On a dark and cold Thursday morning in October, Bill Rasmussen stood in front of a packed auditorium of 525 people at the University of Saint Francis. From that podium in Fort Wayne, Ind., the 1954 DePauw graduate shared stories he's told hundreds, even thousands of times since September 7, 1979.
On that day nearly 32 years ago, Rasmussen's dream that was laughed at, doubted and passed up by a number of businesses finally came to fruition. That day, a 24-hour sports-television network called ESPN broadcasted its first show.
His stories rarely change and there's barely a question that he hasn't been asked, but whoever Rasmussen speaks to listens with a close ear, amazed that one man could have stumbled into founding something so huge. Many in his audiences don't remember television before ESPN, but there he stands. The founder. The originator. The father.
One story Rasmussen frequently tells involves long-time ESPN anchor Chris Berman. Every anniversary, Berman calls Rasmussen and says, "George, happy anniversary." As Rasmussen represents the founding father of ESPN, Berman refers to him as George Washington.
The crowd in Fort Wayne might have considered him George Washington as well. Lines of men and women dressed in business attire asked for autographs near the stage after Rasmussen, and Indianapolis Colts Vice Chairman Bill Polian spoke. During a break in the program, Rasmussen sat and signed copies of his books while Polian left to move on with the rest of his day. With other speakers scheduled to follow him, the crowd had to be asked to be seated for the remainder of the 17th annual CEO Forum.
Wherever Rasmussen travels, these audiences fuel him. At his age, the travel may physically tire him, but the crowds help reenergize him.
Mostly bald with short white hair on both sides of his head, the wrinkles below his eyes and around his cheeks show his age, but the smiles and wide eyes he produces when talking about ESPN bring back his youth.
"The excitement and the enthusiasm of the audience just helps build the adrenaline," Rasmussen said. "Especially speaking to college graduate class is really amazing. The kids are really excited and enthused about it."
Time at DePauw
Rasmussen doesn't make it back to Indiana much these days. Since graduating, Rasmussen has spent most of his time living on opposite coasts. He now resides in the state of Washington, traveling to speaking events, selling his book on the founding of ESPN and pitching new entrepreneurial ideas.
In fact, he can't quite remember his last trip to Greencastle, guessing it was likely the late 90s while Robert Bottoms was president of the university.
Despite his time away, he still keeps a close eye on DePauw. He communicates with Sports Information Director Bill Wagner frequently at conferences, and Executive Director of Media Relations Ken Owen makes sure to send Rasmussen a copy of each year's Monon Bell Classic on DVD.
Rasmussen found his way to DePauw after graduating from Gage Park High School on the southwest side of Chicago. A baseball player, he wanted to pursue a career in the sport but advice from his father and principal led him to take an academic path. A full-tuition Rector Scholarship helped sway his decision to attend DePauw.
"It made all the sense in the world to go to DePauw to me," Rasmussen said. "I think that the small-college experience and of course the scholarship helped. I wouldn't have done it any other way."
Once at DePauw, Rasmussen played baseball as a freshman, but stuck to playing intramural sports in the following years with his Lambda Chi Alpha fraternity brothers. He also joined the Air Force ROTC program.
Through these programs, he made his closest friends.
Rasmussen pointed to his fraternity as a major factor in his success at DePauw.
"We learned from each other. We helped each other. One of the things I'm really proud of, I really learned how to study and attack a problem," Rasmussen said.
"Every single semester I was at DePauw – eight-straight, from the first until I graduated – my grade point average increased. So I must have been learning something. Maybe I wasn't aware of it at the time, but I was learning something."
Fraternity brother Jim Poor '54 currently resides in Greencastle. A close friend from their days at DePauw, Poor recalls Rasmussen as extremely personable.
"I don't think anybody that's ever met him didn't like him," Poor said. "He was outgoing. I think he was smart. And as far as the AFROTC was concerned, he rose to the top very quickly and that's the reason he was student commander."
As student commander of the AFROTC, Rasmussen held responsibility of the two battalions at DePauw.
Walt Dannenberg '54, a battalion commander under Rasmussen and fellow Lambda Chi, remembers Rasmussen as a strong student.
"He's a quick study," Dannenberg said. "It seemed like he didn't have to work as hard as the rest of us."
When Dannenberg got married in 1955, Rasmussen was the best man of his wedding. Both Dannenberg and Rasmussen married their college sweethearts from DePauw, both members of Alpha Gamma Delta sorority.
The four stuck close together throughout college and shortly after. His description of Rasmussen's personality mirrors Poor's.
"He's very personable. He's a lot fun to be around," Dannenberg said. "Guys like him. He did good work. Whatever he did, he did well. That's a pretty good combination. He's a very bright guy."
Still, neither of his close friends from DePauw would have ever imagined Rasmussen would found an institution as large as ESPN.
"Not in a million years. There wasn't such a thing as ESPN when we were in school," Dannenberg said. "I remember going back to our first reunion after he founded it, and I was just stunned. And even then, we didn't have any idea it would take off like it did."
