Putting Bristol on the Map

There aren't many ways to build a multibillion-dollar media company out of nothing. You can invent Facebook, be Michael Bloomberg, or, as ESPN founders did, bring wall-to-wall coverage to what most people consider an organized hobby. With the network's ubiquitous appearance in contemporary culture, it's easy to lose sight of how revolutionary an idea an all-sports channel was back in 1979. And no amount of self-reverential clips of a younger (but strangely, not too much younger) Chris Berman mumbling, bumbling, fumbling around behind a desk could ever re-create the sense of novelty that a viewer must have felt the first time he came across an entire channel devoted to what had previously been the province of some guy with a wacky name at the end of the evening-news broadcast.