They could have been recruited in the gyms of the best engineering schools. The technojocks at Starwave have created a unique culture - and made ESPNET SportsZone the Number One destination site on the Web. With Disney as their new investor, they're poised for their highest score.
How's the song go? "That ain't working, that's the way you do it ..."
Robert Temple was playing ice hockey with his boss and drinking Henry Weinhard's on tap eight hours ago. Now he's sitting at a terminal piled high with LEGO and superhero playthings, showing me where Barry Bonds is likely to hit the ball if he's up against a left-handed pitcher in a losing game at 3Com Park. Oh yeah, and with the count in his favor. There's a virtual ball field on the screen with dots - lots of dots - for the fair balls Bonds hit in 1995 and 1996: Red dots for grounders. Black ones for line drives. Blue ones for fly balls.
You want just home runs? No problem. Temple, in shorts and a hockey shirt, gym bag at his feet, hits a couple of keys, and the dots vanish - except for a clump of red ones out in left field. It's just the kind of addictive feature that might push a garden-variety online sports fan over the edge and into 12-step territory. Temple wrote the Java applet that makes it happen.
A little over 40 minutes ago, Todd Greene was stealing rebounds from his boss at the Seattle Athletic Club gym. Now he's parked at his computer, trying to settle an owners' dispute in Fantasy Basketball, ESPNET SportsZone's automated online version of rotisserie baseball - do-it yourself dream teams. Young, bald, and carrying what looks like about 2 percent body fat, Greene is editing a report to the fictional league commissioner. When he comes across a particularly funny line, he shouts it out to the rest of the Fantasy League backroom crew - a couple of guys with hair, still wet from the postgame shower - and high fives fly. For franchise owners (it costs US$30 a season to join or $20 annually for SportsZone subscribers) who screw up and pick loser rosters, these guys have a policy: sure, you can get your money back - if you cry over the phone.
Forty-one-year-old Tom Phillips was born to run, which is what he's doing right now, up a pine-tree-covered hill outside Bellevue, Washington, in the middle of an otherwise busy weekday afternoon. Without missing a breath, he's explaining the rationale behind online sports: "Numbers are the language of sports. Pre-Internet, no medium offered sports data the way fans want it, need it, and demand it."
Phillips is president of joint ventures at Starwave Corporation, SportsZone's co-owner with ESPN, the TV sports giant. As part of his job, he trains a company team for the Hood To Coast relay and leads a weekly noontime Ultimate Frisbee match (this is granola-fueled Seattle, after all). Like many of his colleagues, he's a New York refugee who still gets pumped about the rich texture of life beyond the Hudson - conducting business in running shorts, for example. But he can also do the corporate rap as easily as he runs a 5:20 mile: "SportsZone gives you up-to-the minute data and the ability to analyze it every which way," he says during a break to point at the bank of clouds where the Olympic Mountains should be visible, maybe five months from now. "Millions of people who love sports are wondering how they lived without it."
Jock itch is an occupational hazard at SportsZone, home-cum-locker room of the reigning heavyweight champs of online sports. On a good day - say, a busy college football weekend or anytime during the NCAA Final Four - with hits pouring in by the millions, SportsZone's not just the world's busiest sports Web site. It's the Net's busiest destination, period, trashing all but the two or three top search engines and navigation sites.
For fans, it's the place to go for instant scores, live audio cybercasts, and video highlights, to read about Dennis Rodman's latest herpes lawsuit, or to dork around with stats on Frank Thomas's batting average against Roger Clemens. For its owners - the world's richest sports nut, Microsoft cofounder Paul Allen, and the little entertainment company whose other properties include Mickey Mouse - it's a screaming success, one of the few nonsex sites with users rabid enough to actually pay hard cash (a dollar a day, $4.95 a month, or $39.95 a year) to log on to SportsZone Premium, a grab bag of special features. And for the technojocks who make it happen, it's a 24-7 world: tough athletic competition one minute, nail-biting deadline sports coverage and mind-scrambling technology immersion the next - Web publishing as a contact sport.
Sports as technology, technology as sport: SportsZone is pushing two envelopes. It's about a content machine that's designed to be equally accessible - transparent, in software-jock lingo - to no-tech sports-nut editors and users alike. It's about databases loaded with literally every stat anyone's ever thought of - in virtually real time. It's about engineering that eschews vanilla HTML for dynamic objects and custom push channels. It's about maniacal fans, from South Bend, Indiana, or the South Pole. It's about killer execution meets dream content. And it's about having the time of your life helping other people have fun.
