Bill Pidto '87 walks past a dozen satellite dishes, enters Building 2 at ESPN Plaza, and rushes by the collection of memorabilia in the lobby: a Number 23 North Carolina jersey, a Lee Trevino golf glove, a Stetson signed by Richard Petty. He passes newsrooms, control rooms, conference rooms, studios, camera operators, producers, and directors, finally arriving at the cubicle he shares with a few other faces seen in 76 million homes. And then he states the obvious: "This is a massive operation. Massive."

It began, in September 1979, as a fledgling New England cable station faced with filling twenty-four hours of screen time daily. "Yea, verily, a sampler of wonders" were the first words uttered on the air, but in those days it was primarily the wonders of model planes, marbles, and tractor pulls. There were seventy employees headquartered in 10,000 square feet surrounded by mud. Even the name of the network was left to chance. Originally called the Entertainment Sports Programming Network, it was soon changed to ESPN-TV. When a printing mistake returned a log reading ESPN, it was left at that. Twenty years later its staff has grown to 2,100, its signal broadcast to 150 countries on all seven continents. "When I first heard about it, I thought it was ridiculous. Nobody's going to watch sports for twenty-four hours," says Dick Schaap '55, host of ESPN's "Sunday SportsDay." "Of course, now there's ESPN2, ESPNEWS, ESPN Classic, ESPN Radio. . ."

Nowadays, one can also grab a beer at an ESPN Zone sports bar, buy ESPN The Magazine at ESPN The Store, and pay for it with an ESPN Visa card. For better or worse, the network is the Starbucks of sports, and the handful of Cornellians in its empire are creating a brand of broadcasting that continues to transform the role of sports in society.

Keith Olbermann '79 became one of ESPN's more recognizable faces during five years as anchor of "SportsCenter," the network'ssignature highlights-and-news hour, before moving on to his own talk show on MSNBC and then returning to his roots with Fox Sports. Olbermann notes that in 1954, Ithaca became the first large community to establish its own cable system. "No Ithaca," he declares tongue in cheek, "no ESPN." But it was in the rural hamlet of Bristol, Connecticut--twenty miles west of Hartford where the tallest building is a 383-foot structure that serves as the Otis Elevator Company's facility for testing "fallibility"--that the cable TV revolution began.

Along with CNN in Atlanta, ESPN in Bristol gave notice that cable networks would not be minor-league replicas of the Big Three. Twenty years later, we're entrenched in the Age of Niche. "One of the things that is occurring now is a fragmentation of the content on television, so that more people have available to them more channels, and the channels are becoming more and more specialized," says Michael Shapiro, associate professor in Cornell's communication department. "Not that many years ago, if you watched a lot of television, you watched all kinds of television because that's what the traditional networks showed. Now, you literally can watch sports all day and never watch anything else."

While observers once questioned whether an all-sports network could survive, ESPN has since spawned imitators on the radio (there are now more than 150 sports radio stations in the country) and on television (Fox Sports and CNN-SI), as well as offspring like ESPN2 and ESPNEWS. The former broadcasts events ranging from the World's Strongest Man Competition to the National Spelling Bee. The latter offers twenty-four hours of sports reports. With its launch in 1996, Business Week asked, "How Much TV Sports News Can You Use?" The answer, apparently, is "How much have you got?"

The all-sports format has also turned the sports coverage on local newscasts into an afterthought for armchair quarterbacks. The viewer who would once half-sleep through the first twenty-three minutes of the nightly news waiting for the local sports segment can now flip directly to "SportsCenter." Thanks to ESPN, says Shapiro, "it has become increasingly possible for someone to consume a lot of media and never really encounteranything that doesn't already fit their interest." Whether that makes viewers more one-dimensional is a matter for debate, but it clearly makes them more sports savvy, and ESPN caters to that expertise. For example, the format of "SportsCenter" (which Esquire calls "the most imitated show in the 500-channel universe") more closely resembles a newspaper front page than it does a local sports broadcast. The big stories are at the top of the hour, not clustered by sport. If that means the subject matter moves from a basketball trade to baseball highlights to figure skating, so be it.

The proliferation and magnification of sports coverage have also changed the way athletes behave. As one college basketball coach complained, "I've got kids going up in the air to dunk, and they're thinking about how the dunk's going to look on "SportsCenter" that night." But if the message has changed with the understanding that every slam dunk is as much a highlight as a high-percentage shot, so has the role of the messengers; the hosts and anchors have become celebrities themselves. Says Schaap, who has written thirty-three books and contributed to Newsweek, "NBC Nightly News," "Today," and "World News Tonight," "I have a larger audience when I'm on ABC, but I get a lot more recognition working at ESPN."

