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May 28, 2011
It’s a truism that ESPN changed the way we watch sports. From modest beginning in 1979 Connecticut, when father-son team Bill and Scott Rasmussen maxed out their credit cards to launch it, ESPN has grown (some might say metastasized) into a global phenomenon, with eight channels covering everything from baseball to poker (not, emphatically, a sport) to Australian rules football, more than 65 sports in more than 250 countries. This book is an oral history, in which two prominent TV critics conduct more than 500 interviews with the likes of Keith Olbermann, Tony Kornheiser, Peyton Manning, Barry Melrose and Erin Andrews to take us deep inside the network’s workings and mindset, and into the locker rooms of the sports world. Cable sports fans will relish the parade of outsize egos and trivial rivalries on display. Globe & Mail May 27 2011