David Furst: This is All Of It on WNYC. I'm David Furst, in for Alison Stewart. Today, most people know ESPN and rely on it to watch games and get updates on sports news. In the 1970s, the idea of a dedicated sports channel seemed almost absurd. Back then, national sports on television meant the occasional game on one of the big three networks or maybe a two-minute update on the local news. That is, until entrepreneur Bill Rasmussen had the idea for a cable channel for sports and only sports 24 hours a day.

Lee Leonard: If you're a fan, if you're a fan, what you'll see in the next minutes, hours, and days to follow may convince you you've gone to sports heaven. Beyond that blue horizon is a limitless world of sports. Right now, you're standing on the edge of tomorrow. Sports, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, with ESPN, the total sports cable network.

David Furst: Wow. ESPN went on the air on September 7th, 1979. A new documentary and audiobook looks back to that moment and tells the founding story. Both projects are called Sports Heaven: The Birth of ESPN. The documentary airs on ESPN April 6th at 8:30. The audiobook is out on April 7th. We have with us Mike Soltys, ESPN's historian, who also served as its vice president of communications for many years. He's a producer and author of the documentary and audiobook. Also with us is Greg DeHart, the documentary's director. Both of you, welcome to WNYC.

Mike Soltys: Thank you, David. Excited to be here.

Greg DeHart: Thanks, David.

David Furst: Greg, ESPN doing a documentary about ESPN. What freedom were you given to tell the whole story here? How did you approach this project?

Greg DeHart: I'm happy to say I had complete freedom. I approached it with a lot of vigor as a sports fan my entire life. Actually, I was younger, but when ESPN launched, I do remember it. The very first anchor, George Grande, I remembered very well when I went to interview him. Yes, I approached it as a documentary filmmaker, but also as a sports fan, but a storyteller. This was quite an amazing story to be able to tell an entrepreneur's story going up against the big boys.

David Furst: [chuckles] Well, before we get to ESPN, paint the full picture for us. Mike, what was sports like on TV before ESPN went on the air in 1979?

Mike Soltys: You captured it pretty well in the lead-in. It was pretty thin gruel, as Bob Lee says in the documentary. You did get your weekend afternoon sports on the-- There was no Fox at that time, your three broadcast networks, and your local news gave you two minutes if weather didn't run long, and Monday Night Football, but then that was all that sports fans really could get. You weren't able to see your teams. You weren't able to say, on a Tuesday night, "I'm going to watch sports." It just didn't exist.

David Furst: Well, Bill Rasmussen is credited with founding ESPN. Greg, he's known as the company's George Washington, right? Working closely with his son Scott, they dream up this whole idea, and they actually make it happen. How did he first get the idea for this network?

Greg DeHart: Well, let's see. Bill was an announcer for the Hartford Whalers, but he had been just a lover of sports growing up. One of his goals in life was to find himself in a profession where he's going to be around sports. He slowly, kind of methodically, made his way up until he was the announcer for the Hartford Whalers, and his son actually was the arena announcer, Scott. It was the first time that they had a chance to work together, but they come up with this kooky idea that they can tie all of the cable networks in Connecticut together.

That's where they were working and grew up. They thought, "Let's get it all into one feed, and we can go ahead and put pro Connecticut and New England sports on this one feed, and all of Connecticut could receive it." It started out as a regional idea to bring sports to Connecticut. They had a very serendipitous moment when they found out about the satellite, and that changed everything.

David Furst: Oh, satellites. Wait, this can be national.

Greg DeHart: Indeed, indeed. Be careful what you wish for, right? Because that brings up a whole nother set of challenges, the least of which is you now have to program 24/7 for the entire country.

David Furst: Mike, how much did Bill and his team know about sports broadcasting before they started the company?

Mike Soltys: They knew a decent amount about how to broadcast a game from the background that particularly Bill had, but not really how to get it into cable systems around the country, not how to do a deal with the NCAA or with Anheuser-Busch or with cable systems. That was a crash course education for them. Looking back and in telling this story, it's unbelievable that a guy fired by the Hartford Whalers can juggle all of these things and make it work.

David Furst: Right, because he was fired, right before this whole idea starts.

