This week my current and weekly written pop culture topic that interests is ESPN. Flashback to before September 9th, 1979, all televised sporting events were on ABC, NBC, or CBS, and fans had to wait for the 5 o'clock or 10 o'clock or the next morning's paper to see other teams' highlights and scores of. That was the pre-ESPN era. Now, sports fans have unlimited access about sports anytime they want 24/7 in today's sports world dominated by ESPN. William Rasmussen was the mastermind behind the fresh edgy network that's broadcast to over half the countries in the world.
ESPN has become a part of popular culture since its inception. Many movies with a general sports theme will include ESPN announcers and programming into their storyline a reference to a nickname formerly used for ESPN2, In the film The Water boy, Adam Sandler's character Bobby Boucher has his college football accomplishments tracked through several fictional "Sports Center" newscasts including the "Bourbon Bowl." Also, ESPN.com Page 2 columnist Bill Simmons often jokes that he is looking forward to running a future network; Sports Center anchors appeared as themselves in music videos by Brad Paisley (I'm Gonna Miss Her The Fishin' Song and Hootie and the Blowfish Only Wanna Be With You and the 1998 TV series Sports Night was based on an ESPN-style network and its titular,
Blossoming into a mini-media conglomeration in its own, ESPN has conquered of the so-called "Sports Nation" does not show any signs of slowing down anytime take over. In addition of being a subsidiary of Walt Disney Company, ESPN's colossal sweep of the United States and abroad can be attributed to its ambiguity to reach all markets in any way possible, by development focusing on the sports fan, modernizing with the times, and the booming popularity of sports in general.
After being fired from his public relations job for Hartford Whalers, William Rasmussen employed his severance pay, which he used to buy a satellite transponder, his contacts in television, and a dream for a 24-hour cable network dedicated entirely to sports. That turned out to be all he needed to launch the network that would eventually broadcast to 87 million homes in United States alone. This initial broadcast was to only 1.4 million homes. This was only the very beginning though. At the very beginning, the sports shown on ESPN, or Entertainment and Sports Programming Network, were not the most popular sports in the world, as consisted of sports like badminton, darts, and Irish hurling. The first major sporting event televised on ESPN was the 1980 NCAA Men's basketball tournament. The NCAA Tournament, both the men's and women's, can credit a lot their success and popularity to ESPN because they would broadcast a sizeable amount of games of the tournament when other national broadcast networks do not.
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