Unlocking The ESPN Empire With Mike Soltys And Garrett Sutton

* Website: Book, Sports Heaven: The Birth of ESPN
* Website
* LinkedIn: Mike Soltys
*LinkedIn: Garrett Sutton

Timestamps:
00:00:00 – Cold Start & Intro
00:05:15 – Why Getting Fired Was the Best Thing That Happened
00:07:26 – The Doubters, the Vision, and Sports 24/7
00:08:41 – Conviction vs. Consensus
00:12:39 – The Culture That Built ESPN
00:20:51 – When Bill Was Pushed Out – and What It Did to the Team
00:29:30 – The Juggle: How Bill Closed Five Deals Simultaneously
00:33:21 – Almost Shut Down: The Moment ESPN Nearly Didn’t Survive
00:38:35 – What Startups Can Learn from Early ESPN

Mike Soltys (00:02:00)
Sports happen at nights and weekends. So, if you have a false illusion that you’re going to work regular hours and you’re going into the sports business, you know, that’s not going to happen.

He was able to do all those deals in a very short time, just positively talking to each of the other ones, saying to Anheuser-Busch, “you know, we got to deal with Getty, we’ve got to deal with RCA, we got to deal with the NCAA.” And then he says to the NCAA, “you know, we got to deal with Getty, and we got to deal with the city of Bristol,” and he just did this positively with each of them, and they all came together about the same time.

Garrett Sutton (00:37:00)
When people were doing press releases or stories and magazines, they wanted to talk to Bill. Bill was an everyman

Skot Waldron (00:51:00)
When I’m not hosting Unlocked, I’m speaking at events all over the world. I’m helping leaders and I’m helping teams communicate better. I’m helping them build trust faster and actually enjoy working together. I’ve spoken for companies like The Home Depot. I’ve spoken at national architectural firms. I’ve spoken for pharmaceutical company offsites. I’ve spoken at associations, you name it.

With 99% of attendees of all those events, over 1800 people have reviewed me at this point. 99% of them saying they got some value. That’s pretty awesome. Even the caterers have thanked me. And if they are thanking me and they’ve heard a lot of talks and they’re busy doing their jobs, that’s saying something. If you’re an event planner looking for a speaker who’s really easy to work with, trust me, I want to be the last thing you’re worried about on event day. I’m going to take care of you. And who actually delivers value for your audience that they are going to use on Monday morning when they return to the office, then let’s talk.

I have a little bit of a surprise for you today. We’re going to throw a little curveball on what we usually do. I am having two individuals on the show. So that’s the first curveball because usually I just have one, but we got two. Two people to add twice the knowledge and twice the impact of what we’re going to learn.

And then number two, there is a little twist because we’re going to talk about sports. I don’t really ever talk about sports on this show because it’s a leadership show, but what we’re going to talk about is the birth of ESPN in those early days and Bill Rasmussen, the founder, and what went into him building this enterprise, this empire, I call it on the show.

Then we are also going to, this is not just for you sports lovers out there. Okay. Yes, you’re going to get some insight into the birth of ESPN. Pretty cool, behind the curtain stuff. But those non-ESPN, those non-sports lovers out there, maybe you’ve never heard of ESPN. Where have you been? There is something for you to learn, something for you to gain from this conversation. In fact, the two guests I have on, so Mike Soltys and you’ve got Garrett Sutton as well. They just wrote a book that launches in July, if you’re listening to this before July. And they just launched the audiobook. So, the audiobooks out there right now, if you’re listening to this right now, the print book isn’t out yet. Cool. And then they did a documentary as well on this whole thing. So, you’re going to, you got lots of angles you can go for here.

So, Mike actually was an intern in 1980, and he was hired by Bill Rasmussen himself. He’s worked for the company for close to 45 years. He served as the Vice President of Communications for two decades and currently is ESPN’s Historian. So, he might know a thing or two about what we’re going to talk about.

And then his co-author, Garrett Sutton, he’s an attorney. He’s an author of 11 business books as part of Robert Kiyosaki’s Rich Dad Advisor series. He is also the co-author of Sports Heaven. That’s the book they just wrote. Sports Heaven: The Birth of ESPN. And the Executive Producer of the documentary film by that same name. His company, Corporate Direct, assists real estate investors and business owners with asset protection and LLC formation and maintenance services.

So, these two gentlemen have a lot to say, have a lot to add to the conversation, have a lot of insight to give us about the birth of ESPN and Bill Rasmussen, the founder. Here we go.

(04:32:00)
Welcome to the show, Garrett. It’s not too often that I have authors who have also produced the documentary at the same time. So that’s pretty cool man. I’m excited to have you on.

Garrett Sutton (04:45:00)
Great to be here, Skot. Thanks for having me.

Skot Waldron (04:47:00)
Yeah, I mean, this whole ESPN thing, I think some people have heard of that before. What’s interesting to me is that it started because Bill got fired from a hockey team. Which is interesting. Well, most people get bitter about some of that stuff. Some people find the fire, and apparently, he did. He built an empire out of this whole thing. Can you give me some background on that? What happened?

