FanHouse MDSinBristol

Notes on an excursion to Bristol.

Many boxers disparage mixed martial arts. Sugar Ray Leonard is not one of them.

At the ESPN headquarters in Bristol on Friday to promote The Contender, Leonard said that as the sport of mixed martial arts has evolved, his appreciation for it has grown.

"When I first saw it, many years ago, before it was regulated, I squirmed," Leonard said. "But I like the fighters now."

Leonard mentioned Quinton "Rampage" Jackson, the Ultimate Fighting Championship light heavyweight champ, as a fighter he particularly respects. (He likes the chains Rampage wears, too.) He's also a fan of B.J. Penn.

And although the shows appear on competing networks, Leonard says he likes what UFC has done with The Ultimate Fighter, a show that is basically the same as The Contender, just with mixed martial arts instead of boxing. Leonard says he believes sports need stars, and reality shows are a good way to create them.

Notes on an excursion to Bristol.

ESPN announced today that it's launching a new news magazine show called E:60 that will be similar to HBO's Real Sports in the way it takes an in-depth, journalistic approach to the major stories in sports. Jeremy Schaap, Lisa Salters, Tom Farey, Rachel Nichols and Michael Smith are the on-air talent.

This part of ESPN's press release caught my eye:

Each segment will meld the stories with a glimpse of the reporters' experiences -- pitching the original idea, creating storylines with producers and interviewing their subjects. Reporters will interact with fans by "blogging" their experiences in the field.

Yes, they put "blogging" in quotes, which is a sure sign that they mean something different when they say "blogging," than you and I mean when we say "blogging." It sounds like a gimmick that won't last.

But aside from the "blogging," it sounds like a pretty good show, with the type of journalism that makes Real Sports great. They're promising real, hard-hitting journalism and solid storytelling. I'll be watching when the show debuts Tuesday, Oct. 16 at 7 p.m. ET.

Notes on an excursion to Bristol.

There's a great episode of Seinfeld in which George says to his boss, "Anyone ever tell you you look a lot like Sugar Ray Leonard?"

The boss doesn't take it as a compliment, though, and says, "I suppose we all look alike to you, right Costanza?"

For the rest of the episode, George tries, unsuccessfully, to convince his boss that he's not racist. It comes down to a final scene at a restaurant where George angers his boss so much that the boss storms out. Then George goes to pay the check, and the waiter, who's black, says, "Hey, Sugar Ray Leonard can eat here on the house."

Today I met Sugar Ray Leonard. He was in Bristol to promote The Contender, but I had to ask him about Seinfeld. And it turns out that although Ray likes Seinfeld, he's never seen that episode. I described it to him, and he laughed long and hard, and asked his publicist to get the episode for him on DVD. I have no doubt that Ray, who's just as likable in person as he is on TV, will enjoy it.

MDS is in Bristol for an ESPN Media Workshop. Here's his latest dispatch from behind the cameras of the Worldwide Leader.

ESPN's head of research gave a presentation Thursday about how people get their sports, with lots of bar graphs showing the amount of time viewers spend watching high definition vs. standard definition, how much time they spend looking at sports scores on the internet, and so on.

But what I was most interested in is what ESPN expects the numbers to look like in five or 10 years. And when I asked that, the answer I got was mobile devices. The future isn't ESPN providing you with your cell phone or your plan, any more than ESPN sells you your TV or your cable subscription. It's having a phone that allows you to watch ESPN, live, with a clear picture on a three-inch screen. Last year Dan Shanoff explained this perfectly:

ESPN *ON* a phone is hot.
ESPN *AS* a phone is not.

We're all familiar with the horror that is selfish uncles dying during the football season and forcing us to miss games with their funerals. Some day, we won't have to miss a thing.

MDS is in Bristol for an ESPN Media Workshop. Here's his latest dispatch from behind the cameras of the Worldwide Leader.

Monday Night Football's first year on ESPN was a huge ratings success, but ESPN decided to make a major change this season, dumping Joe Theismann in favor of Ron Jaworski.

Why shake things up when the ratings are so good? I put that question to a couple of ESPN decision-makers today, and John Skipper, the executive vice president for content, had an interesting answer:

"We want everybody who watches it to want to be in the fourth chair -- we want everybody to think they wish they could be in the booth. With Jaws we thought there'd be a little better chemistry."

I don't know many football fans who would have wanted to be the fourth person in last year's booth of Theismann, Tony Kornheiser and Mike Tirico. Tirico was fine, but Theismann and Kornheiser felt about as comfortable together as recently divorced parents forced to sit with each other at their kid's Pop Warner game.

With Jaworski, fans would kill to be in the booth. He's insightful, he's easy going, and if the preseason is any indication, he makes Kornheiser more comfortable and charismatic. I'd love to be the fourth man in that booth. I just hope ESPN won't ask me to be the fifth man in a booth with those three and Christian Slater.

MDS is in Bristol for an ESPN Media Workshop. Here's his latest dispatch from behind the cameras of the Worldwide Leader.

