It was a slam dunk from the very beginning.
No, not the metaphor. The website now called ESPN.com debuted with an actual slam dunk: video from Bryant Reeves' glass-shattering reverse jam during Oklahoma State's Friday practice before the 1995 Final Four in Seattle.
Like "Big Country," the video was a little crude, and unlike him, very little (think postage stamp) and very short (eight seconds). But on Sunday, April 2, 1995, it left the guests agog at the launch party for this new joint venture between ESPN and Starwave, the company started by Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen. "We watched it over and over again," says Tom Phillips, one of the Starwave executives at the time. "We thought, 'How cool is this?' It was our pride and joy."
As we mark the 20th anniversary of ESPN.com (no need to send the traditional china), it's funny -- and instructive -- to look back and see how it became a digital enterprise with roughly 123 million monthly unique visitors worldwide.
What follows is not a definitive history -- there are far too many essential people and critical moments to keep score. But hopefully, some of the people and some of the moments will give you a sense of how we got here, one score of years later.
At the heart of ESPN.com's growth was technology, of course. The website rode the wave as the world went from dial-up to broadband to 4G, from desktops to laptops to tablets, from walkie-talkies to flip phones to smartphones, from 45 million users to 92 million websites.
But for ESPN.com, it was also about Ultimate Frisbee, a stolen base and a bad call. And people on a mission.
"I've always thought of the site as the purest essence of teamwork," says John Kosner, the executive VP who has overseen ESPN Digital since 2003. "Writers, editors and designers working together with engineers and producers to serve the fan."
Growing An Audience
A look at the growth of ESPN.com's average monthly unique visitors.
The site actually began with a fan. When Bill Gates bumped into his marketing exec, Mike Slade, on the Microsoft campus in 1988, he said, "Did you hear? Paul just bought the Portland Trail Blazers."
Slade, a former Colorado Springs sportswriter who grew up in Portland, fired off a long email about his beloved Blazers to Paul Allen. One thing led to another, and Allen eventually asked Slade to be president of Starwave, his new startup in Bellevue, Washington. Slade convinced Allen that it was time for "the world's biggest sports section" online.
Happy 20 @espn.com! My co Starwave started the site in '95 & its reinvented sports info since! (thx M Slade/team) pic.twitter.com/qJdWsNAS9e
- Paul Allen (@PaulGAllen) April 2, 2015
So that's how Satchel Sports was born in 1994 -- named after Satchel Paige, who shared a July 7 birthday with Slade. He brought an old Stanford Business School friend, Tom Phillips, aboard as president, and Phillips enlisted Geoff Reiss, a colleague from Spy magazine, to be the publisher. Reiss drew up a strategic plan centered on bread-and-butter sports coverage, but it also included fantasy sites, player bio cards, discussion groups, celebrity Q-and-As and data-driven graphics.
ESPN, meanwhile, had already started its own website, ESPNET, a modest if noble operation for Prodigy. In late 1993, Slade met with ESPN Senior VP Dick Glover, and they both immediately saw the possibilities in combining the cachet of the ESPN brand with the startup spirit of Starwave.
Deal done, they had to come up with a name. Because various parties insisted on representation, the site was launched as ESPNET.SportsZone.com, a clunkily terrible name that could've been worse. At one point, the marketing people who had named a certain Seattle-based coffee company suggested they call the site "Spiridon."
Once the name was settled upon, Starwave and ESPN sent out invitations for a launch party that conveniently coincided with the Seattle Final Four: "IT'S A LONG ROAD TO THE FINAL FOUR ... WE'VE JUST BUILT A NEW EXPRESSWAY."
The enticements to the reception at a club in Seattle's Belltown district included shuttle service from the official hotels, free beer and wine, and hors d'oeuvres; a live demonstration to learn how this new Internet service worked; an online trivia contest; and a glimpse into the future of online ticket buying. Oh, and ESPN's own Dick Vitale and Digger Phelps.
