The document summarizes the early beginnings of ESPN in 1978, when it started as an idea to capitalize on UConn men's basketball. It describes some of the improvised early broadcasts, such as hiring the world's fastest sketch artist for slow instant replays when they couldn't afford replay equipment. It also highlights how many early ESPN employees were from Connecticut television stations and helped build the foundation of the new network through their innovative ideas and hard work against critics who doubted the viability of an all-sports network.

1. What started as a humble idea in the late
spring of 1978 to capitalize on the brand-
new mania for UConn men’s basketball
soon morphed into ESPN and a plan to
begin airing a series of “test broadcasts” in
the fall. The new network nearly became
known as IBC—International Broadcasting
Co. In fact, designer Ray Maher had been
commissioned to create a logo depicting
the IBC global network. But IBC never saw
the light of day once Sports Illustrated ran a
photo of an ESPN banner my sister
Meredith sewed for us to hang at our first sample telecast. The ESPN
phone—the one we shared—rang incessantly after that and there
was no changing our name after the national exposure got the P.R.
snowball rolling.
By the way, that first sample telecast, on Nov. 17, 1978, was a beau-
ty. The first voice was that of WTIC radio’s Arnold Dean. His col-
league Lou Palmer did the play-by-play as UConn’s highly touted
freshman Corny Thompson of Middletown and the Big East
Conference made their debuts. Palmer became my counterpart as
ESPN’s founding program director. To this day, we continue to col-
laborate on projects and never fail to end up giggling over some of
the seemingly absurd stunts we were able to pull off.
For example, on that inaugural telecast we couldn’t afford an
instant-replay disk, so we hired Phyllis Kommoner, who billed her-
self as the world’s fastest cartoonist, and stationed her courtside. She
sketched and Palmer tongue-in-cheeked it as the world’s slowest
instant replay.
Come the following spring, we came up with something a little
more practical (and ahead of its time) when we put a microphone on
UConn baseball coach Larry Panciera during a game. I didn’t know
Larry was an old school, tobacco-chewing baseballer. We shut it down
after the first couple of surprise expectorations turned us and, I
expect our audience, off.
Many of the early shows involved NCAA sports events that
weren’t under contract to other networks—and sometimes it wasn’t
hard to see why. Former Hartford Times sports editor Dennis Randall
ran the character generator, and at one point superimposed a “Why
are you watching?” title over a gymnastics disaster. As I recall, it was
a triangular women’s meet between UConn, Yale and Bridgewater
State. Gymnastics at Bridgewater State, it turned out, was a euphe-
mism for Dieting 101, and team members blushed at the prospect of
anyone seeing them expanding their Spandex. The Bridgewater State
coach went so far as to threaten to pull her team off the floor if we
dared show them competing.
In another episode, Bob Chamberlain of Simsbury got rights for
us to same-day telecast World Championship Tennis from Monte
Carlo. He thought Monaco tennis would show off our international
capabilities. It did that and more. Unable to
rent time on the international satellite due
to our fledgling status, we opted to put the
videotapes on the Concorde and fly them to
me in New York.
I rented a studio at WPIX in Manhattan
and met the tapes at JFK customs on Saturday.
Smooth as silk we got our first international
event aired—delayed, but same day.
Those were the semifinals. Easter Sunday’s
finals almost didn’t make the airwaves.
There was a customs personnel change and
the new agent thought the video might contain pornography. He
delayed clearing them. We eventually got the Bjorn Borg victory
match over Vitas Gerulaitis on the air, but not without a panic attack
and a car trip worthy of Popeye Doyle.
As all the sample games were transmitted on RCA’s Satcom 1
satellite, the ESPN sales force traipsed around the country collaring
cable executives and spreading the all-sports doctrine. The first fruit
of those seedings sprouted when cable mogul John Malone’s TCI
contracted to carry ESPN on 26 of its systems with 155,000 house-
holds subscribed. Later, Getty Oil acquired ESPN and provided the
influx of cash that
allowed it to raid NBC
for some lions in the
business. The founda-
tion of the network was
built on Connecticut
talent, however.
The late Bob Bray,
the longtime Channel
30 general manager, brought a conservative mein to an otherwise
swashbuckling supporting cast. He later recruited another Channel
30 stalwart, Bob Pallito.
