Former ESPN anchor George Grande says that when he signed on to host the first SportsCenter in 1979, he had a feeling there might be a market for more than just the 3 minutes of sports people were used to seeing on the local news, The Associated Press reports.
He was right. On Thursday, ESPN will air its 50,000th SportsCenter, the network’s flagship show of highlights, news and analysis that has had a major impact on the nation’s sports culture.
“It’s changed the expectation of every sports fan in the United States,” said Dennis Deninger, a former ESPN executive who now runs the sports communications graduate program at Syracuse University. “We now expect to see highlights from every game, wherever it is played. If there is something odd or strange anywhere — a triple play — we expect to be able to see it, and see it immediately. That’s what this show has done.”
It also has given the job of sportscaster national celebrity status, blurred some of the lines between entertainment and news, and in some cases had an impact on the sports themselves, said Pamela Laucella, the academic director of the National Sports Journalism Center at Indiana University.
“When the show highlights a dunk, catch, touchdown or goal, athletes know they’ve made it when they’re on SportsCenter and the week’s top 10 plays,” she said.
Deninger said SportsCenter has also made foreign the idea of sitting down and watching an entire game on television to many viewers who have grown up with ESPN, and few fans, he said, pick up a newspaper to read about a game anymore.
“Game stories are basically dinosaurs,” he said. “People have already seen that on SportsCenter. You have to do personal features and find different layers.”
Tim Brooks, a television historian and author of “The Complete Director to Prime Time Network and Cable TV Shows,” said the show is the major reason ESPN was able to establish itself as the leading television destination for the sports fan.
“It became the reason to come back to ESPN between the games,” he said. “It’s like their clubhouse, almost. It certainly changed the way sports fans consume sports. They now had a clubhouse and this is the inner sanctum of that clubhouse.”
When SportsCenter first aired, about 1.4 million homes had access to ESPN, according to the network. That figure is about 98.3 million today.
