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Movements, leaders, victories and the continuing fight for equality.
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In 1968 Shirley Chisholm became the first Black woman elected to the United States Congress. In 1972 she launched a campaign for the Democratic presidential nomination, breaking another political barrier.
MORE →Reflects the personal views, recollections, and perspective of the author, Mike Davis.
This is a personal recollection on the Move fire on May 13, 1985
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| Type | Subsidiary |
|---|---|
| Industry | Sports promoter |
| Predecessor | Creative Sports Ohlmeyer Communications Corporation ESPN Plus ESPN Regional Television |
| Founded | 1996 |
| Headquarters | , |
| Key people | Clint Overby (vice president)[1] |
| Owners | The Walt Disney Company (72%; via ABC Inc.) Hearst Communications (18%) National Football League (10%) |
| Parent | ESPN |
| Website | espnevents |
ESPN Events is an American multinational sporting event promoter owned by ESPN. It is headquartered in Charlotte, North Carolina, and shares its operations with SEC Network and formerly with ESPNU. The corporation organizes sporting events for broadcast across the ESPN family of networks, including, most prominently, a group of college football bowl games and in-season college basketball tournaments.
ESPN Events previously operated primarily as a syndicator of college sports broadcasts; the company was founded as Creative Sports, a sports programming syndicator that merged with Don Ohlmeyer's OCC Sports in 1996. After ESPN purchased the merged company, the division was renamed ESPN Regional Television (ERT), which distributed telecasts for syndication on broadcast stations and regional sports networks; these telecasts were also available on the ESPN GamePlan and ESPN Full Court out-of-market sports packages. Most of ERT's broadcasts were presented under the on-air branding ESPN Plus (not to be confused with ESPN+, the current subscription service), but this name was later phased out in favor of dedicated on-air brands for each package, such as SEC Network (later renamed SEC TV as to not be confused with the then-upcoming SEC Network cable channel).
Following its acquisition of the Las Vegas Bowl in 2001, ERT began to double as an organizer of sporting events. The subdivision, which later began to operate under the name ESPN Events, would acquire and establish other bowl games to provide additional post-season opportunities for bowl-eligible teams. ESPN Events also organizes several pre-season tournaments in college basketball, as well as the season-opening Camping World Kickoff and Texas Kickoff football games. All ESPN Events are broadcast by ESPN's networks.[2]
ESPN Regional Television began to wind down its syndication operations in the 2010s, as the proliferation of competing outlets (including other sports channels, conference-specific networks such as ESPN's own SEC Network, as well as digital services such as ESPN's own ESPN3 and ESPN+ platforms) took over most of the conference rights and overflow formerly held by the company.
The company traces its history to Creative Sports, Inc., a North Carolina-based sports syndicator owned and founded by Bray Cary. ESPN, LLC purchased Creative Sports, Inc. and OCC Sports, Inc. in the mid-1990s.[3]
On July 22, 1994, ESPN Regional Television was incorporated in Delaware.[4] ESPN Regional Television was formed in 1996, through ESPN Inc.'s combination of Creative Sports and OCC Sports, under the direction of Chuck Gerber and Loren Matthews.[3] In January 2000, Loren Matthews left ESPN Regional Television for an executive position at sister division ABC Sports. By February 2000, ERT acquired the production rights to the Arena Football League; this included responsibilities for AFL broadcasts on The Nashville Network, which had ESPN retain duties for the events in lieu of its own unit, World Sports Enterprises.[3]
In 2001, ESPN Regional Television moved beyond broadcasting college football bowl games, when it purchased the Las Vegas Bowl from Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority. ESPN Regional did so to help partner conferences that had bowl qualified teams but no bowl available. The company bought four more bowls and started two others.[5]
In August 2008, ESPN reached a 15-year, $2.25 billion broadcast rights agreement with the SEC. As part of the deal, ESPN also assumed the syndicated package of games previously held by Raycom Sports; beginning in 2009, ERT syndicated SEC football and basketball under the SEC Network brand.[6][7]
The original business of ESPN Regional Television began to grow obsolete with the launch of dedicated networks dedicated to specific conferences, including the Big Ten Network, Pac-12 Network, and the ESPN-operated SEC Network, since they largely assumed rights to the game packages that ESPN had previously syndicated. As such, the division pivoted to focusing solely on organizing events, particularly within college football and basketball.[8]
