ESPN founder Bill Rasmussen burned through his own money, his credit cards, and his family's money to get a 24-hour sports network to the brink of launch — then signed the Getty Oil deal that funded ESPN and cost him control of it. Mike Soltys, hired as ESPN's first PR intern in 1980 and now the network's official historian, points to the mistake inside that deal: employment contracts for Bill, his son Scott, and the early team were left as a loose end, and all of them were pushed out after Getty took charge.
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My guest for Episode #360 of the My Favorite Mistake podcast is is Mike Soltys, who was hired as ESPN's first PR intern in 1980, when the network was less than a year old. He stayed 43 years, the last 20 as a vice president in corporate communications, and he is now ESPN's official historian. He produced the documentary “Sports Heaven: The Birth of ESPN” and co-authored the book of the same name with ESPN founder Bill Rasmussen and Garrett Z. Sutton, with a foreword by Chris Berman.
The favorite mistake Mike shares isn't his own. It belongs to Bill Rasmussen, and Bill won't call it one. After being fired by the Hartford Whalers, Bill chased the idea of sports television around the clock and burned through his own money, his credit cards, his son Scott's money, and money from his father, sister, and brother. A venture capitalist kept him afloat for a while. Six months before launch, out of cash, he signed a deal with Getty Oil for the tens of millions ESPN needed. Getty took most of the company. Other terms were left as loose ends to settle after the contract, and employment contracts for Bill, Scott, and the early team were among them. Once Getty took charge, those loose ends never got tied. Two early key figures were pushed out almost immediately. Scott was shown the door at launch. Bill was gone a year later, roughly 18 months after the idea that would define the rest of his life.
Mike has tried more than once to get Bill to name a regret, and Bill doesn't look back. As Mike puts it, Bill was never going to win a better financial deal from Getty — but employment protection was a separate negotiation he had leverage to make, and didn't. Scott took the lesson forward and says he negotiated far better after that.
We also get into why the deal that cost Bill the company was still the deal that made ESPN possible, how Getty's post-oil-crisis diversification strategy landed a sports network next to a logging company, and how ESPN passed to Texaco, ABC, Cap Cities, and Disney. Mike explains the business model the cable operators laughed at — a penny per subscriber per day — that became the foundation of the whole industry. And we cover the early improvisation: the World Series of Slow Pitch Softball as the first live event, with the Milwaukee Schlitzes playing on a night when Anheuser-Busch executives were in the building; the first live remote interview that failed on air when the audio never came through; and why ESPN chose to celebrate its bloopers rather than bury them.
Mike also shares what he learned about memory and evidence while writing the book. Everyone who was there the night of the failed Chuck Fairbanks interview remembers it differently. Mike defaulted to the business diary Bill kept in 1978 and 1979, written in the moment, rather than to recollections that had turned into legend over 45 years. That's a useful discipline for anyone running an incident review.
What You'll Learn
- Why financial control and employment protection are separate negotiations, and why founders lose the second one while focused on the first
- What Bill Rasmussen's refusal to look back cost him, and what it gave him
- How the same idea can fail on timing and succeed on timing (Bill's 24-hour sports radio venture and smart-home business were both too early)
- Why ESPN's leadership treats on-air mistakes as brand-consistent rather than as embarrassments
- How contemporaneous documentation beats recollection when reconstructing what happened
- What Scott Rasmussen changed about how he negotiates after watching the Getty deal
- Why a cable model that got Bill laughed out of meetings became the industry's revenue backbone
- How Jimmy Pitaro and George Bodenheimer describe the willingness to try things and fail as part of what has lasted at ESPN since 1979
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Episode #360: Mike Soltys, ESPN Historian
Meet Mike Soltys, ESPN's First PR Intern
Mark Graban: Hi, welcome to My Favorite Mistake. I'm your host, Mark Graban. Our guest today is Mike Soltys. He was hired as ESPN's first PR intern in 1980, when the network was less than a year old. He stayed 43 years, the last 20 as a vice president in corporate communications. He is now ESPN's official historian. He's the producer of the documentary “Sports Heaven: The Birth of ESPN,” and one of the co-authors of a book of the same name with ESPN founder Bill Rasmussen. Mike, it's exciting to have you here. How are you?
Mike Soltys: Thank you for having me, Mark. Looking forward to talking about it.
