BRISTOL, Conn. _ To hear Bill Rasmussen tell the story, you'd think the famous traffic jam had just happened yesterday.
The date was Aug. 16, 1978, and Rasmussen was driving with his son, Scott, along I-84 in Waterbury, creeping his way toward his daughter's 16th birthday party in Ocean Grove, N.J. He had recently purchased 24-hour access to a satellite transponder but hadn't figured out exactly what to do with it. In the passenger seat, Scott dipped in and out of a nap.
"I'm just saying, 'What about this, what about that? What can we run?' " Bill Rasmussen recalled recently. "And one time, I guess getting a little bit irritated with me, (Scott) wakes up and says, 'Play football all day for all I care,' and puts his head back down."
From that eureka moment, the idea grew. Rasmussen said he and Scott barely paid mind to the birthday party, scheming the entire time about plans for the network that would soon become ESPN. By the time they returned to Rasmussen's home in Avon, they had discussed prospective game schedules, studio shows and even building plans.
Forty years after that traffic jam in Waterbury, Rasmussen's creation stands as the most powerful sports media property in the world and one of the largest companies in the state of Connecticut.
Rasmussen was forced out at ESPN in 1980, barely a year after the network launched, but over the past two decades he has reemerged as a company hero, the face of an unlikely origin story. These days, whenever he ventures east from his home in Seattle, he's invited back to Bristol to take stock of what he created 40 years ago.
During a trip to the Worldwide Leader during the last week of October, Rasmussen reunited with former ESPN anchor Chris Berman, visited the spot on I-84 where he and his son first thought up a 24-hour sports network, taped interviews for an E:60 segment and some 40th-anniversary coverage to air next summer, and hosted a meet-and-greet with current employees. He spoke with ESPNers who spent decades at the company, as well as with one woman who had arrived only eight days earlier. One employee showed him photos of the dog named after him. Another described book reports she'd written about him in grade school.
Rasmussen also sat down with The Courant in a cafe on the ESPN campus built long after he left town, amid a sprawl of buildings larger than he could have dreamed back in 1978. At 86 years old, Rasmussen walks slowly and speaks softly, but his memory remains strikingly sharp. Over several hours, one of sports media's most important figures shared the history of everything from ESPN's name (inspired by Connecticut Natural Gas) to its home in Bristol (not Plainville, where Rasmussen first sought to put the network) to its original contract with UConn's athletic department.
It's a history rich in ingenuity, good fortune and hidden Connecticut connections.
