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* Excerpts were taken from Rasmussen’s interview for the ESPN 25th anniversary
How would you describe the days leading up to sign-on in 1979?
Rasmussen: Hectic, chaotic, frantic. Leading up to the actual launch on the night of September 7, we thought they were frantic and hectic in late August and we had no idea that after Labor Day, the Monday preceding going on the air, the hectic meter was at a high level. We didn’t have everything into the studio. We actually went on the air and had a remote truck outside. We didn’t have a control room that worked and there were people still cleaning windows and picking things up at 6:30, and we weren’t going on the air until 7, so it was pretty frantic.
How did you come up with the idea of ESPN?
Rasmussen: It actually was in late June of 1978. I had been fired by the New England Whalers and had to do something, and we were sitting around, brainstorming, and then we had an idea about doing something in the state of Connecticut. I spoke to a cable operator, United Cable, and they said, ‘there’s this new thing called satellite about to happen. You ought to find out about it.’ So we talked to the RCA people and they said, 'yeah, it’s really true. You can do this, this, and this,' and we said we’ll take one. We had no idea what we were taking, but we took a satellite. We got our reservation in and we were fortunate that we were in line before all the big guys discovered satellites, so we had one and then we had to decide what to do with it, and sports is what happened.
What were your short-term goals?
Rasmussen: We thought we would just do it within the state of Connecticut. When we spoke with the RCA representative about satellite, we found out we could do the entire United States, basically all of North America, for no more cost. So, we thought, wow, that’s terrific. What are we going to put on all this time? We started with University of Connecticut events, just to test it, and we discovered -- the University of Connecticut discovered -- I’ll never forget John Toner, the athletic director, saying, ‘We heard from one of our alumni in Alaska and another one in Fort Myers, Florida, just because you put that test on.’ We thought we might have something if we could send this picture of something and do sports all over the North American continent, we’d do pretty well.
Were they hitting cable companies or did people pull it out of the air?
Rasmussen: It had to be through a cable company. Back then, there were very few earth stations. There were probably less than 100 when we did our first test, all over North America. We had no idea where it was going, really, but some people answered, so we thought we were onto something. Cable seemed to be a place to go. It hadn’t gone anywhere for 25 years and now the satellite was there and it seemed to be a logical next move.
What were your long-term plans?
Rasmussen: Long-term, we wanted to be 24 hours a day, obviously, and we wanted to present both college and professional sports around the clock. We went to Denver and thought, if we could sell it for a penny a day, that would be a pretty good deal. Thirty cents a month and you could have 24 hours, and they thought we were absolutely crazy. They said it’ll never work. We said we also want to throw in advertising and that’s when they were sure we were crazy because nobody advertised on cable in those days. We thought that if we could present quality sports, college sports, and then supplement it with professional sports because we couldn’t possibly get the NFL or MLB and so on at that early date, that we would do very well.
Were you hesitant about approaching the leagues?
Rasmussen: We had a lot of enthusiasm. We weren’t inhibited by facts, so we just went and told the story of what we wanted to do. We thought that Pete Rozelle, who was the commissioner of the NFL at that time, and Val Pinchback, the broadcast director, would be a good audience. We talked to them. They listened intently. This was now in 1979 and they said it’s a little too early in the development of cable, but one day, you come back and the NFL is going to be on cable television. We said, of course, we assume it’s going to be ESPN and, as it turned out, it was ESPN.
We did the game thing with baseball. We talked to the NHL. The NHL was in a little different boat in those days. They were not very receptive. Major League Baseball was about the same as the NFL. We were a little early, but they were looking ahead. They were visionaries too. They wanted to distribute their product wherever they could.
What did you think when they said, keep the door open?
Rasmussen: We didn’t have cell phones in those days. I couldn’t wait to get off the elevator and to the nearest phone and say, ‘guess what they just said?’ We will be there someday. Of course, I only had four people to call because we only had four people working in Connecticut at that point. It was exciting. That was really the first feeling that here is a major professional sport not just throwing us out the door. That was pretty impressive and pretty exciting.
