The new book "Those Guys Have All the Fun: Inside the World of ESPN" contains a fair number of references to people and events with connections to Wisconsin sports.

The former chairman of ESPN, Steve Bornstein (left), is a graduate of the University of Wisconsin.

Authors James Andrew Miller and Tom Shales tell readers how a kid from New Jersey found himself on the shores of Lake Mendota. Bornstein now is president and chief executive officer of the NFL Network.

"Steve Bornstein hoped to attend Berkeley after graduating from Fair Lawn High School in New Jersey, but his father, insisting on driving his son to college, refused to take him any farther west than the Mississippi," Miller and Shales report. "So Steve wound up at the University of Wisconsin, which he had decided was the most ‘fun’ school within dad’s borders."

Jim Cohen, a former vice president of news at ESPN, also is a UW graduate. He is a former Milwaukee Bucks beat reporter and former sports editor of The Milwaukee Journal. Cohen now is a senior coordinating producer for the NFL Network.

Besides the ESPN news operation, Cohen was involved in programming under Mark Shapiro, who at the age of 32 was put in charge of all programming on ESPN, ESPN2 and ESPN Classic. Cohen developed "PTI," "Around the Horn" and "Cold Pizza."

It was Cohen who was charged with telling Jason Whitlock he couldn’t do anymore ESPN television. Whitlock had ripped Mike Lupica of "The Sports Reporters" and Scoop Jackson of ESPN.com.

"Jim Cohen called me . . . and said, ‘Hey, man, you can’t be on our TV shows anymore,’ " Whitlock recalls. "And I said, ‘Fine, no problem.’ I think ESPN’s original thing was 'OK, we’re going to suspend him from our TV shows and that’ll show him and shut him up.’ But I was, like, fine, no problem, and a wrote a column for a dot com the next day saying, ‘ESPN called and fired me because of X, Y and Z.’ I’d had it with Lupica, I’d had it with the whole deal, so I didn’t care what they did – and that was that."

Reporter Bonnie Bernstein (left) says Cohen advised her about her working manner.

"There weren’t a ton of women at ESPN during that time, and my boss, Jim Cohen, told me he wanted to have a discussion with me about how I presented myself as a woman. He wanted me to realize that if I wasn’t careful, perceptions about me could change. I really appreciated that, because in my naïveté, that was never on the radar. I was just going about doing my job, be-bopping around, working on establishing a level of trust with athletes and coaches."

Cohen describes a meeting with Shapiro as the idea of "PTI" was forming at the network.

"Mark called me into his office and said, ‘I want you to start a new show. I want two guys yelling at each other, and I’m thinking (Tony) Kornheiser should be one of them,’" Cohen says. "I asked him about a budget and he said, ‘There isn’t one,’ so I said, ‘I’ve done a lot of things, in charge of a news operation, in charge of a documentary operation, and I can manage people, but I’ve never launched a show that has no staff, no budget, no studios, no talent, and the rest of ESPN probably isn’t on board.’ He looked at me and said, ‘Figure it out.’"

Kornheiser, a columnist for the Washington Post, was reluctant to get into television.

"Tony was very skeptical," Cohen says. "But I remember at one point he said, 'If I do this show, can I wear a dress?' And I said, 'Absolutely.' That changed his mood; that changed everything."

Writer Charlie Pierce, a graduate of Marquette University, was auditioned for the ill-fated "SportsNight" show on ESPN2, which management was aiming to make into a hip "SportsCenter." Or something. Actually, by many accounts in the book, management had no idea what it was doing with "SportsNight."

"I was one of the people who was brought in to try out," Pierce says. "This was one of the more preposterous exercises of all time. They called Bud Shaw, me, and whole bunch of people and they kept rotating us through these tryouts. When I walked into the studio and saw (Keith) Olbermann and Suzy (Kolber), I thought, ‘This is realty a chemistry experiment gone wrong here.’ And then Mitch Albom. I don’t mean to sound like Jerry Seinfeld, but I don’t know what consulting genius put those three together. I had known Olbermann for a while and I went outside and he was sitting on the hood of a car smoking an immense cigar, just shaking his head very, very sadly. I think they offered me some sort of ‘Crossfire’ thing with John Feinstein, to argue about college basketball, but I turned it down because I don’t want to argue professionally."

John Anderson of Green Bay is an anchor at ESPN. In the book he credits Linda Cohn for her support when he first got to Bristol.

"I wouldn't have a career here, I don't think, without Linda Cohn," Anderson says. "She's been instrumental, because when I went to 'SportsCenter,' I wound up sitting next to her. Now, she had been here for a while. She's a made guy at that point. And she could have very well gone to her bosses and said, 'Who's this guy who nobody knows that you stuck me with?' But she was just the opposite. She couldn't have been more helpful and more welcoming, and she's great to anchor with because she pays attention."

Three other ESPN staffers with local ties: Chuck Salituro, Elida Witthoeft and Pat Stiegman are not mentioned in the book.

Salituro, an ESPN senior news editor, is a Kenosha native, UW graduate and former sports editor of The Milwaukee Journal. Witthoeft, a former copy editor at The Journal, is a senior coordinating producer for ESPNews. Stiegman, a graduate of UW-Oshkosh, is editor in chief of ESPN.com. He was a vice president of the Journal Sentinel in charge of the online operation.

ESPN debuted Sept. 7, 1979. Part of the programming that Friday night was a professional softball championship game telecast between the Kentucky Bourbons and the host Milwaukee Schlitz.

One problem was ESPN had just signed a $1.38 million sponsorship deal with Anheuser-Busch, which did not make a beer that made Milwaukee famous. To make matters worse, many Anheuser-Busch executives were present in Bristol for the launch of the network.

"On the very first night of programming, ESPN had managed to tick off their only sponsor," Miller and Shales write.

Scott Rasmussen, ESPN executive vice president recalls: "We had the Milwaukee Schlitz playing in the very first event on with all the Anheuser-Busch people standing in the room, and we joked about that with them. We told them not to worry, nobody was watching anyhow."

There were problems with quality of the softball telecast as well, recalls vice president of programming Bill Creasy.

"We carried a god-awful night game of slow-pitch softball from Milwaukee, at 8 p.m. which was then 7 p.m. out there," Creasy says. "The lighting was just abysmal. You could hardly see the ---damn game."

An estimated 30,000 viewers watched ESPN on its first night.

The first college basketball ESPN carried was Wisconsin at DePaul on Dec. 5, 1979. That game was the first one analyst Dick Vitale (left) worked.

"I went into it with no idea of what I was getting into," Vitale said. "I mean, I came out of a locker room, I knew nothing about television, and somebody just gave me a microphone."

The first college football telecast Kirk Herbstreit called as a color analyst was Wisconsin at Minnesota in 1995. He worked with Gary Thorne.

"I was just blown away by having this chance," Herbstreit says. "I’d never even called a high school game, and here I am calling a game in a sold-out Metrodome."