Those Guys Have All the Fun - James Andrew Miller [2]
But it was hardly inevitable that anyone else’s long-and-windy road to fruition as a media superpower would have started in a hamlet as unkempt, unlikely, and unheard-of as Bristol, Connecticut.
Maybe it all goes to prove that some higher power is a sports fan. Surely someone or something intervened to help see ESPN through the sometimes dark, sometimes bleak, occasionally slapdash early days. Today, lowly little Bristol has been transformed into the world headquarters of a globally branded, dominating presence.
Turns for the better were the results of crucial decisions made by six different men (and many others who worked for them or oversaw them). The men who at different times ran the company wound up being both the right guys for the job and, perhaps more important, the right guys for the eras in which they served. So much so that if, along the way, someone were to have started messing around with the exact order in which these men took charge, it could well have knocked ESPN off its trajectory. The company and the network that are ESPN might not even exist (much less be bookworthy), might have stumbled ignominiously into oblivion, if not for the exact sequence of these decision makers and of the decisions they kept making.
There were many more people involved, of course, than just executives and owners. In the chapters ahead, you’ll meet them—people who worked at the company or who dealt with it from outside its cloistered campus. They all have stories of their own—happy, sad, adventurous, timid, wholesome as pie, or lurid as pay-per-view porn.
ESPN’s playing field has been populated with winners and losers, champions and chumps, cads and catalysts, heroes and, for lack of a better word, villains—and theirs is a shared story of struggle, defeat, more struggle, losses, and victory.
The story began decades ago, but in a way, it’s a saga that’s just getting started. As, indeed, are we….
1
Blood: 1978–1979
“A fanatic is one who can’t change his mind and won’t change the subject.”
—Winston Churchill
It all started with a $9,000 investment, the purchase of a “transponder” by a father and son who had never seen one, and the suicide of a famous playboy.
BILL RASMUSSEN, Chairman:
I was fired as the communications manager for the Hartford Whalers in 1978, and then fired as executive director for Howe Enterprises. Gordie Howe was playing for the Whalers at the time, and the Enterprises job was just a way to do some things for Gordie and the boys. The way I was dismissed was intriguing. It was Memorial Day weekend, that Saturday morning, and I was getting ready to play golf. The phone rang and it was Colleen Howe, Gordie’s wife. She said, “I don’t have much time and I really wanted to see you because I didn’t want to do it this way, but we’re terminating you at Howe Enterprises. I have to catch a plane, so good-bye.” It was a surefire way to ruin a good round of golf.
SCOTT RASMUSSEN, Executive Vice President:
My dad was in broadcasting my whole life. We have a close relationship, but it’s complicated.
We would broadcast high school hockey games together, and when he was with the Whalers, I filled in with a pregame talk show a few times. I had taken a year off after high school, then went to college for two years and dropped out. I don’t think my dad was surprised. School and I weren’t the best of friends.
Then my father and I did a TV show on Channel 18 in Hartford—which was a religious station then—called Sports Only, which basically was SportsCenter in its earliest form. It was around that time that my dad and I started batting around ideas, but none of them were quite right.
Years before, in 1950, Bill Rasmussen had the opportunity to play in the Detroit Tigers Class D farm club; he would have grabbed at the chance, but like many others