Dick Ebersol Quotations

With Tyrone Willingham, the football program is in the right hands. He embodies Notre Dame's core values, and his leadership, character and drive assure Notre Dame's return to its traditional place among the elite national powers.

The Olympics were produced absolutely the same way from 1960 through 1988. It was always the Western World against the Eastern Bloc. You didn't even have to spend one second developing the character of any of the Eastern Bloc athletes. It was just good guys and bad guys.

You want to do Olympics just like you do a pro football game or a basketball game? Be my guest. Watch it all fade away.

Out all of these zillions of letters, one of the first ones that came was, as it turned out from Johnny Carson within the last five or six weeks of his life. I had worked with him. He lost a son who had worked for me.

I will never be cynical again about people.

If there's anything that is the center of my career both creatively and emotionally, it's the Olympics.

I live more than anything else to produce the Games.

She says that I wore some pretty sexy leather pants to that first meeting, but I don't remember.

The second host that I had was an actress I didn't know named Susan St. James.

The definition of winning has become distorted. If winning the rights to a property brings with it hundreds of millions of dollars in losses, what have you won? When faced with the prospect of heavy financial losses, we have consistently walked away and have done so again.

We're asked that question every time before an Olympics, and I really don't believe it's going to happen. The Olympics are unique. People come in large numbers . . . to really be engaged by these very unique athletes who put so much on the line for such a brief, brief period of their athletic careers.

The real issue though to this point, the money that pays for the Olympics, for our rights, is still largely money coming from television advertising. As soon as we see significant money start to come in in fields like the Internet and wireless we'll adjust our policies even more.

I am thrilled that we were able to give NASCAR this record-breaking rating for the exciting sport of stock car racing.

He's certainly the greatest play-by-play person up to this point that NBC sports has ever had. He literally carried the sports division at NBC for so many years on his back. ... He was a remarkable talent, and he was an even more remarkable human being.

He not only got me off of the plane. He ran back into the plane, which had 3- or 4-foot flames all around it, to look for his brother one more time.

John is much more than a football legend, he's an American icon, ... He is the only sports television talent who resonates across all ages - kids grow up today playing his video game and watching him on TV, as their fathers grew up watching him on NFL sidelines every Sunday.

I was just swept away with how that sounded. It just rolls off your mouth.

I saw Al and told him I was hiring Fred. That's when it really hit him.

Sterling made an enormous impression on us at his audition. He has always been unafraid to speak his mind and will bring strong, informed opinions to the show. He has tremendous on-air chemistry with Bob, Cris and Jerome and is the ideal choice to complete our 'Football Night in America' team. I can't wait to get started this fall.

The amazing thing about Bode is that unlike anybody else skiing today, he's going to ski all five disciplines during the Games. He'll be a story through the entirety of the Games.

I was never really a big presence in the home.

We're all a part of General Electric and GE is an earnings-driven company,

We earn nothing from those rights; they've had no value in the United States.

We'll say what we want, but it's the league's schedule.

We had to make the decision here and we passed,

We made every projection we thought we would in terms of profit. We found a way to satisfy every client who had bought advertising here.

We're particularly thrilled with the upscale nature of the events we've picked up.

This time, uniquely, our competitors have very, very, very strong programming.

When you heard Curt Gowdy call a game, you knew it was a big game.

When we made the deal with the NFL this spring, there were four key stars I knew I wanted to build our football team around, but I wondered from the beginning, if I would be lucky enough to get them all.

Figure skating is a sport with its own subculture filled with behind-the-scenes intrigue, fashion, glamour and tremendous drama.

We will probably discuss and update our position tomorrow.

We knew going into our discussions with the TOUR that NBC wanted to become an even bigger player in TOUR programming. We are delighted that we are doubling the number of TOUR events we'll cover. We'll be continuing our coverage of golf's Southern Swing in March and we are particularly excited to extend our relationship with THE PLAYERS Championship, which should have an even greater impact in its new May date. We're also excited about covering the final three weeks of the Championship Series, two World Golf Championships and The Presidents Cup, and the high level of competition and drama those events each embodies.

What am I supposed to do, jump up and down and whine? If this were 15 years ago, I'd be bemoaning my fate. But I'm in my late 50's, and the realities of life have shown themselves clearly to me.

We feel what the audience wants is as much coverage as we can provide for them.

We have defined ourselves by our unprecedented lineup of major championship events, and today we are enhancing that roster, ... Adding the Triple Crown to the Breeders Cup gives us unique promotional opportunities for our telecasts and for the sport.

At this point we are not even discussing make-goods, and it's the belief of the business side of the company that we won't need to.

The Winter Games happen only once every four years. 'Idol' is going to be there for hours and hours and hours, well into May.

The Ryder Cup, with the world's premier golfers putting it all on the line for national pride, is essentially the Olympics of golf. In our 15 years of broadcasting the event, we have been blessed with some extremely exciting competitions that have led to such dramatic broadcasts. The pride and genuine nationalism displayed by the players at the Ryder Cup makes it unique and sports fans identify it as something very special.

After seeing the results of pre-Olympic Trials and competitions and looking at the schedule more closely, we've decided that now there was simply too much rich content featuring some of this Olympics' biggest stars and we needed more time to tell these great stories on these three nights. If I didn't add these new hours, I would feel like we would have left the audience wanting more.

The Olympics will now be opened to an entirely new part of the world where one-fifth of the world's population can experience the world's greatest event for the first time,

The Olympic opening ceremony is the most important event for the vast majority of the athletes here. Most won't come close to a medal. And for them, this is the pinnacle of their athletic careers.

Story is a driving force of anything in sports and entertainment. Not having the playoffs play out in front of the large audience as they had done in the past I think was one factor.

Now he's got the best of both worlds.

The bottom line is we did not deliver the goods with that league, ... This sport (arena football) is well organized at the grass roots level, operations and players, rules and regulations ... all those things that were part of us tripping ourselves up a year ago with the XFL.

They tell us they want to watch the Games when they're available to watch the Games. Over 90 percent of them say that they're available in prime time and at no other point during the day.

And I had no idea what that was.

It was the highest television rating in that entire 24-hour period.

They were the tabloid Olympics. They had the fascination of everybody in the world. Entertainment Tonight would be hanging around at the Olympics ice practice sessions.

can't speak for (Michaels), but the only issue is money.

He told me this incredible story that Walt's first really big production as a cartoonist for the cinema had been a character called Oswald the Lucky Rabbit, which was before Mickey. And for reasons that aren't still totally clear to me, Walt lost those rights. He didn't have the money to hold onto them.

I don't think the love affair with the Olympics has changed one iota. What you're asking with an Olympics is for people to give up every night for two weeks of their lives, and they have to be given reasons to do that.

He believed in him and told the organizers in whatever country the Olympics was in that they should use him.

For the first time a major sports property has largely migrated from network to cable, where the dual revenue streams of subscriber fees and advertising can support the escalating costs of broadcast sports rights, ... In the future, it will become almost impossible for broadcast television sports to match the power of those 'sub' fees, which are unique to the cable world.

The first thing I said to Susan in the emergency room was, 'Honey, you're just going to have to realize that we were blessed to have 14 incredible years with Teddy. He's gone.'

All the electronic marvels now available to viewers are a major selling point in our Olympics coverage.