Bill Rasmussen Marc Serota/Getty Images Bill Rasmussen, a onetime sportscaster for a local Massachusetts TV station who borrowed $9,000 on his credit card on the way to launching the sports behemoth ESPN, died Tuesday. He was 93.
Rasmussen, called “the George Washington of ESPN” by longtime network personality Chris Berman, died of complications from Parkinson’s disease (he was diagnosed in July 2019), the network announced.
Three months after being fired as communications director of the New England Whalers of the World Hockey Association, Rasmussen and his sleepy son Scott were stuck in traffic on Interstate 84 on the way to a birthday party and trying to figure out what to do with the 24-hour access to a satellite transponder he had just purchased.
“I’m just saying, ‘What about this, what about that? What can we run?'” Rasmussen recalled in a 2018 story for The Hartford Courant. “And one time, I guess getting a little bit irritated with me, [Scott] wakes up and says, ‘Play football all day for all I care,’ and puts his head back down.”
Their venture would be all sports, all the time, but initial investors were skeptical. “Everyone said, ‘Who’s going to watch sports 24 hours a day?’ Well, no one obviously,” he said in 2012. “They didn’t get the idea because all TV stations signed off at 1 o’clock or midnight. Here we were saying, ‘You can tune in at two o’clock in the morning, and here will be sports.'”
One of Rasmussen’s original names for his network was SPN (for Sports Programming Network), but that acronym was taken. “We talked about all kinds of things,” he said. “Finally we just said, ‘Sports are entertainment, let’s call it entertainment. And we may do a sports movie someday. Who knows? That’ll be entertainment. That’s good enough.'”
With the help of that $9,000 credit card advance, ESPN was incorporated on July 14, 1978. Rasmussen bought a parcel of land for $18,000 in Bristol, Connecticut, to house the company’s huge satellite dish and future headquarters.
Getty Oil invested an initial $15 million for 85 percent of the venture, and Anheuser-Busch would sign an exclusive advertising contract for nearly $1.4 million to keep Rasmussen’s dream alive.
ESPN went on the air at 7 p.m. EDT on Sept. 7, 1979, with a 30-minute edition of SportsCenter introduced by anchor Lee Leonard, who said, “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.”
The original 1.4 million customers who had access to the channel then had a chance to watch a college football preview show followed by slow-pitch softball games between the Milwaukee Schlitz and the Kentucky Bourbons from Lannon, Wisconsin.
ESPN began to make an impact after Rasmussen secured the rights to the college basketball games in the 1980 NCAA Tournament that NBC didn’t want — before March Madness was a thing.
“I told [then-NCAA executive director Walter Byers,] ‘We want to do every single game you haven’t committed to the [major] networks,”‘ he told Forbes in 2012. “He said, ‘Every single one?’ I said yes and he said, ‘Do you mean to tell me that if Lamar Tech plays Weber State in some regional first-round game, you’d put that on the air?’ And I said, ‘Absolutely.’
“And you know what? That next year Lamar played Weber State in the first round. It was the first tournament we did in March of 1980, and I think [Byers] rigged it. I think he wanted to find out if we’d really be there.”
William Rasmussen was born in Chicago on Oct. 15, 1932, and raised on the South Side. He attended Gage Park High School and graduated from DePauw University in Greencastle, Indiana, in 1954, then served in the U.S. Air Force and earned his master’s degree in business from Rutgers University in 1960.
As a sportscaster, Rasmussen started out in radio in 1963 at a station in Amherst, Massachusetts, then spent 10 years at WWLP-TV in nearby Springfield, eight as sports director. On the nightly news, he never could get all the information he wanted to impart into a three-minute segment.
In 1974, he joined the Whalers of the World Hockey Association, but when the Hartford, Connecticut-based team was swept in the 1978 finals by the Winnipeg Jets, team owner Howard Baldwin (future Oscar-nominated producer of Ray) fired him and the rest of the front office.
Rasmussen, his son Scott and insurance man Ed Egan are credited as the co-founders of ESPN. He served as its first chairman but didn’t last long, being forced out by Getty in September 1980, barely a year after ESPN launched.
According to Tom Shales and James Andrew Miller’s 2011 book Those Guys Have All the Fun: Inside the World of ESPN, the Rasmussen family (including Bill’s brother, Don, who worked as an ESPN marketing exec) had invested $39,000 in the company, and when they cashed out in 1984, that stake was worth $3.4 million. (ABC acquired a controlling interest in ESPN, which had yet to turn a profit, from Texaco Inc. in 1984 for $202 million.)
On getting ousted, “There are two things you can do when something like that happens,” Rasmussen says in Those Guys Have All the Fun. “You can be bitter the rest of your life or you can say, ‘OK, this is just part of a new day, let’s start over.'”
In 1981, he and his son launched the 24-hour nationwide all-sports Enterprise Radio Network, but that quickly went bankrupt. He wrote a book, Sports Junkies Rejoice! The Birth of ESPN, published in 1983, and in recent years worked as a motivational speaker.
In addition to Scott, survivors include another son, Glenn, and a daughter, Lynn. Rasmussen’s college sweetheart and wife of nearly 56 years, Mickey, died in 2011.
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