Mike Soltys: Yes, that's what set him down the path was he's fired, "What do I do next?" As Greg outlined the Connecticut idea, this is pre-Big East Yukon. There wasn't really a television package for it. That was kind of the starting point. Then the satellite thing came up and then it just kept steamrolling. Bill brought his trademark positivity. Everything that anybody else would have run away from, he's like, "We'll overcome that. We're on to the next challenge."

David Furst: Why did he think he could make this work? Greg, what was it about Bill's style and personality that made him think he could make this 24/7 satellite sports network get off the ground?

Greg DeHart: Just to piggyback on what Mike said, when he's fired from the Hartford Whalers, he said it was the best day of his life, greatest thing that ever happened to him. It's this optimism that Bill carried, where he would get nos. He got a lot more nos, and he got yeses, but they absolutely never deterred him. He just kept going and going and going with Scott at his side until it happened. Putting all these pieces together, they did it all in 14 months. From the beginning of the idea until ESPN launched was 14 months. It was just that optimism, what Bill calls intentional optimism, that just drove them all the way to the finish line.

David Furst: Forget about the glass being half full, it's overflowing.

Mike Soltys: Yes.

Greg DeHart: Exactly, yes.

Mike Soltys: My wife listened to the audiobook with me and she said, "Who would possibly spend every last penny they had, borrow all this money, borrow their parents' money, borrow their brother's money and not really be making any progress through all that and yet still go ahead and do it?" That's what he did. He believed in the idea. He believed that everybody wanted sports the way he did. He could see that future and just kept moving forward and successfully juggled all these major, otherwise slow-moving organizations to get deals done.

David Furst: Well, I want to quickly mention. Listeners, if you remember the early days of ESPN, what impact did the network have on television and sports? Call us or text us now at 212-433-9692. That's 212-433-WNYC. We're talking about the new documentary, Sports Heaven: The Birth of ESPN. Before we go any further, let's hear a quick clip from the documentary. It does a great job of conveying the mayhem of trying to get this thing on the air. As you mentioned, Bill Rasmussen made this happen in very short order. He set an on-air date of September 7th, 1979. That was it. It was written in stone. It had to happen. Let's hear a clip from the documentary describing that first day.

[music]

Speaker 5: Were we ready? I'm not sure. The cameras were from the 1972 Olympics, and it was all archaic lighting.

Speaker 6: The technical people are trying to get all the equipment in place and wired and running.

Speaker 7: There was a moment where things weren't working, and there was a scramble to make sure, "Oh, my God, this is not going to happen."

Speaker 6: Building's not done. In fact, to say it wasn't finished is a gross understatement.

Speaker 5: The chief engineer, he came up to me and goes, "I think we got a problem. The transmitter's acting up." No one knew what to do. We were sort of like the island of misfit toys.

David Furst: [laughs] Greg, how frantic was it in the lead-up to that day to get the network ready for live broadcast?

Greg DeHart: The paint was still drying in the studio, literally. They had problems with the transponder, and they had to bring in a cable from a local television station to connect to the satellite. People are running around, going crazy. This is launch night. Bill and Scott, this is their baby. Fortunately, they did bring in some real pros who had been in the fire, who were able to handle it. A lot of the people that came to ESPN at that point were smaller market people from the local area, all professionals. They all said it was chaos leading up to this. They didn't know if they were going to make it. It literally came down to the last minutes, the last hour, the last minutes, and they pulled it off.

David Furst: Mike, how did that first day on air go?

Mike Soltys: It went very well. The first show on ESPN was SportsCenter, and that was a creation in Bill Rasmussen's mind that he had actually done in Hartford, Connecticut on an over-the-air religious channel. He did a time buy three years earlier called Sports Only. He had been a local news guy and was frustrated with the lack of time he got, and said, "Let's do a half hour show." They called it Sports Only three years early. That's what set up SportsCenter. The first show ESPN does, and here we are all these years later and SportsCenter is still the flagship of the network. That went well.

Lee Leonard and George Grande were the anchors, very professional. Then the story that everybody tells, the first live event is the Slowpitch Softball World Series featuring the Kentucky Bourbon versus the Milwaukee Schlitzes. The big advertiser ESPN has is Budweiser, and that's who's sponsoring the Milwaukee Schlitzes. That wasn't very smooth. Otherwise, the whole night happened. Then, as Chet Simmons says in the film, the president who came in after Bill, he just reminded everybody at the end of the first night, "We got to do this all over again tomorrow and the next day." It's never ended since.

