Bill Rasmussen, who co-founded ESPN with his son and a $9,000 credit card advance after getting fired from a hockey job, died at 93 from complications of Parkinson's disease, leaving behind a network now valued at $30 billion.
Rasmussen died at his home in Land O' Lakes, Florida, The Hollywood Reporter reported. He had been diagnosed with Parkinson's disease in July 2019, and the disease ultimately took his life. His family asked that memorial donations go to the American Parkinson Disease Association.
ESPN chairman Jimmy Pitaro issued a statement calling Rasmussen "a remarkable man, a visionary and an innovator who conceived the idea of a network entirely devoted to sports." Pitaro added that the company culture Rasmussen built in the late 1970s still carries on today.
Veteran ESPN anchor Chris Berman went further. He called Rasmussen "the George Washington of ESPN", and, as Breitbart noted, added that Rasmussen "wasn't a glass half-full guy; his glass was always overflowing with optimism."
Rasmussen's path to ESPN started with a pink slip. In 1978, the New England Whalers, a World Hockey Association team based in Hartford, Connecticut, were swept in the league finals by the Winnipeg Jets. Team owner Howard Baldwin, who would later earn an Oscar nomination as a producer of the film Ray, fired Rasmussen and the rest of the front office.
Three months later, Rasmussen and his son Scott sat stuck in traffic on Interstate 84 in Connecticut. They started talking about what came next. The conversation turned to sports television, and whether anyone would watch it around the clock.
Rasmussen recalled the exchange in a 2018 interview with The Hartford Courant. He was throwing out ideas, "What about this, what about that? What can we run?", when Scott, half-asleep, muttered, "Play football all day for all I care," and put his head back down.
That offhand remark became the seed. Rasmussen discovered he could purchase 24-hour access to a satellite transponder, which made a round-the-clock broadcast feasible. He maxed out a credit card for a $9,000 advance, bought a parcel of land in Bristol, Connecticut, for $18,000 to plant a satellite dish, and incorporated ESPN on July 14, 1978. The original name was supposed to be SPN, the "E" for "Entertainment" was added after someone else already held the acronym.
Ed Egan, an insurance man, joined as a third co-founder. But funding was the problem. Getty Oil eventually put up $15 million for 85 percent of the venture. Anheuser-Busch signed an exclusive advertising deal worth nearly $1.4 million.
ESPN went live at 7 p.m. Eastern on September 7, 1979. Original anchor Lee Leonard opened the first 30-minute SportsCenter with a line that doubled as a mission statement:
"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."
What followed was a college football preview and, of all things, a slow-pitch softball game between the Milwaukee Schlitz and the Kentucky Bourbons, played in Lannon, Wisconsin. Only 1.4 million cable customers had access to the channel at launch.
Skeptics were everywhere. In a 2012 interview, Rasmussen recalled the constant refrain: "Everyone said, 'Who's going to watch sports 24 hours a day?' Well, no one obviously." His point was that critics missed the concept entirely. Every television station in America signed off by midnight or 1 a.m. ESPN was saying you could tune in at two in the morning and find live sports.
Rasmussen's shrewdest early move was securing NCAA basketball rights that the major networks did not want. He told then-NCAA executive director Walter Byers that ESPN would air "every single game you haven't committed to the networks."
Byers was skeptical. As Rasmussen recounted in a 2012 Forbes interview, Byers asked: "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?" Rasmussen said yes.
Sure enough, in the first NCAA Tournament ESPN covered in March 1980, Lamar played Weber State in the first round. Rasmussen always believed Byers rigged the matchup just to see if ESPN would actually show up. They did.
Despite building the network from nothing, Rasmussen did not get to run it for long. Getty Oil, which held 85 percent of ESPN, forced him out as chairman in September 1980, roughly one year after the launch. The New York Post noted that both Bill and Scott were pushed aside by the majority owner.
Rasmussen took the blow in stride. As he put it in the 2011 book Those Guys Have All the Fun by Tom Shales and James Andrew Miller: "There are two things you can do when something like that happens. 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.'"
He and Scott tried to start over. In 1981, they launched the Enterprise Radio Network, a 24-hour nationwide all-sports radio venture. It went bankrupt quickly.
The Rasmussen family, Bill, Scott, and Bill's brother Don, who had worked as an ESPN marketing executive, had invested a combined $39,000 in the network. When they cashed out in 1984, that stake was worth $3.4 million. The same year, ABC bought a controlling interest in ESPN from Texaco Inc. for $202 million. The network had not yet turned a profit.
Today, the Washington Examiner reported, ESPN is valued at approximately $30 billion, a staggering return on a venture that started with a maxed-out credit card and an $18,000 plot of Connecticut farmland.
Born October 15, 1932, on the South Side of Chicago, Rasmussen grew up one of four kids. He attended Gage Park High School, then graduated from DePauw University in Greencastle, Indiana, in 1954. After serving in the U.S. Air Force, he earned a master's degree in business from Rutgers University in 1960.
His broadcasting career began in 1963 at a radio station in Amherst, Massachusetts. He spent a decade at WWLP-TV in Springfield, Massachusetts, eight of those years as sports director, before joining the Whalers in 1974.
In recent years, Rasmussen worked as a motivational speaker. He was inducted into the Sports Broadcasting Hall of Fame shortly before his death. He published his own account of ESPN's founding, Sports Junkies Rejoice! The Birth of ESPN, in 1983.
His wife Mickey, his college sweetheart, died in 2011 after nearly 56 years of marriage. He is survived by other family members.
On living with Parkinson's, Rasmussen kept the same attitude that carried him from a hockey firing to a television revolution. "Giving up is not an option," he once said, "and I think a positive attitude is what counts."
Bill Rasmussen bet $9,000 that Americans would watch sports at two in the morning. Every fan who has ever stayed up for a West Coast game or flipped on SportsCenter before sunrise owes him for being right.
