Rick Weiterman, who today serves as superintendent at West Bend Country Club, was a 21-year-old born-and-raised Milwaukeean in 1979 when he became the first athlete to ever perform live on ESPN.

“’Rick, do you understand that you’re a footnote in ESPN lore?’” Weiterman said, relaying a question asked by ESPN personality Jeremy Schaap when members of the Milwaukee Schlitz slowpitch softball team gathered to chat for ESPN's cameras. "He said, ‘You threw the first pitch, so you are the first professional athlete ESPN ever filmed. What do you think of that?’

“I never looked at it that way, but I told him I think it deserves an ESPY," Weiterman said with a laugh. "He said, ‘I think you’re right.’”

He won’t get that trophy (at least, not yet), but the Milwaukee Schlitz will get its moment in the sun when ESPN airs a special commemorating the 40th anniversary of its first broadcast. Footage from that first game will air Sept. 10, with interviews from those who took part in an E:60 primetime segment called "Game 1," kicking off at 6 p.m. locally.

Even local sports enthusiasts may be surprised to know that first ESPN game broadcast on Sept. 7, 1979, emanated from Joecks Field in Lannon. It was Game 1 of the American Professional Slowpitch Softball League World Series, a best-of-nine endeavor, between the Milwaukee Schlitz and Kentucky Bourbons.

“It was well covered, and the slo-mo was great; you can see how professional it was (even then),” said Dennis Mandel, who served as public address announcer for Schlitz home games. “But it was so embryonic. I believe they were only (airing) east of the Mississippi that first night. But there was a betting line in Atlantic City. Any time there’s a betting line on a sporting event, you kind of feel like it’s going national.

“People knew what was happening. The lights were brighter and TV cameras were there. It was an event. It was not dismissed by the people who attended.”

Why did ESPN choose Wisconsin?

Robert Brown was vice president of marketing and public relations for the slowpitch softball league in March 1979, with his office in Cleveland, when he read an article about a 24-hour sports network starting up in Connecticut.

He found a number for the Entertainment Sports Programming Network and got in touch with one of the network’s first hires, New York sportscaster Lou Palmer, to explain what the league was all about.

Brown did have some assets to work with. The Detroit franchise was owned by Mike Ilitch, the founder of Little Caesars Pizza who would go on to purchase the Detroit Red Wings and Detroit Tigers. Former Tigers big leaguers such as Norm Cash and Jim Northrup were part of that slowpitch team. Former Yankees all-star Joe Pepitone also played in the league.

A deal was struck to broadcast the World Series in September.

“You don’t know who’s going to be in the World Series until the playoffs are over,” Brown said. “Milwaukee played Detroit over Labor Day, and the winner of that was going to play either Kentucky or Rochester. The series didn’t end until Sunday night, and then Monday was Labor Day, and Friday, we were starting in Milwaukee.”

The rush was on to get Joecks Field ready for the broadcast.

The clout of slowpitch softball in post-Braves Milwaukee

The Schlitz were coached by Mike Basile, who also happened to be Weiterman’s Little League coach several years earlier. The Milwaukee team was ready for prime time because of a slow-pitch softball league called the Big Eight that started in the 1960s.

“That’s where everything started, back after the Braves left and there was no baseball in town before the Brewers," Weiterman recalled. "They played at Sherman Park and would draw between 3 to 4,000 people to watch these softball games. We’d drive our bikes up and stack picnic tables on top of each other to watch the Big Eight games."

One of the top teams in the Big Eight was Milwaukee Copper Hearth, owned by tavern owner John Korinek Jr. When the American Professional Slowpitch Softball League formed in 1977, Korinek fielded a Copper Hearth team in the league before Schlitz took over sponsorship the following year.

“We had a built-in following from people who knew these players through the Big Eight,” Mandel said. “They had a personal connection with the players and followed them out to Lannon Field.”

The team featured a number of Copper Hearth holdovers and some new faces, like Weiterman.

“All the games were on the weekends, and we went to Connecticut, Philadelphia, out east and down south,” said Phil Higgins, 69, who played in the outfield. "The only team west of us was in Minnesota. We had an old school bus and a then a van, and some guys drove their own personal vehicles (to road games). We’d leave late at night and drive all night to Louisville or Cincinnati or Fort Wayne.”

Louisville is ultimately where the series finished. The two teams were tied in the best-of-nine series, 3-3, before Milwaukee swept a doubleheader in Kentucky to hoist the World Series trophy. However, in the first broadcast, it was Kentucky that defeated Milwaukee.

“Kentucky played very well in that first game, and we had to figure out how to stop the constant hitting up the middle,” Higgins recalled. “They had a five-man infield and three outfielders, and we had four outfielders. In the second game, that same day, we changed and went to a five-man infield, and that proved to be a better defensive strategy for us because they didn’t pound it up the middle the way they did the first game. We were pretty even teams.”

The scramble to make this broadcast work

There was some scrambling to do before ESPN could flip the switch on what would become a cable powerhouse.