Mark Graban: Such a long, fun history with ESPN. There's so much I'm curious to talk to you about — the experiences, the things you saw, the things that you maybe had to talk to the media about. There's a lot of fun stuff in the book. But as we always do here, Mike, what's a favorite mistake story that you'd like to share with us?
The ESPN Founder's Mistake: A Deal Signed Without Employment Contracts
Mike Soltys: Off the launch of ESPN. Bill Rasmussen, the founder, who also wrote this book and who was the one who hired me as an intern, is just a regular guy in Connecticut. He gets fired by the Hartford Whalers hockey team, and he has this idea of sports television around the clock. But that's an expensive proposition.
He burns through his money, his credit cards, his son's money. He goes to his family, goes to his father's money, his sister, his brother. Gets a venture capitalist, which keeps him afloat for a while, and there's real momentum. ESPN's going to happen. There's real momentum going on, and he's out of money. And he does a deal with Getty Oil to fund the tens of millions of dollars needed. And in the negotiation six months before launch, they really put the clamps down on giving him and his investors much of a part of the company. But then there were other things to get settled, loose ends that they had to do after the contract.
I'd say the mistake — and Bill to this day says he doesn't regret things and he doesn't look back, and I've tried to pin him on a mistake — it's like he should have negotiated a better deal out of Getty. He wasn't going to get a better financial deal, but employment contracts for him and his son and the early people that were involved, something.
Because once Getty took charge, not only did they own most of the company, they were putting Scott, his son, was shown the door at launch time. A couple of the other early key figures were pushed out even well before that, and then Bill was gone a year later. So I'd say the big mistake was not doing an employment contract, which if in fact was a loose end, would seem like it was something that he could have tied up when he was giving away the financial control.
Mark Graban: And that's not an uncommon entrepreneurship story.
Mike Soltys: No.
Mark Graban: Bill went on — he's still, what, 92 now?
Mike Soltys: 93, yep.
Mark Graban: How many more companies and ventures was he involved in after he founded ESPN?
Bill Rasmussen's Ventures Before and After ESPN
Mike Soltys: He did quite a few, as well as his son Scott, who was in his early 20s when ESPN launched. Scott became very well known in the surveying business, the audience research business. Rasmussen Reports was his. And now he's got a startup and incubator with Google. Scott told me he learned from that Getty episode on how to negotiate a deal, and he said he did a lot better going forward.
To your question, Bill spent his whole life — he's in his 40s when ESPN starts — launching new things, and many times they were things ahead of their time. Timing can be an important thing. With ESPN it was the right time. Satellite technology was there, people just hadn't figured out it was right there, and the timing was good. He did a thing with Scott on 24-hour sports radio before that was timed right, and that folded. He built smart homes and wasn't able to build it to scale, and that was ahead of its time.
So he often was doing that. But you need, as an entrepreneur, you need the kind of vision and passion Bill has. But so many of these things, you need a lot of money to make it work. And it is the kind of classic entrepreneur story. Somebody has a good idea, gets it rolling, but then financially does not have the wherewithal to pull it off. Sports television is an expensive business.
But his optimism and things that he brought into it — while he's out looking for investors, he's not waiting for the investors. He's doing a deal with the NCAA. He's doing a deal with Anheuser-Busch for Budweiser ads. He's doing a deal with the city of Bristol for headquarters. He's doing a deal for television production facilities to go around the country, all still progressing. He's not letting them know he's running out of money. But ultimately, all that would have come crashing down if he didn't get Getty to write a big check.
Mark Graban: You hear entrepreneurs talking about the loss of control that inevitably happens when you take somebody else's money, and founders do get squeezed out. It's got to be heartbreaking to have something that has this big vision, and to work so hard on it, and to be so excited about it, and then to be pushed out within a year.
Why an Oil Company Bought a Sports Network
Mike Soltys: There were a couple early key characters that we get into in the book, Ed Eagan and J.B. Dougherty, who Stu Evey, the guy at Getty who did the deal, pushed out immediately. Scott, his son, stayed through launch, and that was it, which was in September. And then Bill only stayed another year later. And Getty hung onto it for a little while.
Getty's interest was — you think of an oil company, and why are they investing in a sports media startup? But the 1970s oil crisis led Getty to believe they should have diversified operations, and that was everything from investing in lumbering companies to investing in real estate. And in this case, the guy Stu Evey was a big sports fan and a big television fan, and he felt that there was a good thing for the company to invest in that was outside of oil.
