‘Sports Heaven’: Mike Soltys Talks About New ESPN Documentary
- Philip Thibodeau
- 2 days ago
- 10 min read
There aren’t that many people who know as much about the business of sports broadcasting as Southington resident Mike Soltys. Having joined ESPN in 1980, just a year after the network’s birth, he served for several decades as its Vice President for Communications and witnessed first hand as a scrappy Bristol-based start-up turned into a global sports media empire.
Recently Soltys teamed up with director Greg DeHart and executive director Garrett Sutton to produce a documentary on ESPN’s early years focused on the period between 1978 to 1980 when Bill Rasmussen and his son Scott founded the network. The movie received its world-premiere at the Southington Drive-In last September, where hundreds of members of the ESPN community, including sportscasting luminaries Chris Berman and George Grande, coming out to enjoy it.
This Monday, March 6, at 8:30, the film, ‘Sports Heaven: The Birth of ESPN,’ will air on the sports network for the first time.
Soltys sat down with the Outsider to talk about his time at ESPN and the making of the documentary. The transcript has been lightly edited for clarity.
Tell us a little about your story. How did you first get your job at ESPN?
It was the summer before my senior year at Uconn. I had a chance meeting with Bill Rasmussen. The way it happened is that my father was a sports information director at UConn, and knew Bill because Bill had been a sportscaster in eastern Massachusetts. The stations up there, channels 40 and 22, bled into Connecticut. So he knew Bill, and he happened to run into Bill one day and introduce me to him.
I knew what ESPN was, knew I needed an internship, pitched him on it, and as he says to this day, I said the magic words: ‘I will work for free.’ He said to come on down and he connected me with a woman named Rosa Gatti who is in the film, in PR at the time. She also liked the idea of someone coming to Bristol to work for free, because it was a start up with a lot of crazy work to be done. And that’s what started it all in 1980.
So you came up with a job description all on your own? What was it?
As a starting point I was willing to do whatever Bill thought the need was. But as the conversation went on, he knew that the PR department was strapped and needed help writing press releases and program stories.
It used to be that at college football games you would buy a program. There would be camera-ready copy that you could buy and the college would put it in their program. Someone at ESPN had to write that copy, identify who made those programs, and send it out. I would call sports information offices and say, ESPN is going to show your game on tape-delay in five days, can you include that in your game notes?
So it starts as a marketing job?
That’s fair to say. ESPN was a start-up and people didn’t know what it was.
How would describe the atmosphere in those early years?
When I started, the question, is it going to work on a basic technical level, had been answered. But, is it going to work on a financial level, is it going to get an audience, was up in the air. It was mostly young people, and people who were big sports fans who believed it would work. It was people with strong work ethics, willing to work nights and weekends, and you got a very dedicated, relatively small group of people who were making it all fly.
Was it global in its ambitions from the start?
In 1978 the initial idea for Bill and [his son] Scott was to show sports for the state of Connecticut, primarily UConn, because Bill had been on the Whalers. But after the Whalers and UConn, the drop off was – well, we could do the New Britain bicycle race. There were cable systems around the state that would make copies of their tapes and deliver them.
The big moment that happened was when the RCA salesman came in and laid out to them: 'guys, with satellite you can cover the entire country for what it costs to cover the state of Connecticut.' So the initial focus was on the United States.
It was several years before the international effort became important, particularly in countries that had an interest in American sports. Canada did, Mexico did, Australia did, Brazil did. But Europe did not have a lot of interest in American sport, so where ESPN is successful to this day is a reflection of that.
How did your job change over time?
In the early days a lot of the focus was on getting ESPN’s name out there. You start getting a lot of attention for your mistakes once you get big enough for people to worry about them. ESPN was always the little-engine-that-could. Then when we got big, the challenge was, how do we keep that engine going?
The first couple of decades involved a lot of calling people. USA Today launches in the early 80’s and it’s very successful in the sports and media landscape because they’re covering it nationally. At every Marriott Hotel in America, you wake up in the morning and there’s a USA Today for you; at the airport, there’s USA Today.
Newspapers around the country began to copy what was working for USA Today in their papers. USA Today had determined early on that covering sports television was something most newspapers weren’t doing. Once they started going heavy into that, it was like a domino effect with every major newspaper in America covering sports media.
In a typical week I would talk to maybe 75 writers around the country. I would be on the phone telling them, this is what’s going on at ESPN, and they’re asking, can I interview Chris Berman, we’re having a football game this week, how many cameras are you going to do - that kind of stuff. I would be doing that every day, all day.
Over time, issue management became most of what I was doing – stuff happened and you had to react. Some of it was about growth. We’re on a one-acre spot there in Bristol and we’re surrounded by run-down industrial buildings and beyond that by houses. One by one, ESPN was wanting to buy the property and change the zoning and mitigate the wetlands. Along the way I got to know all of the mayors of Bristol.
I was also a registered lobbyist for over 20 years and was involved with the state. A lot of it had to do with taxation, but whenever there was some initiative about employers, they’d need employers to come in and tell them whether it was a good or a bad idea.
Where did the idea for the documentary come from?
The idea of it came from Garrett Sutton whom I mentioned. He would teach business classes. He was a lawyer, publisher, director, all these things. And he would teach business classes on launching your LLC. Bill Rasmussen took one of these classes about 15 years ago and became friends with Garrett.
Are you saying Bill Rasmussen took a class on how to start a business?
Yes. He was good at coming up with an idea, but there’s the aspect of knowing how to do all these things legally.
So he becomes friends with Garrett. Garrett then buys a video library of films and decides he’s going to do a streaming service called Sunstream. He decided he wanted to create documentaries, so he hired Greg DeHart, who had a lot of experience at that. The three of them came up with the idea that they were going to do one on the launch of ESPN.