SportsZone shares its Bellevue headquarters with the rest of Starwave's ambitious Web lineup - Family Planet, Outside Online (a joint venture with Outside magazine), the Hollywood-geared Mr. Showbiz, and the recently launched CelebSite. The building is part of a nondescript freewayside office park, but any resemblance to the usual high tech warren ends at the door. There's Foosball in the lobby, Gatorade in the kitchen, after-hours foul-shot contests - even a couple of women among the 30 programmers, producers, and editors.
The stereotypical Web developer's office tends to black clothes and body piercings; here gym bags, sweaty towels, and antifungal cream are part of the decor. It's a place where potential career detonators - this actually happened - include getting caught using somebody else's towel in the on site locker room. "We tend to hire to a type," says Starwave chair and CEO Mike Slade. "A lot of people come here from the work-really-hard-then burn-it-off school."
Some of the lineup comes with big names as well, especially by Web start-up standards. Slade, a former newspaper sportswriter, came from Microsoft, where he was product manager for Excel. In his New York incarnation, Phillips was the founding publisher of Spy magazine. Starwave president and CTO Patrick Naughton, who can whack a hockey puck with semipro power and grace, was one of the key players behind the development of Sun Microsystems' Java. With 300 employees, Starwave is small enough that all three execs can split their time between SportsZone and the smaller sites.
It doesn't hurt, of course, to have a billionaire proprietor - especially one who can lend his regulation-size indoor home basketball court for Monday night intramural games. (Allen has another court in Portland, Oregon; his NBA Trail Blazers play there.) And if that's not enough, there's also SportsZone's co-owner, ESPN, the pioneering all-sports TV network. Based in Bristol, Connecticut - and already a Disney property - the cable giant brings veteran commentators, solid relations with athletes, brand credibility, and ad-sales help. Not to mention an audience of 71 million.
What that adds up to is the muscle, financial and otherwise, that has let Slade & Co. build an engineering powerhouse - SportsZone's core idea from day one in April 1995. The site's heart is Bulldog, a custom-built in house publishing tool that parses data from 15 simultaneous wire feeds, assembling it into thousands of carefully crafted software objects - by team, by player, by statistical category - that are continuously updated in as near to real time as the feeds allow.
It's a torrent of information second only to Wall Street's staggering output: Major League Baseball, the NBA, the NFL, the NHL, and NASCAR, pro tennis, and golf. Plus dozens of lesser sports entities (whose fans, needless to say, don't see it that way), including Major League Soccer, the Canadian Football League, the International Hockey League, the East Coast Hockey League, American Association Baseball, Texas League Baseball, and on down the list.
"We're dealing with hundreds of millions of pieces of live data," explains Naughton, who split his chin twice on the ice in February and at one point grew a goatee to cover the stitches. "We have software and databases that deal with every single sport, every single league in each of those sports, every single team, every single player. Every single game and scoring event that happens in any event at any time is live, within a few seconds."
And that's just the back end. The real fun happens out front, where, during March, as the parsers were struggling to keep up with every jump shot and turnover in the 64-team NCAA tournament, SportsZone put even more daylight between itself and the rest of the online sports pack - CBS SportsLine, MSNBC's Sports (its most popular site), and other big-time entries from USA Today and CNN.
That's when it launched Starwave Direct, a push-media channel that works with Microsoft's new Active Desktop, Netscape's Constellation, or SportsZone's own custom-built client. The idea: a system that infers - from watching where you go on the site, as well as a site map of your preferences - that you follow, say, anything involving hockey and only the 49ers in football, and that you don't care about auto racing or baseball drug busts.
It then transparently - there's that word again - feeds you the stuff you want, when you want it. No muss, no fuss. Says Naughton, "Most Web sites scramble to keep up with each new announcement, pushing unproven, unstable, and sometimes unusable technologies on unsuspecting users. We understand the difference between good technology and specious hype." Modesty doesn't seem to be part of Naughton's current playbook; Slade calls him a predator - an epithet pretty close to the ultimate SportsZone compliment.
