Those Guys Have All the Fun - James Andrew Miller [6]
BILL RASMUSSEN:
In one single day we decided that we would do sports twenty-four hours a day, have a half-hour sports show at 6:30 every night, which would be the sports center, that we would go out and hire sportscasters, and buy a fleet of trucks that would roam the nation covering sporting events.
SCOTT RASMUSSEN:
The next day we got in the car and talked all the way home. The plan was born, I won’t say fully hatched, but the big parameters were already in place before we got back to Connecticut that night.
When we got in the house it was well after midnight and we couldn’t think of anything more to talk about, so we decided to design a building, you know, what’s our building going to be like? We took out a ruler that was marked off in eighth-of-an-inch increments and so we decided that one inch equals eight feet in our scale. I think the initial size was 96 by 64 and we made it two stories. We put in the executive-office corner, and we put in the studio. And we’re rearranging and drawing and it’s probably two in the morning and my dad just roars back and starts laughing. He says, “It’s funny, we’ve got to have a tape room!” He took an eraser and erased the outside wall, made the building eight feet longer, and we had a tape room! What we sketched out that night is what was done. The executive offices, the control room, everything.
I can’t fully describe the excitement of those two car rides. We were thinking we had the greatest idea in the history of the world and needed to guard it really carefully because people were going to want to steal it from us. It took us a little while to realize most people were going to laugh at us when they heard it, so eventually we got over that initial paranoia.
Then RCA called. They were concerned because they didn’t have our financials on record to back up our order. I basically said, “You know I can’t believe you’re even asking this question. You haven’t sent us an invoice. If you have concerns, send us an invoice and we’ll pay it.” Then they probably thought, “All right, well, it must be okay, and we’ll send them an invoice.” Fortunately they didn’t send it for ninety days.
BILL RASMUSSEN:
At first, I was just using my own money—about $9,000 that I had put on a credit card, but that was no way to finance a business. So I went to my family in Chicago—my sister, my brother [Don], my mother and father—and put together $30,000.
DON RASMUSSEN, Regional Manager:
I was a junior high school principal in 1978, and on December 14 my dad called and said, “Your brother Bill’s here and he wants to come down and see you.” I said, “Okay, have him come on down.” When I got off the phone and told my wife, she said, “Bill wants money.” Now, you have to understand that my wife and I had been married for twenty-two years and Bill had never been to our home. So this was really something.
There’s a dynamic in our family that was either intentionally or unintentionally cultivated from the time we were kids—it impacts us to this day and had a big impact on the creation of ESPN. My brother Bill is five years older than I am. We had another brother who was less than a year older than me, who was killed as a naval navigator in a plane crash. And we have a sister who is three years younger than me. There was never any affection in the family at all. Now, as we grew up, Bill was the king of the roost, the child with talent and intelligence, and everybody else came in second. No matter what I did, it never measured up to Bill and all his successes.
Only twice in my life can I recall Bill challenging me. The first time was when I got out of the air force and he invited my wife and me to work at his factory during the summer. Somehow we got to digging deep holes in his basement because he was having problems with flooding. He started clowning around and said, “You’re a big judo man in the air force, I want to see if you can throw me. Come on.” I said, “Bill, you don’t want to go there. I don’t want to do that.” He said, “Well, you’re going to have to, because I’m going to come at you.” And he did. So