Olbermann has played "Celebrity Jeopardy," appeared in song lyrics ("We'll watch ESPN--with Keith Olbermann"), and been ranked among TV Guide's annual top ten stars. His grinning mug is splashed across outfield walls in Major League ballparks across the country in a fifteen-foot-high ad for Fox Sports. When he covered the Academy Awards for a local newspaper, Tom Hanks, Matt Damon, and Ben Affleck all wanted to have their pictures taken with him. "That's actually a very old phenomenon," says Shapiro, who teaches a course on the psychology of television. "I've been talking to students about an article that was published in the 1950s about people's relationship with Dave Garroway, host of the original 'Today Show.' Before that, there was that kind of relationship with glamorous movie stars. Even here at Cornell, there was a time after the making of 'Cosmos' that I could have invited Carl Sagan to give a speech on making a ham sandwich and lots of undergraduates would have shown up because he was on TV. Being on TV makes you somebody."

Much as MTV spawned the MTV Generation, today's ESPN employees were yesterday's ESPN target audience. Whit Watson '93, who has anchored shows on ESPN, ESPN2, and ESPNEWS, used to sit in his frat house at 2 a.m. and watch 'Sports-

Center.' "My friend would always joke, 'We're going to see you on that show someday,'" Watson recalls. "I guess, when you're in college, you sort of see that as the pinnacle."

The same is true at ESPN Plaza, where Watson and about forty of his colleagues participate in the sport of musical chairs. At the end of every month, each of the anchors can access a Microsoft spreadsheet program revealing the upcoming assignments--who will anchor what and when. "There aren't a lot of opportunities for feedback here, so one of the ways you find out how you're doing is by picking up your schedule," Watson says. "If they gave you six "SportsCenters" that month, you have to figure they like what you're doing. There's a little bit of anxiety when that schedule comes out because you want to see if they threw you a bone or not."

In sports broadcasting, the trick is to grab the attention of the decision-makers by catching the fancy of the viewing public. At ESPN, particularly in recent years, that often means attaching yourself to a catch-phrase--a sporting shtick of some sort like Chris Berman's nicknames, Dan Patrick's "en fuego," or Stuart Scott's "boo-yah." It means turning the highlights into high drama: hyperbolically at times, dryly at others, as when Bill Pidto describes an umpire-manager dispute as "a developing situation."

Editing highlights is primarily the job of production assistants like Lisa Fenn '97. The task: watch a game in its entirety, logging every shot--wild pitches, bloop singles, crowd banners, dugout tirades--that might translate into a story line. It's a task millions of sports fans would probably do for free, but viewing games more as a cinematographer than a spectator can take the fun out of it. "A lot of times I'll be sitting at home watching a game on TV and I'll say to myself, 'Oh, that would be a great bump shot,'" says Fenn. "It's very sad."

It's up to the anchor-writer to introduce the highlights, but not give away the result--and it isn't always easy to come up with something unique and enticing about your basic Tigers-Mariners yawnfest. Pidto uses the Internet, wire services, ESPN's research department, any outlet where he can uncover a fact funky enough or a quote quirky enough to suffice. For the Tigers-Mariners game, for instance, he began by saying, "In the history of baseball, there have been thirteen Cruzes. Four are active, two are on Detroit, one of them is pitching tonight--Nelson Cruz. . ." When FSU baseball made its seventeenth postseason appearance last spring, Pidto remarked, "Susan Lucci has finally won her Emmy. Will Florida State finally win the College World Series?"

Flash forward to October 1999. The Astros have just beaten the Braves in a National League playoff game, and it's the lead story on "SportsCenter." "Let's go to Jeremy Schaap in Atlanta," says the anchor, and there's Dick Schaap's son, interviewing winning pitcher Shane Reynolds. After game highlights there's Schaap again, interviewing Houston's hitting hero, Daryle Ward. Back to the studio for analysis, and then back to Schaap once more, this time with third baseman Ken Caminiti by his side. With little time to prepare, try asking three pro baseball players three questions apiece in front of a national TV audience that prides itself on separating the pros from the pretenders. "You want to come up with a few intelligent questions for them," says Schaap '91, ESPN's New York-based correspondent. "You don't want to say, 'How did it feel to hit that home run, Daryle?' or, 'Great performance, Shane.' One thing ESPN stresses is, ask a question. Too often, people say, 'Big home run, Daryle,' and then stick a microphone in his face."

Granted, Schaap had a head start. Growing up, he joked around with Muhammad Ali at the champ's Catskills training camp; he received a box of Reggie! bars from Mr. October himself. When Jeremy was eight, his dad let him interview Pete Rose and Tommy Lasorda. "I thought, hey, this is pretty easy. You just go to baseball games and talk to people."

