A silver anniversary for silver-tongued ESPN

It’s nothing you can plan. It just sort of happens, and that is how some of the most memorable television is made.

ESPN charter member Chris Berman knows this well. His trademark baseball player nicknames (which he later expanded to other sports) were born of spontaneity.

It was 1980, ESPN’s first full year of existence, when Berman, then 25 and anchoring the overnight “SportsCenter,” said something he normally uttered only in front of college friends.

“It was either Frank Tanana ‘Daiquiri’ or John Mayberry ‘RFD,’ ” says Berman, who will mark ESPN’s 25th anniversary when he hosts the two-hour retrospective “ESPN25: Silver Anniversary Special” on Monday. “And it just came out, almost like a swear word, you know? And I was like, ‘Oh, my God! What am I doing?’

“Everybody was chuckling, if not then instantly, then eventually. So OK, we’ll do a few more. I already have 50 of them that I do in just talking to my friends. And I did a few more, and then the suggestions started rolling in every day. Lists of 100 or two or 15 -- it just didn’t matter. Everyone felt like they were contributing.”

When ESPN signed on the air Sept. 7, 1979, cable was in its infancy, a fact reflected in ESPN’s inauspicious setting: a building and several trailers on a muddy lot in Bristol, Conn. No one knew then if cable had the legs to compete with the broadcast networks.

For Berman, two years out of Brown University with a history degree and fresh from a stint as a weekend sports anchor in nearby Hartford, ESPN represented a chance to do sports full time.

“I wasn’t thinking at all,” he says. “I was 24; I had three months of TV experience, a couple of years of radio experience. It wasn’t about, ‘Boy, I don’t know about this move.’ If I was 34 with maybe a wife and maybe a 1-year-old or whatever and I had been on TV in Hartford, let’s say, for a few years, you wouldn’t be making that much, but you’d still be, ‘Boy, this is OK. Now, they’ll see me in Cincinnati....’ This was a wonderful opportunity that I didn’t have to worry about, ‘Well, jeez, they might not be around in two years.’ Well, so what? Where else could I do this, and I live in Connecticut and I’m right here? So I was fortunate that I really didn’t have to bring my brain into prominence here to make this decision.... Not to say that I wouldn’t have made the same one, but it was, like I said, a no-brainer for me.”

College basketball analyst Dick Vitale, on the other hand, needed persuading.

He had just been fired as head coach of the Detroit Pistons in November 1979 when a call came from Scotty Connal, an ESPN producer who remembered Vitale when he coached at the University of Detroit.

“He said, ‘Hey, I got a new network. You don’t know me, but I was executive producer of your last game [in college], and I would love to give you a chance, an opportunity.’ And I thought he was wacky, and I said, ‘Nah, nah. I’m not interested. I’m no TV guy. I don’t know anything about TV.’ And then he called me back about, I guess, a week or two later, and finally my wife convinced me, ‘Go try it. Have some fun.’ So I went and I did it.

“The first time he told me ESPN ... I said, ‘ESPN? Sounds like a disease.’ ESPN, nobody heard of it. In fact, we didn’t have it for like, the first, maybe, five, six, seven years at home. I lived in West Bloomfield, Mich., and we didn’t have cable, and my wife and daughters thought it was a fraud because I kept saying I was going out and doing games, and they said, ‘Where? We never see you on TV.’ ”

When Vitale began working in Bristol, he’d be met at the airport by a young mail-room employee named George Bodenheimer, who would eventually work his way up to become president of ESPN. “He’d pick me up, and he would constantly say, ‘You know, Dickie, where am I going? Here, I’m a college graduate of a good school.’ He went to a great academic school: Denison in Ohio -- and he said, ‘Where am I going?’ But you knew that he was going places -- his attitude, his relationship with people, the way he treated people. And I always used to say to him, ‘Some day, George, you’re going to be a big man.’

“Well, I never in my wildest dreams thought when I picked up USA Today several years ago and I looked. It said, named the president of ESPN Sports -- George Bodenheimer. I immediately called his office, made sure I got his voice mail, and I said, ‘Hi, this is Dick Vitale. Where am I going? I’m going nowhere with my life. I’m a graduate of Denison college, and they got me driving you all around, picking up your newspapers. Where am I going?’ I said, ‘George, please, don’t forget me, man. When it’s time to hang it up, I don’t want a wristwatch. I want some cash, baby.’ ”

Much like the early television newscasters of the 1950s, Berman, Vitale and company regard the early years of ESPN with reverence. The network has grown from around 80 employees in 1979 to more than 3,000 today and is regarded as the leader in sports broadcasting. “We’re very proud of this,” Berman says of the milestone. “I really can’t describe it to you. It’s really warmed me over here these few weeks. I’m a sentimental sort anyway and a history major, so I guess that’s up my alley.

“We have an expression that I like to use when a new person comes in: ‘Could they have played in the ‘80s?’ And some of the ones now, maybe they couldn’t, and a lot of them could have. ‘Could you have played in the ‘80s?’ That’s the way we old-timers judge our new guys.”

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‘ESPN25’

What: “ESPN25: Silver Anniversary Special”

When: 5 to 7 p.m. Monday

Where: ESPN

George Dickie writes for Tribune Media Services.