In fact, no one at SportsZone is shy about the site's underlying ambition: to reinvent sports coverage. Publisher Geoff Reiss says it's a matter of switching viewpoints. "When two teams make a trade or when it was announced the other day that the Patriots are going to pick up the Jets' third- and fourth-round picks this year, second-round pick next year, and first-round pick in 1999 in exchange for allowing Bill Parcells to coach, the first thought that goes through a sports fan's mind is, Who got the better deal? Who made out?" says Reiss.
"But it's amazing how little traditional sports media looks at it the way the sports fan looks at it," he adds. "Fans want to be experts; they want to tell you everything you want to know about Bill Parcells. But I don't know how much the traditional sports media really answers the basic questions the fans have about the way things work and what's behind that. The traditional sports media has more and more worked as a relatively detached filter of information."
Hence another SportsZone mission: to make subscribers, 95 percent of whom are male and whose average age is 24.3 years, part of the story. They'll send a reporter into a locker room after an NBA game and open the questions up to online viewers. Anything you want to know from George Karl? The reporter - a SportsZone staffer or an ESPN TV regular on loan - will relay Karl's answers via laptop to the editors in Bellevue, who post them online. "Can we give each fan a distinct voice? No, that's not realistic," Reiss says. "But can we make it a pretty high priority to create opportunities for fans to be looped in? Yes. And it's an interesting part of the story that, say, 60 percent of the fans - a lot of whom are as knowledgeable as anyone covering the sport - think the Angels won in this trade or that the Dodgers got screwed."
Andy Scott, the 26-year-old associate publisher - his sport is basketball - puts it this way: "We just kick back and say, 'What do we want to see?'" That's the approach that spurred SportsZone to develop a sophisticated polling applet that enables users to select, for example, whom they think deserves to be baseball's highest-paid player.That was the question posted 20 minutes after Barry Bonds's record-breaking $11 million annual contract was announced. After Dennis Rodman was suspended for 11 games for kicking a photographer, the question was, Will he be suspended again by the end of the season?
The kick is that the poll isn't just interactive - it's real-time. You just select your answer and hit Submit Vote. Within two minutes, a results window pops onto your screen, reflecting your vote and showing how it stacks up against other fans' choices. For the salary poll, 27,699 fans weighed in: 49.7 percent gave the nod to Ken Griffey Jr., against only 16.3 percent for Bonds. As for Rodman, 57.6 percent thought he'd get another heave-ho. Sure enough, he did, a couple of weeks later, for slapping another player in the crotch.
Another hot feature is SportsZone's sortable stats, which lets a user custom-build what amount to dynamically updated sports spreadsheets. "Every time you hit a page, the tool can look at the statistics for a certain player or conference or league or position, can filter it by group, and can also sort it by points per game, points per played minutes, rebounds per game, rebounds per played minute," explains engineering manager Steve Beck. That sounds harder than it is.
Using software to make things go easy is another SportsZone hallmark. The much-improved ListRanker, for example, allows users to draw up a list of, say, their all-time favorite NBA guards or their favorite college football teams of 1993, then see how it stacks up against other users' choices. Last year, this process required a lot of complicated HTML forms; now it's a Java-powered drag-and-drop.
There's even bigger game down the road: convergence with television. The site's full name isn't ESPNET SportsZone for nothing, and everyone knows that the real prize will be to amalgamate the best of what TV can do - brilliant visuals and real-time clarity - and the best of the Web: responsiveness, depth, and interactivity, one-on-one. Downloadable video highlights are already happening; streamed video is in the works. The goal, says Reiss, is to create "the ultimate buffet, the all-you-can-eat for consumers of sports. It comes down to how easy do we make it for you, how much of it can we put under the hood."
It's the early days of March Madness, the 1997 NCAA Division I basketball finals, and Dan Shanoff, SportsZone's 24-year-old college hoops guru, is standing over a desk editor in the main SportsZone newsroom, dictating a preview for one of tomorrow's 16 first-round games. "UCLA holds a large, inside advantage," he's saying, "but the scrappy ..." Someone interrupts to confirm that he's just updated the site's special NCAA front-page index to reflect the results of the Texas-Wisconsin match. Another staffer says that somebody "upstairs" doesn't like the word index out front, and wants a more colorful title. From left field, someone else yells out that Gordy Howe is making a comeback, but Shanoff is already back rattling off previews: "The Musketeers could pose problems for a backcourt whose play has been spotty at best ..."
The NCAA championships are show time in the online sports world, and with 64 schools' worth of wired college kids craving minute-by-minute fixes, SportsZone's 15 Sun and Hewlett-Packard servers are setting records. Yesterday's was 4.9 million impressions, and today's traffic seems even heavier.
