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David Hill Speaks Out By George Stahl
Five years later, Hill returns to Fox Sports - after finishing a three-year gig as head of the whole network - to lead the new Fox Sports Television Group, which includes the Fox network, and its Major League Baseball and National Football League contracts, as well as Fox Sports Net, a consortium of 22 regional sports cable channels that has contracts with 70 professional teams. In a wide-ranging, 15-minute impromptu interview with ArmchairQB.com, the 53-year-old Australian said he sees his new role as molding Fox Sports with Fox Sports Net. We already see that happening with the recent announcement of Fox Sports Net's new hourlong NFL This Morning, which will air at 11 a.m. Sundays. The show, co-hosted by Chris Myers and former Rams lineman Jackie Slater, will flow into Fox's popular Fox NFL Sunday and will employ Fox announcers such as John Madden, Matt Millen, Bill Maas and Ron Pitts. Between the two pregame shows, Fox can now match ESPN's two-hour NFL Countdown. During the interview with ArmchairQB.com, Hill discussed Fox's rivalry with ESPN, why he doesn't worry about jobs and what his greatest achievement is at Fox.
You get a bunch of guys together, and whether or not they’re playing marbles, pinochle, knuckles, what are you going to have? Now you get two bunches of guys doing sports television on cable - what do you think is going to happen?
I think we got a ways... I think from a standing start three years ago that there’s been some excellent strides made. I think that Keith Olbermann is far and away the best sports broadcaster I’ve ever seen anywhere in the world. I think he’s a genius. I think we’ve got to put more investment into that particular area to get it up to where I’d like to see it.
Conflict only develops if you don’t establish guidelines going in. The one thing that we’ve been able to do in the company right from the get-go is establish firm walls between the broadcast entities and the ownership entities.
The people that work for it.
[laughs] Fairly intense.
First and foremost is that they have to have an unbelievably excellent television sense before anything else. Before sports. They’ve got to understand television and television production in its entirety. And I can say this because I’ve worked around the world, but the people that work at Fox Sports now, I think, is the best team in the world. Television is never about one person. Television sports, especially, is really a team game. It’s not really how good any one person is. You’ve got to have that depth from top to bottom, and then you can make it work. If there’s one thing I look for in a potential employee, it’s someone who has fun doing what they’re doing. That they have a great sense of humor and, to them, it’s not a job it’s a love.
Very much. I really enjoy doing what I’m doing. Always have.
NASCAR. ... [Why?] Because I love it.
Where there’s life, there’s hope.
Absolutely. Of course. The Olympics are the greatest drama of all time. For a production entity, it’s awesome. It’s what it’s all about.
They keep pushing it back. They way they’re going you’ll see it quite soon that the starting date will be Memorial Day 2010.
What’s really encouraging with that is the way the people have taken to it. It really is encouraging how Europeans have gotten over the mystic of American football because it’s so more complicated than soccer, which is what they are used to. Once they understand it, they love it. And there’s a very valuable lesson there in that no one can presume that sports can’t be shifted without doing a huge education process. But now that’s happened and, in Europe, people have really taken to it and loving the game.
Soccer won’t be big in the United States for at least another two generations.
Because it will become part of the culture. It will be a niche sport - unfortunately, because I love it - for a while but I believe it could be up there with the NFL, but it’ll be in two generations. I can see the day coming in 40 years or 50 years where San Francisco going to Dallas will be the top-rated sport in the country, but it’ll be soccer. But that’s not going to happen in a while.
No, not at all. The bottom-line is that the consumer is now god. What does annoy me is when so-called experts look at ratings and say, “Oh, look, the ratings are down because in 1961, it had" ... whatever. The consumer right now is absolutely king and god, and will continue to be so. If the number of alternative entertainment forms available on a day-by-day basis are increasing exponentially, then you can’t consider what one championship did compared to a championship five years ago because the competitive environment has probably changed. For example, ArmchairQB.com wasn’t on last time and that’s probably going to take a lot of people’s attention off the games. He says facetiously. What you’ve got to do is look at it against where we are at today. How does this rate against ER? How does this rate against Frasier? How does this rate against any other form of entertainment that’s available to the general public right now, today? If you look at that, sports is still god. It’s pointless saying, “Now, compared to a year ago or five years ago...” The reason is there’s another 20 cable channels. There’s a new DVD. There’s another 10 million Web sites. There’s someone sitting, downloading CDs that they weren’t doing last year. The whole comparison is absolutely odious. You’ve got to compare across the board with all other forms of entertainment. And when you look at that, you realize that sports is still the strongest and still the driving force in the entertainment world.
No.
Oh, I don’t know. ... Ever since I started in this business, when I was 19. I always thought I’d go back to working as a bricking laborer. I never have any concerns about jobs because I’m a very good bricklayer’s laborer.
The proudest thing I think I’ve ever done in my life was creating the box with the score and time in the corner. I was talking to a friend of mine in Germany a couple weeks ago. He said, “Do you realize that if you had patented this and you charged every television station in the world that runs it - because they all do now - charged them a dollar a minute," he said, "you’d never have to work again?" I said, “I’d probably be buying a house next to Bill Gates.” The whole deal about sports television is about making the sports fan as close to the action as possible. And if you sit in a stadium, you always have a clock and a score there. So why not translate that to the television screen? That was my thinking when I dreamed the thing up. So, of everything I’ve done, I think that that is the greatest aid to viewers. And if that’s what we’re in the business for, then that’s what I’m most proud of.
Holograms. Holograms will be able to put you on the 50 yard line, and you’ll see the game happening right on the table-top in front of you. Then what’ll you have is huge speakers on either side, and you’ve got all the audio coming through. And if you want a flat monitor, you can have a flat monitor, which will give you replays when you hit a button - and the players will do what they just done. And you can either listen to it with commentary or without commentary.
No idea. If I knew, I wouldn’t be working. Photo courtesy of Fox Broadcasting Co. Back
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NEW
YORK (AQB)--In 1994, David Hill started Fox Sports from scratch.
Actually, to say Hill started Fox Sports from scratch, is assuming
that he had scratch. He had nothing. 
Is
there a big rivalry between Fox and ESPN?
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