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12 sports books make a summer reading potluck

These 12 books range from the story of a family of baseball catchers to a tribute to the knuckleball to an introspective exploration by a woman rower and beyond. Together they offer a summer full of good reading.

7. ‘Every Town Is a Sports Town: Business Leadership at ESPN, from the Mailroom to the Boardroom,’ by George Bodenheimer

  • By Ross Atkin Contributor

George Bodenheimer’s career offers a window on the evolution of ESPN from an almost unimaginable 24-hour sports cable venture into a multimedia juggernaut. In Every Town, he recounts being hired in 1981 to work in the mailroom and drive around some of the on-air talent for $8,300 a year. As the the startup TV business caught on so did Bodenheimer, who rose in the ranks, eventually serving as ESPN’s president from 1998 to 2011, when he sold ESPN from town-to-town and cemented the company’s self-proclaimed status as “The Worldwide Leader in Sports.” In his memoir, he takes readers behind the scenes as ESPN negotiates major contracts and innovates with programming and technology.  

Here’s an excerpt from Every Town Is a Sports Town:

“Any curious person might be interested in how ESPN grew from a laughingstock to a household name. If I had to choose just one key to ESPN’s culture it was our strategic advantage. And over the years, we managed to perpetuate that entrepreneurial, underdog, never-stop-innovating mentality that went right along with it. From the beginning, ESPN’s strategy was to hire young people, put them in a team environment, and let them do what they did best. There was a reason, for example, that Chet Simmons and Scotty Connal started me in the mailroom as a driver. Their idea was to bring in young people who were not encumbered by the old ways of doing things. And then, in their ‘Monday Morning Quarterback’ meetings, the identified the hard workers and gave them even more responsibility, to see how they’d do.”

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Mark Sappenfield
Editor

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