It's a sign of the incredible growth of the ESPN brand that at the Worldwide Leader's media event in Bristol today, someone asked if we could expect to see an ESPN brand of food.

Although the answer seems to be no ("We have not done any ESPN food products. Don't know if we ever will" was the ESPN senior vice president's answer), the mere fact that people can ask and answer -- with a straight face -- a question about a Berman Burger or other ESPN-oriented foods is amazing.

More amazing: It'd probably sell. Really, don't you think that the ESPN brand is so strong in the sports world that if they do roll out their own line of snacks to enjoy while you're watching the game, those snacks will be a success? ESPN executives say they don't just want to slap their label on anything. I think they'd do it if they're confident sports fans will buy it.

MDS is in Bristol for an ESPN Media Workshop. Here's his latest dispatch from behind the cameras of the Worldwide Leader.

Within minutes of writing that Matthew Berry is the next star at ESPN, I was besieged with e-mails. Maybe Berry already is a star: People certainly have strong opinions about him.

The most interesting thing I heard in those e-mails is that Berry used to be a writer on Married ... with Children. And since I saw Berry moments after learning that fact, I decided to ask him about it. Berry tells me that Married ... with Children is the reason he's now the face of fantasy sports at the Worldwide Leader.

Berry says he's been playing fantasy games since he was 15 years old, but that it only occurred to him that he could make money off his hobby when he saw a notice that a fantasy sports site was looking for a writer. (He didn't want to name the site, although it's not exactly rocket science to do a Google search and find out where he started.) He e-mailed the editor of the fantasy site, explained that he worked on Married ... with Children (a fact confirmed on his IMDB page) and was told that it was the favorite show of the people who ran the site. He got the job.

But it really wasn't a job, and as recently as 2004, Berry was doing it mostly as a hobby, making $100 a week writing fantasy columns online. Hooking up with ESPN and actually getting to the point where fantasy sports was a better gig than writing the screenplay for Crocodile Dundee in L.A. was a recent development. And a development that never would have happened if he hadn't once written about a high school football star turned women's shoe salesman.

How has Deadspin affected life for people at the Worldwide Leader in Sports? Today at the ESPN media workshop, John Walsh, an executive vice president and executive editor at ESPN, was asked that question.

"We publish less memos internally," Walsh said. "They put everybody on notice in the company that they're out to get ESPN and everyone who works here."

Walsh was referring to Deadspin's habit of obtaining and publishing ESPN memos, and I should add that I think Walsh was at least partly joking -- he's probably not quite as paranoid about Deadspin as that quote makes him sound.

And my own unscientific poll of various ESPN types indicates that the attitude in Bristol is mostly pro-Deadspin. Columnist Jemele Hill says she reads Deadspin regularly (she also reads The Big Lead, but insists that her salary falls far short of what The Big Lead says it is). ESPN the Magazine writer LZ Granderson likes Deadspin, too. And although they say so in hushed tones, just about everyone at ESPN will acknowledge that Deadspin is well written.

Note: Buster Olney seems to think all bloggers are vitriolic fans of either the Red Sox or the Yankees. I happen to know at least one blogger is a fan of the Cardinals, and he's more sarcastic than vitriolic.

MDS is in Bristol for an ESPN Media Workshop. Here's his latest dispatch from behind the cameras of the Worldwide Leader.

I've been in Bristol talking to ESPN folks for the last two days, and one name has surfaced more than any other: Matthew Berry.

That probably isn't the first name you would have guessed. Heck, it probably isn't the 50th name you would have guessed. But there's no doubt in my mind that people at ESPN think Berry can become for fantasy sports what Mel Kiper is for the NFL draft: The generally recognized leading expert and go-to guy for sound bites about every single player you can think of.

Berry, who first made a name for himself with the web site The Talented Mr. Roto, might be especially well-suited to becoming a star at ESPN because he provides two things that ESPN craves: He attracts fantasy players, and he has the ability to work on multiple ESPN platforms (TV, radio, the web, etc.) Be ready to see a lot of Berry this football season.

MDS is in Bristol for an ESPN Media Workshop. Here's his latest dispatch from behind the cameras of the Worldwide Leader.

Before she worked for ESPN, sports writer Jemele Hill was best known for writing a profile of Willis McGahee in which she rode in his car while asking questions like, "What's more troublesome, an ex-wife or a baby momma?"

Hill was criticized in many quarters for seeming to condone McGahee's rather casual attitude toward fatherhood, but at an ESPN media workshop today in Bristol, Hill made clear how she feels about McGahee: "He looked like a moron because he starts ripping on the mother of his children," Hill said.

And although the uproar surrounding her piece led to Hill receiving a written reprimand from her boss at the Orlando Sentinel, Hill says it also led to her moving on to bigger and better things, leaving the newspaper world for the Worldwide leader. (Although I'm not sure you can call arguing with Skip Bayless bigger and better.)

"I swear, I got a letter in my file -- even though I didn't publish the story myself -- for inappropriate content," Hill said. "That's when I knew I had outgrown newspapers."