Mark Schwarz '81, a Catskills native whose WVBR experience was geared more toward the Rolling Stones than the Colorado Avalanche, has been ESPN's West Coast correspondent since 1990. He's often been called upon to report on the darker side of sports; his two Emmy awards were for stories about boxer Jerry Quarry's pugilistic dementia and improprieties involving the University of Houston football program. Over the past decade, he has drawn the ire of O.J. Simpson's best friend Al Cowlings, a series of angry curses from former University of Washington coach Don James, even physical threats from Mike Tyson. "We were chest to chest for a moment," Schwarz recalls. "It's the kind of thing you read about: MIKE TYSON FLATTENS REPORTER."

He has covered sexually molested hockey players, did a live report from Magic Johnson's HIV-announcement press conference, and spent weeks covering the Simpson trial and the Tonya Harding debacle. "These stories have nothing to do with the sports you tend to follow with this job. You really have to learn as you go," says Schwarz. "Especially the Tonya thing. I was giving these reports live, moments after coming out of a courtroom, trying to consolidate all these legal terms in my head and delivering it to a live audience."

Sports journalism is no longer, as old newspaper staffers used to call it, the "Toy Department." During one weekend last October, for instance, Jeremy Schaap reported the story of Dimitrius Underwood, the troubled NFL player who slashed his own throat after walking away from a $1.7 million signing bonus and being jailed for non-payment of child support. Meanwhile, Schwarz was researching a feature about Native Americans in the National Hockey League, while former WVBR sports director Dan Weinberg '94 prepared a documentary about Moe Berg, a baseball catcher who doubled as an American spy.

Even an innocent roundtable discussion like "The Sports Reporters," the popular Sunday morning half-hour show featuring host Dick Schaap and a panel of three sportswriters discussing current issues, consists of asides interspersed with venomous criticisms and sober pronouncements. "My feeling is that sports at its best is entertainment, and the more humor you can find in it, the better off you are," says Schaap. "Unfortunately, in recent years it seems to become harder and harder to find humor in it. The higher the stakes, the fewer the laughs."

Because "SportsCenter" is broadcast live three times daily, there have been more than 21,000 telecasts since it first went on the air, meaning it has surpassed the "CBS Evening News" as the most-televised live show in history. "Being on live television and adapting and editing on the fly, and having people talk in your ear while there's a camera on you, that part of it is exactly as exciting as I thought it would be," says Watson. "It's the same addiction I got when I was at WVBR and went on the air live for the first time, and I realized there were people actually listening to me."

Combine real-time performance with a chaotic environment, and gaffes are inevitable. Microphones disappear, sets fall apart, anchors are overcome by fits of laughter. Once, Dan Patrick ended a show by saying, "For Dan Patrick, I'm Bob Ley. Good night." And just about everyone has mispronounced names or words, usually the worst word at the worst time. "I did a 2 a.m. show a few years ago, and we beeped out Andre Agassi's F-bombs," Pidto recalls. "It went something like, 'Andre Agassi is displeased. . . beep, beep, beep, beep!' Then it comes back to me, and I say, 'Thank goodness for the beep function.'" Only, he forgot the "n" in function. "That's the beauty of what we do," says Pidto. "You can't do anything about it once it's over."

Brad Herzog '90 is a frequent contributor to Cornell Magazine and the author of The Sports 100, a ranking of the most important people in U.S. sports. ESPN founder Bill Rasmussen is Number 57.

To work at ESPN, you have to know your Xs and Os. This becomes obvious from the outset--in the job interview. Longtime ESPN talent coordinator Al Jaffe, who receives 2,500 resumes a month, is less likely to ask applicants where they will be in five years than where the Oakland A's will be in five years. "I walked in there thinking about my strengths, my weaknesses, why I want this job. I was ready for those kinds of questions," says former WVBR sports director Dan Weinberg '94, who was applying for a production assistant slot. "Then Al just said, point-blank, 'To work at ESPN, you have to have a working knowledge of sports. Now I'm going to test that knowledge, and you're going to be hired or not hired based on your ability to answer these questions.'" For Weinberg, who passed up law school for a run at ESPN, it was like visiting the dentist and finding the Good Humor man. "I thought, are you kidding me? This is great!" he recalls. "You want to talk sports for an hour? Fire away!" Think it sounds easy? Here's a sample of the kinds of questions pitched to ESPN candidates.

1. Who won the 1999 Vezina Trophy, given to the top goaltender in the NHL

2. Name the starting nine for the Houston Astros.

3. Who won the National League RBI crown last year?

4. Name the top five players in college basketball.

5. Who was chosen first in last year's NFL Draft?

6. Name the starting five for the Sacramento Kings.

7. Who won the most recent Wimbledon women's singles title?

8. Who is the reigning Olympic gold medalist in the men's 100 meters?

9. What golfer is ranked No. 2 in the world?

10. Who is the best sixth-man in the NBA?

Published in Cornell Alumni Magazine. Used by permission.