What was your master plan for staying on the air?
Rasmussen: We hatched this crazy idea that we would do sports, obviously around the clock, but there was still something missing and we hit upon the idea of doing a half-hour sports news show. Again, when you’re uninhibited by facts and no dollars, you can just brainstorm all you want. We said, ‘let’s put it on at 6:30, opposite the big three news networks.’ That was the plan right from the start. We thought that would be a defining moment, if we could say, ‘look, sports fans, you can watch the headlines with the big three guys or you can watch sports with us,’ and that’s what happened.
What was the impetus for showing early round NCAA basketball games?
Rasmussen: We had made the presentation to the NCAA in a very bold way. We said, you conduct 34, 36 championship events. It was about three dozen championship events, and the only thing that ever got really good television coverage was the NCAA Final Four. They’d do some games, but then they would do the third place game, semifinals and so on. We said to the NCAA, we’ll do every single game, and I can remember (former NCAA executive director) Walter Byers, to this day, saying, ‘every game?’ And I said, yup. He said, ‘what about Weber State and Lamar?’ I said, if they’re in the tournament, we’ll do Weber State and Lamar. And we did, as it turned out that first year.
The NCAA was such a quality brand that, if we could associate ourselves with the basketball tournament, nobody had ever seen many of those early round games. The NCAA really embraced the idea and, of course, fans just loved it.
Why was that such a defining moment?
Rasmussen: Up until that time, we had done a lot of taped college football games. We did some regular season basketball games, but … we were just filling time. One of our early programs was Irish hurling from Limerick, Ireland. We got a lot of people to watch that because we played it about a dozen times, but the NCAA basketball tournament, with the hoopla that they put around it, was our first really major event with quality teams, players that people knew, teams that people knew, and the idea that being able to see all those games just captured the sports writers’ of the day imagination and fans knew about it.
What was the schedule like?
Rasmussen: A friend of mine, who is a basketball coach, said he sat down at noon. He couldn’t believe he could see tournament games starting at noon. He watched all the way through until NBC came on the air that night with their one game or two games, and then we picked right up again and kept on going. For those who might have missed it, we replayed some tapes and started over again the next day. It was just literally wall to wall basketball. We didn’t, in those days, have a lot of commercials, so we just played basketball and just went around the clock.
What was special about it?
Rasmussen: When you’re in the business, you hear people talking and you see sports writers from everywhere and, of course, we would get clippings from around the country and coaches were saying, ‘can you believe this?’ … We thought, wow, if all these people are talking about this, this really is special. And that brought advertising money. It brought more cable subscribers. It was a turning point in those early days. That was a big moment. That was the first big thing we had done.
Did you plan to acquire this programming?
Rasmussen: We had already committed to do it before we signed on. When we made the deal with the NCAA, it was signed in 2/79 and we had committed to do the lacrosse Final Four, the soccer Final Four, the hockey Final Four, and all of the NCAA basketball tournament that wasn’t on network television. We had decided and committed, in contract with the NCAA, a year before, so we had to do it.
Was there anything revolutionary about how those games were televised?
Rasmussen: The fascinating thing was that we were able to cut in and out of games and the whip-around theory that was developed by ESPN. I know that this is a prejudicial statement, but after CBS bought them, I still don’t think they have it as good as ESPN had it in those early days. The guys just, they had a feel for the games and when to cut from one to another and fans felt that they were getting their full measure of all of the games that were happening that night.
What attention did ESPN get from broadcasting these games?
Rasmussen: Everybody in the media was basically incredulous. How can these guys be doing this? You know, who would think about doing all these games? Who’s watching all these games? Because a lot of people at that time, the standard question was, ‘who’s going to watch sports 24 hours a day anyway?’ Now we’re going to play basketball essentially around the clock. They thought we were really kind of crazy, but we were crazy enough that they wanted to watch and see what happened, and then they all wrote about it. It was pretty exciting.
