I remember the early days of ESPN.  I was working overnights at a really bad radio station and would come home in the morning to watch Sportscenter.  Back then, it wasn't the cute, happy talk, catchphrase heavy anchors you get now.  It was a young Chris Berman, Bob Ley, Tom (Cement Head) Mees, Sharon Smith George Grande and others  pretty much reading sports stories, running highlights and keeping it simple.

The programming was a bunch of stuff that wouldn't have made Wide World of Sports.  Curling.  Bull Riding.  Monster Trucks.  Back then, ESPN took the E (for entertainment) very seriously.

The world changed in 1986 when ABC/Cap Cities (now Disney) bought ESPN from private investors.  The anchors became snappier and more opinionated and the programming, although more familiar, began to drive the entire operation.  The second generation of anchors (Olberman, Tirico, Saunders, Patrick, Mayne, Eisen, Roberts) came in and  took things to another level.

In 1993, ESPN became more than just scores, highlights and games.  They became a self-proclaimed sports news organization, doing exposes and breaking sports news.  They also offered more opinion, which was mostly from an East coast prospective.

One of the marketing concepts ESPN started back then which continues today is to promote the product.  If your sport is on ESPN, you get love continuously.  If ESPN is courting you, you get love continuously.  If you are not a member of the family or not part of the plan (you know who you are, Gary Bettman), then you get little if any love.  ESPN is all about promoting itself.  Endlessly.

ESPN tried to branch out into other areas as well.  Game shows.  Talk shows.  Full length movies.  Some have been successful like "Around The Horn" and "PTI" and others have flopped (how bad was Brian Dennehy in "Season on the Brink."  In fact, how bad was that movie, period?)

My defining moment with ESPN came in December of 1997.  It was announced that afternoon that the ABL, the women's professional basketball league had folded.  I was the play by play voice for the Nashville Noise and we were all standing around at the team headquarters as the news was being read to us.  It was three days before Christmas, some of these women had children.  All of us had bills to pay and not only were we all being turned out into the cold, we weren't going to get paid for December.  In the corner, there was a TV and Sportscenter was on.  Linda Cohn and Rich Eisen were anchoring.

Before I continue, let me interject that the NBA wasn't on ESPN.  In fact, the NBA was on strike.  The ABL had really ticked off the NBA because of its aggressive marketing in NBA cities.  In fact, word had it that David Stern had threatened all of the media outlets that coverage of the ABL would result in the organization getting a lifetime ban from receiving NBA broadcasts or consideration of broadcasts,  That was the word and a couple of years later, the state of Connecticut filed an anti-trust suit against the NBA which was very quietly dismissed due to lack of hard evidence.

Back to our story.  Cohn and Eisen thought making jokes while acting pleased that the league folded was a proper course of action.  If you had been in that room, with those people, and saw the looks on their faces, it would have ripped your heart out.  Many of these women would never play professional basketball again.  Yet there were Cohn and Eisen cracking wise about how the ABL folded and would anyone care and yadda yadda.  They may have scored a bunch of brownie points with Stern, but they sure pissed me off.  To this day, if Cohn comes on my TV, I change channels.

I've never been a fan of the Generation X ESPN guys, probably because I am an old and traditional sports fan.  I am less enamored with all the forced catch phrases they've come up with, although I really enjoyed the Kenny Mayne "this is Sportscenter" promo where he was trying to come up with something to describe a Ken Griffey Junior home run.

I watch ESPN for games and maybe one of the themed sports shows.  But even those are kind of lame because most of the opinions are shallow. 

ESPN has come a long way since their birth on September 7, 1979.  I'm not thrilled where it went, becoming not only the biggest and most important sports entity in America, but a self serving monolith that will decide for you what's good and bad.  Great concepts often get spoiled as they grow and big corporations often forget their roots on the way up.