal brings so much angst and anticipation for TV types, especially in the sports world.
Because, as Steinbrenner built his own distribution system for the content he controlled, Comcast has come to the equation in the opposite way – grabbing one of the biggest content creators in the media business to align with its direct pipeline reaching millions of users on the business end of its cable company.
There will be regulators and middlemen trying hard to put shackles on this deal. If you own rights to broadcast the Tour de France, you don’t necessarily want Versus lowballing its fees to Comcast just because the two are corporate cousins.
But in a way, resisting this rushing trend feels a bit like fighting waves at high tide. Consumers mostly want more convenient, more comprehensive, more efficient services – if uniting the content creator and content provider makes it happen, concerns over the monopoly side of it all will diminish.
In this, Steinbrenner also proved to be something of a pioneer. Let some crybaby sports fans grouse about his underhanded tactics, ruthless treatment of employees, win-at-all-costs ethic and strategy of leveraging the Yankees’ legacy and wealth to ensure the haves would dominate baseball for long years to come.
Steinbrenner knew winning brings lots of forgiveness. It reminded me a bit of another unlikely student of his example: Donald Trump.
As driven, big-spending moguls with a taste for the public space and a reputation for demanding a lot from employees, the two had more in common than some might allow.
But where Steinbrenner’s peculiar personal code kept him from touting himself too directly – even when The Boss played the good sport and finally taped an appearance on Seinfeld, it didn’t air — Trump turned his personal brand into a giant, moneymaking billboard, exploiting his status as a privileged winner in a way even King George might have seen as unseemly.
In the end, Steinbrenner’s example opened a door others have stampeded through to birth the always-available, 24-7 sports media culture that put those who create the spectacle in charge like never before.
And that may be the most appropriate legacy for a man who redefined the art of using media to control and exploit the most important franchise in the history of sports.
R.I.P. King George. Wonder if you realized what you started.
Eric Deggans is TV and Media Critic for the St. Petersburg Times and a 1990 graduate of the Indiana University School of Journalism. His work has also appeared in the Washington Post, Village Voice, VIBE magazine, Chicago Tribune, Detroit Free Press, Chicago Sun-Times and many other publications. He also writes a blog on media, The Feed, at blogs.tampabay.com/media.
