ESPN has some distinct counter-programming for the NCAA Men’s Basketball Championship on Monday night in the new documentary “Sports Heaven: The Birth of ESPN,” which tells the story behind the creation of the network, including founder Bill Rasmussen’s efforts to launch the network, early financial backing from Getty Oil, the first programming deals and investment in satellite tech.
It’s also a one-shot performance for the doc on ESPN linear airwaves, as this isn’t a production of ESPN Films but of an outside company in Tenero. “The priority for us was Bill Rasmussen very much wanted his story on his network,” said longtime ESPN exec Mike Soltys, who is now the company’s historian and a producer on the documentary. “He particularly liked ESPN over ESPN2, and he particularly liked prime time over daytime. And so, he’s very happy with it. But they acquired it for the one air, and then Tenero hopes to sell it to somebody else. So it will be a free agent next week.”
But while ESPN Films isn’t involved with the production, there was plenty of support and cooperation from many senior and long-tenured ESPN personnel, including interviews with the likes of Rasmussen, Jimmy Pitaro, Chuck Pagano, Rosa Gatti, George Bodenheimer, Chris Berman and Bob Ley.
“Everybody that’s in the film, we asked, and they were happy to do it. Nobody turned us down,” Soltys said. “We had a director of photography, Bruce Taylor, who worked at ESPN a long time. He provided that comfort level for people to know that this is the crew that’s coming into your living room.”
Looking for buried treasure
One of the better finds for Soltys while making the film was a rehearsal of the first “SportsCenter” from Sept. 7, 1979, which not only had he never seen, but he didn’t know existed.
The director of the film, Greg DeHart, was actually surprised at how little video was available from the earliest days. “The issue was in 1979, because ESPN’s losing a lot of money, if something wasn’t going to be repeated, Getty had the instruction that we had to tape over the tape, because tapes were too expensive to just keep going through them,” Soltys said. “It was like almost no ‘SportsCenter’ from 1979. ... We tried the town of Bristol, the state of Connecticut and the local news stations and the NBC affiliate. We did get a little clip of Berman on the weekend sports that he was doing before he came here. But Chris Berman in 1979 on ESPN — I’m not aware of it existing.”
One area where Soltys’ research for the film will come in handy is for ESPN’s 50th anniversary set for 2029. “If you’re going to do an anniversary big, you got to do it a lot of time in advance,” he said. “Anything that I’ve uncovered for this film, I’ve made a digital home for it.”
