Institutionalizing and Industrializing Sport History in the Contemporary Sports Television Documentary

Documentaries compose a key way that ESPN has cultivated its self-named status as “The Worldwide Leader in Sports.” SportsCentury (1999), a multimedia project for which ESPN commissioned a forty-eight-member expert panel to rank the twentieth-century’s top 100 North American athletes was the media outlet’s first major foray into the genre. This essay outlines how SportsCentury aided ESPN’s efforts to build its brand identity; enhance and diversify its now dominant market share in sports media; broaden its demographic reach; and support, promote, and expand its other programming. It then briefly considers how SportsCentury established a popular model for producing sports documentary series that other cable sports television outlets have since adopted.