ESPN and Me: How the Worldwide Leader Shaped One Fan's Life

Thirty years ago today, something called "ESPN" showed up on America's cable and satellite TV systems. I can't swear that I've been watching it from the very beginning, but if not, it was pretty close.

I first heard of the future worldwide leader when the newspaper in my home town of Fort Dodge, Ia., announced that we'd be getting some new channels on our cable system. One of them was something called the Entertainment and Sports Programming Network, or something like that. It promised to bring sports news and game broadcasts.

If you remember the 1970s, you remember that sports used to be doled out pretty stingily by the Big Three networks. The NFL, the NBA, and MLB were somewhat available. Golf, tennis, and bowling were around. You could count on one -- and only one -- college football game a week. It wasn't enough.

My hope was that ESPN would change all that. The thought of a network devoted to nothing but sports was the best thing my third-grade mind could conceive of.

Back in the day, ESPN wasn't a 24-hour network. It came on at 4 PM our time. That gave me enough time to run home from school, grab a stale snack cake out of the deep freeze, watch the first half of a rerun of "Emergency!", and switch over to ESPN just as the cheesy 1970s promotional jingle would start.

I sang along. I always sang along. We're E! S! P! N! Everything worth seeing!

The irony, of course, is that back then the only thing worth seeing on ESPN was SportsCenter. The network didn't have the broadcast rights to anything people really recognized as "sports." Even SportsCenter was a bit iffy. Unlike today's slick, graphics-intensive show, early SportsCenter looked like the noon news broadcast in the sort of TV market which reporters and anchors try to get out of as quickly as possible.

But it was sports. And only sports. No annoying political stories, no weather forecasts that ate up half the broadcast, no interviews with the director of the Iowa Sugar Beet Promotion Board, just sports.

After SportsCenter was over, it was literally anybody's guess what you might see next. It could have been table tennis, it could have been a horse show, it could have been a lumberjack contest. Two sports, though, stand out to me from those early days of ESPN.

The first was the CFL, which was the best football ESPN could get. It took a little while to get used to the 110-yard field, the three downs to go 15 yards, and the point for a touchback, but hey, it was football, and it was on weeknights.

The other was Australian Rules Football, which I seriously wish they still broadcast. There has never been a sport that looked more like a bar fight than Aussie football. Throw in the pith helmet-wearing referees and the impenetrable accents of the announcers, and the whole thing was a glorious assault on the senses. I even managed to convince my classmates to suspend the permanent Pittsburgh Steelers/Dallas Cowboys football game on the playground to give Aussieball a try. Once.

The early days of ESPN awakened my thirst for sports. Any sport. For Christmas in 1980, I begged for a big paperback book called Rules of the Game which had all the rules for just about any sport played anywhere in the world. I read the covers off that thing, making careful note of what sports I'd seen on ESPN and which ones I hadn't. Eventually I think I saw everything except Gaelic football and pigeon racing. My classmates even quit asking me if I'd seen The Dukes of Hazzard on Friday night. They knew I was watching the bobsled races on ESPN instead.

(Actually, no, I never got beat up back then. But thanks for asking.)

The sea change came with college basketball, the first sport ESPN showed that people really wanted to see. Before ESPN, you might get one local game on Saturday or Sunday, if it was syndicated in your area. It sounds like heresy now, but the opening rounds of March Madness weren't even on TV until ESPN offered to buy the rights. ESPN went long on college basketball, which pleased my hoops-loving mom. More than once I'd stumble downstairs around midnight for a drink of water only to find her wide awake, watching whatever game ESPN was showing, even if it was something like Eastern Delaware versus St. Thelonious. I had the only mom in Iowa who didn't think Fennis Dembo was a typographical error.

Soon came college football, the NBA, the USFL, and even baseball. The weirdness faded and the ratings grew. All through high school and college I watched SportsCenter obsessively, sometimes even sitting through the morning repeats two or three times in a row, just to see if anything was different. I considered The Big Show with Dan Patrick and Keith Olbermann to be way more entertaining than anything else on TV at that time. I lost the better part of a day to shock and grief when I heard Tom Mees, my favorite early ESPN anchor, had passed away.

