Chris Berman's office at ESPN Plaza is barely more than a cubbyhole tucked into a corner between the newsroom and ESPN Radio. He just fits between the coat rack and the cooler.
"When we first moved in here, we didn't even have a control room. We had a truck," Berman said."All the cables went out the door. It was so cold in here. One night, a skunk came in and let fly. It stunk to high heaven, and I don't lie about this. That studio stunk for weeks."
The flies were even worse, or at least more plentiful.
"I remember my first night, there was this one fly going from nose to nose, following the lights," said Bob Ley, who joined the station about the same time as Berman 16 years ago. "I was young, stupid and I came cheap. I was just excited about doing something new."
No longer new, ESPN has become a part of American culture, a network with fans rather than viewers, more of a hangout than a TV channel. It has gone from being the nation's largest carrier of Irish hurling and slow-pitch softball to a purveyor of all the world's most popular sports, including the NFL, major league baseball and World Cup soccer.
Throw in Berman's outlandish nicknames, a few bikini-clad body builders, some sky diving parasailers on mountain bikes, a constant bombardment of newsy nuggets, and ESPN suddenly has a cult-like following that includes everyone from couch potatoes to pro athletes.
It has changed the way Americans watch sports and the way they get their sports news. Four minutes on the local news each night just isn't enough any more.
"ESPN has had a huge influence on our industry," former CBS Sports president Neal Pilson said. "It's become a colossus. ... We found ourselves constantly outflanked by their ability to do sports 24 hours a day, seven days a week.
"ESPN has become a key factor in whether a sport is `making it' or `not making it' in our culture. It's become a litmus test to get on ESPN. Sports are willing to go on ESPN for nothing, just for exposure."
And even sports' biggest stars take notice.
"It's a nightly recap of your profession, of what you do," San Francisco 49ers quarterback Steve Young said. "I'll bet I catch `SportsCenter', bits and pieces of it, at least twice a week to see what's going on. It's definitely mainstream, and for a sports fan it's indispensable.
"How could you not have ESPN?"
Just 16 years ago, hardly anybody did.
On the evening of Sept. 7, 1979, ESPN went on the air, available in about 1.4 million homes, most of which were oblivious to this radical, new idea of sports all day, every day. Getty Oil invested $10 million in start-up money to back ESPN founder William F. Rasmussen, an area broadcaster whose original idea was to televise schoolboy sports in Connecticut. It's employees numbered about 75.
Today, ESPN is seen in 67 million American homes - more than 90 million worldwide - and it has 1,400 employees scattered across the globe. In 1984, Capital Cities bought ESPN for $237.5 million. Now, estimates of the value of ESPN and ESPN2 range as high as $5 billion, or about one-quarter of the $19 billion Disney paid for the entire ABC-Capital Cities Inc. empire.
It's gone from a money pit that once was relegated to showing fashion news in the afternoon, to a global industry that spilled out of tiny Bristol and into 150 countries.
Industry analysts say ESPN is the most profitable cable network of them all, expected to generate $350 million this year.
At the heart of ESPN is "SportsCenter," the hour-long sports news show that is ESPN's trademark. Baseball and hockey might go on strike forever, or Fox might buy all the football there is, but "SportsCenter" belongs to ESPN. Ley calls it "the spine of the book."
"What I tried to convince everyone of when I came here in 1987 was that everything else would come and go, but `SportsCenter' is forever. It's like a tattoo," said executive editor John Walsh, a former Newsweek editor and one of many former print journalists ESPN has hired over the years.
"SportsCenter" didn't just hatch; it evolved over a period of time and in several incarnations.
The show started out at a half hour. It has been as long as its present hour and as short as 15 minutes. Ley once was shunted aside and nearly quit. Keith Olbermann was sent to ESPN2, then reunited with Dan Patrick on the nightly wrapup version of "SportsCenter."
"It took us a while to find its identity," said Steve Bornstein, who started at the network in 1980 as a programmer and ascended to its presidency 10 years later. "We were kind of flipping around, trying to figure out what to do."
The show's influence has transcended television, ultimately changing the way even print sports stories were reported.
"The `SportsCenter' highlights act as a visual standard that we can assume our most intense readers have seen. So we have to go deeper in the locker room and be more insightful in the analysis in order to give readers something fresh," said John Cherwa, deputy sports editor of the Chicago Tribune.
"ESPN is so wired into everything that you kind of don't want (a story) to appear there first. You kind of want them to be quoting you," said Bill Dwyre, sports editor of the Los Angeles Times.
"These are not just throw-it-up-against-the-walls guys. They have a much higher standard of broadcasting. Walsh was smart in getting newspaper guys there."
Bristol lies about 95 miles northeast of New York City, virtually dead center in bucolic Connecticut. When ESPN moved in, it shared the neighborhood with a herd of Herefords and the Otis elevator test facility across the road.
Former ESPN president Roger Werner said the network lost as much as $30 million the first year. It continued to lose until 1987, one year after it was purchased by ABC-Capital Cities Inc., and in 1990 turned a pre-tax profit of about $140 million.
"For every deal ESPN makes that requires them to pay a license fee, they probably have a dozen deals they get for free - fishing shows, horse racing, specialty golf," Pilson said. "All that programming you see in the off hours is either free or pays to be there, and I say this with great respect."
Kenny Mayne, fresh from ESPN2, sat alone at the "SportsCenter" desk. Four minutes before air, Robin Roberts walked in and took the seat next to him. Ley entered at an easy canter about a minute later, pulling his jacket on as he made his way to his desk on the other side of the set.
"I thought you guys were going to stiff me," Mayne said. The new guy's always the first one on the set.
The red light went on, and it was show time.