But Getty then gets bought by Texaco in the mid-'80s. Texaco wanted nothing to do with Getty Oil's diversified operations, and immediately sold ESPN and the logging company and everything else. But Getty was certainly an important factor in getting ESPN off the ground because they had deep pockets. An oil company has a lot of money. And as Stu Evey would say, “If it doesn't work out with ESPN, you're just like a dry hole that we dug in Oklahoma.” We just move on. And that was the kind of financial investment they needed, because it's not cheap.
Mark Graban: You think of ESPN being part of Disney and being part of media companies, and there's consolidation of media companies. But it's a different era back then, the corporate conglomerate. I remember learning in business school in the late '90s that it was not uncommon, it was really popular, it was almost like the Warren Buffett model of, we're going to own all of these different companies and then balance out or diversify revenue swings and profitability. But that certainly fell out of fashion. That was probably inevitable, that it would have been sold out of the oil company.
From Getty to Texaco to ABC to Disney
Mike Soltys: Texaco sold us to ABC. The broadcast networks ruled the world in the '70s and early '80s, and they were all struggling with this whole cable idea. And they all were poo-pooing cable. But then the momentum started for cable, and ABC was happy to invest in ESPN, and CBS and NBC started to invest as well. Fox didn't exist at the time. But it was all of a sudden the broadcast networks that thought that the cable companies would be a secondary business.
They didn't see the era that ultimately — you watch sports to this day on ABC, and it's ESPN on ABC. That's what's on your screen. We're producing it, we're selling it, we're doing everything with it other than putting it on our platform. But at that point, the broadcasters were like, “Okay, we need to invest in cable.” And so ESPN was looked at as a pretty good investment for the ABC television network, which then got bought by Cap Cities, which then got bought by Disney.
Mark Graban: I appreciate you sharing Bill's story on his behalf. The fact that he could bounce back from that, and the fact that he and Scott learned from that mistake to not repeat that mistake — that's really what we celebrate here on the podcast.
“Intentional Optimism” and the Origin of the Title
Mike Soltys: We were originally going to call the book and the movie “Intentional Optimism,” because that was Bill's philosophy. Our audiobook publisher thought that was a little squishy and asked us to change it. And in the opening show, Lee Leonard says, “You're going to think you died and went to sports heaven,” when ESPN launched.
So Bill's optimism just really helped carry him on. He never looks back. When he was out at ESPN, he's looking forward. But as the father of ESPN — Chris Berman likes to call him our George Washington — he got a lot of attention, and he would speak at colleges and at chambers of commerce and whatever, and it was always about the launch of ESPN. That 18 months defined his life. The day he dies, it'll be the lead of his obituary. He's the founder of ESPN. And as he played that card, as he got into new businesses, it would be, “Hey, I launched ESPN, I know what I'm doing here,” kind of thing.
But he always was optimistic. He would have a business fail, and I didn't even know it failed, and he'd call me up and he'd be talking about a new business, and I'm like, “Bill, wait a second. What happened to the other thing?” He says, “That didn't work out, but we've moved on.”
And he gets into it in the book, that he feels when somebody is trying to sell ESPN before launch, and cable systems are kind of laughing at him, his approach was, “They're just wrong. They don't get it. Okay, I move on to the next cable system.” He wasn't going to try to talk them into something. In his head he's thinking, “No, really, ESPN's going to be a big success. You guys are ridiculous for not realizing that.” But he's just like, “Okay, nice doing business with you. If you change your mind, call me.” And he'd go on to the next meeting with a smile on his face.
Mark Graban: It sounds like the entrepreneur version of Getty and, “Well, just another dry well. We'll move on.”
Mike Soltys: Yep. That's what it is.
The Cable Business Model Everyone Got Wrong
Mark Graban: I wanted to ask you, there was a story in the book — entrepreneurs are looking for money, they're looking for deals, they're often looking for advice. There's a story in the book about what Chuck Dolan from HBO said about ESPN and the ad-supported cable model. It sounds like there's advice that might have been a mistake to take.
Mike Soltys: There were a lot of different thoughts. Bill first announced that he was going to do a package of UConn sporting events to the state of Connecticut, because he was with the Hartford Whalers, he's here. At the time, this is pre-Big East UConn, and there wasn't a whole lot of television, and he was going to sell that as a pay-per-view.