Derzis retired in 2021,[9] and the division is led by vice president Clint Overby.[10]
ESPN Plus held the rights to Conference USA football and basketball, Mountain West Conference football and basketball, Big Ten Conference football and basketball, and various other collegiate conferences, but has lost them as detailed below:
 | This section needs to be updated. (December 2020) |
ERT acquired its first bowl game in 2001, with its purchase of the Las Vegas Bowl from the Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority. The company moved into the area as it saw that some of their conference partners had teams that were bowl-eligible, but with no bowl available to take them. By 2013, ERT had founded two new bowl games and purchased four additional games.[5] The games primarily serve as a source of live content for ESPN during the early weeks of bowl season, prior to the larger, traditional games in proximity to New Year's Day (such as the New Year's Six games of the College Football Playoff, which are also broadcast by ESPN). This strategy has been successful for ESPN, although it has in recent years contributed to an oversaturation of bowl games that have prevented them from all being populated by bowl-eligible teams. ESPN also runs the Celebration Bowl in Division I FCS, which is played between the champions of the Mid-Eastern Athletic Conference (MEAC) and the Southwestern Athletic Conference (SWAC) — the two prominent conferences of historically black colleges and universities.[19][8]
ESPN Events operates the following 17 bowl games, which ESPN televises:[20]
ESPN Events also organizes several opening weekend games, such as the Camping World Kickoff, Advocare Texas Kickoff, and FCS Kickoff.[8]
ESPN Events is also involved in college basketball, operating early-season events such as the AdvoCare Invitational, the Champions Classic, the Jimmy V Classic, the NIT Season Tip-Off, and the Phil Knight Invitational.[22][8]
The company's success with college tournament operation and broadcasting led ESPN Regional Television to form a college marketing division, which provides colleges all-in-one services for selling sponsorships, local media rights and other marketing campaigns. The University of South Florida, the University of Kansas and the University of Oregon are some of the clients that the division began representing in 2000.[3]
The SERVPRO First Responder Bowl is one of 17 bowl games owned and operated by ESPN Events.
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Owners: Walt Disney Company (via ABC Inc.) (72%); Hearst Communications (18%); National Football League (10%) | |||||||||||||||||||
Source: Wikipedia. Article content is retrieved live through the MediaWiki API.
ESPN Events is an American multinational sporting event promoter owned by ESPN. It is headquartered in Charlotte, North Carolina, and shares its operations with SEC Network and formerly with ESPNU. The corporation organizes sporting events for broadcast across the ESPN family of networks, including, most prominently, a group of college football bowl games and in-season college basketball tournaments. ESPN Events previously operated primarily as a syndicator of college sports broadcasts; the company was founded as Creative Sports, a sports programming syndicator that merged with Don Ohlmeyer's OCC Sports in 1996. After ESPN purchased the merged company, the division was renamed ESPN Regional Television (ERT), which distributed telecasts for syndication on broadcast stations and regional sports networks; these telecasts were also available on the ESPN GamePlan and ESPN Full Court out-of-market sports packages. Most of ERT's broadcasts were presented under the on-air branding ESPN Plus (not to be confused with ESPN+, the current subscription service), but this name was later phased out in favor of dedicated on-air brands for each package, such as SEC Network (later renamed SEC TV as to not be confused with the then-upcoming SEC Network cable channel). Following its acquisition of the Las Vegas Bowl in 2001, ERT began to double as an organizer of sporting events. The subdivision, which later began to operate under the name ESPN Events, would acquire and establish other bowl games to provide additional post-season opportunities for bowl-eligible teams. ESPN Events also organizes several pre-season tournaments in college basketball, as well as the season-opening Camping World Kickoff and Texas Kickoff football games. All ESPN Events are broadcast by ESPN's networks. ESPN Regional Television began to wind down its syndication operations in the 2010s, as the proliferation of competing outlets (including other sports channels, conference-specific networks such as ESPN's own SEC Network, as well as digital services such as ESPN's own ESPN3 and ESPN+ platforms) took over most of the conference rights and overflow formerly held by the company.
