Chapel Hill, North Carolina, U.S.A. – Every American sports fan has heard of ESPN. The brand is ubiquitous in the world of entertainment, shaping sports storytelling in the digital age since its launch in 1979.
Sports Heaven, a documentary covering the founding and growth of ESPN and the people behind it, premiered Sunday. Ittells the story of ESPN through the men and women who built it from nothing.
Listen to the author read this story:
Over a decade before ESPN’s first telecast, founder Bill Rasmussen spoke his first words on the radio in 1963 as a sports announcer. Rasmussen’s passion for sports took him to a commentator gig for the New England Whalers, a former pro ice hockey team then in Hartford, Connecticut.
Then, in 1978, the Whalers fired him.
Looking back, Rasmussen says it was “the best day of [his] life.”
Being let go from the Whalers was the catalyst for Rasmussen and his son Scott to create a sports media titan: ESPN.
They had no idea how they would pay for nationwide coverage or what satellite technology even meant, but it allowed them to broadcast to “sports junkies” across America, so they made some calls.
Al Parinello, a salesman at the Radio Corporation of America, met with the pair in a rented conference room in Plainville, Connecticut.
“That was the pivotal meeting,” the younger Rasmussen said. And soon, ESPN was on the air.
The launch wasn’t without its complications, and there were bumps along the road – literally. In a combination of interviews and animations, part of the documentary tells the story of the day before ESPN’s opening.
The Rasmussens argued in the car during a traffic jam about what their channel would broadcast, and Scott Rasmussen uttered a phrase that would change the company forever: “Play football all day, for all I care.”
So they did. They played sports, all day, everyday.
The elder Rasmussen took loans from family members and maxed out his credit cards to fund his company.
It was “the American dream,” said Bob Ley, one of ESPN’s first anchors, in an interview shown in Sports Heaven.
By 1979, Getty Oil helped Bill Rasmussen buy ESPN’s facility in Bristol, Connecticut.
Needing exposure, the NCAA paid ESPN to broadcast every single men’s basketball game. Then Anheuser-Busch invested $1 million to have their beer exclusively advertised on the network. Things were falling into line.
As ESPN grew, it began televising the NFL draft. It filled the 24/7 coverage with professional boxing, handball, and karting events. Ever watched Australian football?
As the company grew, unfortunately, so did internal fractures. Stuart Evey, a Getty Oil executive, butted heads with co-founder Scott Rasmussen and others from the original crew. Their final meeting ended with Scott Rasmussen walking away from ESPN in 1980.
That same year, the company fired Bill Rasmussen.
“That chessboard got crowded,” Ley said. “Some pieces had to leave.” But the company was left without its founders, the family business that sparked a media movement. “[Bill] is the story of ESPN, bar none.”
“It no longer felt like a family,” said Chuck Pagano, an ESPN engineer who had been with the company since its launch.
Scott Rasmussen summed it up.
“It was a big corporation taking advantage of a couple of guys who didn’t have good enough lawyers,” Rasmussen said. “That’s just the way it goes.”
In 1984, ABC bought the company from Getty Oil and the Rasmussens, who still owned 15 percent of the company.
Being owned by ABC made it easier for ESPN to compete for rights to other major sports events.
ESPN launched Sunday Night Football in 1987, and it quickly became the highest-rated NFL telecast, a run that lasted 17 years.
Then came ESPN Radio, a sports talk radio network with commentary programs and audio play-by-plays, and ESPN2, a channel broadcasting overflow and more niche sports. By the 1990s, it had expanded to over 75 million subscribers – a far cry from the struggling network without a penny to its name only about a decade earlier.
“It’s one thing to have a good idea,” ESPN President George Bodenheimer said. “It’s another thing to make it happen.”
Just like the sports they broadcast, ESPN’s history is filled with hard work, struggle, and unfair plays.
Sports Heaven tells the story of regular people who had a dream and dedicated their lives to an idea that nobody else believed in.
Sreehitha Gandluri is an Associate Editor with Youth Journalism International.
