A look at the beginnings of a cable television that changed how sports is covered
Eric Deggans |
June 15, 2010 11:25 a.m.
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Couldn’t ESPN have predicted how annoying the impact of thousands of plastic horns blaring throughout the matches would sound to U.S. fans? With all the effort they put into 3-D technology, couldn’t they have created a secondary audio feed for American fans that mutes the troublesome horns, which mostly provide a tone like 1,000 angry bees droning underneath every match?
If the World Leader in sports coverage is using its blanket World Cup coverage as a way to prove it is ready for the Olympics, as the Associated Press recently implied, then finding a way to silence those horns would go a long way toward proving it’s ready for the big stage.
Of course, Bill Rassmussen still finds such talk amazing. When he and his partners first cooked up the idea of a 24-hour sports network, most cable systems were still used to provide better TV reception in rural areas where broadcasting was difficult.
Now, ESPN is on the verge of making many broadcast sources for sports news obsolete, available to nearly 90 percent of the nation’s TV households, with six domestic channels available in the U.S. and related platforms ranging from book publishing and a radio network to major online portals, restaurants and a complex near Walt Disney World in Orlando.
“Half of America has no idea what life was like before ESPN,” said Rasmussen, who founded the channel with his son Scott more than 30 years ago, unveiling the first broadcast on Sept. 7, 1979. “We didn’t even have fax machines, much less computers. And satellite television was brand new; nobody knew what it was.”
In fact, a spin through Rasmussen’s book Sports Junkies Rejoice: The Birth of ESPN, reveals he was at the very beginnings of a technology and programming revolution which would turn the TV world upside down. First published in 1983, the book has been re-released as his brainchild grows into a programming powerhouse big enough to dominate every aspect of sports coverage.
But all Rasmussen knew back in mid-1978 was that he had just been fired as communications director for the New England Whalers and as executive director of hockey star Gordie Howe’s Howe Enterprises and he needed a job.
Working with a few partners, Rasmussen hit on the idea of trying to package a bunch of Connecticut collegiate sports and Whalers games into an interstate TV network. By the time the E.S.P. Network (entertainment and sports) debuted, they were broadcasting Irish hurling to a potential audience of less than 2 million people.
But they had stumbled on the future of television: snagging the biggest niche audience possible.
Consider the channel’s first signature show, which remains a highlight for ESPN, SportsCenter.
When he and his son first dreamed up the idea of a half-hour show devoted to sports at 6:30 p.m., television experts at the time said they were insane, Rassmussen noted. “The cable industry said, ‘How are you going to fill it?’ and 93 percent of the people watching TV at that time are watching the evening news,” he recalled. “It’s suicide.”
But, as modern TV programmers now know, ESPN would offer what industry types now call “counter programming." Sometimes, the best way to get an audience is to offer something totally different than what they can find everywhere else.
That’s the game cable TV, and by extension ESPN, created almost from scratch, subverting and transforming the rules of television as the channel grew bigger and more pervasive.
Conventional wisdom back then said offering programming 24 hours a day was an expensive waste – not even the broadcast networks aired shows overnight, figuring nobody watches TV at 3 a.m. Now, cable operators have mined the value of pulling in viewers at all times of the day.
Experts back then figured no one would pay to access television who didn’t have to; but cable’s dual stream of revenues – money coming in from both subscription fees and advertising – allowed programmers like ESPN to target specific interests with high-quality programming. And there is no viewer with a more intense specific interest than a rabid sports fan.
And early cable TV systems only had 12 channels or so, many of which carried multiple affiliate stations airing the same network TV programming. The multi-tiered cable systems with premium, digital and standard channel options numbering in the hundreds would be decades away – a wide playground created by the explosion of demand and technology (after all, this is a world where people even pay for bottles of water).
“All of the networks back then only showed 1,300 hours of sports programming in a year; we were going to show 8,760 hours – six times what all of them did combined,” Rasmussen said, chuckling as he remembered how they built ESPN’s programming from kick boxing and Australian rules football to NCAA football games, the NFL draft and, eventually, Monday Night Football. “Some people wondered who would watch all of it.”
Located in Bristol, Conn., because it was close to his home and they could find a cheap plot of land for their satellite dishes, ESPN now fills more than 700,000 square feet in a complex with a dozen buildings over 116 acres in a town once home to less than 10,000 people.
Rasmussen and his family were cashed out of ESPN when it was sold to ABC, a company with its own ideas of how the franchise should be managed. Estimating he and his relations shared about 12 percent of the $237-million purchase price, the founding president has few complaints.
Sports Junkies Rejoice tells a painstaking story of how the project came together, with lots of detail on satellite transmission systems, early programming and sponsorships deals and early technological mishaps. It is, in the end, a read designed for mostly for the kind of ESPN fan who lives for the kind of minute detail that obsessives crave.
But between the lines stands a story of how modern television came to be invented – as most great American products are – by a handful of visionaries flying by the seat of some very inspired pants.
Eric Deggans is TV and Media Critic for the St. Petersburg Times and a 1990 graduate of the Indiana University School of Journalism. His work has also appeared in the Washington Post, Village Voice, VIBE magazine, Chicago Tribune, Detroit Free Press, Chicago Sun-Times and many other publications. He also writes a blog on media, The Feed, at blogs.tampabay.com/media.
