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By Simon Applebaum
On most nights, ESPN Deportes general manager Lino Garcia limits the high-tech tools in his possession to a cell phone and Blackberry. He's not a gadget guy--so he says.
But a few minutes after I join Garcia at Shea Stadium to watch the hapless New York Mets play the Houston Astros, he pulls out a Kyocera palm-size digital camera and starts shooting the crowd. He had bought it from a Radio Shack in L.A. for $399 while attending the 10th anniversary X Games. The device--loaded with 4 megapixels and able to hold two hours of video in a single bound--outperforms the trusty Canon I'm using to snap his picture.
"I just had to pick this up," says Garcia, a member of the Deportes contingent that had attended a pre-game ESPN picnic held behind the left field bleachers. He videotapes a 360-degree view of the fans as they eat wieners and burgers and get autographs from mascot Mr. Met. He's a bit more enthusiastic about the camera than about his dapper--particularly for Shea--attire for the night. It just so happens that Garcia is nattily dressed in a green sport jacket and light blue shirt.
"Someone should have sent me the memo," he sighs. "At least I left the tie at home."
Luckily, Garcia doesn't leave his passion for sports at home or at the office. In the 14 months he's been in charge of ESPN's 24/7 Latino-focused channel, Garcia has expanded his own sports skills and become a sharp-eyed event attendee. At the X Games, Garcia and his 12-year-old son received surfing lessons before watching the athletes step into the water. "I appreciated that competition more," he reflects the morning after our rendezvous at Shea. "A lot of those athletes are there for the pure enjoyment of sports, compared to the money. It's a throwback to the athletes of many years ago who were paid a fair wage, but [were] not getting the multimillions."
In one sense, attending the ESPN picnic at Shea as GM of the Spanish-language Deportes reminded Garcia of his first cable job in 1988--as the first sales rep Time Warner Cable hired for New York City advertising. Local cable sales then was a nascent business. "The analogy is that the Spanish-language local cable advertising market now is at the same place local sales in the general cable market were back then," Garcia notes. "That gives you the opportunity to grow this category into a tremendous market."
Garcia wasn't the only one who experienced a roots reconnect. For several years in the late 1990s, going outdoors in August with colleagues for BBQ at Shea or Belmont Park was one of my favorite summer activities. Sometimes my colleagues brought special guests along to watch the races or root for the home team. Generally, they weren't at the executive level of NBC Universal Cable president David Zaslav or Comcast Spotlight chief Charlie Thurston. They both surfaced at Shea, along with ex-Lifetime sports programmer Brian Donlon, who brought along some of the staff and talent of Cold Pizza, the ESPN2 morning show he executive produces.
Garcia tries to mix business with pleasure equally when attending events in person. "You have to pick and choose your spots. It's important to entertain your clients, while immersing them in the sports we cover," he says.
ESPN Deportes is hitting the back stretch of its first 24/7 year (the venture was a Sunday night block before going full-time nine months ago), and Garcia is pleased with his managerial performance so far. Sports Illustrated is pleased too: The magazine named him one of the 101 Most Influential Minorities in Sports. "I'm happy with what we put on the air, the level of talent we have and the national advertiser support we're picking up," Garcia adds. "We're also happy with the way we reach out to athletes to express themselves in Spanish."
A picnic just for Deportes staff, affiliate and advertiser clients is on Garcia's 2005 must-do list. Perhaps the Mets will come up with some of the same--sadly uncharacteristic--batting magic: They came through for us as we sat in the orange bleachers last month, rallying from behind to beat the Astros 7-3.
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