Early cable was: you live in the countryside, your neighbor with the tallest roof or highest hill puts an antenna up to pull the signals from another city, and then he puts in a wire and he sells it to you. But HBO then started to say, “Well, I can tap into this.” And HBO's providing a movie service, and that was a premium. If you got your over-the-air channels for 10 bucks, HBO was another six, and you could take it or not take it. And that was what people were thinking the cable model would be.
And it was quickly realized, if you're going to really survive, you want to be in every home. And to get to every home, you've got to be doing it originally for free. But then they realized quickly that it's not going to get supported just on the once-an-hour Anheuser-Busch commercial that was running. Everybody that worked here has Budweiser and Michelob ingrained in their brain, because every hour there was one of those ads. You needed to build up as part of the subscriber basis, and not the way HBO was doing it at the time.
And following ESPN came CNN and USA Network, and a lot of ones that became what we got to know as basic cable. And it became a fast-moving success.
Mark Graban: Beyond the ad revenue, Bill got laughed at for wanting a penny per cable subscriber per day. Being paid by the cable companies.
Mike Soltys: They wanted some payment, and the cable companies were like, “A lot of people are coming here promising us lots of things, and they don't happen.” And ultimately it was free, but then that turned around pretty quickly and became the business model that made ESPN the big success that it became. That kind of revenue — you're paying your cable bill every month. At that point, pre-streaming, every household in America was basically doing it. And a chunk of that was going to ESPN every month, whether you're a sports fan or not.
Mark Graban: I read something online. I was doing a little digging. If this is accurate, that on average it's maybe $10 a month to ESPN, 30 cents a day adjusted for inflation going back to '79 or '80.
Mike Soltys: It has been the model. Even as a streamer, if you subscribe to YouTube TV and you get ESPN, it's the same as if you're getting Comcast or Cox. There's not much of a difference there. It's a different distribution model, and you might have a different channel lineup or what have you. But it's similar.
And then ESPN a year ago went into the direct-to-consumer business, where you can subscribe to ESPN without having cable or without having YouTube — ESPN Unlimited — and you can get everything that ESPN is doing. And that was a long time coming, but again, it was something that the modern consumer wanted. ESPN always was trying to distribute to where the audience is. Big commitment ESPN's made to social media and to YouTube and to ESPN.com and radio and what have you. You wanted to be where the sports fan was, and ESPN wants to be the leader, and still to this day in 2026 is the leader to sports fans on a lot of different avenues. And the direction seems to be going direct-to-consumer. But it's not to say that the old multi-channel universe, as it was called, with cable and now streaming, isn't the backbone of the company still.
The Go.com Era and the Value of Four Letters
Mark Graban: ESPN was one of the first major players on the web. I'm thinking back long enough when it wasn't ESPN.com. Disney had this notion — I think it was actually go.com.
Mike Soltys: Yes. Part of the Go Network.
Mark Graban: And ESPN was part of that. And at some point I think they realized, okay, maybe that was a mistake, and let everyone have their own domain.
Mike Soltys: Really early on it was the ESPNET SportsZone. And there was just the notion that you didn't want to confuse the consumer or something. And then finally it was, hey, the ESPN brand is gold. It should be ESPN.com. It should be ESPN+. It should be ESPN Radio. It should be ESPN2. There were a lot of notions that ESPN2 should — I mean, they nicknamed it The Deuce — but should have some different name. But the four letters are just so valuable that it's silly not to.
Launching ESPN2 to Reach an Audience They Already Had
Mark Graban: One story that I've heard related to the launch of ESPN2 is a story I've heard Keith Olbermann tell. He was a part of the launch of ESPN2. The way he's told the story — and I'd love to hear your thoughts on this — is that they were launching ESPN2, it was going to be like the hip version of ESPN. Everything was in lowercase letters and cool '90s graphics. And he famously hosted the first — was it called SportsNight on ESPN2?
Mike Soltys: It was a SportsCenter, but longer-running and more irreverent. And he famously opened it up with a leather jacket and introduced everyone to, “Welcome to the end of our careers.” Keith was the anchor on it. There were others. Stuart Scott actually came to ESPN on the Sports Smash, which was kind of the side highlight desk. Suzy Kolber, Kenny Mayne, a lot of people came to ESPN through that early show.
