Now, the midwife of this so called great transformation,
the growth of sports fandom into a gigantic phenomenon is very
obviously technology and in particular communications technology.
As radio develops and then, especially, television in the 1960s and
70s, followed in the 80s and the 90s up to the present by the Internet.
These communications technologies bring sports to every corner of the world and
make it possible to engage in our passion addiction for sports at any time of day.
So you can do sports now anywhere, any time.
When I go to do research in a little Andean village
in Peru where I've been going for 30 years, I can now watch over the Internet.
I can stream a New York Yankees or an Oakland A's baseball game if I want.
So you can watch sports anywhere.
You can also now watch sports anytime.
If I can't sleep some night, I wake up at 3:30 AM worrying about this or
that as we sometimes do, I can turn on a game.
I can get a cricket game from India or watch a soccer game that's being
played in Russia or whatever sports 24/7 everywhere around the world.
And this phenomenon of what could be called sports creep,
the massification of sports and their availability.
All around the world at any time is really a relatively recent
invention of the last forty or fifty years.
It takes television first for this to become possible.
But in the early age of television and sports in the 1960s and
the early 1970s, you still didn't have all that big access to watching games.
So I can remember back when I was a little kid in the 1960s and
I was already really into sports that the only thing that you could watch on TV was,
that I remember anyway.
Was the Saturday game of the week.
I think it was on NBC.
It was a baseball game.
We still had a black and white tv in those days of the dinosaur, and that was it.
If you wanted to watch baseball, you watched it on Saturday.
And they had football games, I believe, NFL games on Sunday and
maybe a basketball game on Sunday.
It was only on the weekends and it was only once a week.
And it was the same way when I was a kid in the early 1970s in Italy.
There if you wanted to watch sports during the week forget about it.
The only time that you could watch sports was on Sunday afternoon,
because that's when the Italian City League soccer games were happening.
So all of this begins to change in 1970.
You can fix it at a particular date.
That's when Monday Night Football is invented in the United States.
And these TV producers have what was then a kinda wild original idea.
Hey, what would happen if we showed a football game during the week and
in Prime Time in the evening, not in the middle of the day?
Wouldn't that be a radical idea.
Well, they did it and Monday Night Football took off.
There was a huge appetite for that.
And 30, 40 years later you have Thursday Night Football and
you had football on Saturday and you had football on Sunday and
you had football highlights shows and talk shows all through during the week.
So 1970 Monday night football and
then in 1979 ESPN another landmark in the story of the great
transformation of sports creep of the massive occasion of sports.
ESPN as the idea hey, we cannot only show some games during the week,
as Monday night football is pioneering, we can have a 24/7 sports channel so you can
watch something related to sports every day of the week at any time of the day.
So, that's where we have gotten to now, and
it's only accelerated thru the internet, sports anytime, anywhere.