Sunday, October 03, 2004
Thank You
to ESPN and Dick Vitale. (There, I wrote it). Via the Buffalo News:A few months before ESPN's 1979 debut, the NCAA championship basketball game between Larry Bird's Indiana State team and Magic Johnson's Michigan State Spartans raised the national visibility of college basketball to a new level.
That summer, the Detroit Pistons fired their coach, Dick Vitale. A then ESPN executive, Scotty Connall, liked Vitale's style and soon hired him -- for $175 per game -- to be the network's hyper voice of college basketball.
Vitale wasn't sure he knew what cable television was, but he went along for the ride. "When Scotty said ESPN, I thought that sounded like a disease," Vitale said.
The network in the '80s became the first TV outlet to show early-round games of the NCAA Tournament, inventing the game-to-game whip-around. Competition from ESPN essentially forced CBS in 1990 to begin broadcasting the entire tournament.