Garrett Sutton (05:15:00)
Yeah, Bill is 43 years old. He’s working for the Hartford Whalers. They were part of the NHL. And he gets fired at 43, and he is you know upset at the time, but he’d had this idea for a year of doing a cable network for sports in Connecticut. It just started out as just Connecticut and so he considered it a very good day to get fired so that he could pursue this opportunity that he saw for sports on television. And if he’d been fired a year later, it would have been too late. You know the cable companies, we’re starting to move forward. And by getting fired when he did, he was able to be on the ground floor to get this thing going. And instead of a Connecticut network, he learned that there was a RCA that had a satellite up there and you could rent the transponder and cover the whole country. And that really opened up the vistas for ESPN.

Skot Waldron (06:27:00)
And what’s really interesting about the timing that we’re filming this today on May seventh. This will go out a little bit later, is that yesterday another media icon passed away, Ted Turner, you know, I’m in Atlanta, Atlanta, you know, staple, Ted Turner’s everywhere. Who also built an empire back in the 70s and thought, hey, let’s launch this whole you know radio thing and get brave, the Atlanta Braves across the entire country, and people didn’t think about that. And he evolved that into more things and more things. And what’s interesting is that they were both told something.

They weren’t just starting businesses. They were really trying to change human behavior. And they were both told some versions of this isn’t enough content or people don’t want to watch that all day. You know that whole mindset. How did Bill fight that?

Garrett Sutton (07:25:00)
You know, that’s a great point. And with regard to Ted Turner, Bill Rasmussen and Ted Turner were often compared because they were the first two. HBO was already up on the RCA satellite, but CNN and ESPN were the next two and so Ted Turner and Bill Rasmussen were contemporaries in the early days, as you mentioned.

The mindset for Bill was just that he had a sense that he had done sports. He did sports for the Whalers. He did local sports casting in Connecticut. And he just had this sense that the fans out there weren’t being properly served. And you know, you probably remember, Skot, back in the day in the late 70s, you got sports at the 6 o’clock news for 2 minutes, the 11 o’clock news for 2 minutes, and maybe a half an hour or an hour on the weekends. And that’s all you got and people, the consensus was that’s all people needed was just that limited amount of sports.

And Bill had this vision and he stuck with it that people wanted sports all the time. And people doubted him. He had legions of doubters. But, you know, it’s conviction versus consensus. And he went against the consensus. He was convinced that he was right. He was very optimistic. People loved to follow him. And he just kept going and was able to get Getty Oil involved to bring in the money to do this. And, you know, he didn’t fare as well as Ted Turner did, because he had to leave after a year, but he still to this day is very proud of his accomplishments in getting ESPN started.

Skot Waldron (09:12:00)
Mike, I want to know from your side of things, what part of ESPN, what part of that idea did people think was just impossible, right? Or just plain crazy. When they were throwing it out and Bill’s presenting this idea, I mean, you know, did the sponsor have any concerns with this thing? Or they’re like, “hey, Bill, here, have all this money.” I mean, what was going on?

Mike Soltys (09:38:00)
The sponsor, the major sponsor, was Anheuser-Busch, but there was also Gillette and other kinds of the typical ones that you still see on sports today that are going after young male viewers. But the skepticism came from viewers and the media. It was sports that had been on weekend afternoons on the three broadcast networks, with the exception of Monday Night Football and a little bit of local coverage, but you didn’t get the kind of coverage that everybody today just takes for granted.

So, the idea was, what do you mean you’re going to put sports on a Wednesday night or at three in the morning or Saturday morning or whatever? It’s just that’s not how we do things. And that’s I think a lot of the thinking. It’s like, all right, it seems to work okay the way it is, so we’ll keep it going. And Bill’s thing was, no, sports fans want to turn on the TV whenever they want to turn on the TV, and they want to watch sports. And he was right so.

Skot Waldron (10:34:00)
Yes, he was. I mean, it’s amazing the vision that some people have that some people don’t get. And I see that a lot with leadership. And you know, you’ll have these leaders that can see things, or there’s people and teams that’ll see things that people just can’t quite grasp yet. And in that type of culture in which you’re trying to innovate and push and grow something that you can see, but maybe not even fully be able to articulate what it is, I mean, I see a lot of trust that has to fall in there.

And when you’re talking in the late 70s about some of this stuff, I mean, technology was what it was. And I mean, there was a lot of trust that had to play in. I mean how did that play out?

Mike Soltys (11:24:00)
Yeah. And he emphasized that, you know, when you’re an entrepreneur and starting a business, keep it simple. You need the simple premise. And his premise was just sports 24 hours a day. That’s the premise. And that’s what he was telling everybody. And he needed to get the trust. He really, and we get into it in both the documentary and book a lot. He announced the September 7, 1979, launch date. And to your point about trust, is that the cable industry was in its infancy and a lot of people were promising a lot of things that didn’t happen. And he felt it was critical that we launch on September 7, because that’s what he told people months ahead of time.