"I got there halfway through the party," says Kevin Jackson, now a vice president/executive editor for ESPN.com but then just a newbie hired off the desk of the Bellingham (WA) Herald. "I had been at the office posting news about an injury to Penny Hardaway. When I got to the party, people were buzzing because the news appeared as a real-time update during a demo of the site."
The early site was mostly utilitarian, with very few bells and whistles and very little personality. Mistakes were sometimes made. "I remember asking for a photo of Elvis Grbac after he had a big game for the Chiefs," says Jackson. "We ended up posting a picture of the wrong Elvis. No, not The King. Elvis Stojko, the figure skater."
For the most part, though, the editors and writers relished the opportunities.
Ted Bishop, who still has a shard from the glass blackboard that Reeves broke, is now a senior director of digital partnerships for ESPN.com. "I went from working in the University of Washington sports information office to covering Super Bowls and World Series," he says. "We put in long hours, sure, but we knew we were onto something."
The News Cycle
Some athletes have made more headlines than others, for better or worse ... or both. Here are the athletes who drew the most number of articles on ESPN.com since 2004.
David Kraft, senior director/executive editor of editorial operations, joined the site in January 1996. "I came straight from Volleyball Monthly to work on this living, breathing document with no time or space limitations," he says. "And I found out that we could bridge the gap between fans and athletes in ways I never thought possible."
He recalled approaching Atlanta Braves pitcher Mike Bielecki before Game 3 of the 1996 World Series in Atlanta and asking him if he would conduct a chat with users. Bielecki agreed. "So there he was," Kraft says, "standing in the outfield during BP, talking on one of those huge cellphones to an editor back in Washington state, who relayed the questions and typed Mike's answers." Kraft said Bielecki spent about 15 minutes with fans as part of an interactive pregame notebook.
(The moment wasn't notable for Bielecki. "I'm sorry," he said when contacted last week. "I don't remember it at all.")
The opportunities at the site were just as enticing to programmers and engineers as they were to journalists. "I joined Starwave in mid-'97," says Aaron LaBerge, executive vice president and chief technology officer today. "They really were rocket scientists, brilliant people who made you smarter. When we started doing NASCAR Online in '97, we came up with a way to track a car during a race after NASCAR put a transponder in it. We then showed that visually, online. I'll never forget getting an email a few years later from a GI in Afghanistan, thanking us because he could follow his favorite driver in real time from inside his tank."
The Starwave folks worked hard, and they played hard. On Monday nights, there would be basketball games at Allen's private gym on Mercer Island. On Friday at noontime, the staff would play Ultimate Frisbee in nearby Robinswood Park. Phillips organized a team of runners for the Hood to Coast Relay. There was a basketball court outside the offices, a Nerf hoop inside it and a foosball table in the lobby. "When I showed up for my interview," says LaBerge, "I think Mike Slade was playing foosball shirtless with Tim Armstrong, an ad sales guy then and the CEO of AOL now."
When Wired magazine did an article about Starwave in a June 1997 issue, it played up the "technojock" angle by photographing the executives in the shower next to the locker room. But the author of the piece, David Diamond, found the truer nature of the enterprise when he wrote: "It's about having the time of your life helping other people have fun."
Says Slade, "Even back then, I kept telling people, 'These are the good old days.' "
Stop By and Have a Look
In 1998, ESPN.com had 1.2 million visitors per day, making it the most-visited sports website in the United States. Last year, the daily average was 24.7 million visits.
In 1998, Allen sold the remaining stake in Starwave to Disney, which had recently acquired ESPN, but the DNA of Starwave is still in the system -- literally. Whenever you or I or any of the other 100 million domestic users calls up a story on ESPN.com, a computer pings in Las Vegas, thanks to a cryptic series of numbers, letters and punctuation marks that identify the user and the story. The coding that tags each user is an SWID, short for Starwave ID.
