Dick Ebersol
From Open Encyclopedia
Duncan "Dick" Ebersol (born July 28, 1947) is an American radio and TV manager. He was protégé of ABC Sports czar Roone Arledge and was a key NBC executive in the launching of Saturday Night Live in 1975 and which he produced from April 1981 to May 1985. He became president of NBC Sports in 1989. In May 2004, Dick Ebersol was named chairman of NBC Universal Sports & Olympics. He is responsible for all sports programming on the NBC and USA networks, and also manages NBC Universal's involvement with the Olympics.
He received his bachelor's degree from Yale University in 1971, after dropping out in 1968 to work as a researcher at ABC Sports for the 1968 Grenoble Winter Olympics.
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.
He has been instrumental in keeping the contract for University of Notre Dame football for NBC.
Ebersol has been married to actress Susan Saint James since 1981. They had three children, Charles, Willie, and Teddy. Saint James had two children from a previous marriage.
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, was 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 two breaks in his 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.
He and his family appeared on the Oprah Winfrey Show on February 2, 2006 to discuss the tragedy.
