When ESPN Was a Bunch of ‘Rebels Without a Clue’

SportsCenter, 1979. Photo: ESPN Images

ESPN’s 45th anniversary party was a little bit like the network’s first days on television: organized chaos. The only two planned segments, a group picture and a panel discussion, are nearly impossible to pull off. The nearly 400 current and former employees who earlier this month gathered inside a Bristol, Connecticut, event space, a long fly ball from the company’s sprawling 117-acre campus, showed no interest in breaking up their conversations and after several minutes of pleading, the photo is snapped with only half the people in it. A short time later, veteran anchor Bob Ley tries to get everyone’s attention for the panel, which he is steering. “Excuse me, please, we just need a few minutes of your time,” he says. Several more people grab the mic, but none are successful at getting people to pay attention. Two start whistling. Another blows an actual whistle. Nothing works.

The panelists take their seats at the front of the room, but one person is missing: Chris Berman, the beloved and boisterous anchor. He’s mingling, somewhere.

“Paging Chris Berman,” Ley says several times into the mic. “Chris Berman, PLEASE REPORT TO THE FRONT OF THE ROOM.” Finally, former ESPN producer Kevin Mihaly, nicknamed Serge because he towers over everyone at six-foot-seven, goes into the crowd and drags Berman by his arm to his seat.

With Berman deposited onstage, the panel begins. Leading off is George Grande, who hosted the first SportsCenter in 1979. “Tonight is a special night,” he tells the crowd. “We celebrate not trophies or books or awards. What we celebrate are the people in this room. Forty-five years ago they said this would never happen. Well, you’ve all been a part of the greatest success story in the history of television.”

When it is Berman’s turn to speak, he stands up and becomes animated. “We’ve often said, ‘If the walls could talk …’,” he tells the audience. “Well, tonight, they’re freakin’ talking.”

He recalls May 9, 2017, with perfect clarity when his wife, Kathy, died in a car accident at the age of 67. “Many people in this room showed up unannounced,” Berman says. “I got letters and cards. You have no idea what sense of family [I felt from you]. I knew we were together. Thank you for that.”

Berman, who joined ESPN a month after it launched, managed to get the crowd to pay attention for a few moments with his signature catchphrase. “They laughed at us, said it will never work,” he says. “Well, guess what … We. Did. Go. All. The. Way,” the crowd chanting the final three words in unison.

Ley was hired on ESPN’s third day and was SportsCenter’s first anchor, later launching Outside the Lines. But the most memorable moment in his 40 years at ESPN was covering game three of the 1989 World Series in San Francisco. He and his colleagues were sitting in the ballpark when they felt the whole stadium shake — a 6.9 magnitude earthquake had struck. After scrambling out of Candlestick Park safely, ESPN was the first television outlet reporting, on the air in just 15 minutes. “A very scary but also proud moment,” says Ley. “We were nimble and understood right away that this was much bigger than sports. And it was. We reported on something that was quite literally life or death.”

Kevin “Serge” Mihaly, a former producer who helped organize the reunion, is greeted by another ESPN veteran. Photo: Conor Coar/ESPN

Andrea Kremer bounces around the room, filling every interaction with the energy that made her become the network’s first female correspondent in 1989 and a bulldog reporter, winning nine Emmys and a Peabody Award. She spent 17 years at ESPN during which she famously gave birth to her son four days before the Super Bowl in 2000, then covered the game on the pregame studio show.

When Kremer first arrived at ESPN, she would often be the only correspondent to sit in on production meetings, so she could generate ideas. In 1990, she was asked to cover the Chicago White Sox’s first “turn back the clock” day at Comiskey Park to commemorate the team’s last World Series title in 1917. She insisted she would only do it if she went all in and dressed up in clothing from that era. “I did a stand-up in the press box back when you didn’t see women in press boxes,” Kremer says. “We were able to take a lot of risks back then. We had a lot of fun, and I think people appreciated the way we covered things back then.”