So even though the building was half complete and the staff was being hired and all these other reasons not to do it, it was like I promised people September 7, we’re launching September 7th.

Skot Waldron (12:12:00)
So bold vision, bold date, deadline, we’re hitting this thing. I’m curious what the culture was like early on. I mean, Garrett, can you speak to that a little bit? I mean, was it a scrappy startup? I mean, was it, you know, Silicon Valley kind of thing? Was it in the garage? Was it chaos? Was it blind faith? Was it followed by this guy? What happened?

Garrett Sutton (12:39:00)
In the documentary we show how the building is being built as they’re on the air. It’s really an incredible story of how they were still building the building and on the air. But the spirit there I think is best shown by the chairman of Getty Oil, who invested the money, came out and saw all these scrappy New Englanders with their work ethic making this happen. And he went back to Getty Oil in Los Angeles and said, “I wish everybody here worked as hard as the people at ESPN did.” And so there was this culture there, and Mike was there at the beginning. There was this culture of let’s just get it done. And they did.

Mike Soltys (13:24:00)
And part of it comes from being in the sports television world. Sports happen at nights and weekends. So, if you have a false illusion that you’re going to work regular hours and you’re going into the sports business, you know, that’s not going to happen. And so, the people that were getting hired, you know, understood that that’s what they were signing up for. And the culture that was created, we interviewed both longtime president George Bodenheimer and current chairman Jimmy Pitaro, who both talked about that culture has maintained itself till the present day and the culture I can do attitude, the culture of looking at how do we serve the sports fan what they want, that started in 1979 and keeps going in 2026.

Skot Waldron (14:11:00)
That’s incredible. I mean, when you have something like that, you better find people that believe what you believe. Cause they’re not going to stick around. And when that early start, having the right people on the team, it’s so critical for your growth. So, what do you think those early employees believed that kept them going?

Garrett Sutton (14:32:00)
Well, you go ahead, Mike, ’cause you were right there.

Mike Soltys (14:35:00)
Yeah, we all shared that everybody believed it was going to work. I mean, there were some people that were a little skeptical that, you know, this is before direct deposit and they’d get their check on Thursday or Friday and run to Bristol Savings Bank and, you know, want to deposit it. You know, my point always was, you know, Getty Oil is the one that’s writing the check. I’m not too worried that this check’s going to clear. But everybody was believing that came here, that yeah, sports around the clock. Makes sense. I like it. I want to watch it. My friends want to watch it. So why isn’t this going to succeed?

And the key in the early days was having Getty Oil with the kind of pockets they had, because the losses were in the tens of millions. It was not a cheap enterprise to get into. I mean, that was the challenge for the founders was getting somebody with deep enough pockets who would sustain it until it got into enough households that it was profitable, which took about 5 years. But Getty Oil certainly did not have a problem writing the checks. They saw that their asset was growing every month and that ultimately, they would have a very valuable asset.

Skot Waldron (15:45:00)
Did ESPN succeed because they had resources like that, or because they didn’t necessarily have “resources” to get that thing done, right, at the beginning. I’m sure it had to grow.

Mike Soltys (16:01:00)
Yeah, I think it’s both. I think it’s that you become, you know, you’re very dollar conscious, which ESPN certainly was, versus the rest of television. I mean, in producing the documentary, we were challenged to find a lot of footage from 1979 because Getty had ordered unless the tape is going to be shown again, you’re recording over it. So, there’s like very little record of, you know, the Sports Center started right away in September 7, 1979, there’s very few of them that didn’t get recorded over because that was a way to save money.

But, you know, it also required a lot of money, even managing the budget properly, because you had to hire a lot of people, production trucks, television studios, the equipment’s very expensive. And then, you know, sports rights. You can maybe get something cheap like darts or tang gliding. You know, but if you want to do the NCAA or you want to do college football or the NHL, you’re going to pay for it. And that money had to come from somewhere. It wasn’t coming out of Bill Rasmussen’s pocket. He’d already burned through his money, his family’s money, his credit cards, everything, and so Getty had to fund it.

Garrett Sutton (17:15:00)
Well, and there was no guarantee that Getty would continue funding it. So, the employees there in Bristol, you know, they were working as hard as they could to make this happen. So, you did have this edge there. It wasn’t guaranteed that Getty was going to write a check every single month. And the employees had an esprit accord to make this thing work. And it did.

Skot Waldron (17:38:00)
I’m curious a little bit about, you know, you’re speaking about the operations. I mean, I’m so fascinated. I think my listeners probably are a little bit about any of the behind-the-scenes stuff when you’re starting this thing. ESPN is an empire, really. Like I used that word at the beginning. It is an empire. I mean, there’s so many offshoots and so many partnerships and everything that they’ve gone into now. And you think about those early days, and you think logistically. What in the world like had to happen for you to go, you know, get multiple NCAA games or multiple college football games or what whatever sport you’re filming all over the country and to get the cameras and to get broadcasting lines back to the I mean, can you give us a glimpse of what that looked like?

