Over the years, Cue has joked that sports were the only thing he was “smarter than Steve” about (as in Jobs). And, with time, he’s become something like the company’s sports ambassador. Earlier this year, I clocked Cue at the Super Bowl in Arizona, in February, and then at the Miami Grand Prix, in May. At home, he’s got nine televisions arrayed in a grid, plus a digital ticker relaying scores—the sort of sports-viewing system you’d dream up if you were a wildly successful, sports-mad tech executive. He’s become a courtside fixture at Warriors games. His true love is the men’s basketball team at Duke, his alma mater. (In a funny way, that’s thanks to the changing tides of sports broadcasting, too: Cue, who grew up in Miami, didn’t know much about the school until 1978, when its hoops team played well enough to make it into the nationally televised portion of March Madness.)
At work, he was sometimes able to put his knowledge to use. Years ago, he was excited to cut a deal with the NBA to sell recordings of Finals games on the iTunes Store. More recently, he helped dream up Apple TV’s “Close Game” notification, the alert that tells you when you’re missing a closely contested finish. But for the most part, Cue’s day job only rarely intersected with his identity as a sports fan. This was thanks, in part, to the way Apple goes about things: the company famously gets into a new line of business on its own terms, and the world of live sports is particularly resistant to change.
That’s one of the reasons, Cue told me, why he never expected to get into business with Major League Soccer in the first place. There is basically one way to start airing sports, and it didn’t appeal to Cue, or to Apple. “If you try to do a deal with almost everything that’s out there, it’s doing the exact same deal that has existed for the last 20 years: Pick a sport, pick a set of games, and pick a region. And that’s really all that’s been out there. It’s all the same,” he said. CBS pays the NFL to broadcast a handful of games on Sundays, while Amazon pays for sole possession of Thursday nights. “I knew we didn’t want to do that,” Cue said. “I was positive: we’re not going to get in the game of playing here if we have to play by those rules.” Beyond that, Cue was only interested in a deal that would allow Apple to influence “how to present [the game], deliver it, and use technology.” Apple wasn’t just looking for a sport to air—it wanted a sport that was open to being changed by Apple.
Sam Schube
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