How a young executive, two cable titans and a snowbound Denver morning became the launchpad for a lifelong strategy.
In November 1983, the Great Thanksgiving Blizzard arrived over Denver with over 20 inches of snow, the city locked down, schools and businesses shuttered, and Stapleton Airport closed. Yet from the snow swept runway of Newark we boarded the first flight in for the re-opening of Stapleton, three of us from the fledgling cable network UTV - Talk‑Back Television. Our destination: a scheduled meeting with John C. Malone and Robert “Bob” Magness of Tele‑Communications Inc. (TCI) -- then the dominant force and arbiter in the cable-TV world.
No phone lines were working. No assurances that Malone or Magness would even be present. Schools were closed, traffic halted, snowbanks towered. I stayed overnight at the airport Hilton, marched through half-frozen drifts, walked from terminal to hotel where not even a restaurant remained open, joined by UTV founder Frank D’Alessio and President Richard Levinson. Early the next morning, coat collars up, we trudged through locked doors at TCI headquarters in Englewood, Colorado. After minutes of knocking, Bob Magness emerged, in socks, bewildered by anyone who was there. Malone and Magness had slept in the office for three nights: the few people awake that week who believed the industry was moving whether the world paused or not.
Malone and Magness did not hide the truth at first: “You cannot expect funding at this time,” they said. But then -- they shifted. For the next two and a half hours, they opened up their perfect-storm strategy: how cable distribution would scale; how programming, carriage and funding networks would align; and how a tiny Talk-Back network might position itself for survival and growth. They sketched out the blueprint. We didn’t record it; we lived it. And I, as one of their earliest believers, took that plan and made it my own.
When I launched The Myers Report in 1984 -- born of that morning -- with UTV folded and the business landscape shifting, the playbook I followed had its origins in that snow-storm meeting. Cable networks, agencies, marketers: I advised them in a transforming industry, always with Malone’s timetable and insight in mind.
A decade later, at an industry event, I thanked John for giving me not only his blueprint for the future -- but for trusting a young executive early in his career. I asked him to share what came next. He smiled and leaned close, said simply: “Just follow Liberty Media.” That moment, colloquial yet powerful, proved to be prescient. Malone had built and folded, spun off and re-acquired. From TCI to Liberty Media, he rewrote the rules of cable and content.
“The key to future profitability and success in the cable business will be the ability to control programming costs through the leverage of size,” Malone told analyst David Wargo in 1982. He did not speak in fluff. He spoke in math, scale, cash-flow, leverage. “They haven’t repealed the laws of arithmetic… yet, anyway,” he quipped. As I listened in 1983, snow-crusted and wide-eyed, I understood that the future was not arriving next year -- it was arriving while we were bundled in scarves, knocking on locked doors, and asking to sit with the decision-makers.
John Malone, for me, was not simply the most influential driver of the cable industry -- he was a human being who extended trust and foresight at a moment when almost everyone else hunkered down and waited. He stayed in his office. He waited in socks for a young network to walk through the door in snow boots. And then he shared the road map.
That moment anchored my career: I didn’t just report on the industry -- I participated in it. I lived with the powers in Denver, Long Island, Boston, and Philadelphia; I tracked the acquisitions and the leveraged roll-ups; and I aligned my vision with Malone’s. I listened to the Madison Avenue halls of influence. But I added something: my own humanity, my own intelligence, and a belief that market insight meant more than spreadsheets -- it also meant stories, relationships, decisions made in airports and snowstorms.
In the years since, Malone’s legacy has grown: he led TCI’s transformation into the largest U.S. pay-tv operator in the 1980s and then built Liberty Media into one of the largest global media holders. His reputation earned epithets like “Cable Cowboy,” a nod to his frontier-scale mindset in an industry that once dared not dream. Yet behind the legend was a man who counted on the small meeting, the handshake in the snowstorm, the young executive ready to step up. That’s why this is more than a business story: it’s a tribute.
John, thank you for guiding our industry. Thank you for trusting me. I watched you move two steps ahead, and I chose to move right beside you. The blueprint you drew that morning remains alive in the work I continue to this day. The wires may change, the screens multiply, the storms differ -- but the DNA of strategy, trust, and foresight remains. And because you trusted early, I was ready to follow -- not just your blueprint, but our shared future.