But the whole idea that it had to be younger and hipper — ESPN was already skewing very young and very hip, as Keith has pointed out. But going to the cable systems that were like, “Oh, I don't know that we want more ESPN,” it would have to be, “Oh, this isn't more ESPN. We're offering you a differentiated product.” So it was really about the marketing of it, to say that ESPN2 was going to be different. And some of the things, like the X Games, launched because ESPN2 wanted to do a lot more of these types of sports. So there was some substance behind it. But largely it was ESPN Too, more of the same kind of content that the sports fan loved.
Mark Graban: Keith was telling this story, kind of wondering about going after the young audience, and he asked some executive at ESPN, “Well, what are the ratings for the 18 to 34 group on SportsCenter?” And it was huge ratings already for the 18 to 34. But I think your point makes sense, of trying to get placement. And now ESPN2 is basically an overflow channel for sporting events. That's probably not the best way to say it, but it's the same logo with a two. It's no longer the lowercase.
Mike Soltys: At the end of our documentary, where you get in documentaries those cards about what happened, one of the cards pointed out that ESPN has been the number one network for men 18 to 34 for 40 years or so, every year. So it hasn't changed. And it certainly, when ESPN2 launched, was the number one network with men 18 to 34, which doesn't mean the whole audience is there, but it's a coveted audience for advertisers, and always has been. And so that has been helpful.
Now, the audience does well. We get an older audience, and certainly the amount of women that are watching has grown over the years for ESPN. But that core 18 to 34 that they were targeting when ESPN2 launched — ESPN was already number one, and SportsCenter was really strong in that.
Filling the Hours: Darts, Australian Rules Football, and The Ocho
Mark Graban: I wanted to ask you about filling an entire year with sports programming. It was hard to find the money, it was hard to fill the hours. X Games later on was one of those things to help fill in. Summertime, I noticed the other day that was on. I'm not an X Games viewer, but my wife and I were at a restaurant that had a lot of TVs. On one screen was X Games. On the other screen, apparently it was the weekend where ESPNews converts itself to the joke from the movie “Dodgeball” — ESPN8, The Ocho. And there was a break dancing competition, and then it was something called roof ball, people throwing a football up on a roof and trying to catch it.
Mike Soltys: Yeah, you throw it up on the roof, and then you have to catch it. And as it was pointed out on my Twitter feed, isn't there a better roof to have the world championships on? It looked like just anybody's suburban cul-de-sac house. And that was the world championship.
But coming off The Ocho, ESPN8, from “Dodgeball,” in recent years there's been the celebration of the zany, wacky sports, from cornhole to the roof ball and what have you. And it started as a thing that was done on August 8, 8/8. And it's kind of grown to where you recently saw it still in July, and then there'll be quite a bit of programming leading up till August 8.
But the early days at ESPN, the primetime lineup, a lot of it was some of those sports. It gets into crazy rules in the country, but you couldn't do live college football. ESPN couldn't do it. It was very limited. Oklahoma and Georgia sued. It went all the way to the Supreme Court, because Oklahoma and Georgia wanted more games on television, and that opened the door to ESPN to do all the college football that we do today.
But we still did college football, we just couldn't do it live. So then we would record a bunch of games on Saturday, and then we could start doing them on Sunday. And so you would get Sunday night a game, Monday night, Tuesday night, Wednesday night during college football season — the game from the previous Saturday. But as a viewer, it was better than anything else that you had on your television. And college football was a big-time thing that ESPN could affiliate with, and it certainly helped carry it.
But at the same time, we're doing darts, Chris Berman hosting darts. We're doing Australian rules football, which continued to grow in popularity through the '80s because ESPN was doing it. But over time, there was a mix of more of the mainstream things, and we saw opportunities. The NCAA tournament was not getting much coverage, and ESPN offered, “We'll do all these games. We'll do the College World Series. We'll do any of the NCAA championships that were available.” And sure enough, there was an audience, and we would lend ourselves to it.
You look at how successful the World Cup was. We did the 1982 World Cup, and nobody wanted it. And nobody wanted it in '86, and we did a bunch of it. We were able to grow events by giving the coverage to it.
Mark Graban: It's amazing how much that's all shifted. And now during the college football season, you have live games on Tuesday and Wednesday, and MACtion, and different leagues that are happy to shift their games to a different day of the week to get that live coverage.
