Those Guys Have All the Fun - James Andrew Miller [3]
While working for the Whalers, Rasmussen had met an insurance man named Ed Eagan, who was working at Aetna but really wanted to be in television. Eagan had wanted to talk to Bill about the Hartford Whalers being the centerpiece of a monthly cable show about Connecticut sports.
BILL RASMUSSEN:
I called Ed Eagan right after Colleen’s call and told him, “I don’t think it’s a very good idea to talk to me about the Whalers since I’m not there anymore,” but he said, “Come on in, and we’ll talk about something else.” We ended up thinking we should do what I was going to do with the Whalers but do it independently. As the conversation continued we thought, why not do UConn basketball, and then we thought, if we can do UConn, why not Wesleyan, why not Yale, why not Fairfield, and Southern Connecticut? One thing led to another. Ed even had the idea for the first two shows: hot-air ballooning and a game from the Bristol Red Sox. Ed said we would tape a show every month with a sports topic of interest to Connecticut, and take these big two-inch reels of tape in his car to cable systems. We could do shorter distances on bicycle.
Rasmussen knew virtually nothing about the cable TV business, but he wasn’t alone: in 1978, there were just over 14 million homes receiving cable—less than 20 percent of all TV households. HBO had gone on the air in 1975 but offered limited programming and signed off at midnight. A year later, Ted Turner uplinked his then-piddling Atlanta UHF outlet to a satellite, thereby creating the country’s first “SuperStation,” but one that delivered more Braves games than original programming. The next year, televangelist Pat Robertson launched his 700 Club on satellite, and in 1978, despite the fact that HBO reached only 1.5 million homes, Viacom fired up its slow-blooming imitation, Showtime.
Regionally, cable was beginning to make some inroads. In Reading, Pennsylvania, a pioneering cable system acceded to demands from the local American Nazi Party to lease time on its public-access channel (regulations prohibited turning anybody down). On the other extreme, New York’s Glenn O’Brien’s TV Party provided a crazily kinetic TV home to punk rockers, subterranean semi-celebrities, and exploratory artists like Andy Warhol, Jean-Michael Basquiat, and David Byrne. Among the lyrics to the show’s theme song: “We’ve got nothing better to do than watch TV and have a couple of brews…”
Beginning in the summer of 1978, Bill, his son Scott, Eagan, and Eagan’s buddy Bob Beyus, who owned a video production company, sought the backing of cable operators and potential investors for a new sports channel. They had originally wanted to name it SPN, the Sports Programming Network, but something called the Satellite Programming Network had already laid claim to those letters. Bill knew they’d have a tough time filling hours with only Connecticut sports and argued that they’d have to include some entertainment programming. Thus was it born: ESP, the Entertainment and Sports Programming Network.
On June 26, presentations began. ESP invited twelve representatives of Connecticut’s cable operators to a rented conference room at United Cable in Plainville, Connecticut. Only five showed up, and those mostly out of deference to Bill Rasmussen’s contacts in the industry rather than out of breathless anticipation of the new enterprise. Skeptically, they listened to far-fetched proposals about delivering Connecticut collegiate sporting events, amateur sports, the Whalers, and “entertainment” programming to cable operators via an interstate network. The reaction was a double shot of bad news: implausible, the cable crowd said, and too costly.
Undaunted that the presentation bombed, the quartet of entrepreneurs pushed