They get into it just a little bit and find out it’s not going to work unless ESPN is fully cooperative. Bill has a good relationship with Jimmy Pitaro, the current chairman, and he says that to do this we need your full cooperation. Jimmy is a lover of ESPN history and he commits to do that. The cooperation was going to be digging into the archives, providing clips of the first show and the first rehearsal, opening the door to do interviews. Jimmy and [ESPN VP for Communications] Josh Krulewitz said, this is real work, what if I hire Mike to do this?
That leads to a discussion about other historical things they didn’t have time for. So they created a part-time job for me where I would focus initially on this film, then do other historical stuff. That’s most of my time now. It’s a half-time job and that’s a great thing to do when you’re age 66. I know the history and I lived it, and if I don’t know it, I can find the answer pretty quickly.
The company’s working on a documentary about 40 years of NFL Primetime, the show with Chris Berman. We have the Superbowl for the first time next year and they want to run that during Superbowl week. I know how to dig out who was working the shows, the ratings, how they tie in to the NFL deals, the historical stuff.
We’re archiving things to make sure we have what we want. ESPN’s 50th anniversary is not that far away. Looking ahead to the 75th anniversary, so all that stuff is not lost to time, we can put it on a computer site, or a file cabinet, or digitize it, whatever needs to be done so that it’s there. That’s what the job currently is.
So were you watching a lot of old VHS tapes?
Not really. Ten years after the events of the film people were running around with camcorders, but that [technology] didn’t exist yet. ESPN was losing so much money in its early days that [corporate owner] Getty had all the old tapes recorded over, unless one was going to be repeated. Dick Vitale’s first basketball game exists in the archives because it aired live but they repeated it later, so they didn’t record over it. SportsCenter was new every day, so everything got recorded over. There is no video of Chris Berman in 1979 at ESPN. He was on the air a lot, and it just doesn’t exist. We’re fortunate we have the very first show, and random things around it. They digitized some of it.
One day a guy who works in the tape library says to me, have you ever seen the September 7, 1979, first-show audition? I said, not only have I never seen it, I never knew it existed. He sends me over the digital link and it turns out to be a huge find.
There was a big crate of old tapes in the PR department and we were getting them digitized, saying, is there anything here? But the movie had to rely on interviews because a lot of that footage doesn’t exist.
What exactly is ESPN broadcasting Monday night?
The documentary ESPN is showing is exactly the same as the one you saw in the fall [at the Southington Drive-In] except for a title change. It was called ‘Intentional Optimism’ because that was the point we were trying to make – that was Bill’s philosophy. The audio book publisher hated the title. They came back to us and said give us another suggestion. We came up with ‘Sports Heaven: the Birth of ESPN,’ because in the opening someone says ‘you’ll think you died and went to sports heaven,’ and that ties it in.
What is the audio book based on? Is there a print book?
There will be a print book. The publisher, Hachette Book Group, wanted to be exclusive in the audio book space for a brief period of time before the print book comes out, by the end of April. I was just on a flight to DC yesterday checking that the copy matches the pictures of the people they are supposed to be. That is something I probably should have done three months ago. But they say there will be about a month between my sign-off and the book coming out.
Bill Rasmussen kept a very detailed diary in 1978 and 1979. He then turned that into a self-published book in 1982, called ‘Sports Junkies Rejoice.’ It didn’t sell, but he always felt it should have.
Garrett Sutton is a guy who has had a lot of success selling business books. Bill pitched him on the idea of the doing the book on a business platform and selling it that way.
About a year ago Garrett told me this over dinner. I said to him, I’m a little skeptical that that will do anything for you. But, Bill went around for 40 years speaking about entrepreneurship. Being the ESPN founder was the hook that got him before chambers of commerce, or wherever. I went through a bunch of old speeches that he did about it. At the end of each chapter we added three of Bill’s tips about launching a business. That became the business angle.
We did 22 long interviews on camera with some big names for the movie. I said, why don’t I go through the transcripts, pull out some quotes that relate to a specific part of the narrative of the diary, or give perspective on Bill as an entrepreneur? I did, and we called these ‘perspectives.'
So for the audio book there’s a professional book narrator who is basically Bill throughout the whole thing. Then you have 22 voices that get interspersed, but it’s the actual person – Chris Berman, Bob Ley, Jimmy Pitaro. I did the afterward at the end. It talks about what’s still relevant about ESPN today that started in 1979. Chris Berman did the forward.
Hachette loves it because, with the ‘pod-ification’ of audiobooks, they’re able to sell it as something ‘snackable’ with lots of different voices. They’ve been very enthused about it and it comes out the day after the documentary. That was a really fun concept.
How did you get the film over to the Southington Drive-In?
Once the film was done, we wanted to get it out for ESPN employees. I’m doing a screener at the Bristol cafeteria that seats 100 people. I’m doing one in New York City at the building ABC and Disney have, again probably 100 people. But we wanted to do a big one where we invited ESPN old-timers, local officials, and current employees, all tied to ESPN’s anniversary, back in September.
I thought the Drive-In was the perfect venue for the era, and the time of year was perfect. I reached out to Mike Fasulo to see if this is possible. He went to the Drive-In committee and the town to say, can we do this, and it was fabulous, the feedback we got. The night was great. A lot of the younger people got a kick out of Chris Berman and George Grande, people that to them are historical figures but here they are live, talking about the experience. That was a lot of fun.
It sparked a conversation within the walls of ESPN that we should air this film, and that’s how we ended up with the airing on April 6. It’s just that, an airing, and the production company has the right to sell it elsewhere. They hope that the publicity that comes form the announcement will make them more marketable to the streamers of the world.