David Furst: Yes, I remember that game well. We are discussing the founding and early history of ESPN. You can see much more in the documentary, Sports Heaven: The Birth of ESPN. We continue this conversation in just a moment. You're listening to All Of It here on WNYC.

[music]

David Furst: This is All Of It on WNYC. We're talking about the new documentary, Sports Heaven: The Birth of ESPN. It's going to air on ESPN on Monday, April 6th at 8:30. There's also a companion audiobook coming out on April 7th. Our guests are Mike Soltys, ESPN's in-house historian and former VP of corporate communications, and Greg DeHart, the documentary's director. We'd love to have you join this conversation as well. Do you remember growing up with ESPN? Do you remember watching SportsCenter after school or after work? Do you remember those very early days? Call us or text us. 212-433-9692. That's 212-433-WNYC.

Greg, we have a text right here, and you should jump right into this answer. How did they finance this new venture?

Greg DeHart: That leads into something that's really important, I think, is that Bill's son, Scott, who was with him the entire time, first of all, he's 22 years old, and one of his tasks, main tasks was to work with who ultimately became the funder of ESPN, which is Getty Oil. They'd been working with financiers who had gone out and tried to sell this idea. Across the board, people liked the idea, but it was just too big for them. Once the venture capitalists suggested, "Let's go to Getty Oil," the basic reason is that they're used to taking risks with trying to find oil wells and strike oil. Scott's job was, at 22 years old, to work with these very high-pressured executives at Getty Oil and to help to start negotiating this. That's ultimately where the money comes from. 22-year-old entrepreneur up against the bigwigs in the corporate boardroom.

David Furst: Let's hear a little bit of that relationship from the documentary, Getty Oil, crucial early investor in ESPN. This is a clip from the documentary describing the final meetings with Getty.

Speaker 8: There was this big meeting at Getty Oil where they had to decide if they were going to commit. Sid Petersen, the CEO, said, "Will the cable industry grow? Will it accept satellite programming? Will people watch? If those assumptions are right, we're going to make a lot of money."

David Furst: Then here's how the meeting resolves.

Speaker 9: When we closed the deal with Getty, Stuart was very definitive. First, he said, "We'll give you all the money you need for 80% of the company." I said, "Stuart," and I started-- He said, "No, it's now 85. Any further questions?"

[laughter]

Greg DeHart: Oh, boy.

David Furst: Yes, talk about that moment, Greg. Any further questions?

Greg DeHart: Stu Evey, who was the Getty Oil exec they were working with, was a pretty tough guy and had a lot of pride in himself, his company and the money that they had to give out. They drove a very, very hard bargain, and Bill and Scott accepted it.

David Furst: Let's talk about that and what that led to. For all the credit that Bill and Scott get for launching ESPN, their time there did not last long. Pushed out in 1980, right? Mike, can you explain that? Why was the tenure with ESPN so short? What happened?

Mike Soltys: Well, they would have folded if they didn't get Getty's money. They were really at the end of the line. They had to go with the terms that Stu Evey dictated. Stu had got Scott out the door shortly after launch. Bill could read the writing on the wall. He was around for about another year. It really came from the fact that there was a lot of publicity about ESPN. Sports writers were excited about ESPN, and it was getting stories in places like Sports Illustrated. They loved Bill and Scott's story. They weren't so interested in the money guy from Getty, but the money guy from Getty wanted his name in Sports Illustrated.

He had a problem with Scott and with Bill, and he brings in Chet Simmons from NBC Sports, moves up from New York to Bristol. Bill and Scott had bought themselves white Cadillacs with ESPN vanity plates, and Chet Simmons had a big problem with that. There was, right away, a battle of egos. Bill and Scott did not have the leverage to save themselves.

David Furst: We are talking about the new documentary, Sports Heaven: The Birth of ESPN, and the early days of ESPN. We're taking your calls as well. Let's hear from John calling from Brooklyn. Welcome to All Of It.

John: Thank you. I'm glad to be here. I'd like to applaud ESPN for bringing the sport of hockey some prominence after it's been disrespected for so many years by network television.

David Furst: Was that powerful to you that you could access hockey regularly on ESPN? Oh, maybe we lost John.

Greg DeHart: Right away, it was funny the way that the hockey ends up on ESPN in 1979. I think John was referring to more modern times, but 1979, we did deals with individual teams. It wasn't represented by the league across the board. We're able to do a deal with the Hartford Whalers, ironically, with the Washington Caps, with the Islanders and have a bunch of hockey on. The first game we ever did was the Hartford Whalers, the team that had fired Bill, playing the Washington Capitals.

David Furst: Amazing. We were talking about how their relationship ended with ESPN, right? At the very end of this documentary, we learn in the credits that the founders, father and son, Bill and Scott Rasmussen, are estranged and have been for years. Coming at the end of this story of them battling against the odds and winning and then losing the network at the same time, Greg, it almost feels like a shock.

Greg DeHart: Yes, it was a shock to us, and it was a choice. There are a lot of people who thought we probably shouldn't have included that because it's a shock and a bit of a downer at the end. In my opinion, it's the truth. Working with both Scott and Bill, who are just both great people throughout this journey, I always hoped, and I would kind of lay it out there. I would love to see you guys together at some point because we don't see them together during the film. It's kind of a practical choice to include it because people who were seeing the rough cut were saying, "Why didn't we ever see them together?" I chose to put it in there and fought the fight, and there it is. It's true. It's something that's private that they just don't want to talk about, unfortunately.

David Furst: Mike, what did they do after ESPN?

Mike Soltys: They went on to, again, this was a bit ahead of its time, launch 24-hour sports radio. This was before WFAN and all the others that followed. They didn't have a Getty Oil, and that collapsed under financial weight pretty early on. Bill continued to do entrepreneur work. He worked with the Big Ten Conference, ESPN's Big Monday. He was part of the creation of that. When it was Big East and Big Ten. He did a stadium golf project where you built stadiums around the 18th hole in Florida. He started up a smart homes company before anybody was doing smart homes. That was a little bit ahead of its time.

He's currently 93, lives north of Tampa, has been dealing with Parkinson's for several years. He wasn't able to travel and do some things with this, but he was an active participant in the documentary. Scott then went into public polling. Rasmussen Reports became a big success. I think the story was that he kind of recognized the rise of MAGA before others did on a polling end. Rasmussen Reports became prominent. He then sold that, and he currently has another startup that he's doing with Google out of New York, doing AI-related public polling.

Scott also did not have any dealings with ESPN. When his boys got old enough to know that dad had a role in founding this, he asked to visit on a summer vacation with the boys and he did. That was his only connection until Greg reached out with this movie, and he really had to come to terms with it. He still, all these years later, had a problem with how Getty Oil treated him. He had a problem with the whole experience. He has, through the documentary, and he's written a 3,500-word story that we posted on our corporate blog today about the experience, and he's come to terms with it this many years later.

David Furst: Greg, just to wrap up, ESPN has grown tremendously since those early days in 1979, but it faces its own struggles in competing for sports fans' attention, and it has developed closer relationships with sports gambling companies, something it has certainly been criticized for. Greg, how do you see the future of ESPN in the sports media ecosystem?

Greg DeHart: I see them as being the leader indefinitely in the sports world, how they're expanding into social media, into streaming, I mean, now, sign of the times, embracing gambling. They're out there. They're still the leader as far as I'm concerned, and I don't see that going away anytime soon. The leadership there is great. President Jimmy Pitaro has just had a very-- he's had an incredibly successful run there. As long as there are people like that and people like Mike here still there, it's going to be a success.

David Furst: We have been discussing the founding and early history of ESPN. You can see much more in the documentary Sports Heaven: The Birth of ESPN. Lots of incredible moments in there. The film airs on ESPN on Monday, April 6th, at 8:30 PM. There's also a companion audiobook that comes out April 7th. Our guests have been Mike Soltys, ESPN's in-house historian, former VP of corporate communications, and Greg DeHart, the company's director. Thank you very much. [crosstalk] The documentary's director. Sorry, I gave you a raise there.

Greg DeHart: I'll take it.

[laughter]

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