Dick Ebersol

Duncan "Dick" Ebersol (born July 28, 1947) is a radio & TV manager. He was protégé of ABC Sports czar Roone Arledge and was a key NBC executive in launching of Saturday Night Live in 1975. He became president of NBC Sports in 1989.

As president of NBC Sports, he pursued several inventive and sometimes risky programming packages such as the Olympics Triple-Cast and the Baseball Network. He also been instrumental in keeping the contract for Fighting Irish Football for NBC.

NBC tried to hire Ebersol in 1974 by offering to name him president of their sports division, but at the age of 27, he decided he wasn't ready to compete against Arledge. Instead, he moved to NBC with a new title: Director of Weekend Late Night Programming. After NBC charged Ebersol to to find much less create something that could replace reruns of The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson, Ebersol along with Lorne Michaels, a former writer for Rowan and Martin's Laugh-In, conceived Saturday Night Live.

As Saturday Night Live took off, NBC promoted Ebersol to Vice President of Late-Night Programs, with an office in Burbank and responsibility over every late show that did not belong to Johnny Carson. Ebersol had become, at 28, the youngest vice president in NBC history. By 1977, he had become head of NBC's comedy and variety programming. Unfortunately, Ebersol has said that his only success in this period was hiring Brandon Tartikoff away from ABC to be his associate. After a confrontation with new programming director Fred Silverman, Ebersol quit his position at NBC, and Tartikoff replaced him.

Dick went into independent production, taking over The Midnight Special and various sports programming. Shortly afterward, however, NBC asked him to rescue Saturday Night Live. Executive producer Lorne Micheals, the original cast and writing staff left SNL after the 1979-80 season. The tenure of Michael's sucessor, Jean Doumanian turned out to be an absolute disaster. NBC would ultimately fire Doumanian and and Ebersol eventually agreed to produce the show if NBC would end Midnight Special.

Dick took Saturday Night Live off the air for a month of "retooling." Following this hiatus only one show was broadcast before a writers' strike in early 1981 halted production until fall. Meanwhile, he fired all of the cast except rising stars Joe Piscopo and Eddie Murphy, and hired Christine Ebersole (no relation), Mary Gross, and Tim Kazurinsky. Dick also brought back the head writer from the first season, Michael O'Donoghue.

No Sleep Productions, Dick's production house, had brought Friday Night Videos to NBC in 1983, where Michael Jackson's groundbreaking "Thriller" video debuted. The next year, Ebersol took over Friday Night Videos full-time, and shared the reins on Saturday Night Live with Bob Tischler. Some time later, Ebersol quit to spend more time at home, and Brandon Tartikoff, now his boss, hired Lorne Michaels as producer.

In 1985, he produced The Saturday Night Main Event, a series of World Wrestling Federation matches, to rotate in Saturday Night Live's off weeks. In 1988, he produced the very late-night Later with Bob Costas.

Dick Ebersol returned to NBC in April 1989 as President of NBC Sports. That July he was also named Senior Vice President of NBC News, a position that paralleled the situation of his mentor, Roone Arledge, at ABC. As the executive for the Today Show, Ebersol, who would eventually be removed from his post, presided over the controversial removal of Jane Pauley from the anchor desk in favor of Deborah Norville.

Dick Ebersol became hooked on television sports when he saw the debut of ABC's Wide World of Sports in 1963. Later, when that show was shooting in his area, he got errand jobs with the crew. By the winter of 1968 he was working as a research assistant for ABC's coverage of the Winter Olympics in Grenoble, France, and while finishing his studies at Yale, he worked full-time as a segment producer. In 1971, following graduation, he became an executive assistant and producer with Roone Arledge, vice president of ABC Sports and creator of Wide World of Sports.

Ebersol is the only person other than songwriter Carly Simon to know the name of the subject of Simon's hit song You're So Vain. He won the privilege of learning the name in a charity auction and is sworn to secrecy.

Ebersol has been married to actress Susan Saint James since 1981, although she has recently filed for divorce. They have five children.

On November 28, 2004, Ebersol was seriously injured in a charter plane crash in Montrose County, Colorado. The pilot of the Bombardier Challenger CL-601 and a flight attendant were killed. The body of Ebersol's son, Edward "Teddy" Ebersol, was found in the wreckage the following day [1]. The aircraft was departing from Montrose Regional Airport (near the Telluride Ski Area) for South Bend, Indiana where Charles Ebersol, Dick Ebersol's son who also survived the crash, is a senior at Notre Dame. Dick Ebersol suffered broken ribs, a broken sternum and had fluid in his lungs. Charles Ebersol suffered a broken hand and had a sore back. The co-pilot of the aircraft, Eric Wicksell, was in critical condition at a burn unit in Denver.

NTSB investigators said that the plane had not been de-iced prior to takeoff and that they were investigating other potential factors in the crash. Original eyewitness accounts said that the plane never even got off the ground: running off the runway, skidding across a road and crashing through a fence and into a field where it burst into flames. However, Ebersol himself said that the jet struggled at 20 feet in the air before falling back to the runway and breaking apart.

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Talk about smoking the competition: With the 1996 Atlanta games already in hand, Dick Ebersol of NBC sports has grabbed five more Olympics -- in the years 2000 to 2008