Long before sports fans could watch games around the clock, check highlights at any hour or wake up to a full morning of scores and analysis, Bill Rasmussen had an idea that plenty of people thought would never work.
Rasmussen, the visionary co-founder of ESPN who helped transform the way generations consume sports, died Tuesday, August 18, at his home in Florida. He was 93. ESPN said Rasmussen died from the effects of Parkinson’s disease, which he publicly revealed in 2019 after being diagnosed several years earlier.
For today’s sports fan, the idea of a television network devoted entirely to sports seems almost obvious. In the late 1970s, it was anything but.
Rasmussen had worked in radio and television before becoming communications director for the World Hockey Association’s New England Whalers. After the team’s front office was fired in 1978, Rasmussen and his son Scott began discussing what would become one of the most consequential ideas in sports media history while sitting in traffic during a drive from Connecticut toward the Jersey Shore.
The original concept was considerably smaller: a regional cable network covering Connecticut sports. Once the possibilities of satellite distribution became clear, however, Rasmussen started thinking nationally. Armed with little more than ambition, industry contacts and a reported $9,000 credit-card advance, the Rasmussens pursued the idea of sports television 24 hours a day.
Cable executives weren’t exactly lining up to tell them it was brilliant.
But Rasmussen kept pushing.
Financial backing from Getty Oil, an important rights agreement with the NCAA and a major advertising commitment from Anheuser-Busch helped turn the concept into an actual network. On September 7, 1979, ESPN officially went on the air from Bristol, Connecticut.
And appropriately, the first program was SportsCenter.
George Grande and Lee Leonard anchored that inaugural broadcast, with Leonard welcoming viewers by suggesting sports fans might believe they’d gone to “sports heaven.” ESPN’s first live sporting event wasn’t Monday Night Football, Major League Baseball or the NBA. It was the American Professional Slow Pitch Softball World Series, featuring the Kentucky Bourbons against the Milwaukee Schlitz.
Those humble beginnings make what followed even more remarkable.
ESPN eventually became the self-described Worldwide Leader in Sports, changing not only television but the economics and presentation of American athletics. Dedicated highlight shows, wall-to-wall college basketball, live drafts, debate programming and eventually multiple networks and digital platforms all grew from the basic proposition Rasmussen championed: sports fans would watch sports programming whenever you gave it to them.
Rasmussen’s own tenure at the company was surprisingly brief. Getty Oil purchased 85 percent of ESPN before the network launched, and Rasmussen was pushed out of the organization in 1980. Yet his separation from the company couldn’t erase the significance of the idea that started it.
ESPN Chairman Jimmy Pitaro called Rasmussen a “visionary and an innovator,” adding that the network wouldn’t exist without the passion and entrepreneurial spirit he brought to its creation. Veteran ESPN personality Chris Berman went even further in remembering the company’s founding father, referring to Rasmussen as ESPN’s “George Washington.”
Rasmussen continued working in sports and media after leaving ESPN, including consulting work involving the Big Ten and other media ventures. He also documented the network’s unlikely beginnings in books about ESPN’s creation. In 2025, Rasmussen received another overdue recognition when he was inducted into the Sports Broadcasting Hall of Fame.
His legacy, however, can be measured every night without looking at an award.
Turn on a television during football season and find games on multiple networks. Watch a college basketball tournament from beginning to end. Check SportsCenter for highlights. Follow a draft live. Watch a relatively obscure sport receive national exposure that would have been unimaginable decades ago.
None of those things happened because of Rasmussen alone, but the sports-media universe we take for granted today traces a significant part of its DNA back to his vision.
Bill Rasmussen saw a future where sports didn’t have to wait for the evening news or the weekend game of the week.
He believed sports could be television all day, every day.
Nearly five decades later, it’s difficult to imagine the sports world any other way.