Books: "The Early Days of ESPN" By Peter Fox

 

The Early Days of ESPN: 300 Daydreams and Nightmares 

By Peter Fox

Globe Pequot / Lyons Press; 200 pages; hardback, $29.95; eBook, $28.50

Peter Fox was the founding executive producer of ESPN, after he established himself with an advertising agency that he sold in the 1970s before he became an independent television producer who won Clio, Addy, and Golden Pen Awards. He then went on to become a producer, director, and writer of corporate communications materials for Lloyds of London Correspondent, DuPont, United Technologies, and PPG Industries. Currently, Fox is the Editor in Chief of SportsEdTV, the leader in online sports instruction, and managing director of its Learn to Win peak performance training, powered by HeartMath research and technology.

ESPN went live 45 years ago today, September 7, 1979, at 7:00 p.m., and in the exhilarating new book, The Early Days of ESPN: 300 Daydreams and Nightmares, Fox chronicles the days that led up to the debut of the 24-hour sports station that became a behemoth. 

The people who were tasked with creating ESPN were television veterans who gambled their careers, and were full of guile, luck, fear, fun, and unbridled optimism. They defied critics who said "all-sports television will never work."

Fox, in his role as founding executive producer, was privy to the spectacular efforts by a cadre of Connecticut locals who made the dream a reality. The first 300 days of ESPN's existence (hence the title of the book) before it went live were filled with mayhem, on-air gaffes, and the slowest instant replay in television.

ESPN was the outgrowth of a humble idea in the late spring of 1978 to capitalize on the brand-new mania for UConn men's basketball, and the idea of the network and a plan to start airing a series of "test broadcasts" in the fall.

The biggest thing ESPN got was an infusion of cash from Getty Oil, whose chairman and CEO Sidney Peterson took a meeting with Fox as the station was in development. This was the jump start that made ESPN reality, as it could now recruit, as Fox called it, a "cavalry of big-time TV executives."

This started with Chet Simmons, whose career began at ABC's Wide World of Sports, which turned "1960s Saturday afternoon television into an anthology of offbeat and on-beat sports," as Fox put it. Simmons then went on to become president of NBC Sports, and eventually a power struggle with Don Ohlmeyer ensued. By 1979, Simmons went to ESPN, and he took with him Scott Connal, who was NBC's manager of sports programs; announcer Jim Simpson, and a whole crew of middle management and junior producers. 

"Simmons and Connal were the cavalry ESPN needed. Their Rolodexes alone added millions in value," Fox wrote. The thing about having a figure like Simmons on board was that, when it came to whether they had the rights to run sports highlights from NBC, ABC, and CBS, Simmons said to use them and that they all owed him. One cool thing that Fox includes is the press release announcing Simmons as ESPN's President, as well as the advertisement that ran in the New York Times the day of its debut. 

In this excerpt, Fox writes of what was accomplished in Bristol, Connecticut: "During the 25th anniversary of ESPN's frequently publicized first telecast of 7 p.m. on September 7, 1979, I wrote an article in Connecticut Magazine that carried a 'Before the Before' headline chronicling the November 17, 1978, actual first telecast of the fledgling network. 

I agree to all pickers of nits that we were then known as ESP Network, but c'mon.

We televised sports programming from that first basketball game, through the gymnastics, track and field and baseball seasons intermittently, while we missionaries the all-sports religion to cable television moguls around the country during the 300 days before the second first ESPN telecast.

The point I made weakly then was that a makeshift tribe of pioneers, freelancers, and flat-out sports nuts managed to televise a series of University of Connecticut sports on the only satellite in the sky that allowed commercial television.

In the ensuing time I came to understand the value these local folks brought to the revolution of television sports. It was an incredible time in the late 1970s and early 1980s when brashly, broadly, and perhaps a bit blindly we did cause big-time puckering in the sports television c-suites.

I would also posit that our lightning-fast acceptance begat a viewing revolution birthing other network verticals that comprise a litany that begins with news, music, food, sex, religions, et al.

It is for those brash and bold early 'SPNauts that this work is aggregated.

As you'll see, it weaves memories of mine, clear and clouded, and paraphrased from notes of interviews with key personalities.

You'll read actual quotes from taped interviews.

And for me the most interesting parts are the italicized in-their-own-words stories by colleagues and friends who have agreed that the rocket we rode left indelible memories, and even a scar or two."