Mike Soltys (18:28:00)
Yeah, I mean, and part of the early Getty investment was buying television production trucks, five of them to be spread out around the country, because we weren’t allowed to do live college football in the early 80s, but we were doing college football in a tape delay. Pretty much every game in that era was happening on Saturday afternoon. So yeah, you had to have a production truck and announcers and camera people and everybody else at the 5 or 6 games you were going to do in order to bring that tape back to Bristol to then run it on Tuesday night or whatever night of the week it was going to run. And you multiply that times, you know, all the other events that are going on. Twenty-four hours a day is a big nut to fill.

And then of course the staff in Bristol had to be beefed up because right out of the get-go, the sports center was the flagship. And putting on up to that point, you would, as a sports fan, you would hope your local news at 11 o’clock would show you two minutes of, you know, your local team. And that was the sports news you got on television.

Bill had the idea for the SportsCenter right out of the box. And, you know, the first show was SportsCenter, and the show at 11 o’clock that night was SportsCenter. And SportsCenter just continued going, but that required a lot of staffing. Sports Center was a show where games run early, games run long. You need a studio to bridge everything. And a funny thing that Skot points out in the NCAA contract, they would not allow professional sports to air either before or after a college game.

So, we had to put on a SportsCenter, and professional sports included, you know, slow pitch softball world series, Australian Rules football, anything that somebody was getting a paycheck for, that’s professional sports, and the NCAA didn’t want to be adjacent to it. So, you know, we’d have Australian football and then you had to have a little SportsCenter bridge before you went to the NCAA event.

So, the building up the studio was critical as well.

Skot Waldron (20:28:00)
Garrett, what surprised you about those early days logistically? I mean, when you’re learning about this and you’re getting into the world you know, later on, you weren’t there at the beginning, but like what surprised you about those beginning days?

Garrett Sutton (20:44:00)
Well, I was surprised by, as I mentioned, the esprit de corps. I mean, these people were focused on making this work. They love sports. They were willing to follow Bill anywhere. He was, we almost called the book, instead of Sports Heaven, intentional optimism because Bill is a very optimistic person. If there’s a challenge, if there’s a roadblock, he’s so optimistic and finds a way around it. And people were willing to follow him from the very start. And for a lot of people, when Bill was asked to leave after a year, as they brought in the people from NBC and the people that had a lot of sports experience, more so than Bill had, a lot of people were very upset because it felt like the family was, you know, going away. That you know, they had followed Bill from the very start.

So, for me, Skot, it was really unique to see a founder and you see this in other businesses, but with ESPN, the founder was the key. He was the glue that held it all together until Getty Oil and the NBC executives came in. So that for me is a big part of the story.

Skot Waldron (21:54:00)
Can you give the listeners a little bit of background on why he was asked to leave after a year?

Garrett Sutton (22:07:00)
Well, I’m sure Mike has thoughts too, but for me it was because you had competing egos. You had Chet Simmons from the president of NBC Sports brought in by Getty Oil, and you know Stuart Evey from Getty Oil was also involved, and these two gentlemen had pretty big egos and when people were doing press releases or stories and magazines, they wanted to talk to Bill. Bill was an everyman, and he just had a way of communicating. And in the documentary, we interviewed Rosa Gatti, who was the first PR executive for ESPN. And she said that, you know, people just wanted to talk to Bill. He was the highlight for these interviews, and this angered Stuart Evey and Chet Simmons, and they wanted Bill out in part for that reason, and in part because this was a startup that is now getting ready to expand and they wanted their people in there. Mike, what are your thoughts?

Mike Soltys (23:18:00)
Yeah, the egos and ultimately when Bill did the deal with Getty to rescue it because he needed the money, he gave the leverage to him, so he didn’t have a whole lot of choice.

Skot, his son, who started it with, is 23 years old. And Chet Simmons said, “you know, if this is my kid, he’s got to start at the bottom.” And they said, “you can hang around, but you’re going to start as an entry level guy.” This is eighteen months after, you know, he’s doing spreadsheets for Getty Oil about the financial opportunity that existed and you know, playing the role of co-founder and suddenly they want him to be, you know, starting in the mailroom. And so, he left. And then Bill, they pushed him aside and made him chairman of the board and gave him some responsibilities on the sales and marketing side of things but didn’t want him doing any press interviews. And that, you know, quickly became even more of a problem. You know, Chet Simmons and Stuart Evey wanted the press interviews. They wanted the attention.

I visited Bill last week at his house in Florida and he has a bronze plaque that his daughter sent him that had been in storage that they were going to dedicate the first building and call it the Bill Rasmussen building. He has this beautiful plaque that says it will be dedicated on October 15, 1979, and it never happened. Chet Simmons heard about it and said, “throw it away” and the person that was throwing it away put it in Bill’s trunk and he still has it to this day. But you know, that was the egos at play.