Dannenberg, who was CEO of First Midwest Bank in Lake Forest, Ill., at the time, even said he wouldn't have invested in the network.
Poor knew that Rasmussen was invested in sports from all the intramural athletics he participated in but considered ESPN to be a vast undertaking.
"I guess he knew what people wanted," Poor said. "I guess he knew what would go and what wouldn't go. And he was an entrepreneur as far as 24-hour-a-day sports were concerned and it paid off for him. Paid off big."
The founding of ESPN
The birth of ESPN wasn't the culmination of a lifelong dream, tens of years of planning or a first job out of college. Rather, the idea was born from Rasmussen finding himself jobless as a middle-aged man. In May of 1978, Rasmussen was fired from his position of communications director of the New England Whalers, a team from the former World Hockey Association.
Rasmussen worked a number of jobs since his graduation from DePauw.
After entering the Air Force post-graduation, Rasmussen started an advertising service business in 1959. At age 30, he committed himself to sports broadcasting. He landed a radio job in Amherst, Mass., in 1962 and switched over to television three years after. In 1974, Rasmussen started his stint with the Whalers.
No more than a week after his firing, Rasmussen started to look into producing sports for Connecticut cable systems, taking advantages of the numerous colleges and universities in the state. But with the insistence of his son Bill, who would later graduate from DePauw in 1986, Rasmussen committed in August of 1978 to creating a national sports network.
At this point, Rasmussen's idea needed three things: a way to transmit the network, programming to fill every day and financial backing. He simultaneously had to find solutions to all three problems.
"It's amazing what you can do when you don't know what you can't do," Rasmussen said to the crowd in Fort Wayne.
Once he was able to purchase a satellite transponder through RCA to distribute the network, Rasmussen felt his idea start to grow legs.
Rasmussen flew all over the country meeting with investors and NCAA committees trying to convince them that his idea was stable from all sides. He referred to his discussions with these organizations as a "mental Ponzi scheme" of sorts.
Eventually he found financial backing through the Getty Oil Company after failing to convince eight other possible investors. Rasmussen then reached an agreement with the NCAA to allow ESPN to provide coverage for a number of sports.
A little over a year after Rasmussen set his eye on creating a national sports network, ESPN premiered at 7 p.m. on September 7, 1979, becoming the first 24-hour broadcast network.
ESPN anchor Lee Leonard uttered the first words for Rasmussen's network.
"If you're a fan, if you're a fan, what you will see in the next few minutes, hours and days to follow may convince you that you've gone to sports heaven."
Though the network was his idea, Rasmussen was unable to maintain his hold on the network for long. By the end of 1980, Rasmussen was replaced as president of ESPN and was a mere consultant at the request of Getty Oil. When ABC bought the network in 1984, Rasmussen lost his share in the company.
Since ESPN, Rasmussen has continued his entrepreneurial ways with less success. Attempts in radio, television, the Internet and even a stadium-golf project haven't reached anywhere near the level of ESPN.
Still, Rasmussen fancies himself as an idea man.
"I guess it's kind of a compulsive organization thing," Rasmussen said. "I like to see all the things in line. Once you have an idea and start you just fill in all the blanks until you get there. Some ideas work, some ideas don't work."
Watching from a distance
As ESPN has grown, Rasmussen has watched with a smiling eye.
"It's like watching your children grow up to be huge successes," said Rasmussen, a father of three. "I've watched my sons and my daughter and they're all successful. That's fun. And ESPN is kind of our fourth kid if you will. There is a great satisfaction to watching it."
One of the biggest moments for Rasmussen came when ESPN bought the rights to broadcast Monday Night Football.
"I got chills up and down my spine when the first Monday Night Football game came on ESPN. Can you imagine Monday Night Football on ESPN?" Rasmussen said. "When we started – unattainable. We knew that eventually we would get a big enough audience. We were all confident that the audience would grow because sports are just absolutely compelling."
This January, Rasmussen was named one of the "Pioneers and Innovators in Sports Business" by the "SportsBusiness Journal/Daily." He's still working on other ideas, though.
Rasmussen's most recent project is called Power Grid TV, which he hopes will stream college sports games that aren't normally televised.
"I really think that every campus in the country can be its own 24/7 TV channel if they want to," he said. "But there's some technological glitches along the way of people trying to get out front. You know, me of all people, I'm not going to blame them for that. Some of the pieces weren't in place."
"And frankly at my age, I don't want to have to go through studying something and then they have to fix it and that will be three or four years from now before they really get it," Rasmussen said. "So we've got a couple of other companies we're looking at. If they've got the technology, we'll let it happen."
While pitching Power Grid TV and closing in on 80 years old, Rasmussen has started to come to realization with just how long ago his DePauw experience ended.
"I graduated in 1954. I can't believe that," he said. "And I was trying to figure out which alumni reunions were coming up. And I looked in one of the DePauw Alumni magazines, and I can remember when I was first out of school, we were way back at the end, now we're on page one."