Mike Soltys: Everybody grasps the positiveness of the exposure. There was a lot of sentiment in the '80s that, oh, if you put it on TV, nobody's going to go to the stadium. And they kind of found out the opposite was true. You put it on TV, and people get familiar with your sport, and then they want to go see it in person. It doesn't mean they're not going to still watch it on TV if they're home. It complements it.
Mark Graban: Aussie rules football is a famous example of what was aired. I laughed in the book at the proposal for a weekly half-hour show about hot air balloons. That never made it to air, I'm guessing.
Mike Soltys: No. Though we did do some hot air balloons. Richard Branson, the Virgin Atlantic guy, was a big investor in these long-distance balloon things, and we did televise a thing called Earth Winds that he partnered with a Russian cosmonaut on. They were going to get really high up and go around the world, and we televised that. They didn't go very far. The thing wasn't designed well.
But there was just generally an openness to, let's try something and see if it works. Even within the X Games, which were first called the Extreme Games, they would do kite skiing in the water, and the athletes are getting blown three beaches down. Or sky surfing, where people jumped out of an airplane and would have like a snowboard on their feet and do tricks through the air. Bungee jumping was part of the original X Games. So there was just a spirit to keep trying things.
The First Live Event: Slow Pitch Softball and a Beer Sponsor Problem
Mark Graban: One of the other famous early ESPN offerings was professional men's slow pitch softball. There's a funny story there about a conflict between — you mentioned Budweiser as a sponsor — and this was ESPN's first ever live event.
Mike Soltys: Correct. It was opening night.
Mark Graban: Tell us about that.
Mike Soltys: It was opening night. Anheuser-Busch did this huge deal for the time, the biggest deal in cable, and then they renewed it a couple of years later. Again, it was the biggest deal in cable. It was kind of a natural marriage between Budweiser and sports fans. So they're going to have an ad every hour around the clock, and their executives come to Bristol for opening night. And the first live event, the only thing they could get for Friday night, September 7, was the World Series of Slow Pitch Softball. It's like, okay, that's going to be the game.
Well, who makes the World Series of Slow Pitch Softball? The Kentucky Bourbons against the Milwaukee Schlitzes. And for younger people who don't know what Schlitz was, it was a pretty big beer brand back then.
We get into that. ESPN did a great 30 for 30 — Jeremy Schaap did it — that you can find on YouTube. But it's a tremendous story of how that came to be. Bill wanted to start with SportsCenter, which still exists to this day, and then go to the World Series of Slow Pitch Softball. They wanted a live event, and they got a live event. It was a best-of-nine series, so they got several live events out of it.
Mark Graban: I guess Anheuser-Busch rolled with it.
Mike Soltys: They did. They had exclusivity for the beer category through the '80s. They were paying a premium because they invested early, and ESPN was loyal to them. We used to run press events, and we had to check ahead of time with the hotel that they served Anheuser-Busch products, because any event ESPN did had to have Anheuser-Busch products and not Schlitz or another brand.
Mark Graban: So the Miller Lite “less filling, tastes great” ads weren't running on ESPN.
Mike Soltys: Those were not on ESPN. We got Michelob Ultra, not Michelob Light, and Michelob and Budweiser Light, et cetera — whatever their product was, and nobody else. And at that point you couldn't run alcohol ads. It was interesting, you could run beer ads on TV, but you couldn't run alcohol. So the only spirits ads that aired on ESPN for a long time were Anheuser-Busch products.
The First Live Remote Interview Failed on Opening Night
Mark Graban: One of the other firsts at ESPN, there's a funny mistake story involved — the first ever live remote during SportsCenter. Tell us about that one.
Mike Soltys: Chuck Fairbanks was making his debut as the University of Colorado coach, and it was, “Hey, for the first show we're going to throw to a live interview to show our capabilities.” The Colorado game the next day was to be Chuck Fairbanks' debut as a college coach. We're going to get him for a live interview, and they test it out and everything seems to be working fine.
We have it in the book. We ended up not putting it in the documentary because everybody that was there that night has a different version of what happened — whether it aired, whether the Chuck Fairbanks meltdown happened live on air, or happened just before the telecast, or happened in the first commercial break. But for whatever reason, the Chuck Fairbanks interview, even though we put all this money and effort into it, and it was to be the big moment of the first show, didn't happen. They couldn't get audio. They got a picture, and Chuck's there, but they can't get audio.
