ESPN’s John Skipper Suddenly Has a Drug Problem

There are any number of Fortune 500 company CEO’s who you’d be hard pressed to figure out why they make tens of millions a year despite their companies failing fortunes. Marissa Mayer comes to mind. Outside of being a reasonably attractive female CEO, of which there are basically none others, she drove Yahoo! in a reverse Jeffersons, from the penthouse to the outhouse and a low-ball buyout, while remaining highly lauded in the popular media.

ESPN chief John Skipper has had one non-illustrious track record since taking over the top management spot in 2012. He’s been partly hounded by the largely uncontrollable market forces of cord-cutting and sports leagues demanding larger television contract fees, but he’s also managed to make very publicly lousy decisions at every turn.

Skipper has presided over ESPN during a series of Disney-corporate ordered layoffs of prominent sportscasters and reporters. This as he took the sports network clearly into a realm of progressive leaning social and political bents, including some controversial firings of conservative sports personalities while coddling Jemele Hill and other employees with inflammatory anti-Trump and anti-middle America public rants.

The nail in Skipper’s coffin was likely struck this past week with a Boston Globe article detailing sexual harassment patterns at ESPN, because Disney doesn’t mind losing a few hundred million on a leftist sports network, but it’ll be damned if it’s being tarred with the disturbing taint of dick jokes in the office.

Yet, Skipper was still not fired. He was allowed to resign, blaming his mutually agreed upon quitting on a suddenly revealed substance abuse issue. Skipper issued a statement about his disease that you’d have to be cruel to call out as shamelessly self-serving and bogus:

“I have struggled for many years with a substance addiction. I have decided that the most important thing I can do right now is to take care of my problem. I come to this public disclosure with embarrassment, trepidation and a feeling of having let others I care about down. As I deal with this issue and what it means to me and my family, I ask for appropriate privacy and a little understanding.”

So the appropriate time to quit being the drug addict President is after 500 people have lost their jobs beneath you? After you decided an Asian sports announcer named Richard Lee may be confused with the Confederate general Robert E. Lee so you pulled him from covering a UVA game? 

It wouldn’t be shocking to learn that Skipper’s substantially below-par operation of ESPN was in part due to booze or cocaine or opioids. Hard to imagine Disney and ESPN weren’t aware of such a situation for a long time now. Now seemed to be the right time to bring it up. Integrity is a convenience the powerful can’t afford.

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