Starting with two satellite dishes in a vast field in the middle of Connecticut on September 7, 1979, the network’s early challenge was finding enough sports for 24 hours’ worth of programming. “We were writing the book as we went along,” says Steve Bornstein, who was president from 1990 to 1999. “Before we got the NFL in 1987 and became established, we had a lot of hours to fill and took chances. I remember getting yelled at when I made the decision to cut into the America’s Cup race when Australia was about to take back the Cup, but it was the right call. Necessity is the mother of all invention.” One partygoer called them “rebels without a clue.”

Berman, who was 24 when he joined ESPN, recalled a skeleton crew in the early days who worked virtually nonstop. To wind down after a particularly long night, they would drink beer in the parking lot before going home. “We were so young and didn’t know anything, but we grinded and we would do whatever it took to do a good job,” he says. “Our social lives were each other. We’d pop open someone’s trunk, have a few cold ones, get some sleep, and do it all over again. There wasn’t much going on in Bristol, Connecticut. Heck, there still isn’t.”

Today the parking lot is much bigger. ESPN employs 3,600 people at its main campus in Bristol and more than 9,500 worldwide. The business has also changed significantly with cord cutters causing the network to lose 35 million subscribers and as companies such as Apple, Amazon, and Netflix create new competition for live sports. This has led Jimmy Pitaro, ESPN’s chairman, to try to shake up the network. He made shock jock Pat McAfee the company’s highest-paid employee and pursued sports betting and multi-network rights deals like the one to broadcast the expanded Big Ten and to license TNT’s popular Inside the NBA. A sports streaming bundle with Fox and Warner Bros. will debut next year, if it survives a legal challenge.

“There’s no doubt that we’re navigating through a storm,” Pitaro says. “In order to continue with the success that the founders of this place built through innovation, we can’t stand still. We have to continue to reinvent ourselves. We can’t cling to a business model that’s in decline. We’re very much in the mode of disrupting ourselves. It’s a different time and a different environment.”

There has also been personal loss. In the last 18 months, the ESPN family has lost three of their own, beloved producer Barry Sacks and researcher/trivia guru Howie Schwab, who both died suddenly at the age of 63, and NFL reporter Chris Mortensen who passed away from cancer at 72. In April, Mihaly and Ley were talking on the phone about the need to get together for a joyous occasion instead of a funeral, and the idea for the reunion was born.

The fledgling network might not have survived the 1980s without George Bodenheimer, the company’s longest-tenured president who significantly grew ESPN’s revenue with increased cable carriage fees and secured rights to broadcast the four major professional sports. He was jumping from one conversation to another when a woman stopped him. On Ashley Benedict’s first day on the job as a ratings analyst in 1998, she was struggling to find her desk in the Manhattan office when Bodenheimer spotted her. Then the company president, he stopped the wide-eyed Benedict, welcomed her, and said if she never needed anything to give him a call.

“Thank you for setting the tone and welcoming me to the company,” Benedict tells Bodenheimer, who stood speechless. “I never forgot that day and that gesture. You changed my life.” She went on to have a successful career at ESPN and is now a freelance documentary producer living in Maine, keeping in close touch with many of her former colleagues. “ESPN is truly like the Hotel California,” she says. “You can check out, but you can’t leave.”

ESPN became a dominant cultural force in the 1990s largely thanks to John Walsh, who infused the network with a journalistic mentality from his background in newspaper and magazines. He reinvented SportsCenter, turning it into must-watch TV with charismatic anchors such as Keith Olbermann and Dan Patrick. Later, he created the ESPYs.

“I’ll never forget coming home one day after my first couple of months on the job and telling my wife, ‘I love this place!’” says Walsh. “I could tell very early on that ESPN was different. I worked at 32 companies before I came to ESPN. I got a really good look at what made a good working environment, but I never saw a culture like the one at ESPN.”

Even today Kremer is sometimes stopped by people on the street who tell her that she is their favorite person on ESPN, though she hasn’t been on the network since 2006 — she doesn’t have the heart to tell them that she’s no longer there. Kremer says, “ESPN is the fraternity or sorority that you have for life.”

This post has been updated.