The Terry's Chocolate ESPN Events Invitational (previously the ESPN Events Invitational, Orlando Invitational, AdvoCare Invitational, Orlando Classic, and Old Spice Classic) is an annual college basketball tournament originally played over the Thanksgiving weekend—Thursday, Friday, and Sunday. The inaugural tournament was held November 23, 24, and 26, 2006. The Metro Atlantic Athletic Conference serves as the host for the event. The tournament is played in the State Farm Field House within the ESPN Wide World of Sports Complex that is part of the Walt Disney World Resort in Kissimmee, Florida. From 2006 through 2023, the tournament consisted of eight teams from separate conferences. All eight teams were guaranteed three games. Teams who lost in the first round moved to the consolation bracket and could finish no better than fifth place, whereas teams who won in the first round moved to the championship bracket and could finish no worse than fourth place. The final ranking of the teams was determined by separate games for first, third, fifth, and seventh places. The 2020 tournament was cancelled because of the COVID-19 pandemic. In 2024, the tournament had only four teams, with winners in the first (semifinal) round advancing to the championship game. The two teams that lost in the semifinals played in the third-place game. In 2025, the tournament will last five days, include sixteen teams, and consist of twenty games played across three separate brackets. The tournament will open with the eight-team Adventure Bracket played over its first three days. During the final two days, eight other teams will play in two separate four-team brackets, the Imagination Bracket and the Magic Bracket.
ESPN Radio, which is alternatively branded platform-agnostically as ESPN Audio, is an American sports radio network and extension of the ESPN television network. It was launched on January 1, 1992, under the banner "SportsRadio ESPN". The network is based at the ESPN campus in Bristol, Connecticut, with multiple studio facilities nationwide, along with home studios. The network airs a regular schedule of daily and weekly programming as well as live radio play-by-play of sporting events. ESPN Radio is broadcast to hundreds of affiliate stations, along with national and Canadian carriage on SiriusXM. The network's content is also available online through its affiliates via Audacy, iHeartRadio and TuneIn, and the network also makes its programming available via podcast feeds and providers, with some additional content audio and video available through an ESPN+ subscription. Several of its programs are also featured as fully live or "best-of" video simulcasts on the ESPN family of television networks.
ESPN on ABC (formerly known as ABC Sports from 1961 to 2006) is the branding used for sports event and documentary programming produced by ESPN and primarily televised by the American broadcast network ABC. Despite its name, these telecasts are generally supplemental to ESPN, and only some of these broadcasts may be simulcast on its cable channels. However, almost all broadcast are available on ESPN's namesake streaming service. ESPN is majority owned by ABC's corporate parent, The Walt Disney Company, in partnership with Hearst Communications and the National Football League (NFL). ABC Sports was established on April 29, 1961, as the broadcast network's sports division. When ABC acquired a controlling interest in ESPN in 1984, it operated the cable network separately from its network sports division. Disney then bought ABC in 1996 and began to consolidate the corporate structure of ABC Sports and ESPN. The merger of ABC's sports division into ESPN was completed in 2006, and the ESPN on ABC branding made its debut on September 2 of that year. The branding change was made to better orient ESPN viewers with event telecasts on ABC and provide consistent branding for all sports broadcasts on Disney-owned channels (shortly thereafter, ESPN2's in-game graphics were likewise altered to simply use the main "ESPN" brand). ABC on ESPN broadcasts use ESPN's production and announcing staff, and incorporate elements such as ESPN-branded on-screen graphics, SportsCenter in-game updates, and the BottomLine ticker. The ABC logo is still used for identification purposes such as a digital on-screen graphic during sports broadcasts on the network, and in promotions to disambiguate events airing the broadcast network from those shown on the ESPN cable channel. Since 2021, ABC is currently the only Big Three network to have rights to broadcast games from all four major professional leagues at the same time, largely due to joint contracts with ESPN and those four leagues.
Before the 1921 destruction of Tulsa’s Greenwood District, Black residents had created a remarkable center of business and community life. The district included stores, professional offices, entertainment venues and homes owned by Black citizens. Understanding Greenwood means learning what was built—not only what was burned.
MORE →Shirley Chisholm, elected in 1968.