So it kind of is the lesson about, no matter how many times you check and prepare, you just have to be able to roll with it. It's also funny historically that all the people there that night have a different version of what happened. I tend to go with — in the book, Bill kept a business diary in '78 and '79, which we based the book off of, and based some of the movie off of too. And I go back to that a lot. All right, Bill wrote that back in the moment. People's memories of what happened, it becomes like legendary tales, and they're kind of based in truth, but they've got their own little spin on it. And you don't want to tell anybody their story's wrong. But it doesn't necessarily align with everybody else's story.
Why ESPN Celebrates Its Bloopers
Mark Graban: Things are always going to go wrong, and it's one of the themes of the podcast here — we're all human, and even with a lot of experience, things are still going to go wrong. Think of famous bloopers. Live TV and news, or ESPN. There's free publicity from that. The one that comes to mind — maybe I'll let you tell it — and talk about, as a PR person, do you try to capitalize on the blooper, or are there times where you had to apologize? Steve Levy was trying to describe somebody's injury as a bulging disc. It didn't come out that way.
Mike Soltys: Correct. And for the most part, when it's an innocent mistake like that — part of what ESPN has as its brand promise, as the marketers say, has been that we take our sports seriously, but we don't take ourselves too seriously, and kind of having a sense of humor. Which has been important. If you watch SportsCenter over the years, whether it was Chris Berman or Olbermann or Kenny Mayne or Stuart Scott or Scott Van Pelt, whoever it's been, you want a sense of humor.
So ESPN ended up celebrating the bloopers, and we would do them in anniversary shows. Most of the anniversary shows would include a blooper reel. And the kind of live programming that ESPN has done over the years — there's been no show in television history done more frequently than SportsCenter. So there's obviously going to be a lot of bloopers. And you might as well just roll with them and have fun with them and bring them back and let the audience laugh once again with them.
Inside a “This Is SportsCenter” Commercial
Mark Graban: And then the thing with the humor, there's the “This Is SportsCenter” ads. A classic example of — I don't know if it started when the show “The Office” was popular, or if that was even earlier — of showing these sort of pseudo-documentary moments.
Mike Soltys: The whole premise of the “This Is SportsCenter” campaign was that Bristol, Connecticut, in the middle of Connecticut, away from media centers, was the center of the sports universe, and all these athletes hung out on our campus. That was kind of the premise, and it went from there. And if people aren't familiar, I definitely encourage, go to YouTube. You can go down the rabbit hole and watch these for hours.
Mark Graban: They're great.
Mike Soltys: They are. You had so many sports celebrities, other celebrities. Over the years, pretty much any SportsCenter anchor has appeared in them, and most of them are very funny.
I had the good fortune to appear in one. They needed a network suit, as they called it, and it was a Friday afternoon, and this is in the casual Friday era. And it was known that I had a sports coat hanging on the back of my door if I needed to do a last-minute television interview. And so they called me up and said, “You still have that blue blazer?” I'm like, “Yeah.” “Can you get down to this conference room?”
And I walk into this conference room, and the setup was, it was when there were musicians that were becoming agents, and they were going to become sportscaster agents. So Kenny Rogers, the singer, not the pitcher, was going to be an agent, and he's in the spot. And Dee Snider of Twisted Sister was an agent. And my thing that I walked into, Davy Jones of The Monkees. And he's negotiating a contract for Karl Ravech. And they needed somebody that Davy Jones is screaming at, that you don't know how valuable he is.
And I just had to sit there and shake my head and smile. The spot turned out great, the 60-second version and 30-second version. And to be yelled at by Davy Jones of The Monkees several takes, it was hysterical.
Mark Graban: That's great. And I guess with the non-speaking role, you didn't have to worry about a mistake.
Mike Soltys: Well, I did at the end. Davy had me repeat — he's negotiating, I'm the suit he's negotiating with — I had to say, “We love Karl,” as monotone as I can, that I was repeating it because Davy Jones was telling me to say it.
The Hardest PR Moments in 43 Years
Mark Graban: So for all of the fun moments, I am curious, from your role as a PR executive, was there anything you had to deal with that you would call a PR crisis? Like the most serious thing to have to deal with?
Mike Soltys: Over time you would have the death of, particularly, on-air people that people felt that they knew. Tom Mees, who was an early SportsCenter legend, who drowned in a swimming pool near here. John Saunders later passing away, Pete Axthelm. Those are the most difficult.