“They asked Johnny (Korinek) to pay for bringing in the lights because they had to have it three times brighter than it was (for the broadcast quality),” Mandel recalled. “So, he brought in portable lights. I don’t know if he ever got paid back or not. They had to get cameras, too; I don’t know how they got them. But they did have their own truck.”

As the network went on the air for the first time, a 30-minute SportsCenter served as an intro to the broadcast, with Joe Boyle working play-by-play and former Yankees player Johnny Blanchard offering color commentary.

“It wasn’t perfect, but considering the short notice, I think it came out really well,” Brown said. “The only people who had cable at that time were in rural areas who didn’t have access to over-the-air TV, so it was a limited audience. But they got it on the air and showed two nights in Milwaukee. Two games Friday, two games Saturday, then they came back Friday in Kentucky.”

Later in the series, Blanchard was replaced by Jim Price, a former member of the Detroit Tigers who had played in the slowpitch league and currently serves as Tigers color commentator on radio broadcasts.

“While you’re playing the game, you’re not looking for a camera or anything like that,” Higgins said. “You’re basically just playing the game. The only way we knew something different was going on was that between innings, you’d have to wait for some commercial time. It kind of slowed the game down.”

Kentucky won that first battle, but not the series, and Weiterman said it was a big deal for his team to triumph over the Bourbons.

“We were such rivals with Kentucky; this was Packers-Bears rivalry stuff,” Weiterman said.

Weiterman, who made $2,000 for the year, said the Milwaukee team had a much different vibe than the teams capable of adding former pro players.

“A bunch of us all lived within a square mile of each other,” Weiterman said. “We didn’t care about the money. We just wanted to win.”

The first broadcast lived exclusively in a Wisconsin basement

When E:60 feature producer Simon Baumgart was assigned the task of tracking down the story alongside co-producer John Minton, it essentially began as an investigative report.

"We always understood that these tapes haven't been in ESPN's possession for God knows how long," Baumgart said. "When I got assigned to do this story, the first thing we did was try to find the footage."

He had gotten wind that Korinek might still have some tapes, but he couldn't get a call back when he reached out. He reached out to several other players and lined up interviews when Korinek finally called back.

"Just before we hung up the phone, I said, 'By the way do you have any idea what happened to these tapes?'" Baumgart said. "He said, 'Oh yeah they're sitting in my basement.' That was kind of a game-changer for us."

The pro softball league was in its third and final year in its current structure — a handful of teams branched off the following season, and though the league lingered for one more year, Milwaukee opted to remain in a different league with teams in the Midwest. They didn’t appear again on ESPN.

In an effort to drum up new franchises for the new league, Korinek requested the tapes of the games from ESPN, intending to use them as marketing fodder. They remained in Korinek’s basement, unearthed several years ago when a few clips were strung together for a Schlitz reunion.

With footage to work with, Baumgart spent time in Kentucky and Wisconsin interviewing those who were involved. He expects the segment to run anywhere from 15 to 30 minutes. E:60 has typically aired on Sunday mornings, but this will be the first airing in its new primetime spot

"This piece is as much about the game itself and what happened behind the scenes at ESPN that day, the first couple hours of putting this network on the air," Baumgart said. "Back in the day, ESPN didn't have contracts with any major sports out there. These are the guys that the network is sort of built on. This game is the beginning. It's wild to think how far we've come."

Lannon gets to celebrate a big anniversary with a bit of history

The timing has been great for Amy Martin, the director at the Sussex Lisbon Historical Society who is plotting Lannon’s 90th anniversary of incorporation in 2020.

“Joecks Field was one of the top fields in the area for the Land O’Lakes team,” Martin said. “The father of baseball here — Erv Miller — had the fields in immaculate shape, and it was just the place to be for any sort of baseball in the area. Schlitz being such a big thing at the time wanted to play on the best field.”

Martin met the ESPN camera crew that came to collect footage at Joecks, though she said they weren’t sure they had the right place.

“(One of the producers) was watching part of the game and didn’t think the ballpark was the same ballpark, the field looked totally different,” Martin said. “It’s been 40 years, but I said, ‘I’m 100 percent sure.’"

That first broadcast almost hit a somewhat humorous snag over beer branding. Anheuser-Busch was a prominent early sponsor for ESPN, but the team on the field went by the name of one of its biggest competitors: Schlitz. So the announcers only addressed the teams as "Milwaukee and Kentucky."

"Apparently, the Anheuser-Busch team was in the control room during the first airing with the bigwigs," Baumgart said. "The game comes up and it's the Milwaukee Schlitz, one of their biggest competitors at the time, and they said, 'What the heck? I thought we were going to be the main sponsorship here.' Somebody in the control room said, 'Don't worry about it, nobody's watching anyway.'"

It was slowpitch softball in Wisconsin, and yet, it led to a battle over sponsorships, brought in former big leaguers as commentators and launched a powerhouse television network.

“We were just happy to be on TV,” Weiterman said. “We had no idea what ESPN would turn into.”

JR Radcliffe can be reached at (262) 361-9141 or jradcliffe@gannett.com. Follow him on Twitter at @JRRadcliffe.