Game on: A History of How Sports Media Grew Up, Sold Out, and Got Personal with Billions of Fans

In Game On David Bockino, a former marketing and advertising manager at ESPN turned professor of communications and sport management, provides the first overview of the evolution of the sports media industry. Written at a time of great uncertainty and rapid change and told through the fascinating stories of the most important innovations, matchups, events, and personalities over the last hundred years, Game On explores how sports media both affects and reflects our society.

From the groundbreaking radio broadcast of the Jack Dempsey-Georges Carpentier boxing match in 1921 and the launch of Sports Illustrated magazine in 1954 to the birth of ESPN in 1979 and the unveiling of the NFL’s yellow line in 1998, Game On details the most important events, platforms, and personalities in the evolution of the sports media industry. Early on, sports media had the unique ability to bring people together: nationally through the Olympic Games and regionally through telecasts of local professional teams. Increased interest led to more innovation and more options--cable TV, sports talk radio, internet broadcasts, and now multitudes of podcasts. With so many choices, some fans have begun to show deeper loyalties to brands or personalities in place of loyalties to teams or players. Today the personalization of sports content means broadcasters increasingly focus on what individual consumers want, often at the expense of the collective fan experience.

Exploring the evolution of the sports media industry can tell us a lot about how our world has changed over the past hundred years and how it might yet change in the future. Through an exploration of sports media trends, Bockino shows that the industry’s privileging of personal over collective interests reflects how people today form and maintain their social identities--and sports’ key role in shaping them.

David Bockino is an associate professor at Elon University, where he teaches communications and sport management. He spent more than seven years working with ESPN, including ESPN Outdoors, ESPN Research and Analytics, and ESPN International. He is the author of The Guidebook Experiment: Discovering Exploration in a Hyper-Connected World.