Chet Simmons, a Founding Force of ESPN, Dies at 81

Only tangentially Baseball-related, but thought this probably should be here, since ESPN so totally has changed sports as we know it.

In three years as its president, Mr. Simmons helped establish ESPN as a legitimate force in television, overturning perceptions of it as a novelty operating in the suburban wilds of Bristol, Conn., far from the action of the major networks in Midtown Manhattan.

He made “SportsCenter,” the nightly news-and-highlights program, the linchpin of a network that lacked big-time events; conceived of covering the National Football League draft, even if the league was surprised that anyone would want to; and oversaw coverage of the early rounds of the N.C.A.A. men’s basketball tournament, helping to set the stage for March Madness.

“He was big at ABC, he was big at NBC, and the fact that he took this gamble on cable sent a signal to other people that they ought to think about this network, that it had potential,” said James Andrew Miller, a co-author, with Tom Shales, of the forthcoming book “Those Guys Have All the Fun: Inside the World of ESPN” (Little Brown).

Mr. Miller said that Mr. Simmons and another former NBC executive, Scotty Connal, set ESPN’s production standards as high as resources would allow. “They were not the cable standards of 1979, but the broadcast network standards of 1979,” he said.

George Grande, a “SportsCenter” anchor for its first 10 years, recalled that Mr. Simmons gave department heads daily pep talks about the future. “He preached that someday, we’d have the N.F.L., the N.B.A., Major League Baseball and so forth,” he said. Mr. Simmons was right, and ESPN became the most powerful force in sports TV.