David Rosenthal

A third independent baseball league, yes.

With some pretty radical ideas, really borrowing from the NFL and the league-first mentality, he wanted to embrace television in this new baseball league and have a radical solution where all the clubs in the league would share all of the revenue from a television deal.

Pretty crazy.

So Lamar Hunt and the new American football league, the AFL,

They take this cast aside idea from baseball and they run with it.

Hunt says, we'll just centrally negotiate one national television contract for the entire AFL and then we'll split the revenue completely equally amongst all the teams.

This is like the epitome of the league first mentality.

It'll be great for us and it'll help us compete with the NFL.

And the two major networks at the time, CBS and NBC, had deals with NFL teams.

But there was another upstart TV network out there, ABC, and they were the perfect match.

So Hunt goes to ABC and they find a young executive there.

ABC doesn't even have a sports division at this point in time, but a young executive within ABC named Rune Arledge.

What a legend.

So Rune would ultimately become Bob Iger's mentor, and Bob Iger would rise through the ABC Sports ranks in the beginning of his career before taking over Cap Cities and then obviously all of Disney.

So this is Rune's big opportunity.

He sees, it's obvious at this point in time in the late 50s, that nationally televised football games are

There's demand for it.

Well, and with those early NFL deals, it was like those were individual deals that teams made with networks and local stations.

So it was like a local thing.

It wasn't football Sunday.