EVEY, Stuart

PERSONAL: Male.

ADDRESSES: Home—Spokane, WA. Agent—c/o Triumph Books, 601 S. La Salle St., Ste. 500, Chicago, IL 60605.

CAREER: Consultant and entrepreneur. Getty Oil, senior executive for twenty-six years, founding chairman of ESPN (television sports network), 1979–85.

WRITINGS:

ESPN: The No-Holds-Barred Story of Power, Ego, Money, and Vision That Transformed a Culture (nonfiction), Triumph Books (Chicago, IL), 2004.

SIDELIGHTS: Stuart Evey was the business executive who developed the ESPN sports channel from an idea few believed could become such a massively successful venture. Evey was working as an executive for Getty Oil when he was approached with the idea of a satellite television network devoted exclusively to sports. At the time, broadcast television accounted for a huge majority of all television viewing, and interest in televised sports was considered minimal. Yet under Evey's guidance, ESPN quickly established itself, and went on to become a powerful media company with four television networks, a radio network, a magazine with more than 1.5 million subscribers, and even a chain of ESPN-themed restaurants. Evey's decision to fund the ESPN development proposal was considered a huge folly by many, and it was also a radical departure for the Getty Oil company, which had never before sponsored any such business venture. After the network became an undisputed success, Evey also showed his mastery of business by engineering a spirited bidding war for the sale of ESPN, ending in its sale to the ABC television network in 1985.

In his book ESPN: The No-Holds-Barred Story of Power, Ego, Money, and Vision That Transformed a Culture, Evey recounts ESPN's rise to the top in a way that seems "more like an autobiography than the story of a network," observed Jim Burns in Library Journal. In Burns's opinion, this book inspires admiration for Evey's "vision and guts." Noting that ESPN's meteoric rise was also due to the general boom in satellite and cable broadcasting, Booklist reviewer David Pitt reported that ESPN is "not just a book about a sports network," but about the changes that swept the television industry during that era. The publication of Evey's memoir coincided with the twenty-fifth anniversary of the sports network.

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

BOOKS

Evey, Stuart, ESPN: The No-Holds-Barred Story of Power, Ego, Money, and Vision That Transformed a Culture, Triumph Books (Chicago, IL), 2004.

PERIODICALS

Booklist, September 1, 2004, David Pitt, review of ESPN: The No-Holds-Barred Story of Power, Ego, Money, and Vision That Transformed a Culture, p. 47.

Library Journal, September 15, 2004, Jim Burns, review of ESPN, p. 64.

Publishers Weekly, August 23, 2004, review of ESPN, p. 49.

ONLINE

Eastern Washington University Web site, http://www.ewu.edu/ (June 13, 2005), "ESPN Founder Stuart Evey Will Speak at EWU."

Stuart Evey Home Page, http://www.stuevey.com (June 13, 2005).

Triumph Books Web site, http://www.triumphbooks.com/ (June 13, 2005), "Q & A with Stuart Evey, Author of ESPN: The No-Holds-Barred Story of Power, Ego, Money, and Vision That Transformed a Culture."