While the existing staff of The Early Show deals with its own dilemma, the saga of executive producer hopeful Ben Sherwood continues. Or maybe it doesn’t.

Despite a push from his CAA team on both coasts, we’re hearing his chances may be slipping, or have all but disappeared already.

But that won’t keep us from bringing you this twenty-year old Spy magazine article! After all, we’ve already gone through his old emails.

The October 1998 article, posted in full after the jump, profiles Ben when he’s a 24-year-old Rhodes scholar at Oxford. What do we learn?

• He went to prep school
• He’s the son of a “well-connected Beverly Hills lawyer”
• His parents paid kids to play with him and his siblings
• His Harvard peers bonded over hating Sherwood and his enthusiasm, with one classmate saying people made it their business to dislike him, and with one going so far as to say, “When you think Ben Sherwood, you think funny stories, you think asshole, you think ‘Thank God I’m not him.’”
• He thinks Machiavelli is misunderstood
• He likes magic tricks. And mime
• He wanted to lead the Harvard Crimson, and ended up with internships at the Los Angeles Times (no thanks to family friend, publisher Tom Johnson) and CBS before spending three months with the United Nations on the Thailand-Cambodia border (where he discussed fellowships with others) and a stint at the World Bank
• He took an interest in rugby to “lock up my Rhodes,” but it’s arguable whether he ever played a single game at Harvard. His teammates did like to strip him naked and force beer down his throat, though