The bi-coastal relationship between Bristol and Bellevue was always a little complicated, in part because of the culture clash. Back in those days, there would be what were known as "prisoner exchanges," one editor spending a week at a time at the other place. Bellevue had Mount Rainier as a backdrop. Bristol had the Otis Elevator testing facility.
While the site had the blessings of ESPN president Steve Bornstein, there were other people in Bristol who were stuck in time -- they refused to recognize that the TV wasn't the only screen people were going watch. "To be honest," says executive editor David Albright, who was among the handful of Bristol employees working on the website back then, "some executives saw us as the Hula Hoop of the '90s."
"It became evident ESPN.com would benefit greatly by embracing its relationship with Bristol, as that is what would make the website more successful through synergy," said Susie Kamb, a veteran journalist who worked in both Bellevue and Bristol. "The content from ESPN on-air commentators and anchors made the sports website unique and gave it personality." After some of the editorial staff made the move east, members of the technology group followed. "Their move was critical ... you can hire content editors from a lot of places, but software engineers and web producers are hard to find and retain," Kamb added. "I think some of the tech group were game for an adventure and made the move [thinking that] working for ESPN would be fun."
John Skipper, who had just successfully launched ESPN The Magazine, was put in charge of the site in 2000, and the first thing he tried to do was redesign it to look more like a magazine. "I worked with Dan Benshoff, the designer," the ESPN president recently told "His & Hers" hosts Michael Smith and Jemele Hill. "The trouble was it took two and a half minutes to load." Skipper also worked to convince the Starwave people to migrate east. Most of them did, where they were moved into the basement of Building 3 on the Bristol campus, which was not considered prime real estate. But then Skipper moved someone down there with them: John Walsh.
Walsh was ESPN's executive editor at the time, the most influential editorial presence in the company. He had brought real journalism to "SportsCenter" and helped start The Magazine, along with Skipper and editor-in-chief John Papanek.
"I was so clueless about technology that it was a running joke in my household," says Walsh. "So when I came home one night and told everybody about my new job, my two kids started laughing hysterically. My wife Ellen just smiled."
Walsh looks like Santa Claus, and his present to ESPN.com was instant credibility. The other branches of ESPN now had to treat the website seriously. He reached into his Rolodex and pulled out Pulitzer Prize winner David Halberstam, former Sports Illustrated writer Ralph Wiley and an old friend from his days at Rolling Stone, Hunter S. Thompson. He tapped an Inside Sports colleague, Jay Lovinger, to work with Jackson on a free-wheeling section called Page 2.
Looming over the section was Hunter S. Thompson, known for his gonzo style and "Fear & Loathing" days. "I loved the guy," says Jackson. "But he was always missing deadlines and totally unpredictable. One time he led me to believe he was going to write about University of Georgia football coach Mark Richt, so I sent him all this research material. The column I got back was about the Oakland Raiders."
Walsh would hold Newsmaker question-and-answer luncheons on the Bristol campus, and Thompson infamously showed up three hours late for his. His regular Hey Rube column was highly irregular. But he did give Page 2 one of the best pieces he'd ever written -- and one of the finest political essays anybody had.
Written the day after Sept. 11, 2001, and titled "Fear & Loathing in America," it began, "It was just after dawn in Woody Creek, Colo., when the first plane hit the World Trade Center ..." And then it foretold what would happen in the world:
"The towers are gone now, reduced to bloody rubble, along with all hopes for Peace in Our Time, in the United States or any other country. Make no mistake about it: We are At War now -- with somebody -- and we will stay At War with that mysterious Enemy for the rest of our lives." (The full text can be found here.)
Following ESPN.com along at home while tending bar was a Holy Cross grad with a sports blog on AOL called the Boston Sports Guy. "The website became mandatory reading when they hired Peter Gammons," says Bill Simmons. "Then when this mixture of sports and pop culture called Page 2 started appearing, I'm thinking, 'Wait, this is what I do. I can't believe they haven't called.' "
Actually, Simmons was already on the radar. He had written a running diary trashing the 2001 ESPYS, and the column got passed around Bristol. Lovinger started assigning Simmons pieces, one of which went viral: "Is Clemens the Antichrist?" Walsh then hired him full-time for both ESPN.com and ESPN The Magazine.