Skot Waldron (24:49:00)
Unreal. And you see a lot of that in business running around and I think about the long-term impact of that and the impact on culture and what it does. I mean, what did it do to the culture of the vibe? And you said people were like, but we came here because Bill, we believed in Bill and his vision and his optimism and now we have, you know, ’cause we’ll, I’m going to equate this to a little bit to like PE, right? You know, private equity will come in and buy up a company and everybody’s like, wait a second, I was following this thing and now I’m answering to this private equity group that I wasn’t that wasn’t part of the deal at the beginning.

I mean, so people get jerked around in the cultures all the time. How did people adapt to that? Did they adapt well? Was it like, no way, I’m out of here? How was it?

Mike Soltys (25:36:00)
Yeah, fortunately Getty Oil was based 3,000 miles away. And they sent one person to Bristol, a guy named George Conner, who was the nicest person, was kind of the anti-Getty spirit, and that helped a great deal in terms of, you know, the culture in Bristol. But then in Bristol, you know, you had the 1978, 1979 hires, which Bill had brought in. But then you had this influx of people. Chet Simmons had been the president of NBC Sports, and he comes in just before launch and brings a bunch of NBC people. And so those two cultures then had to merge. And everybody that Bill had hired believed in the vision. Everybody Chet was bringing in saw it as the future of sports television. And so, it worked out ultimately. People were very sad to see Bill go, but the culture still was able to mesh and flourish and go forward.

Skot Waldron (26:33:00)
That’s cool. That’s good. And I think it’s, I mean, what do you attribute that to? I have my own opinion, but I mean my own thoughts, but what do you attribute that to?

Mike Soltys (26:43:00)
I believe in the twenty-four-hour sports concept. It was like we’re pioneers; we’re doing something as everybody else should be doing, but we’re doing it. And we’ve got the opportunity to create something, and it was a lot of fun to work on. I mean, working at a SportsCenter is a lot of fun. Going to a college football game and producing it is a lot of fun, and people just really enjoyed their job. Yeah, they were working round the clock 7 days a week, holidays, etc. And in most cases, not really getting paid particularly well, but they loved what they were doing. And a lot of the people that started in 1979 and 1980 were still here for 35 to 40 years.

So, and to this day, I mean Chris Berman started in 1979, Dick Vitale started in 1979. They’re still doing it and still believing in ESPN.

Garrett Sutton (27:36:00)
Well, and in the documentary, we interview Chris Berman and George Grande and the original anchors. And to this day, they honor Bill Rasmussen for his efforts in getting ESPN going. They recognize that it was Bill that got it going and gave them a career. They’re very thankful. Chris Berman calls Bill Rasmussen our George Washington. You know, they’re very thankful for Bill’s vision. It was unfortunate that he had to leave after a year or so, but his contribution and vision is still recognized.

Mike Soltys (28:15:00)
And Chris was a history major in college at Brown and loves American history. He just was telling me, and he does make the George Washington references, and he was upset. He just found out that George Washington didn’t actually sign the Declaration of Independence. And his mind was like, why was that? I got to research this. That’s the historian. And he gets a big kick out of the fact that here it is in 2026, and he is, you know, the historical icon of ESPN. And here’s the history major who becomes that and he gets a particular kick out.

Skot Waldron (28:50:00)
That’s fantastic. I mean, I think it just blew a lot of people’s minds, Mike. You know, it just blew a lot of people’s minds. You know, we talk about leadership traits. I mean, he was, you know, an everyman in that sense. He was optimistic and had people follow this optimum, but it was almost contagious. Like they loved the idea of what he was bringing to the table there.

What do you think is another leadership trait of Bill’s that really doesn’t get talked about enough that you think is a little bit like people don’t talk about this, but Bill, blank.

Mike Soltys (29:30:00)
Yeah, we call it the juggle in the film, but there’s a point for about 6 months that Bill and keep in mind, he’s a guy who’s fired by the Hartford Whalers. I mean, he’s not some rich executive with other experience of that magnitude. But in a very short period of time, he had to do a deal with Anheuser-Busch for sponsors, with cable systems for carriage, with RCA for the satellite, with the NCAA for programming. With the town of Bristol to get a facility.

And none of these were done. But in each case, the leadership thing that was very interesting, and George Bodenheimer, who was a longtime chairman, just every time I see him, he marvels as he thinks about that. That he was able to do all those deals in a very short time, just positively talking to each of the other ones, saying to Anheuser-Busch, “you know, we got to deal with Getty, we’ve got to deal with RCA, we got to deal with the NCAA.” And then he says to the NCAA, “you know, we got to deal with Getty, and we got to deal with the city of Bristol,” and he just did this positively with each of them, and they all came together about the same time. And without all of those deals, it falls apart.

Skot Waldron (30:42:00)
For sure. I mean, I can’t imagine how quickly did he have to do all that? And what time span did he do all that?