Mostly, though, I look back now and I realize all the subtle and not-so-subtle ways ESPN has changed the way we in the United States relate to sports. Perhaps the best example of this comes from the 1980 World Series, the Royals versus the Phillies. (For those of you under thirty, yes, the Royals have played in a World Series. More than once, in fact. I'd say "get off my lawn" but I live in a condo.)

Kansas City's star back in those days was George Brett, who had been on pace to hit .400 at several points during the 1980 season. He had to leave Game 2 due to a painful flareup of hemorrhoids. After minor surgery, he came back and hit the cover off the ball in Game 3.

I forget what network broadcast the Series. I don't remember baseball ever being on any network other than ABC. Whoever was broadcasting the games dutifully reported the story of Brett's little problem, along with his famous quote, "My problems are all behind me."

ESPN actually reported on the doctor who did the surgery, making Dr. John Heryer the first, last, and only celebrity proctologist in American history.

Today, that obsessive level of coverage doesn't seem strange at all. But in 1980, nobody thought anyone would ever want to know that much about an athlete, even if it was a star. In fact, even in 2009, if any of my favorite athletes have hemorrhoids, I'd just as soon not know about it.

ESPN didn't do it alone, of course. It was actually the USA Network that turned me on to hockey, while WGN did its part to convince me that the Chicago Cubs and DePaul Blue Demons were a lot more popular than they actually were. (I'm still amazed to meet a sports fan my age who doesn't remember Mark Aguirre.) Also, WGN had Bozo the Clown. Remember, I was in grade school.

Still, it was ESPN which, for better or worse, proved that America's thirst for sports is unquenchable. That's why it's now possible, if you so choose, to live ESPN: The Life. You can watch any of the six ESPN channels (everybody always forgets about ESPNEWS and ESPN Deportes) at home. Stuck in your car? Switch on ESPN Radio. Stuck in your office? Try ESPN.com or ESPN360. Stuck in the bathroom? Be sure to take the latest ESPN The Magazine. Hungry? Stop at the ESPN Zone for a double cheeseBerman with a side of Golic mashed potatoes. Need to get away from it all? Head for ESPN The Weekend. Thrown out of the house for watching too much ESPN? Just move to ESPN The Neighborhood.

(Okay, I made that last one up. I think. It actually wouldn't shock me if there's a corner of Bob Ley Drive and Chris Berman Parkway somewhere between Bristol and Hartford.)

Of course, in thirty years, ESPN isn't the only one who has changed. So have I. The adrenaline rush I felt when ESPN first made sports available to me any time I wanted (after school, at least) has been replaced by the narcotic oblivion of knowing that it's always there. ESPN is more than a network; it's as much a part of my memories as the smell of my grandmother's house, the hideous bulletproof wallpaper that was in our kitchen, and even the sound of my middle daughter's first breath.

Like all things that become familiar and comforting, it's possible to wind up taking ESPN for granted. I never miss a day on ESPN.com and nearly all the presets on my car stereo are for various ESPN Radio affiliates. Apart from an occasional glance at SportsCenter, however, I pretty much only tune in to ESPN for college football games these days. It's not that I don't like ESPN (though I'm well aware the network has its critics), it's just that, as the Worldwide Leader has grown successful, it's grown safe, and the thrill isn't the same for me as it was before. Better I feel this way about ESPN than about my wife, right?

Then again, just this Saturday I was doing my usual game-day shuffle of watching one game on TV while monitoring five or six box scores and the every-game scoreboard on my laptop. In the midst of it all my youngest daughter, who is three, sat down next to me on the couch and said, "Watch football with you, Daddy?" so we did. She may never remember it. I'll never forget it. And ESPN was there. The next thirty years of memories could be just as good as the first.