ESPN is literally going back to the beginning on Monday night when it debuts a 90-minute documentary about its creation.
“Sports Heaven: The Birth of ESPN” will premieres at 8:30 p.m. EDT. It will air the same night as the championship game of the NCAA Tournament, an event that helped put the network on the map by showing early-round games.
The documentary showcases Bill Rasmussen and his son, Scott Rasmussen, as they bring to life the idea of a network that would carry sports around the clock.
“Many people claim to be the founders of ESPN. The founders are most definitely Bill and Scott Rasmussen,” said Rosa Gatti, who was ESPN’s publicist from 1980 through 2013.
Bill Rasmussen’s original idea was a cable channel covering only Connecticut sports. Many cable operators in the state were skeptical, but someone suggested buying satellite time to reach a national audience.
The documentary also covers how the Rasmussens secured financial backing from Getty Oil, a rights deal with the NCAA, and built a studio in Bristol, Connecticut, still under construction when ESPN went on the air on Sept. 7, 1979.
The Getty investment and the deal with the NCAA occurred on the same day.
“When someone tells you you can’t do something, you want to prove them wrong,” Bill Rasmussen said. “Many, many people told us there wasn’t enough sports to do a 24-hour channel. I didn’t argue with anybody. I just thought they were wrong and I was right.”
The first minutes of ESPN going on the air are shown, along with the frantic four hours before the debut. George Grande welcomed viewers to the first “SportsCenter” broadcast before the network’s first live event, a slow-pitch softball game between the Kentucky Bourbons and the Milwaukee Schlitz.
“In those days, we didn’t know if we’d last four weeks, four years, let alone 40-some, but we knew it was special,” Grande said. “Bottom line was Bill Rasmussen was the true pervader of the original American dream, and he gave us all something very special that we still have today.”
In an ESPN blog post previewing the documentary, Scott Rasmussen said his estimate of how many households the network would reach by the end of the 1980’s was a little off.
“I estimated that ESPN would be in 30 million cable households by the end of the ’80s. That certainly seemed aggressive at a time when only 12 million households in the country had cable television,” he wrote. “When all was said and done, my numbers were way off. Rather than my optimistic projection of 30 million households, ESPN ended up in nearly 60 million households by the end of the ’80s!
“That success says more about the tens of thousands of people who worked at ESPN after I left than it does about my projections. My work showed what was possible; their work made it happen.”
The Rasmussens were forced out of ESPN in 1980. At the time, Getty owned 85% of the network.
Bill Rasmussen and the network were estranged until 1999, when company executives invited him to the 20th anniversary celebration. Since then, he has been embraced and recognized for his vision of creating an all-sports network. He toured the country in 2019 for the 40th anniversary and gave speeches at Walt Disney Company and ESPN events.
The documentary marks the first time Scott Rasmussen has spoken at length about the network’s birth and its early days.
“There was a whole lot of chutzpah and a whole lot of vision, and they’re maxed out on their credit cards. It’s the American dream,” said Bob Ley, one of the network’s original anchors.
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