Mike Soltys (30:49:00)
So that is from the late fall of 1978 to the spring of 1979. Because those all had to get in place and you know, for him to move forward to get the thing launched 6 months later. And they all did. You know, they just had a screening and the mayor of Bristol was there and you know that was you know, the thing to talk to her and the thing to about Bristol was, you know, they were a little skeptical, but you know, it’s the late 70s industrial blue-collar town and they needed business. But then the guy from Getty Oil comes into a town council meeting and says, “yeah, Getty’s going to invest in this,” even though they haven’t finished the deal yet.

And so, Bristol’s, Getty’s doing it good, we’re all in. And so, he knew how to hit the right note with all the others, and people saw it and believed in it.

Garrett Sutton (31:47:00)
And for me, it’s his people skills. I mean, he just is such a good guy. I met him 14 years ago. He was teaching a class, and we just hit it off. And, you know, he has such great common skills, people’s skills. You know, a lot of people now are happy to work remotely. And you know, I have a daughter in Manhattan who’s in a with a big company, and she goes into the office because, you know, you need to interact with
mentors and everything and you know, Bill was able to interact with everyone. I mean the janitor to the head of Getty Oil. He just was a unique individual in that regard. And I think a lot of times, Skot, people forget the importance of people’s skills.

Skot Waldron (32:33:00)
Yes, I can agree with that. Having worked, I work with leaders all over the world about people. And I say, you know what? Business would be so easy if the people weren’t involved. You know, it would be so much easier. If we didn’t have to mess with the people. But you know, having the people’s skills is what’s going to drive everything forward in our global economy and just as us as humans in general.

All right, I’m going to do it. I’m curious about this though. What’s a moment in ESPN history when it almost didn’t survive? Was there any moment where it was like, y’all, we’ve got problems, like hailing the alarms, like something’s going on, we need to fix this now or we’re going down.

Mike Soltys (33:21:00)
I mean, a lot of it leading into launch was just that tenuous nature of all the different things that had to happen. Once the launch happened, it was more just a kind of corporate boardroom angst out of Getty. Getty got into, you know, they’re an oil company. And in the 70s, there’s an oil crisis, and they start to create their diversified assets division, and they invest in lumbering and real estate and other things. And that’s where ESPN fell under.

But there got to be pressure within Getty Oil. You know, what are we doing here? And when they got bought by Texaco in 1984, Texaco wanted nothing to do with not only lumbering, they wanted nothing to do with ESPN and sold us immediately. So, it was just holding off, you know, the skeptical voices in the Getty corporate boardroom, I think, more than anything else.

They questioned the SportsCenter. I mean, it was expensive to produce a SportsCenter. I remember as a 21-year-old employee, and we used to have to fax things everywhere. And there were like three fax machines in the entire company. And we’d make a press announcement, and I had to go to a fax machine. And one day, you know, you can’t receive a fax and send a fax at the same time. So, coming in the fax machine is a memo from Getty Oil to the head of SportsCenter questioning whether we should close the show down or chop it to 15 minutes or something to save money.

And as a 22- year-old, I’m looking at this thing saying, “what the heck are they talking about?” Like I never heard anything crazier. And you know, they fortunately made the right decision to keep it going, and then Texaco saw the opportunity and sold us to ABC in 1984.

Skot Waldron (35:06:00)
I got a couple of little quick questions. These are more lightning round-ish questions. All right. Y’all ready? Okay. Ready? And okay. Garrett, you go first on this one.

Who’s the most underrated person in ESPN history?

Garrett Sutton (35:22:00)
Mike Soltys. My co-author and producer of the documentary. He’s starting to shine now though.

Skot Waldron (35:34:00)
Finally?

Garrett Sutton (35:35.00)
Finally.

Mike Soltys (35:36:00)
Yeah, it just took a while.

Skot Waldron (35:38:00)
Mike, what do you think?

Mike Soltys (35:41:00)
I would just kind of generically say there were so many behind-the-scenes people that had to do that, you know, the second and third shifts to keep us on the air. You know, the on air, the broad the announcers become famous, they become household names and sports fans, and you know, presidents of companies do as well. But, you know, in order for the place to really shine, you needed these people that were, yeah, I’ll work at two o’clock in the morning, you know, pressing a button to make sure SportsCenter’s on the air.

Skot Waldron (36:09:00)
Awesome. It’s the people we don’t see, the people behind the scenes, the people behind the curtain, the stuff that’s happening back there, right? All right.

How about, Mike, you start this one? A sports moment that everyone at ESPN remembers.

Mike Soltys (36:23:00)
Boy, well, everyone, because over 46 years everyone is different people. To me, when we were televising the World Cup soccer, just the excitement in the stadium when the World Cups would begin, whether it was in the US when soccer was trying to take off in the 90, or I had the good fortune to go to South Africa and they’re like, wow, you know, we were apartheid not that long ago, and now we’re hosting the world’s biggest event or Brazil it looks itself at as we’re the home of soccer and finally the World Cup is here and you know, that’s kind of the unifying factor of sports and the excitement of sports.

