AMERICA AT LARGE:A MENTION of The National Sports Dailyin a bustling sports bar today is apt to elicit little beyond baffled stares around the table.

A noble experiment, described in a retrospective that appeared last week in the charter issue of blogster Bill Simmons' new website Grantland.com as "a long-dead and short-lived newspaper that, for 18 months, between January of 1990 and June of 1991, attempted to cover sports in a way that no other American publication would, could, or have ever imagined," The Nationaldrew its last breath 20 years ago this week and promptly vanished from the face of the earth.

On the other hand, television screens in that very same saloon will almost certainly be tuned to ESPN, or ESPN2, or perhaps ESPN Classic. The network’s claim to being “the worldwide leader” in sports is hardly an idle boast. In the 30 years since ESPN first went on the air it has become so ubiquitous the same generation who don’t know of The National can’t begin to imagine life without it, and probably believe it has always been there.

The saturation is so thorough today that when we walk into an airport bar in Bangkok and see SportsCenteron the television set, we no longer bat an eye. But if anything is clear from the recitations witnesses to the respective start-up enterprises gave (both, perhaps by design, couched in the form of "oral histories") it is how much both owe their respective fates to serendipity.

Less than a month after its publication, James Andrew Miller and Tom Shales' Those Guys have all the Fun: Inside the world of ESPNcontinues to rise on the New York Times' best-seller list. Miller, the author of an earlier book on the US Senate, and Shales, the Pulitzer Prize-winning entertainment critic of the Washington Post, interviewed over 500 of the dramatis personae for their ESPN book.

Alex French and Howie Kahn also appear to have encountered co-operative interviewees for their oral history of The National.

Taken together, the two books represent a fascinating case study in how the media worked in the latter years of the 20th Century and serve as a cautionary tale of how easily could the fate of one been that of the other.

In August of 1978 Bill Rasmussen had just been cashiered from his job as a marketing executive with the Hartford Whalers of the World Hockey League. He and his 22-year-old college dropout son Scott came up with the idea of a mini-network that would show five hours a month of local sports programming on Connecticut-based cable television, then in a start-up phase. They had heard that a newly-marketed communications satellite called SATCOM I might offer the best means of accomplishing that modest goal.

When the Rasmussens met with Al Parinello, the RCA satellite rep, their vision was soon altered by two revelations. The first was it would actually cost them less money to buy the satellite transponder time 24 hours a day by the month than their modest goal of five hours. The second was that for exactly the same amount of money they’d be paying for their regional service, their signal could be beamed anywhere in the country.

“Anywhere in the country?” asked an incredulous Scott Rasmussen.

“Anywhere,” replied Parinello.

In a meeting that barely lasted an hour, their concept had grown from a modest little regional cable network with a few hours’ programming a month to round-the-clock sports programming with the potential to be fed to every cable system in America.

“At that price,” Rasmussen fils told his father on their way out the door, “we should get three or four of those things.” “Yes,” Bill Rasmussen reminded him, “but we don’t have the money to buy even one.”

All of that was quickly remedied. Bill Rasmussen was able to come up with $9,000 by maxing out one of his credit cards, and a few friends and relatives ponied up the rest of the $35,000 to cover the first month’s satellite time. A venture capital company came up with a few million to tide them over until further capitalisation could be secured. That was eventually forthcoming in the form of a $15 million letter of credit from arch-conservative Getty Oil Corporation.

All of it, of course, came at a price. With each new corporate angel, the Rasmussens’ stake shrunk further. Before ESPN aired its first day’s programming, Scott Rasmussen had been shown the door, though he retained his initial modest stake, and before long, Bill Rasmussen had been stripped of responsibility and remained on board only as a figurehead.

But through a remarkable combination of luck and design, a brilliant mix of disaffected network production executives were lured to Bristol, Connecticut, from New York. ESPN scrambled to fill its broadcast day with everything from Australian Rules Football to rodeo and NCAA events no other network wanted. A rag-tag crew of hitherto unknown talent was assembled to telecast them; Chris Berman, Dick Vitale, and Mike Tirico became household names. ESPN acquired the rights to the NFL draft, then a novelty, and within five years had broken a network stranglehold to televise its first NFL game. Before it attained the age of eight ESPN had rights to NFL, NBA and Major League baseball games.

Today more than 350 million subscribers in over 200 countries subscribe to ESPN in at least one form. In 2011, SportsCenteralone is produced in eight languages each day.

While ESPN grew its star system from the inside out, The National indented from the outset to avail itself of technological advances to produce a veritable all-star team of the best journalistic talent money could buy.

The brief came from a Mexican tycoon named Emilio Ascarraga, aka El Tigre who gave publisher Peter Price, late of the New York Post, and Frank DeFord ( Sports Illustrated), the dean of American sports journalism, an open chequebook to produce the greatest newspaper money could buy. When Price warned Ascarraga The Nationalmight lose as much as $100 million before it ever showed a profit, "he didn't even flinch".

As with ESPN, satellite technology was going to short-circuit the traditional process by eliminating the need for a composing room. The paper would initially be produced in three separate editions, in New York, Chicago, and Los Angeles, and would expand from there. In lieu of a distribution system, The Nationalmade a deal with Dow Jones, signing a five-year contract to piggyback its distribution with that of the Wall Street Journal.

But where ESPN's business model, if there ever was one at all, somehow flew along by the seat of its pants, The National, supposedly technology-based, was bitten by technology at every turn. Millions were spent installing satellite dishes on the roof of the paper's home base in New York, but when it snowed, people, armed with brooms, had to trudge up there and brush the snow away.

Hundreds of thousands were spent on matching Toshiba laptops for staff, but due to a modem glitch none of them were compatible with the multi-million dollar computer system that had been installed at the home base.

The distribution system had a major problem. The stock exchange closed at 4pm, so the Wall Street Journaltrucks were done for the day and ready to roll by five. The baseball scores from night games wouldn't be available until nearly midnight – thus ensuring the paper went out with incomplete scores.

DeFord, who lived not far away in Connecticut, couldn't even get The Nationaldelivered to his house.

Eighteen months and $150 million later El Tigre pulled the plug on The National. Deford put a headline – "We Had A Ball! – on his final issue and celebrated with a lavish party for the staff. The paper disappeared without a trace.