The tie between the Big Dance and Eddie Einhorn

[juddling]

The NCAA men's basketball tournament, now in its 70th year, is more than a sporting event. It is a lexicon, and a season — the sports fan's bridge from winter to spring. Just as a plethora of agnostics celebrate Christmas, a multitude of sports unenthusiasts eagerly fill out a bracket for the office pool.

 

"I consider it the No. 1 sports event in America," says sports television pioneer Eddie Einhorn, who attended his first Final Four in 1956 as a senior at Penn and called in reports to campus radio station WXTN. "At the start of the tournament, you've got 65 teams from all over the country. Even Montana can get in (though not this year)."

 

Beginning Thursday CBS will commit 68 hours to televising parts of all 63 games (excluding the play-in game) of the tournament. CBS, which holds exclusive television, radio and digital rights to the tourney, is in the midst of an 11-year, $6 billion deal with the NCAA.

 

How did the big dance get so big?

 

Much of the growth traces back to Einhorn, whose trajectory in sports television mirrors that of March Madness. In 1957, when Einhorn was a first-year law student at Northwestern —studying not far from where the initial championship game was played, but more on that in a moment — he created a loose network of radio stations and called the game himself. Einhorn even persuaded hoops legend George Mikan to be his color commentator.

 

Five years later, long before television rights for the championship game were a notion, Cincinnati played Ohio State (who had a sixth man named Bob Knight) in the championship game. It was Einhorn who cobbled together seven affiliates in Ohio that showed interest in the game and put it on air for them.

 

It was also Einhorn whose TVS network (which was little more than a loose consortium of affiliates thrown together depending on the regional interest in a particular game) broadcast the monumental UCLA-Houston game in 1978. That game aroused NBC Sports, who the following year paid more than half a million dollars for the rights to the NCAA championship game, and who made, if not the entire tournament, then at least the Final Four, a network television event.

 

You can even thank (or blame) Einhorn for ESPN analyst and former Notre Dame coach Digger Phelps. Einhorn, now a part-owner of the Chicago White Sox, arranged the Notre Dame-UCLA series in the early '70s, which saw the Irish end the Bruins' 88-game win streak. That series helped make Digger a TV star.

 

whole article here ....March Madness orgin

[knightni]

It was Einhorn who recommended that the Sox show games on this new television format known as premium cable. Sox fans had to get cable, pay extra for SportsVision or go to the games. Many chose "none of the above."