Bill Rasmussen was out of work and stuck in Connecticut traffic when he blurted out the pitch that would remake the way the world watches sports.
That August 1978 conversation on Interstate 84 with his son Scott produced a 24-hour cable sports network in a television landscape that had never seen one. Thirteen months later, on September 7, 1979, ESPN went live at 7 p.m. ET into 1.4 million American homes, financed in part by a $9,000 credit card advance.
Rasmussen died on Tuesday at his home in Land O’ Lakes, Florida, from complications of Parkinson’s disease. He was 93. He had first been diagnosed with the degenerative condition in 2014 and made his diagnosis public in 2019.
From a Whalers dismissal to a Bristol studio
Rasmussen had been public relations director for the World Hockey Association’s New England Whalers in Hartford when he was let go in the summer of 1978. Rather than look for another PR job, he and Scott chased a satellite transponder and a programming idea that almost nobody in television believed would work.
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“When someone tells you you can’t do something, you want to prove them wrong,” Rasmussen once said of the venture.
Getty Oil bought a controlling stake and pushed both Rasmussens out within a year of launch. The network they left behind grew into the most valuable brand in sports media, and in 2025 Rasmussen was inducted into the Sports Broadcasting Hall of Fame.
Tributes from the network he built
Chris Berman, who joined ESPN three weeks after launch and has stayed with the company for more than four decades, reached for a founding-father analogy.
“Bill was our George Washington and a good friend. He was such a grateful person and every sports fan can be grateful for Bill.”
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ESPN chairman Jimmy Pitaro said in a network statement that Rasmussen was “a visionary and an innovator who conceived the idea of a network entirely devoted to sports,” and credited the modern company’s culture to what Rasmussen built in the late 1970s.
Mike Soltys, a longtime friend, described him as “an insightful and curious entrepreneur who had eternal optimism and a keen sense of humor.”
The tribute that got cut off mid-sentence
Hours after the news broke, ESPN’s own on-air tribute became a story of its own. During First Take on Tuesday, panelists Evan Cohen, Jason McCourty and Chris Canty reflected on Rasmussen’s legacy before host Courtney Cronin began her closing remarks over a graphic of the founder.
She had barely started before her microphone was drowned out by Pat McAfee’s live intro.
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“Hello, beautiful people, and welcome to our humble abode, the DraftKings Thunderdome.”
First Take had run long, and the switch was a master-control decision rather than one McAfee made. But the timing landed badly enough that Pulitzer Prize winner Don Van Natta Jr. summed up the mood in four words on social media: “This just makes me sad.”
Rasmussen is survived by his sons Scott and Glenn, daughter Lynn, seven grandchildren, and two great-grandchildren. His wife Lois died in 2011 after 56 years of marriage.
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