"Hey, look at this," says someone eyeing the Georgia-Chattanooga first round game on TV. "They want to run the clock, but Chattanooga's leading scorer fouls him in the backcourt." It's an upset in the works, with seconds left in the game, and Shanoff comes over to watch. Suddenly there's a shout: "I'm locked out!" Someone else says calmly, "The server just shut down." Everyone's screen is frozen.
"It's college students pounding the system - those kids are fanatics," says Shanoff, who looks like a student himself. The good news, it turns out, is that only Bulldog, the publishing system, is down; the public servers are fine, and the automated features are running normally. Suddenly sidelined, the editing crew stands around watching the televised game. When a score is announced or an impressive play is made, high fives go around. Ten minutes later, the system is back up, and everyone goes back to work.
Live human editors are fun, but the database and dynamic pages give SportsZone an incredible efficiency. Three-quarters of its 100,000 pages - including scores, stats, and schedules - are automated: the pages are continuously updated and sent out on the Web without encountering a human. Wire-service news stories go straight to another custom-built database. Editors make their choices from a friendly front end that shows the day's headlines; they cut, splice, or rewrite to taste, then pick a template, write a headline, and go. "It completely removes an editor from having to know HTML," says Harry Snyder, manager of the automated publishing group. "The templates allow producers to define how a page gets formatted. It describes what the page is going to look like. It's actually defining the HTML, but it's transparent to the editor." Says Beck, "You just hit Publish and, boom! It's out to the front page."
Most of SportsZone runs in Java, and not just in deference to Naughton. Everything is keyed to the database, which consists of executable objects preloaded with all the content needed for a particular page or feature. The system works like this: Objects wait to get all the necessary content - say, updated scores - from the wire parser. Once the objects are full, they get "published" in the system: a designated Java template pulls in the necessary content, then writes an HTML file. "The template language has some HTML in it," says Beck, "but we're basically getting away from that. It's our own proprietary language."
Starwave Direct, the new push feature, is even more heavily customized. "On the front end, there's a user experience that's almost like a next generation PointCast," says Slade. "It has a way to change channels and drill down relatively deep inside them. Instead of just saying, 'I care about the NBA, give me all the NBA stuff,' you can say, 'Oh, I care about the Blazers, but not about that Blazer. I care about this stat, not that stat.'
"Because we designed the database first, we can do things in more precise and more interesting ways," Slade adds. And because we're building the client, it's got an instrumentation in it that lets us watch what you do: 'This guy never reads about hockey. I'm never going to send him anything about hockey.'"
Says venture capitalist Neil Weintraut, a partner with the San Francisco based 21st Century Internet Venture Partners, "SportsZone is taking the consumer media experience to the next level. It's an early manifestation of one of the Internet's holy grails - machines do the work, down to the individual level."
Could push lead SportsZone away from HTML entirely? Naughton says that Web pages will continue to be part of the mix "because they're big traffic builders and revenue sources." But he and the SportsZone engineering crew are also writing eye-popping applications for both Active Desktop and Constellation that simply wouldn't be possible with existing technologies. Naughton jumps to a whiteboard to show an example. "Take ScorePost (a daily rundown of scores). There's a little applet that's stuck in this document," he says. "Pick it up, make it the whole world, and put documents in it - a complete inversion of the Web site. Rather than having applets stuck in documents, you have Java code that owns the world and understands it and treats documents just like they're images." Translation: stats that will do what you, the user, want.
On SportsZone's scale, that's daunting. "It's easy to push a Web site like Slate or Suck, basically a three-page Web site," says Naughton. "But with close to 100,000 pages, it's difficult to push the whole thing. The worst thing is what FreeLoader or BackWeb do, which is to take the front page and one-level-deep every link off of it." That's where big (and expensive) engineering comes in. "The thing is to be smarter," he says. "Environments like Active Desktop or Constellation or PointCast are generic. They know virtually nothing about the content. That really homogenizes the user experience. We need to do a lot more."
Nobody around SportsZone seems to doubt that they can do it. "We have programmers here who are doing more complex things, on a bigger scale, with sports statistics than they were doing before with, say, airline reservation systems," says Slade. "How cool is that?"
