ESPN Book Reveals How Much of a Jackass Olbermann is

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The excerpts published from the new book “Those Guys Have All The Fun” which chronicles the story of ESPN, tell us what we already know about Keith Olbermann.

The excerpts have been published in this month’s issue of GQ magazine, focusing most of it’s attention on the former “SportsCenter” anchor.

Olbermann and Dan Patrick are often wrongfully credited with putting ESPN’s flagship program on the map, but in fairness to both they did reinvent SportsCenter and made it one of the most entertaining shows on television.

Some of the book’s reviewers see Olbermann as a savvy businessman, but the following excerpt paints a picture of just how unrealistic he was regarding his salary.

“Based on the reported profits of the Today show and the salaries of its key figures, a fair ratio was to pay your talent a total figure of about 10 percent of their show’s profits. Working off numbers I had gotten from a sales guy in the N.Y.C. office, I calculated that the correct salaries for Dan and me were about $2,750,000 a year. And a year and a half later, Fox offered me a contract for something like $2,813,000 a year. The top salary paid to anybody doing SportsCenter had been whatever I was getting, which I think topped out around $310,000 a year.”

I don’t begrudge Olbermann for trying to make more money, but using the “Today” show as a base for his argument was absurd.

NBC’s flagship morning program was and is a well-established property that has existed since the 1950′s and is watched by millions.

Attempting to argue a salary increase using a program on one of the three major networks and comparing it to a late night sports-oriented newscast on a still young cable network suggests Olbermann wasn’t nearly as savvy as some would have us believe.

And not once throughout all of the excerpts will you see Olbermann acknowledge the most important fact; without ESPN he may have ended up being a cab driver.

Olbermann’s biggest problem throughout his career has been his ego and inability to accept reality, that reality being his presence at ESPN amounted to nothing more than an employee working for a television network.

ESPN provided him the opportunity to make a name for himself, and for that he re-payed them by alienating everyone at the network.

Just as ESPN dumped him, Olbermann’s much publicized departure from MSNBC suggests that he remains a self-absorbed egotist.

Olbermann has clearly failed to recognize that the guy who signs the checks gets to make the rules, and that’s always been the predominant issue he can’t seem to get his head wrapped around.

Despite what he obviously believes, the networks that have employed him survived before his arrival and will continue to survive now that he’s gone.

Now that’s he’s with fellow Kool-Aid drinker Al Gore’s Current TV, he may have finally found a home that’s perfect for him – a low rated cable network that less than 1 percent of Americans will watch.

His presence on Current TV will amount to nothing more than a man whose past has caught up with him, but Olbermann will never admit that because he’s too blind to see it.

No one questions Olbermann’s journalistic abilities, but his lack of integrity, disloyalty and overly inflated ego have led him down this path, a path that he alone paved.