In 1978, Stuart Evey was vice president of world wide non-oil operations for Getty Oil Company. He agreed to hear the pitch for funding a new cable network,he had good reason to be skeptical. An all sports network whose programming would consist of events like slow pitch softball, Australian Rules Rugby, and day-old college football games that couldn't make it on to the major networks? It shouldn't have been a tough call. Eight other companies had already said no.

Not that there would be many viewers anyway. The three broadcast networks controlled more than 90% of TV viewing, and considered the public's appetite for viewing sports so small as to be worth just a combined 18 hours per week of national sports programming. The cable industry's four million subscribers, scattered among 40 independent cable companies, was considered a rounding error in the Nielsen ratings.

But Stuart Evey said yes, and the rest, as they say, is history. But it's history of a most remarkable and dramatic sort, and a history, at least of the early years, that has until now gone largely unreported. Evey's life at the helm of ESPN plunged him into a world of intrigue, backroom negotiations, and duels with executives at Getty, the major networks, and Hollywood studios.