Almost immediately, Simmons struck a chord with younger readers. He readily admits he was something of a thorn in the sides of his editors, Lovinger and Jackson: "I would put in seven jokes, two of which were outrageous, just so they would keep the other five." But his passions came through loud and clear and funny. To say his columns became must reads is an understatement. They became I-wish-I-could-do-that writing.
And then the stars aligned for Simmons and his beloved Red Sox. He had moved to L.A. to write for "Jimmy Kimmel Live," but he still contributed to the website, and now he was back in Boston for Game 4 of the 2004 ALCS. The Sox had dropped the first three games to the Yankees, and were trailing 4-3 in the bottom of the ninth when pinch runner Dave Roberts stole second and scored the tying run on Bill Mueller's single off Mariano Rivera. Then David Ortiz hit a two-run walk-off homer in the 12th.
"I celebrate and go back to my dad's house to write," Simmons says. "The only time in my life where I handed in a column after a few drinks was Super Bowl XXXVI in New Orleans. That Game 5 column was definitely the one fueled by the most coffee and sugar. I sent the story in and then the next day I spoke to John Papanek, who was the editor of the site at the time: 'John, I'm wiped out. I don't have anything left.'
"Well, here's where my life became a sports movie. Papanek gives me 'The Speech.' 'Everybody's reading you, Bill. Your voice matters. Suck it up and get back out there.' "
The Red Sox ended the 86-year curse -- and became a factor in boosting traffic to the site, which went from 4,272,000 average monthly unique visitors in 1998 to 15,719,000 by the 10th anniversary.
Whatever happened to Simmons?
The Public Has Spoken
ESPN.com clubhouse pages are a destination for fans to check out the latest and greatest on their favorite teams. Here are the top five most-trafficked teams since 2008.
People make mistakes. Grady Little should've taken Pedro Martinez out in Game 7 of the 2003 ALCS. And ESPN introduced its own mobile phone in 2006.
It wasn't that the phone was bad -- it was actually kind of cool to have a flip phone that readily served up games, highlights and analysis. It's just that potential customers didn't want to pay for a new phone, switch carriers and fork out high monthly fees. "We briefly lost our minds," said Skipper of being in the hardware business.
As the Red Sox discovered, the key is to learn from your mistakes. President George Bodenheimer had the foresight to include all mobile devices in his rights deals, and the tech team had put a lot of time and effort into developing software for phones. An ESPN phone didn't work, but bringing ESPN to your phone did. Smartphone applications launched a new chapter in the world's mobile evolution, and ESPN became a regular part of consumers' screens as the acronym "app" became part of society's common vernacular.
John Zehr, who was in charge of the mobile unit, was as obsessive about speed and presentation as he was about his Jets and his alma mater, Virginia. "He carried around a bag of phones, from all over the world, just to check out the competition," says LaBerge, "And he could triple-tap text as easy as he could type. Fastest fingers I've ever seen."
"You know how people are always looking at their phones nowadays?" says Benshoff. "Well, John was doing that years ago. It was kind of annoying at our company golf tournaments. He'd be staring at a phone, and we'd be going, 'C'mon, John, it's your shot.' But what he was doing was testing ways for us to report our scores faster. He wanted his data as live as possible."
In April 2005, ESPN launched ESPN360.com, which provided users with exclusive, on-demand, high-quality video that made the days of Big Country Reeves seem ancient. The ScoreCenter app for Apple devices debuted in June 2009, ushering in a new age for sports fans.
Zehr was also heavily involved in fantasy games, which is especially useful when you're trying to serve the over 7.5 million who play fantasy football on ESPN. He once told an interviewer, "They're counting on us. They set their vacation schedules around a three-hour draft on a Thursday night in August. It's still just fantasy, but it's their life."