And everybody that’s worked at ESPN that had the good fortune to travel has their own stories of different events they went to that they saw that they saw how meaningful sports is to fans and fans’ lives and how meaningful it is in you know in and culture is a you know, today everything is getting splintered. I mean, I won’t touch politics, but even entertainment. I mean, everybody doesn’t have the same streaming service. And where you used to go to the office and, you know, talk about the Seinfeld episode. I mean, that doesn’t exist anymore, but sports still does. Everybody watches the Super Bowl. Everybody in a city will watch when their team is in the NBA or NHL playoffs. So that is the unifying factor of sports.

Skot Waldron (37:42:00)
That’s cool. Garrett, do you have one?

Garrett Sutton (37:45:00)
Yeah, I think we covered this in the documentary in the early days, you know, ESPN did not have rights to the NFL or the NBA. So, they broadcast Aussie rules football. And, you know, here’s this rough and tumble game. It’s almost like rugby, outside of Australia, and they don’t know if people are going to take to it or not. But all of a sudden everybody’s into Aussie rules football. And they got ten thousand requests for the rules because the rules are a little different. But ten thousand people wrote to ESPN asking for a rule book for Aussie rules football. And it’s just a fun little nugget that we cover in the documentary.

Skot Waldron (38:26:00)
That’s funny. Yeah, that’s awesome. All right. What’s Garrett, start with this one? What’s one thing startups can learn from early ESPN days?

Garrett Sutton (38:35:00)
Well, I think it’s consent versus conviction. You know, I mean consensus is, you know, easy. The group decides things, but it’s like Henry Ford says, if I listen to the consensus, I would have built a faster horse, you know. And so, Bill had the conviction. He had a clear vision. And I think entrepreneurs need to, you know, understand the difference between conviction and consensus.

Skot Waldron (39:04:00)
Good one. Mike?

Mike Soltys (39:04:00)
And focus on the positive and having that optimism that we talked about earlier. But then the second part of that is because obviously everything doesn’t go well. And Bill Rasmussen launched several other businesses that didn’t go well, but I always saw with him that he quickly moved on. It was back to optimism. All right, I gave that the best shot. Or it’s like, well, I understand this, but that person doesn’t get it, and then quickly moves on and returns to optimism. Just don’t dwell in the negative.

Skot Waldron (39:35:00)
I just interviewed somebody and we were talking about this. She had this really great phrase, you know, know it all versus learn it all and try to create a culture of learning and where it’s okay to okay to fail, but it’s okay to kind of try new things and experiment. And when that doesn’t work, you go and you do this thing and you go in with the culture of things that are going to not work. And we are going to figure out those things that don’t work so we figure out the things that do. And you got to have that early on or you’re just going to get discouraged and just bury it. You’re not going to do it at all.

Garrett Sutton (40:13:00)
Well, it’s like Bill wanted to do a subscriber base and it wasn’t going to work out, so he pivoted and went for advertisers, you know. And so early on he had to be flexible to get this thing off the ground.

Skot Waldron (40:26:00)
Interesting. And now we find the subscriber platform, you know. So, he had that vision back in the late seventies, huh?

Mike Soltys (40:32:00)
Right, came back. Right.

Skot Waldron (40:35:00)
Yeah, for sure. So, he had that vision back in the late 70s, huh?

Mike Soltys (40:39:00)
Yeah, yeah. He wanted to do, you know, first it was ’cause he was going to do a state of Connecticut network. He wanted to tap into Yukon. This is pre-Big East Yukon, not no national championships Yukon. And but he wanted to do a subscriber base of Yukon fans who weren’t getting any local telecasts. And that just then morphed into, well, we’re going to put their soccer games on because we need something on Wednesday at two o’clock.

So, it took the relationship, didn’t abandon it, but said, all right, subscriber’s not going to work. Let’s go this way. So, when things didn’t work out, it was still well, what can we pick from that and make it work for us?

Skot Waldron (41:22:00)
Here’s the last one. I’ll do that. I want you to answer. I want you to finish the sentence. So, Mike, you go first on this one. ESPN worked because…

Mike Soltys (41:33:00)
Because sports fans want to watch their games.

Skot Waldron (41:39:00)
Garrett, how about you?

Garrett Sutton (41:40:00)
Because Bill Rasmussen had the vision.

Skot Waldron (41:45.048)
Okay. And that I think both of those things I think in my eyes go together. He had the vision and the understanding of what people wanted. He give the people what they want. And if we could figure right, I think that’s the call of business is to give the people what they want and you won’t have a problem selling.

Mike Soltys (42:10:00)
And there’s some serendipity and timing because of the satellite availability, but it had been available for several years and nobody else was doing it. So, Bill saw it and jumped on it. But if it’s a different era, you know, it doesn’t happen. So, it’s knowing what’s available technologically at that particular time.

