“Hunting isn’t about relaxing, but about taking your mind away from other things,” he said.
At a recent quail hunt at Burge Plantation, a farm near Atlanta, Lazarus taught Fred Gaudelli, the producer of “Sunday Night Football,” and Drew Esocoff, the director, how to use a rifle. Gaudelli was worried that he would shoot a dog. He didn’t. He shot only dirt, no birds. But Esocoff bagged three quails.
“Drew had bloodlust,” Lazarus said with some pride.
Lazarus, 48, may need hunting more than ever to balance the intensity of his job, which is to build a new sports empire — not necessarily to compete head-on with ESPN, but to give it a stiff challenge.
He is blending NBC Sports, which he calls a “350-hour-a-year production boutique” that existed on weekends, except during the Olympics, with the sports properties that Comcast brought along when it took over NBC Universal: the profitable Versus and Golf Channel cable networks and 11 regional sports channels.“NBC Sports has a great heritage and legacy, but it had limitations,” he said, alluding to its lack of a cable sports side to add financial strength. “The Comcast Sports Group didn’t have that great heritage and legacy. One of the great joys is to create a new group where each side longed for what the other one had.”
Since replacing Dick Ebersol in May, Lazarus has been part of the Comcast/NBC group that extended NBC’s long Olympic run from 2014 to 2020 for $4.38 billion; added Major League Soccer, primarily to benefit Versus; renewed the PGA Tour deal to benefit NBC and the Golf Channel; and renewed the “Sunday Night Football” contract last week for nine years at an average of $950 million annually.
A month before the N.F.L. deal was signed, Lazarus predicted that the league had to provide much more to NBC if the network was going to pay much more. And working with Steve Burke, the chief executive of NBC Universal, he got a divisional playoff game, a Thanksgiving night game, three Super Bowls over nine years and video rights that will let Versus introduce two programs, one a Sunday pregame show.
Simultaneously, he is overseeing the transformation of Versus into a more viable, higher-quality channel that will be renamed the NBC Sports Network on Jan. 2. Already, the changes are apparent, in the creation of a weekday program, “NBC Sports Talk,” and the weekly “NFL Turning Point,” which both have modest ratings, and the addition next year of an interview show and town meetings hosted by Bob Costas.
Don Garber, the M.L.S. commissioner, said he declined to stay at Fox Soccer Channel for more money because Lazarus and other executives convinced him of their vision about the future NBC Sports Network.
“Dick never really embraced the game, but that was a function of NBC being steeped in traditional sports,” Garber said. “Mark comes from the cable world, where you need to be hungrier and more innovative.”
At a recent industry conference, Lazarus said that Versus, which is anchored by the N.H.L., must improve markedly to push its number of subscribers to beyond 90 million from 76 million.
“You can’t get an audience’s trust if you’re all over the place,” he said.
The quail-hunting Lazarus will reduce Versus’s successful hunting and fishing shows while seeking college rights, like the overhauled Big East Conference’s, and others that will become available in the next year or two, like those of Major League Baseball and Nascar. An eight-game Thursday night N.F.L. schedule could be auctioned even sooner.
According to people who have worked with him, Lazarus is a consensus-builder who fits into Comcast’s conservative style, which spreads credit liberally. “No one was running around in isolation,” he said of the team that negotiated with the N.F.L. Lazarus lacks Ebersol’s swagger but relies on a self-deprecating manner, a business background and his wit to win over converts.
“He doesn’t need to be acknowledged as a big cheese,” Costas said.
Ebersol and several executives who were close to him declined to be interviewed.
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