But some things are bigger than even a technojock's ego. "Our biggest problem is bandwidth," explains executive producer Jeff Day, taking a quick breather on the sidelines of a Friday intramural Ultimate Frisbee match. "Probably half our users are on their company networks and have T1 connections to the Internet. But the other half are at home and have modems. That means when we design the Web site, we're fairly restricted as to how big we can make applications and how big we can make graphics. Two or three years from now, with cable modems, more ISDN, satellite connections to the Internet, ADSL, all that, we'll be able to do more heavyweight stuff."
That can't happen soon enough for Team SportsZone. During my visit in March, streamed video was getting ready for launch. Live baseball on the desktop, and then some: You're watching the Mariners, Griffey batting against Clemens. You'll be able to click on Griffey and get all the stats. Or SportsZone might do it for you. "In real time," says Day, "we'll go to our database and be able to say, 'In this situation, against Clemens, bottom of the ninth, two outs, bases loaded, the Mariners down by four runs, this is what he's done before.'"
A little bit further down the road, Day says, "you'll be able to tell your computer or TV really specifically what your interests are. So when Chattanooga's about to upset Georgia, you get email, or a window opens up on your computer screen. Or you could even get paged on your PDA and tune in and watch it live - and you'd have synchronized live stats, even if you've tuned in at the last minute."
Those kinds of features won't come cheap, especially if the market in Internet sports broadcast rights heats up. The issue reared its head in March, during the Final Four weekend: NCAA officials barred reporters from SportsZone and other online sports-news sites from courtside in Indianapolis, in an effort to monopolize traffic for an official tournament site, FinalFour.net.
Those excluded - including USAToday's online division, which threatened legal action - were not amused. "You want your own people at events," says Gelman, who had to scramble and run wire accounts, "the same way you'd want your own people covering the White House."
But Slade and his crew have a leg up - several of them, in fact: ESPN's backing, along with long-standing deals to produce official sites for both the NBA and the NFL. More than that, though, SportsZone has made a breakthrough on the revenue front, proving that people - or sports nuts, at least - will pay for the right online stuff.
Launched late last year, SportsZone Premium put a password-protected gate on many of the site's hottest features, including sortable stats, cybercasts of every NBA game, and downloadable video highlights. As a privately held company, Starwave is guarded about numbers. But Reiss calls the experiment in tiering "an unqualified success. We've got people numbering well into the tens of thousands."
In April, that translated into exponentially bigger numbers: after months of closed-door negotiations, Disney - already part owner of SportsZone through ESPN - paid an undisclosed sum, reportedly $100 million, for a controlling stake in Starwave itself. The press releases went out of their way to say that Slade, Naughton, and the rest would be staying on - with suitably grander titles.
But the real payoff was a simultaneous announcement: their first job in Mouse Land would be to spearhead the long-awaited online plunge by another little Disney subsidiary, ABCNews. "The Internet represents what news on demand is all about," ABCchair Roone Arledge says, vowing to make the new venture "the world's premier Internet news service." Also in on the deal are Netscape and AOL, with a combined 16 million online vistors daily. In other words, television numbers.
Ironically enough, the squeaky-clean Mouse connection probably bars SportsZone from the one feature that some analysts think could be online sports' true killer app: instant betting. The billion-dollar allure is obvious - so much so that Washington lawmakers are already talking about trying to ban Internet wagering. But even without Disney, Starwave already has partners - the NBA and the NFL, for starters - who don't want to hear the word gambling. And as an NBA owner, Paul Allen couldn't even think about it. Not that he needs the money.
But there are other things on my mind as I watch Naughton fire slap shots in a funky rink somewhere in Seattle's northern reaches. I'm on the ice beside him, trying to balance on bad skates. But Naughton makes it look easy, which sums up what SportsZone does best - make things look easy and have fun doing it.
And then it's Henry Weinhard's time at a roadhouse saloon straight out of Twin Peaks. Naughton's still rolling. "The clean-and-simple user experience belies the complexity and completeness of our underlying software system," he says. "Unlike any other software environment in the world, we manage to harness the dynamic nature of the Web with almost constant subtle technological refinement."
Nine guys talk hockey and computers, who's up and who's down in the NHL, and how everybody played tonight. A second pitcher of beer arrives, there's more hockey talk, then suddenly the conversation switches to something that sounds a lot more like Silicon Valley: how much someone they all know overpaid for a hot new car - what one of the assembled testosterone-pumped geeks calls "a big dick on wheels." In the big leagues, wherever they are, boys seem to still be boys.
