Straight Shooter by Stephen A. Smith

Author:Stephen A. Smith
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Gallery/13A
Published: 2023-01-17T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 10 THE BEGINNING OF MY RESURRECTION

Before I could reach out to anybody about a new job, I got the most unexpected call I could have imagined: from George Bodenheimer, then president of ESPN and ABC Sports. He asked me to come to his office just days after my official exit.

If there’s a nicer executive in this cutthroat business, I haven’t met him. Bodenheimer started in the mailroom at ESPN, so he always seemed to have a bottom-up feel for the place. He was incredibly unassuming; for a guy who held the kind of power he did, he never came across as somebody who was anxious to use it. He was smart, fair-minded, and totally committed to the well-being of the company.

No one has treated me with more respect and decency in my entire career than Bodenheimer. He was like that from the moment I met him, just weeks after I started at ESPN. He’d made it clear then that he believed I would do big things for the company. As our relationship continued to develop, he would remind me from time to time that folks at ESPN believed in me, and with that belief came expectations and responsibilities.

My interpretation of what he said was that trust would play a big role in how successful anyone is in this business. That no matter how big the talent, if that person was seen as someone who wouldn’t hesitate to throw a colleague under the bus when things got tough, that person should expect a hard time getting to wherever he or she wanted to go. So when I received the call from Bodenheimer, I didn’t know what to expect.

I immediately thought back to the last time Bodenheimer called me to his office, ten months earlier, in June 2008, weeks after my contract negotiations stalled. He’d summoned me there from Boston, where I was working the NBA finals between the Celtics and Lakers. He wanted to have a heart-to-heart about things he was hearing concerning my feelings and behavior toward some of his subordinates—the honchos running the day-to-day operations at ESPN.

In his spacious office, Bodenheimer listened intently as I explained myself and all the underhanded rhetoric being spewed about me. He acknowledged a few of my points, admitting he could see how I’d drawn some of my conclusions. He then pointed out the flip side—the side my mother later pointed out to me when I fled to her home after my firing.

“A lot of what you’re expressing is how you feel, it’s your perception,” Bodenheimer began. “But what about what others are saying? They’re entitled to their perceptions of you, just like you have your perceptions of them. And if they’re your bosses, with negative thoughts about you, where do you think that’s going to get you?”

Where it got me is back inside Bodenheimer’s tenth-floor office, only now as an ex-employee. I didn’t blame him for any of it, of course. After all, he’d tried to warn me, indirectly, of what might happen nearly a year earlier.

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