Several former colleagues at WFSB Channel 3 grabbed onto to the
ESPN dream. Jim Stewart, the meticulous WFSB-TV senior director,
led the off-camera team during those demo telecasts and covered my
fib to the Rasmussens when they asked if I had ever produced any TV
sports events. (Actually, I had once hired Bill Rasmussen years earlier
while I was producing radio shows from the Sammy Davis Jr. Greater
Hartford Open in Wethersfield.)
I watched MaryWalton,of Bloomfield,go from newspaper freelancer
to WFSB apprentice to ESPN camera operator to director of Phil
Donahue’s famous talk show. She introduced me to Jan Hayes, a butt-
kickin’ Irish woman who was the mother of SportsCenter in its infancy.
She moved on to become back-of-the-house manager at The Bushnell.
Bob Schlenker and Bob Pronovost, both WFSB production stars,
made ESPN their training ground for big-time network jobs. I
shared a home with Pronovost, a real
BEFORE THE BEGINNING
September 2004 CONNECTICUT 79
By Peter Fox
In its earliest days, ESPN once
hired the world’s fastest sketch
artist to provide the world’s
slowest instant replays.
The tales of early ESPN people who gambled their careers while critics carped that “all-sports
television will never work” are full of guile, luck, fear, fun and unbridled optimism. As ESPN’s
founding executive producer, I was privy to some spectacular professional efforts by a cadre of
locals who made the dream real. The saga of the network’s founders, Bill and Scott Rasmussen, has been told before, and
new versions will likely proliferate as the network observes the 25th anniversary of its full time sign-on, Sept. 7, 1979.
continued on page 101

2. gunslinger with a penchant for wagering.
Once, he bet the SportsCenter crew he could
direct the late-night highlights show upside
down and backward. He did, inverted under
the control-room console, calling directions
from the reflections on the back glass wall of
the control room.
Chris Berman was an almost-svelte weekend
sports anchor at NBC affiliate WVIT-
Channel 30 and traffic and sports reporter
on Naugatuck radio WNVR who threatened
to keep knocking on our door till we hired
him. We couldn’t hire him then, but our suc-
cessor, Scotty Connal, was bowled over by
Boomer Berman’s exuberance and suc-
cumbed to his persistence and charm.
All the pre-full-time-launch activity took
place in ESPN’s original space at 319 Cooke
St., Plainville, a building that also housed
United Cable Television. Those Plainville
offices were where Connecticut people like
Vivian Arsego, Eric Hansen, Jim Dovey, Bob
Beyus, Bob Ronstrom, Jon Foley and Ed
Eagan stirred the early ESPN pot in their
own constructive ways.
While ESPN’s facility was being built in
Bristol, a period known as “the panic in the
attic” ensued in Plainville, where United
Cable rented us their attic when our ranks
multiplied exponentially in the summer of
1979. Plain and simple, the broadcast center
would never be finished in time to fulfill our
Sept. 7, 7 p.m. sign-on promise. The solution?
Wrap the SportsCenter set in plastic and
park a rented remote truck in the mud out-
side the unfinished building and use it as the
control room.
Jerry Moring, a Peabody award-winning
news director when he was at West Hartford’s
WHNB TV 30, was recruited to fill a role
known as senior studio producer. It was
Moring who named SportsCenter. George
Grande, a WTNH-Channel 8 personality,
became SportsCenter’s senior announcer.
As ESPN celebrates its 25th anniversary,
it goes without saying that “sports’ little
engine that could” has become a monolith
that dominates sports and media. My per-
sonal salute is to the talented visionaries
with Connecticut roots without whose
talents and courage I am sure ESPN would
not be.
In the chaos that was ESPN opening
night, Sept. 7, 1979, 25 years ago, I remember
this: Chief Engineer Ralph Voight delivered
an impossible-to-forget one-word prophecy
to me, much in the spirit of Walter Brooks’
immortal two-syllable “plastics” coaching of
Dustin Hoffman in The Graduate.
Voight’s prophetic one word that night:
“Digital, Peter. Digital.”
Before the Beginning
continued from page 79
September 2004 CONNECTICUT 101