How did this speak to potential of the network?
Rasmussen: It demonstrated the ability to be at several venues at the same time and be able to interface, if you will, with all of those venues and bring people what was happening at five or six different sites through the course of the evening, with some meaning. People could actually see what was happening. They got a feel for it. ESPN, long after I was no longer involved, they just kept improving on that feeling that the fan was at all the games and, no matter what was happening, when it came time for the NCAA Final Four, or the tournament … you really couldn’t be anyplace else but ESPN.
How important was the move to televise the 1980 NFL Draft?
Rasmussen: It was a big deal. I can remember people wondering, even the NFL kind of said, ‘do you really want to come and put a camera and watch these guys sit around on the clock for 15 minutes and so on? ‘ Chet Simmons, who had been involved with the networks in New York for a number of years, and Scott Connell, really got involved with that, built a tremendous library of graphics and turned it into a show, and all of a sudden the fans said, hey, that’s pretty neat.
Why was America’s Cup in ‘83 and ‘87 special?
Rasmussen: People were pretty excited about NCAA basketball and so on, and we had a strong core of fans, fans being the viewers. Cable systems still had to be convinced and it was a long, hard chore, convincing cable systems that we had something really good for them. It appeared on the front page of USA Today, how ESPN brought back the America’s Cup from Australia, however many satellite links there were, and people were having parties in the middle of the night, watching it.
All of a sudden, ESPN was there with the big guys. NBC hadn’t done that. ABC and CBS hadn’t done that. Here’s ESPN down under, doing this marvelous thing. Even though America’s Cup doesn’t have the fan base that let’s say some of the mainstream sports do, it was an opportunity for people to hear about ESPN and, hearing about it, not only fans, but advertisers and cable operators as well. It was a big sell to cable operators.
Was ‘87 a big moment because it showed potential?
Rasmussen: There were a couple of things. 1, American pride. Americans always love to beat somebody and here was a chance that nobody ever saw the America’s Cup, really saw it. Here was America, battling a long way off, and it did give the cable operators some excuses to do more promotion and gave ESPN an opportunity to present a really big event the way ESPN does it, very well.
Were you surprised?
Rasmussen: Yeah, I was obviously aware of it and I was amazed at how many people did talk about it. I can remember a very specific incident. We were living in Florida and one of our neighbors came up and she said, ‘I know that you’re no longer involved with ESPN, but that is just such a great show you put on last night.’ I said, ‘I don’t have anything to do with it.’ I didn’t even know she knew ESPN existed, but a lot of people were caught up in it and that excitement, neighbor talks to a neighbor and pretty soon we had a lot of people watching.
What did you think when ESPN got the NFL cable package in 1987?
Rasmussen: The first thing I thought of was the comment that Pete Rozelle had made back in 1979. I remember saying to someone, I guess someday is here. Because that’s what he said, ‘someday you’ll be involved with us.’ Someday arrived halfway in 1987.
Was that the stamp of approval that showed ESPN was here to stay?
Rasmussen: Part of that happened. A lot of folks wondered why ESPN got only half the package, so to speak, and was the NFL kind of hedging its bet to see which of the networks was going to do something for a couple of years and then one or the other would get it all. But from the day that happened, I just had a feeling that ESPN was going to have it all before very long and be a real player.
How do you feel about all of ESPN’s platforms today?
A lot of people ask me about that. My answer is always, if anybody tells you that they were there in 1979 and they knew it was going to be this way today, they were maybe smoking something funny or having a bad day because I don’t think anybody, even as late as the early 1990s or mid 1990s, could guess where all this was going. Even today, I don’t know if anybody can say, this is where it’s going to be 10 years from now. It has just been incredible growth and I think really it’s the fans that made it so -- their thirst for sports and everything related to sports.
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