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GEORGE BODENHEIMER:

If I’d had a Bible handy, I’d put my hand on it when I tell you that on the first night we launched—October 1, 1993, at exactly eight o’clock to the second—as Keith Olbermann came up on the air for the official launch of ESPN2, you could hear the little beeps and clicks of my fax machine, and we could see the TCI signatures coming across. The timing was unbelievable. That agreement meant we launched with ten million homes, the largest cable launch ever.

KEITH OLBERMANN:

Lack came to me within no more than an hour before the first show and said, “Walsh doesn’t know what the fuck he’s doing.” Which was true, but it was not inclusive enough. What I meant to say to him was, “None of you know what the fuck you’re doing. I don’t know what the fuck I’m doing. I don’t know what I’m going to say in an hour.”

It was tense. I’ve never seen anything like it. To this day, as chaotic as some things got with MSNBC the first time I worked there, CNN—either in its original incarnation when I worked there in the eighties, or when I went back in ’02, when they had fifteen or twenty vice-presidents who had something to do with the show, I was guest-hosting and they all had an idea—as chaotic as those things were, nothing came close to what was going on at ESPN2.

MITCH ALBOM:

The network began on a Friday night. We were sitting in the dark waiting for the lights to come up and I remember thinking, “Wow, this is the start of a network, this isn’t just the start of a show, this is the first time you turn the lights on in the building, this is the first time you turn the key to the house, this is the first time your ship sails and lands on the shore of an uncharted island. Who starts a network? Wow, I’m part of history here.”

And with that thought in mind, the lights come up and Keith Olbermann, wearing a leather coat, says, “Welcome to the end of my career.” Any grand thoughts I had about the significance of that moment went right out the window.

MICHAEL MANDT, Production Assistant:

I was working the teleprompter for that first show, on the set, and I can tell you that first line of Keith’s was not on the prompter.

BILL WOLFF:

So we start ESPN2, it goes on the air, and the first words from our anchor, Keith Olbermann, are, “Welcome to the end of my career.” We’ve got twenty-three-year-old guys making seven bucks an hour, working twenty hours a fucking day, killing themselves, and the guy in charge decides to mock the network. It was a killer, I mean a killer. So you had to have a pretty big sense of humor and you had to have a lot of perspective to understand Keith and to understand that some of it was hyperbole and some was done for dramatic effect. But not every twenty-three-year-old has that perspective.

GARY BETTMAN, Commissioner, National Hockey League:

I was the first live guest in the studio on ESPN2. I actually went up to Bristol, and came on during the very first hour. I think the big deal then was that I wasn’t wearing a tie. That passed for big news in those days.

SUZY KOLBER:

To me, the launch wasn’t that monumental. I don’t think I ever grasped how big a deal it was until the night we were on and there was this massive party going on outside in the parking lot and we were in this stupid little studio out in the garage doing this show. I didn’t go to the party. We were on the air for three hours. Afterward, I went home.

What a night. There had never been anything quite like it in the history of ESPN, certainly not on this scale. While it’s true that back in the network’s Jurassic age, some of the early gang’s impromptu booze bashes got pretty raunchy, and ESPN Christmas parties of that era were both cherished and notorious, the party celebrating the launch of ESPN2 was a grand affair, held on-campus in a giant tent.

Many ESPN clients (advertisers) and friends were invited out from New York for the bash, marking the first time the huge gap between Bristol and Manhattan had been bridged.