It's a great history of ESPN but for a sports book it is missing a scorecard to keep track of the hundreds of players in the book. It certainly has given me new insight into ESPN.

First of all, this book is HUGE (it barely fit in the library overnight return slot!)!! I still decided to give it a try but I only made it maybe 30 pages.

The first section (as far as I made it) is a series of thoughts from the big players involved in the creation of ESPN which is probably cool for someone who already knows some of it but I had a hard time keeping everyone straight and the format didn't keep my attention long enough for me to make much progress.

What worked great for Miller and Shales' book on SNL falls flat here. While the story of ESPN's birth and early years is quite interesting, the book's interviews are too centered on politics among personalities and business dealings and not enough on memorable moments at the network that the reader can relate to. As the book progresses, Miller and Shales don't seem to have a narrative to tie to the book, leading to anecdotes and dead ends that don't seem connected to anything that drives the ESPN story forward. While there is plenty of interesting stuff here, it's nowhere near as good as their book on SNL and goes on about 200 pages too long.

You know, the most interesting thing about this book is the story of how a giant business like ESPN gets started, survives the lean times, and eventually finds a way - through innovation and ruthlessness - to the top.

Sure, it's fun to read about sports geeks getting drunk, having sex and being obstinate, but I found myself latching on to the lessons being revealed about media, business, journalism and good old fashioned American tycooning in the modern age.

It's a big bitch of a book, and about 20% of the stories you could care less about and I did wonder why they even bothered with some anecdotes, but overall interesting and a little thought-provoking. Who knew?

This book suffers in some ways from being unorganized. You're reading something about some event in the history of sportscenter and suddenly the next paragraph is something by someone else that is completely unrelated. The books works best when using multiple voices to tell different sides of the same story, or get multiple opinions about the same event. When the books decides to ramble switching topics seemingly at random, it suffers as a narrative.

I found that as someone who started watching ESPN in the late 90's, the later chapters were more interesting as they provided inside knowledge of events I witnessed firsthand. For fans of ESPN or sports in general, this is a good account of how ESPN rose to its dominant place in the world of sports.

The bad: At over 700 pages, this easily could have been cut back by 25% and been even better. An oral history, there were too many quotes that just didn't need to be included. They also could have organized the whole thing better. Being someone who appreciates knowing the timeline as I'm reading, I liked the fact that it was organized in groups of years, but they could have broken it down even further, and put the corresponding quotes together in a clearer manner than they did.

The good: An amazing story of a true cultural phenomena, anyone interested in media, television, sports, or even pop culture history will appreciate this. Its an easy read too. Despite what I say above, I highly recommend it.

I really enjoy oral histories, and this one was fantastic. It covered all aspects of espn, which I found fascinating. It was interesting to see the behind-the-scenes of people and events I grew up with. Very well done.

753 pages long.....and about half of it was the business end of ESPN. Ok, that was not what I was looking for. I did get some inside dirt, but all the deals and figures and counter offers and buyouts really bored me. Worth picking up for the other stuff....stories are told by the tv personalities own words, and it's interesting to see (for example) how Kornheiser says "A" and then Tirico says "B", one paragraph right after another. Too bad we won't know which story is true.

I highly anticipated this book, knowing that it was going to be in the same format as the Saturday Night Live book "Live From New York". This book was a fast and entertaining read, but slightly disappointing. Where Live From New York focused on the personalities of Saturday Night Live, after a while Those Guys Have All The fun bounces from event to event, feeling a little tedious by the end. Part of that is the nature of the personalities, as many of ESPN's faces come off as prima donnas, which wasn't unexpected. I found that I learned more from the earlier part of the book (how ESPN was founded and got off the ground) that the later part (obnoxious personalities butting heads with management and other obnoxious personalities.