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basically took command of the meeting then and said, “Look, he doesn’t know what the revenue is going to be in 1988 anymore than we do. We have a decision to make. If we believe in these underlying assumptions that people will watch a channel like this and that advertisers will support narrow casting and all the different assumptions that are built into it, this is going to be a big win for all of us. If it’s not, it’s going to be another dry hole. We make decisions like this in the oil industry every day. Let’s decide.” My father and I were then asked to leave and they had their discussion, and we were told after lunch that they voted to fund it.

It was in theory a commitment for $100 million, but the actual allocation was probably about $15 million. But more than the specifics, more than the numbers, Getty was embracing and committing that they were going to fund this and make it go.

Bill and Scott Rasmussen had been to more than half a dozen potential suitors before Evey, and all had said no. Chances are they wouldn’t have found another investor, certainly not someone willing to risk millions. Whether it was Evey’s love of sports and his love for star athletes; whether it was the idea of doing something in George Getty’s name to make his mentor proud; or whether it was just egomania, it was Evey’s Getty money that brought the Rasmussen dream to life.

Getty’s investment of $15 million in May of 1979: Step Number Two in ESPN’s rise to world dominance.

STUART EVEY:

I was laughed at in the company, in a kind of a kidding way. They even called it “Evey Sports Programming Network,” not ESPN. My whole business reputation was put on the line. Nobody had any idea the risk I took. But I had done so many things from the hip that had turned out so successfully, from a golf course in Acapulco to giving a big investment to the government in Africa for a boondoggle which we took a huge tax loss on, but more than made up for when we discovered oil in the North Sea.

There’s absolutely no way Getty would have gone into ESPN without me. None. I was given that opportunity to take the risk for past performance perhaps, but also for personal relationships. I did this primarily because I thought George Getty would’ve liked it. I know that sounds ridiculous, but it’s not. George Getty always wanted to get involved with a business that didn’t have his father’s name tacked to it, a successful business, and that motivated the hell out of me. He had died in ’74, and this idea didn’t come along until ’78, but it was still almost like in his memory. If he didn’t get to do it, maybe I could. I was surrounded by oilmen who were using money to drill oil wells; shit, I was using money to build a new TV network.

SCOTT RASMUSSEN:

There were times when I thought that one of the reasons we got approved is some of the people at Getty wanted Stu to fail. I think some people thought funding ESPN would be a way to take him down a peg or two when it went under.

BILL RASMUSSEN:

You really didn’t want to negotiate with Stu. The whole time we were going to do this thing it was for an 80/20 split, and just as we’re about to close the deal, Stu said, “I’ve been thinking about this and I want 85 percent.” He wasn’t asking, he was telling. It wasn’t like there was a rational reason for the change. But we couldn’t say, “Forget it, we’re going somewhere else,” because there was nowhere else. We wouldn’t have had anything.

J. B. DOHERTY:

Stu had the morals of a rattlesnake. There were all these signals about doing the deal without us and I had to remind them that we were prepared to sell the transponder rights to the highest bidder and that we weren’t going to roll over. Stu and Getty were so busy taking steps to basically screw the minority shareholders that we actually put up a $50,000 retainer with Skadden, Arps just to send a signal to Getty that we weren’t going to sit around passively and let him completely ignore our interests. Stu was a guy without a moral compass.

In May 1979, Anheuser-Busch signed the largest advertising contract in cable history