We had a couple times over the years that announcers were arrested. Those aren't a whole lot of fun. We would get protests. I was just telling somebody — I'm talking to you from Bristol — there used to be regular protests on the front lawn. That was a more common thing in like the '90s. You'd go out and protest things, and so that kind of thing. And then, as you referenced, an announcer would say something on air that one group or another didn't like.
Those were the kind of things that had to be managed, that were more of the crisis issue, the crisis du jour, as we would call it. And later rounds of layoffs and things, businessy kind of things that you don't want to be dealing with. You want to be talking about Monday Night Football and Sunday Night Baseball and what have you.
What Still Remains from 1979
Mark Graban: Our guest again, Mike Soltys. The book is “Sports Heaven: The Birth of ESPN.” Chris Berman — Boomer, legendary Chris Berman — wrote the foreword. Bill Rasmussen, ESPN founder, with Mike and with Garrett Z. Sutton.
One other thing that really stood out from the entrepreneurship journey was you quoting current chairman of ESPN, Jimmy Pitaro, about the DNA — not being afraid to fail, accepting it, and learning from it. I'm curious about your reflections. It sounds like Bill had a lot of that from the beginning. How does that reflect itself in ESPN even today?
Mike Soltys: In the afterword, I actually wrote it as ESPN historian to talk about what Bill started in 1979 that still exists in 2026, and we talked about a couple of them. The importance of college sports — college sports will be played seven days a week. SportsCenter being our flagship. It's remarkable to think the success SportsCenter has had over the years. Being in Bristol, Connecticut, of all places, and kind of the New England work ethic, pragmatic thing that became very evident very early on in the labor force, and I think continues to this day.
But Jimmy talks about the focus on the fan. Lee Leonard's first words in 1979 are, “If you're a fan,” and that later became the mission statement of, serve the sports fans. And the focus there, it's still on the wall here. You walk around, it's on the wall. And Jimmy argued in the documentary and the book that he feels that mission statement is as important or more important today than ever. And George Bodenheimer, who also was a longtime president, is in the book as well, and talks about the same thing — that workforce, that passion that this workforce has towards sports, continues to live on, coming up on the 50th anniversary.
Why the “Sports Heaven” Audiobook Is Worth Hearing
Mark Graban: So Mike, as a final question as we wrap up here — the book is great. The documentary aired once on ESPN, and as the book points out, it's available for a pay-per-view rental. It's $6.99. I'm going to check that out. That seems well worth it. But the audiobook is pretty cool. Tell us what makes the audiobook worth checking out.
Mike Soltys: The audiobook was a load of fun to do. We were bringing back Bill's original story, and Hachette, that published it, hired — we got three audiobook narrators to rehearse for us and give us a tryout. And Bill and Garrett and I all chose the same guy, a guy named Will Damron, who basically is Bill throughout. Because with Parkinson's at 93, he wasn't able to play his part. And he does a tremendous job telling the story. And you don't have to be a sports fan. If you love origin stories or you love entrepreneur stories, you certainly capture that in Will's enthusiasm.
But then with the documentary, we interviewed 22 people, and we had their voices, and most of them were people that know how to speak publicly, whether it be Chris Berman or Bob Ley or Greg Wyatt, or executives that have to do the speaking thing. And we intersperse in the audiobook — they're in the print book too, and reading them is fine, but in the audiobook you're hearing their actual voices, and you're hearing Chris Berman do the introduction. And we intersperse perspectives where they talk about the moment that's being discussed in the book, or just 48 years later, what did that mean? And that makes it a fun listen.
And people that do listen to audiobooks, if you have an Audible subscription or Spotify Premium or whatever, “Sports Heaven” is there, and you can get it and listen to it. My wife, who has no interest in sports, loved listening to it. It's a fun story. And the thing that I know from people that listen to audiobooks, a lot of times people can't stand a narrator. You'll love Will Damron, but even if you don't, you're getting 22 other voices in it. And I think that's why Hachette was willing to publish it — they really liked the idea of having so many voices.
Mark Graban: Great voices, familiar voices, a big part of many of our lives. As a sports fan, ESPN goes hand in hand. So again, Mike Soltys. The book is “Sports Heaven: The Birth of ESPN.” Thank you so much for sharing these fun stories. Thank you for helping Bill with that. And thank you so much for being a guest today.
Mike Soltys: It's been a great time talking about all these stories, Mark. Thank you.