Those Guys Have All the Fun - James Andrew Miller [12]
Eight thousand, seven hundred, and sixty hours to fill. To realize his dream of a 24/7 network, Bill Rasmussen would need a much better recipe than the motley stew he’d prepared to air so far: Australian rules football, slow-pitch softball, Irish bicycling, and, also from Ireland, Munster hurling—which has nothing to do with vomiting cheese or trying to heave Herman, Lily, or Grandpa across a barroom floor. (Hurling is an Irish variation on rugby, with the same shirts and slightly different rules. For many years it had failed to take America by storm.) Rasmussen knew there was no way he could afford TV rights to any big-ticket pro sports. But college sports? That might work, he reasoned, and with the right ones, maybe he could persuade Getty Oil to fork over more dough. In Connecticut, NCAA basketball was king, and Rasmussen believed that this game—fast-moving, flashy, energetic—had the potential to woo new viewers. And a juicy contract with the league could do more than spike viewership; it could be the major, critical coup to give ESP legitimacy and stature.
Rasmussen made a sales call on the National Collegiate Athletic Association headquarters in Shawnee Mission, Kansas. A presentation filled with enticing generalities had been hastily cobbled together and rushed to a printer; even Rasmussen was surprised at how well it turned out. Plans for the new twenty-four-hour sports network included a major role for the NCAA, league leaders were told. Rasmussen also argued that their annual basketball tournament was getting insufficient attention from the current rights holder, NBC, and that there was great untapped potential in the tourney’s early rounds. Those games, he said, suffered from severe media malnourishment. By airing the beginning of the tournament, ESP, as it was still known, could attract more fans for the NCAA while at the same time, and not incidentally, enticing viewers to sample ESP’s other offerings.
Fortunately, the name Getty carried clout, and it helped ESP get taken seriously by the NCAA, at the bargaining table and elsewhere. Rasmussen was, in fact, cleverly playing both sides against the middle: he convinced the NCAA of the network’s importance by dropping the name Getty every chance he could, and he enticed Evey and the Getty hierarchy to be more generous to ESP every time by dangling the prestigious acronym NCAA in front of them.
BILL RASMUSSEN:
In our negotiations with the NCAA, we talked about doing all the championships. For example, CBS was contracted for college football and for a one-minute highlight of the lacrosse championship game to be shown on the CBS Sports Spectacular, which was their Sunday afternoon answer to ABC’s Wide World of Sports. Our presentation proposed complete live coverage of not only the lacrosse Final Four, but also Soccer Final Four, Hockey Frozen Four, and the entire College World Series from Omaha. They actually gave us their logo to put on the side of our trucks for the first year on the road. That was a real coup because they guard that so jealously. We were talking about doing every game that the networks didn’t do during the basketball tournament, which was, like, all of them, except they did weekend games and that was it. I remember Walter Byers said to me, “Do you mean if Weber State and Lamar Tech are playing, you’re going to televise it?” “If they’re in the tournament, yeah. Every game. We mean every game.” You know, if you go back and look, who played in March of 1980, Weber State and Lamar Tech played. I don’t know whether that was rigged or whether it was just the luck of the draw, but that’s just such a coincidence. It’s very difficult for me to believe that wasn’t a test.
As talks continued, one thing became clear: if ESP was going to get NCAA basketball, it would have to show interest—sincere or not—in the NCAA’s seventeen other sports as well. So the network pledged that “the entire spectrum of NCAA sports will be included in the ESP package,” including hockey, soccer, lacrosse, and the collegiate baseball “world series” from Omaha. A deal was forged: