Cross & Crescent

On August 16, 1978, Bill Rasmussen (DePauw 1954) and his son, Scott, came up with the idea. It was Bill’s daughter’s 16th birthday and father and son were driving to see her at the grandparent’s summer home.

“We were on our way down and we got stuck in traffic,” says Rasmussen. “We had already talked to RCA and had a satellite but didn’t know what we were going to do with it.”

In Waterbury, Connecticut, stuck on Interstate 84, the two discussed how they would fill 24 hours of programming on the new technology that was cable. The car was hot, finally in exasperation, Scott exclaimed, “Play football all day for all I care.” And ESPN was born.

“When ESPN went on the air, we said ‘This is going to be the headquarters of sports’ and we went after it.”

The Early Years of ESPN

Rasmussen had been working for the Hartford Whalers for four years and in 1977-1978 the team missed the playoffs for the first time in the team’s short history. This sparked management to clean house, firing nearly everyone, including Rasmussen. It was a blessing in disguise.

“If it hadn’t happened ESPN probably wouldn’t have happened — cable TV was just beginning to break on the horizon in Connecticut,” says Rasmussen. “The stars were aligned. If we had waited a year later all the transponder space would have been taken because the big companies found out what was going on with the technology.”

In 1977-78, Ted Turner started talking about his Superstation and one thing led to another and more people started to get interested in cable. Rasmussen met with the cable operators in Connecticut, and then the RCA sales person, and they couldn’t give transponder time away. They got a satellite for $35,000 a month, which is nominal compared to what the price is today.

“They couldn’t give away satellite time,” jokes Rasmussen. “Due to that fact they gave a long leeway before they sent you any type of invoice. By that time we had financial backing from Getty Oil. We never had to pay a cent.”

They bought an acre of redeveloped land in Bristol, Connecticut, to build the headquarters of the new station. Bristol, which had a population of 9,000, was a mill town that manufactured a lot of semi-conductors before ESPN came to town. It has since spread like a wildfire, now on engulfing 165 acres.

“I think putting it there added to the mystique of Bristol. This little hole-in-the-wall town, New York a 130 miles away, why would you do it there,” says Rasmussen. “Well, nobody in New York would talk to us; they thought we were all crazy so the first four ESPN buildings were literally built on a dump.”

The big problems the young company faced were money, a place to market, and programming.

ESPN and other early cable stations were about letting the viewer decide when they wanted to watch sports or news, in the case of Turner, and movies, in the case of HBO.

The ESPN anchor show was the inception of “SportsCenter” that was created that afternoon in the car.

“We said we were going to half-hour sports news shows at 6:30 p.m. across from the networks’ newscasts,” says Rasmussen. “Once we put all the papers together and started to sell it everyone said, ‘wait a minute, no one does a half-hour sportscast, especially up against the news.’”

At the time ESPN started, networks controlled 93 percent of the television market. “We said ’so,’ and we went after them,” says Rasmussen, “and I guess it worked.”

To this date there have been more episodes of “SportsCenter” uninterrupted than any other program in the history of TV. The networks now control under 20 percent.

The Rasmussens thought the NCAA was the best source of programming because the preceding year there had been 116,000 sanctioned events by the NCAA. That’s 232,000 hours of programming, and the new station would handle only 8,640 hours of programming a year.

“We went to the NCAA headquarters in Kansas City and said we will do every single championship event that the networks don’t take,” says Rasmussen. “I remember Walter Myers, executive director of the NCAA, saying to me. ‘You mean if Lamar plays Weber State you will televise it?’ Yep.”

The CBS contract with the NCAA at the time only aired a 60 second clip of various sport’s championships including hockey, soccer, and lacrosse. It also only covered five of the NCAA men’s basketball tournament games.

“The final four of lacrosse to lacrosse people is every bit as fascinating as the final four in basketball,” says Rasmussen. “The frozen four in hockey, the final four in soccer, we said we are going to do them all. We didn’t really know what we were committing to, but we said we would do them.“

Ironically, in 1980, the first covering of the NCAA men’s basketball tournament, ESPN aired a first round matchup between Weber State and Lamar.

“There was a moment at 6:30 at night the night we went on air when my son and I walked around the building. It was all dirt and mud near with a jack hammered whole in the back wall because we did not get the control done in time for the launch of ESPN and actually launched ESPN from a remote truck outside,” says Rasmussen. “We had been going so frantically and were pretty pleased for what was about to happen. We walked around the building and looked at each other and it was one of those special moments. In 30 minutes, for better or for worse, whatever we are going to put out was going to be seen around the world. I could still take you to that spot behind the building.”

ESPN was the new kid on the block and had a number of critics in the media. CBS and Channel 39 in Boston wanted to sue the ESPN for using highlight clips in its broadcasts, which were considered public domain. When an executive from NBC heard about CBS’s complaints he bought the ESPN staff bright red jackets and tickets to all the games CBS was covering.

“The young guys stayed on the side of the field and the camera followed the ball, follow-upped with their backs to the cameras,” says Rasmussen. “On the back of these bright red jackets was a big white ESPN. We did that two weeks in a row and CBS said ‘forget the suit.’”

Life after ESPN

In 1984, Texaco made an offer to purchase Getty Oil, the major stockholder of ESPN. Texaco didn’t want to take on Getty’s non-oil entities and planned to sell ESPN and other properties.

“During the process, Ted Turner called me and said he wanted to make a run at buying ESPN away from ABC,“ says Rasmussen. “When that heated up they moved us up the pecking order of companies to sell. ”

After the sale to ABC, Rasmussen was retained as a consultant for a year and placed on the board of directors. He then started his own company, Rasmussen Sports. The new company produced many live events for ESPN, including Big Monday Basketball, and the Maui Classic, and had rights to all the Big Ten Games. He also did consulting for the Big Ten.

College Fanz

ESPN was founded on the idea of letting viewers watch sports when they want. That is the thought behind Rasmussen’s new brain child CollegeFanz.com. The site is part sports information and part social networking with chat and discussion boards. The virtual press box includes scores from all sports from all divisions of college athletics. Each school has its own homepage as does each sport in which the school participates. The site is introducing new widgets for customization of one’s fanz page.

“There is something like 281 NAIA schools, 442 division III, and 239 division II,” says Rasmussen. “ESPN doesn’t do a lot of work with Division II and III and NAIA, so we started out to give a place for people to talk to each other under one roof.”

Holding true to giving a voice the smaller divisions, in March when hosting March Madness brackets, CollegeFanz had 10 options, one for each of the NAIA and NCAA men’s and women’s divisions. The grand prize was $25 million, with secondary prizes of trips to the Maui Classic, and plasma TVs.

CollegeFanz will be broadcasting 18 NAIA college football games this fall online, kicked off with the First Down Classic double header on August 29. It is this type of online broadcast that Rasmussen sees as the new evolution of sports entertainment.

“Kids that play at smaller institutions play just as hard and are competitive but don’t get much credit outside of campus,” says Rasmussen. “The more variety we give to parents and alumni, everyone likes it.”

One of the cornerstones of CollegeFanz is its intern program. It recruits students from campuses to write or broadcast stories, market and maintain their university’s site, and maintain a Facebook presence. Rasmussen believes this gives the fans a voice.

“We want this site to be developed by the students and the young alumni, “ says Rasmussen. “ESPN gives viewers a lot of information, but doesn’t give the fan a voice. Once again we are the small guys and don’t have to worry about that.”

Lambda Chi Alpha

When Rasmussen joined Lambda Chi Alpha in 1950 he felt he was part of the greatest pledge class. He boasts that the four years of his class the chapter was No. 1 in athletics and won intramurals three times.

During his freshman year, Rasmussen learned a lesson about brothers and a university pulling together. A fire broke out in the chapter house and his roommate Chuck Reed stayed cool and collected. He sent Rasmussen outside and under their room’s window. Reed began dropping all their belonging as Rasmussen stacked them neatly.

“I hope you never relive the fire part of it, but everybody worked together and the campus really came together and worked with all the Lambda Chis.”

“While we were doing it I don’t think any of us ever thought it was going to last a half century,” says Rasmussen. “We have reunions and it’s within the Fraternity, not so much the school. I don’t really go back to see people from other classes. I go back to see my Fraternity brothers and their wives.

If I hadn’t gone there and hadn’t lived in a fraternity house, I don’t think I ever would have had that kind of memory of people. I don’t remember that from grade school, and kids…when you have a best friend….”