"At times, it seems like the room is full of snipers," Olbermann said. "We could be doing the show in the middle of a Grand Central Station IRT platform, and it would be less chaotic. We've had shows where nothing's gone right the whole hour."
They have their excuses. For one, there is no script. There's a form, but "SportsCenter" is a work in progress each night. The reporters all write their own copy, and that lets their personalities shine through - when they're not too sleepy to shine, that is.
"I wrote last night until 2 in the morning. I got up at 6 and did some more writing. I don't just come in and do all that," Berman said.
While Mayne was reading the lead story of the night, Ley worked at his computer, and Roberts had a go-round with one of the production assistants. The tennis scores he'd posted were from the previous night. There was a brief scramble.
At least three stories planned for the newscast wound up in the wastebasket. Breaking news had put them over their allotted hour.
Ley sighed and walked off the set.
"Every once in a while, you wish for the old days," he said, "but at least there's no flies anymore."
With new buildings going up literally by the month, the ESPN headquarters now consists of 16 acres of offices, news rooms, studios, garages, control rooms, production facilities and parking spaces, surrounded by 31 satellite dishes big enough to bounce signals right up Quark's nose.
It looks like a cross between Cape Canaveral and a college campus, which is particularly appropriate.
"The kids in college just can't believe that when we went to school, ESPN wasn't there," Berman said. "I see that look of fear in their eyes. `What did you do?' And I tell them, `I walked in the woods five miles every night and read by the fire and ate pumpkins.'
"And they don't believe it.
"We read the paper."
ESPN is seen in an average of 31.5 million American households each week, and its audience is made up predominantly of young, affluent males. About 13 percent of its viewers are college age or younger.
ESPN2, meanwhile, was launched to about 9 million homes on Oct. 1, 1993, and it now reaches more than 25 million. Of its viewers, 19 percent are college age or younger.
Nowhere is ESPN more popular than on campus.
ESPN Enterprises senior VP Dick Glover was at a wedding recently, and about halfway through the reception, his fiance asked him to run home for his "ESPNET To Go" pager, a beeper-sized toy that scrolls scores and results all day long.
"I thought she'd had too many drinks," Glover said. "I asked her why. She said there was a guy over there that really had to keep up with the football scores. He turned out to be the president of Northwestern."
At heart, though, ESPN really is a blue-collar joint. There's no star on Berman's office door. His name isn't even on it. And many of ESPN's production people are paid far less than their network counterparts.
Jeff Gowen produced everything from "SportsCenter" to major league baseball in 12 years at ESPN. Caught in a logjam of talented, young producers and unable to do football as he'd wanted, Gowen left to do the NFL on Fox last year.
"My years at ESPN were an unbelievable experience," Gowen said. "It's THE place to be for a young person."
Despite smaller budgets, Gowen said he believes ESPN's production values and capabilities have gone from "quite shabby at first" to equal to or better than the networks. It started when ESPN got the NFL in 1988.
"That's when we realized we were suddenly in the big leagues, and we'd better do this right," Gowen said. "It was sort of a reality check.
"In the late '80s, I think we stopped trying to compare ourselves to the networks and tried to take the lead in production. All of a sudden, it wasn't enough to be as good as CBS, we had to be better. By then, you had to be good or get out because the standards were so high and the competition was moving so fast."
Perhaps more than anyone else, Al Jaffe sees the effect ESPN has on young people. He's director of talent and production recruitment at ESPN, and most of his recruits, like Gowen, come out of college.
"A lot of them have grown up with us, and they can tell you things about ESPN that are amazing. They remember everything," Jaffe said.
Jaffe said he gets about 100 resumes a month for entry-level jobs, some written on baseballs, others stuck inside plastic bats. And he said he receives so many tryout tapes, "I've often thought about starting The Resume Channel."
There was a day, as Bornstein put it, when ESPN "was hemorrhaging so much money," its executives thought it would never survive. Not only did ESPN resort to afternoon fashion shows, it also tried business news in the morning. "All Sports All the Time" was a little white lie that ESPN never publicly admitted.
"Those are a couple of black holes that we would just as soon not resurrect," Bornstein said.
The turnaround began in 1983. Late in the year, ESPN reached 28.5 million subscribers, becoming the largest cable network in America. One year later, after the CFA split with the NCAA, ESPN acquired its first major property, college football.
"That was the first property we had that the networks wanted," Bornstein said.
The same year, ABC Video Enterprises bought ESPN from Texaco, which had taken over Getty, and one year later, Capital Cities bought ABC.
The NFL awarded its first cable contract to ESPN in 1987, and major league baseball joined the ESPN airwaves in 1989.
ESPN International was launched in 1988 and is now shipping American culture ESPN-style worldwide with broadcasts in 14 languages.
An UEFA Cup soccer game flashed across a dozen screens in the control room, and in small booths down the hall, two-man teams were doing broadcasts simultaneously in Spanish, Portuguese, Mandarin and Cantonese.
"We're much like ESPN was in the early years," said Bernard Stewart, vice president of programming and production for ESPN International. "There's no book where I can look up how this is supposed to be done."
ESPN has become so valuable that ABC-Cap Cities chairman Thomas Murphy pronounced it the key property in the Disney takeover.
With ESPN dabbling in radio, the internet, magazines and computer games as well as television, Disney's vision of "Tomorrowland" has arrived. That leaves ESPN executives to plan for a future that looks more like "Fantasyland."
"If somebody tells you what the world will look like in the year 2005, I'd like to meet him. He could make a lot of money," Glover said. "All I know is if we continue to create compelling programming and software, whether it comes into your wrist watch from a satellite or into a high definition TV in your home entertainment center is kind of irrelevant to us."