Skot Waldron (42:35:00)
I see. I see a lot of this all going into this whole concept of vision before validation, of throwing it out there, scrappy innovation, cultural timing, as you said, with the technological advances that were kind of happening at that time, resilience of Bill to bounce back when he didn’t, you know, he could have wallowed in the fact that he got fired from, you know, Hockey and then just threw his hands in the air, but he saw it as an opportunity to open, you know, open the door to a new, new thing.

Belief before proof is really hard for some people. Some people need the proof before they’ll do anything. And you’re not going to build an ESPN that way. And I think that that’s honestly what I’m catching from y’all.

Mike Soltys (43:29:00)
Yeah, And Bill and Skot, after ESPN launched a 24-hour sports radio network, Enterprise Radio, which again was ahead of its time. You look back and like, yeah, that’s a no brainer, but didn’t exist. They didn’t have Getty Oil to finance it. And so, it didn’t work. Then later on in Bill’s life, he launches a smart home company. And he had that concept of smart homes and had difficulty bringing it to scale. So, he always had the vision and ideas, but you do need money, you do need it to be if you can be ahead of your time and have something not work too.

So, there’s a lot of aspects that are beyond having but the starting point for Bill was always looking forward to what it is where is there a need? I know where there’s a need. How do we make a business out of this?

Skot Waldron (44:21:00)
So, Sports Heaven: The Birth of ESPN, is I can read it, I can listen to it, I can watch it. but it just aired for one night. So where else can I watch it if I want to watch the documentary and then access the other materials?

Garrett Sutton (44:41:00)
Well, the documentary is available at Tenero.tv. So that’s TENERO.tv. The audiobook is out and it’s on Amazon and all other outlets. The print book will come out July 28th. So, there are three ways to enjoy this great entrepreneurial story. The audiobook and print book follow Bill’s diary, but he also provides his entrepreneurial lessons. And in the audiobook, we have the voices of Chris Berman and George Grant. So, their contributions are in the audiobook. So, it’s a fun audiobook to listen to. And then the documentary, of course, has all the players who were there back in 1979.

And so, it’s great that we’ve been able to interview these people because George Conner from Getty Oil just passed. So, we were lucky to get him on the documentary before he passed.

Skot Waldron (45:41:00)
Very cool. Very cool. Well, gentlemen, thank you for your contribution. Thanks for the education, the insights and the historical work you’ve been doing to document this journey, because it is one that has impacted our entire global economy, our world. It’s impacted a lot of us that you know engage in the ESPN every day. And that’s it’s pretty amazing what Bill has done in his lifetime to impact the world that he has. So, thank you for sharing that with us.

Mike Soltys (46:16:00)
I appreciate it. Tremendous questions and you really don’t have to be an ESPN viewer to love this story because it is a business success origin story that everybody that’s seeing it or listening to is giving me the same feedback that like I didn’t have to be an ESPN fan. So, it’s for anybody that just loves a good adventure and excitement and seeing how something comes together.

Skot Waldron (46:41:00)
Exactly. And I think that that’s what my listeners, you know, some of them will get out of it. Some of them are not sports fans, but I think the story about what you’re talking about is leadership and is vision is how do we go out there and make an impact on the world the way we think we can and what should we take away from Bill’s story that can help impact our lives, I think is the goal.

So, man, thank you. Thank you all for sharing the story.

Garrett Sutton (47:06:00)
Thanks.

Mike Soltys (47:07:00)
Thank you.

Skot Waldron (47:10:00)
What are you going to take away from that story? What are you going to take away from the thoughts you were having? What action are you going to take? How are you going to start thinking about who you are and what you do? How are you going to start thinking about those people that come with these visionary ideas? Maybe you are the person with the visionary idea and no real concrete way to get there just yet. And how are you going to understand what that means for you and the way you run your business, the way you run your teams, the way you operate?

And I think at the bottom of all of this, underneath everything, it started with relationships. I do not believe that Bill could have built what he built if people didn’t trust him, if he didn’t have the relational fortitude, the ability to inspire people, the ability to be optimistic and to run that in a way that made people want to follow him.

People worked all the time. As Mike was saying, there was no like, you know, you nine to five at ESPN. It didn’t work that way. They were committed to the vision. They were committed. They all shared a purpose. They shared a goal, and they were aligned in that. Even when Bill, a year later, was asked to leave, they continued because that shared optimism, that shared goal, that shared vision was still present.

When times get tough, when things change, how much does that shared vision unite you? Does it? Or are you too fractured to really go along with that? Or is the shared vision not even obvious enough or communicated well in a way that makes you want to follow that? Something for you to think about.

Thank you guys for being on the show.

If you want to find out more information about me or check out the show notes where there’s going to be more information and links to the things referenced in this episode, visit skotwaldron.com. And lastly, I’m asking for a little bit of love, just a little bit. So please take a moment, follow, rate the show. The algorithm is like that; it helps me get the word out. I really appreciate it.

Thank you. And until next time, stay Unlocked.