While driving home to Connecticut from a Jets game in 2010, Zehr suffered a stroke that precipitated a collision and left him incapacitated. He died in November 2012 but not before the first Zippy Z Cup was given out at what has become an annual Hackathon at ESPN, a meeting dedicated to presenting innovative ideas for the company.
"We would not be where we are today without John Zehr," says Kosner.
Another key in the growth of the site was the concurrent enhancements on the editorial side. Chief among them was the 2009 redesign. "The site became a more hospitable place for both content and users," says Executive VP Rob King, who took over as editor-in-chief in 2007. "Traffic drove placement, but we also tried to highlight storytelling and distinct voices. I remember looking at the metrics on a Friday afternoon, and being astounded that at 4:40, 58 percent of the traffic was for Bill Simmons' Friday NFL Picks column."
One of the original intentions of ESPNET.SportsZone was to serve both a national and a regional audience, but that vision didn't become a reality until April 2009, when ESPN Chicago launched as an initiative of ESPN Radio. Successful sites for Boston, Dallas, Los Angeles and New York soon followed.
"The Decision" of LeBron James in the summer of 2010 brought another epiphany to Patrick Stiegman, now the vice president of editorial for ESPN Digital and Print Media. "Somebody said, 'Gee, I wish we had a site for Miami.' Then somebody else said, 'No, I wish we had a site for the Miami Heat.' It wasn't about the city so much as it was about the team, and the Heat had suddenly become a national team." That realization led to the Heat Index and the subsequent NFL Nation, with correspondents for every NFL team.
Growth begets growth. We now have what Skipper calls "Page 3s," affinity sites that appeal to different audiences: Bill Simmons' Grantland, which is a more polished and expansive version of Page 2; espnW, which is finally doing justice to women's sports coverage; Nate Silver's FiveThirtyEight, which brings narrative to analytics; and, coming soon, The Undefeated, Jason Whitlock's site for coverage of race and sports in society.
The relationship between ESPN.com and ESPN The Magazine has become more seamless, sharing both resources and an editor-in-chief, Chad Millman. The commitment to storytelling has also deepened over the years. Once upon a time, the Enterprise Unit responsible for long-form and investigative pieces consisted of two people -- an editor and a writer. Now, it numbers nearly two dozen editors and writers, including four Pulitzer Prize winners, and produces features that are ground-breaking and thought-provoking.
Four years ago on the Saturday of the Final Four -- 16 years after the debut of ESPNET.SportsZone -- we gave lead placement on the site to Wright Thompson's remarkable profile of Indian cricket legend Sachin Tendulkar. The title was "Why You Should Care About Cricket."
Says Stiegman, "It wasn't about cricket per se. It was about the passion for sport and the relationship we have with our heroes."
The first day it ran, the story got 400,000 page views: pretty good traffic. The second day, 125,000 more views. The third day? The feature topped 1.2 million overall. What happened? Well, Om Malik, an Indian-American investor and financial columnist, tweeted out, "This has to be one the best pieces written on cricket in modern times." And he had more than a million followers.
Back when Starwave and ESPN were throwing that launch party, cricket wasn't even on our radar. Now ESPNcricinfo.com is part of the family, and the recent Cricket World Cup matches generated huge numbers for the site. On March 26, the day of the Australia-India semifinal, ESPNcricinfo's digital properties had their best day ever with 13 million unique visitors.
Says Kosner, "The first 20 years of ESPN.com were about sports in English. The next 20 will be about reaching sports fans around the globe."
One of them is a cattle rancher with 250 head in Gans, Oklahoma. "Oh yeah, I look at ESPN.com," says Bryant Reeves, fresh from holding a practice for the travel basketball team he now coaches. "I have two sons, 17 and 15, who are on it all the time, so it's my way of keeping up with them. They both filled out brackets on the site."
We've gone from Big Country to Small World.