FSN's Altitude adjustment.

• Author: Schley, Stewart
• Position: FSN Rocky Mountain sports network television management

From his third-floor office, Tim Griggs has an expansive view of Denver's Platte Valley. On a concrete path below, bicyclists clad in colorful jerseys whir by. A latticed Ferris wheel at Six Flags Elitch Gardens idles in early morning repose.

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And in the distance you can see the oval outlines of the Pepsi Center, where two years ago a former colleague was preparing to fire a wicked curveball at the teeth of a business Griggs has been running for the past 11 years.

Griggs is the 51-year-old vice president and general manager of FSN Rocky Mountain, one of 16 regional TV sports networks owned by media mogul Rupert Murdoch's News Corp. The curveball was Altitude TV, the rival network conceived by Kroenke Sports Enterprises, which owns the Pepsi Center and most of the teams that play there. When Kroenke Sports unveiled its TV gamble in February 2004, it unraveled a longstanding arrangement between FSN and Kroenke's Denver Nuggets and Colorado Avalanche teams, which had pocketed millions of dollars a year for letting FSN televise live games and related coverage.

For Griggs and his bosses at Los Angeles-based Fox Cable Networks, the concept behind Altitude TV was nothing new. Team owners in a handful of markets had concluded it made more sense to run their own television network than to rent out rights to an independent company. But Altitude was unusually worrisome because Kroenke Sports controls both National Hockey League and National Basketball Association franchises. When Kroenke Sports launched its network, it ripped away a big share of FSN's live sports coverage, leaving a void in the network's fall and winter schedule, and a sinking feeling around FSN's offices.

"I think when Altitude initially launched, the impression was that we were going away," says Griggs, who grew up in Connecticut and remains a New York Yankees fan.

Instead, Griggs and his boss Robert Thompson, who runs Fox Cable's regional sports group, devised a game plan. Goal No. 1 was to hang on to the network's remaining high-profile pro sports deal, with baseball's Colorado Rockies. Struggling financially, the Rockies needed cash, and got it from FSN, which in 2004 signed a $200 million, 10-year rights accord and agreed to buy a minority share in the team for a reported $20 million. That arrangement sealed up spring-to-fall rights for 126 live games (another 24 are televised by corporate sibling KDVR-TV).

Griggs...