In the early 1980s, when Denver’s Tele-Communications Inc. was the
fastest-growing cable company nobody had ever heard of, enterprising
reporters (defined as those who had finished at least one cup of coffee)
could occasionally get president John Malone on the phone simply by calling
the switchboard. No gauntlet of PR people to run, no voice mail messages
fading to nowhere. You left a message with Marty, Malone’s assistant, and
that day or the next day your phone would ring and there would be the
understated baritone voice: “This is John Malone.”
Interviewing Malone was like the moment in the first Indiana Jones movie
where Harrison Ford opens the ark: a brush-up with something unusual and
genuine. Whatever you asked, Malone would answer. He feared nobody, and knew
more than everybody, and as a result, he was unusually candid.
I’m flashing back because once again Malone is in the news, or at least his
company is in the news, and the story revolves around such an bizarrely
spiced brew of tax laws and changes to modern-day sports ownership that it
conjures memories of the old TCI, where Malone and his boss Bob Magness
scarcely allowed a month to pass without formulating some sort of
brain-mangling partnership with some good ol boy cable pioneer from Texas
or Arkansas that involved a stepped-up equity play and, inevitably, a way to
wash so much asset depreciation across a financial statement that the
Treasury Department couldn’t come anywhere near the place.
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