Bill Rasmussen, the Fired Publicist Who Bet a Credit Card on ESPN, Dies at 93

Every fan who has ever left a television glowing past midnight for highlights they had already seen is living inside a bet Bill Rasmussen made when almost no one else thought it was sane. Rasmussen, the fired sports publicist who willed ESPN into being and ran it as its first president, has died at his home in Florida. He built the machine that turned watching sport into something you could do at any hour, and he did it with nerve long before he had money.

The obituaries will call him a visionary, and he was. But vision is the cheap part of this story. What set Rasmussen apart was that he acted on an idea every professional investor in front of him had rejected, and he did it with a father’s stubbornness and a son’s dare rather than a fortune. The tribute he would recognize is not the milestone list. It is the wager itself.

The idea arrived, as his family has always told it, in traffic. Rasmussen had just been pushed out as communications director of the New England Whalers, and he and his son Scott were crawling along a Connecticut interstate, turning over what to do with satellite time they had optioned. Scott’s shrug, do whatever you want with it, show sport all weekend, became the premise of a company. A modest regional channel grew, over the course of a single conversation, into something no one had built: a network that never stopped showing games.

The decision that made it possible was not romantic. It was arithmetic, and it is why the entire sports-media economy now looks the way it does. Rasmussen worked out that leasing a satellite transponder around the clock cost roughly what a few hours would. If airtime was nearly free once you had paid for the day, the sane move was not to fill an evening but to fill every minute. Scarcity had always defined sport on television, a game here, a highlights reel there. Rasmussen inverted it. Abundance became the product.

He had almost nothing to back the conviction. Rebuffed by one financier after another, he kept the venture breathing on a cash advance drawn against his own credit card and money his family put up to cover the first payments. When Getty Oil finally said yes, it rescued a company that had been running on borrowed faith and borrowed dollars. That is the detail the polished version tends to sand away: ESPN spent a stretch of its infancy one missed payment from never existing at all.

What he loosed on the culture outgrew him quickly. The network gave sport its own clock and its own liturgy, the nightly recap, the running score, the anchor’s catchphrase, and it taught an audience to treat games as continuous company rather than appointments to keep. Every rival that followed, every streaming grid of live sport now fought over by the richest companies on earth, is an argument Rasmussen started. He stepped back from the top job barely a year after launch, yet the template was set, and it never really changed.

In his final chapter he was candid about the Parkinson’s disease he lived with, choosing to make the diagnosis public and to speak for others who carried it, the same instinct for going first that had shaped everything before it. Colleagues remembered the warmth as much as the audacity. ESPN’s chairman, Jimmy Pitaro, called him a remarkable man, a visionary and an innovator. The longtime anchor Chris Berman put it more plainly, calling him the network’s George Washington.

He is survived by his children, his grandchildren and his great-grandchildren, and by an unlikelier legacy still: the reflex, shared now by hundreds of millions, to reach for the remote at any hour and simply expect the game to be there. It always is. It very nearly wasn’t.

Tags: ESPN, sports media, Bill Rasmussen, Scott Rasmussen, sports broadcasting