Those Guys Have All the Fun - James Andrew Miller [32]
Perhaps the only bright spots in the lineup were men’s and women’s college basketball and hockey games—results of the deal Bill Rasmussen had signed with the NCAA on March 9, 1979. ESPN had the rights to broadcast all NCAA championship events that were not legally committed to other networks. That meant ESPN could televise the early rounds of the 1980 NCAA Men’s Basketball Tournament. Those early rounds were available for two main reasons: one, NBC, which had the final rounds of the tournament, didn’t want to give away precious soap opera afternoon hours and valuable prime-time slots to the early rounds; and two, the whole idea of slotting early-round games on air was dismissed as a foolhardy notion by supposedly Smart Guys in the network TV sports business.
BOB LEY:
I know March Madness is a copyrighted phrase, but through the 1980s, our network created college basketball. Yes, you had Magic and Bird the year before, but you can argue that was more an NBA-maker than a college-maker. NBC, then CBS, had the Final Four, but they were standing on the shoulders of this cultural phenomenon that we kept creating, reinforcing and embellishing night after night through the winter and during the tournament. ESPN was the seminal impetus for creating what that tournament was.
LOREN MATTHEWS, Vice President of Programming:
The first Thursday afternoon of the tournament we went on the air around noon, and we did more than twenty-four hours of games. One game was live, but we’d bring in another game that was going on at the same time, tape it, then turn it around for air. We had to stop, I think, at noon or one o’clock on Saturday afternoon because of the NCAA’s deal with CBS, but in all that time, we only showed one repeat. There were a lot of us who didn’t even go home for those two days, but I remember looking at the screen and saying, “My God, there’s something here. We might make it.”
STEVE ANDERSON, Executive Vice President:
ESPN couldn’t go regional. Unlike the networks, we only had one feed, so whatever we were showing was national. While we could only show the country one game at a time, it was important for us to keep people up to date with whatever else was going on in the tournament.
BILL FITTS, Executive Producer:
Chet came over to me and said, “I want you to cut in with reports on the other games.” I said, “Chet, we don’t have anybody near those other trucks. How am I going to do that?” and he says, “That’s the problem,” then walks away. So I put Bob Ley in the studio and just cut into games. I’d try to pick times when they almost had to give the score—there were no continuous scoreboards back then—and I’d say, “Okay, Bob, now!” Since I had nobody to coordinate with in the other trucks, sometimes I would cut in and they would never give the score or they would throw to a commercial as soon as we joined them. Those weren’t good times to get in at all.
STEVE ANDERSON:
I read an article about the three networks criticizing ESPN for this notion of live cut-ins, which said: “They don’t get that when people start watching a game, they want to see the whole game.” And I’m just saying to myself, “That’s not true.” If we were doing a game and it was in the second quarter, but another game was near the end and it was close, it seemed obvious to us to go to that other game.
ROSA GATTI, Senior Vice President of Corporate