David Bockino is an associate professor at Elon University, where he teaches communications and sport management. He spent more than seven years working with ESPN, including ESPN Outdoors, ESPN Research and Analytics, and ESPN International. He is the author of The Guidebook Experiment: Discovering Exploration in a Hyper-Connected World. His book Game on: How Sports Media Grew Up, Sold Out and Got Personal with Billions of Fans was published by Nebraska in April.

In Game On David Bockino provides the first overview of the evolution of the sports media industry. Written at a time of great uncertainty and rapid change and told through the fascinating stories of the most important innovations, matchups, events, and personalities over the last hundred years, Game On explores how sports media both affects and reflects our society.

In early 2021 former professional baseball player Jose Canseco agreed to a boxing match against Billy Football, a twenty-one-year-old intern for the digital media platform Barstool Sports. Canseco had been hoping to fight one of the Paul brothers (Logan or Jake), both of whom had become famous as social media influencers and one of whom had dated Canseco’s daughter. But they ignored his challenge, confident that they could secure better opponents on the celebrity boxing circuit. Canseco moved on, reverting to an old beef with Dan Katz (a.k.a. Big Cat), co-host of the popular Barstool podcast Pardon My Take. On Twitter Canseco threw the first jab: “The only person that dodges more than the Paul boys is @BarstoolBigCat.” Billy Football, an intern who worked with Katz, responded: “O you have crossed the line raisin balled fuck.” Then Barstool president Dave Portnoy chimed in: “Jose Canceso [sic] vs. Billy Football. 100k to winner.” Both fighters quickly agreed. And suddenly Jose Canseco, once one of the most famous baseball players in the world, was scheduled to fight a Barstool Sports intern in a three-round exhibition boxing match.

Not that Jose Canseco’s life had ever been normal. As an outfielder for the Oakland Athletics in the 1980s, Canseco was about as popular as any baseball player can be. He won an MVP award, made it into an episode of The Simpsons, and dated Madonna. He was comically strong, had cool hair, and drove around California in a Porsche 911. Canseco was the perfect caricature of a specific era in baseball history—an era ruled by performance-enhancing drugs—only nobody realized it at the time. Everyone just thought he was the man. Then he got outed as a steroid user, wrote a book accusing a bunch of fellow players of doing the same, and became a baseball pariah. As the years went on, Canseco began lingering on social media, starting illogical beefs with famous people. It was only natural that these social media tirades would eventually lead to Barstool, whose fans eat such stuff up.

Jose Canseco vs. Billy Football was scheduled for February 5, 2021, the main event for Rough N’ Rowdy 13, an amateur boxing competition that Barstool had purchased in 2017. The affair was pitched as a night of “unparalleled absurdity,” complete with scantily clad ring girls and an undercard of amateur fighters “throwing haymakers.” The ongoing pandemic meant there’d be no live audience. Instead the fight would be exclusively streamed on the internet by Barstool for $19.95, quite a deal for “an experience worth roughly a gazillion dollars.” Even better news: Stoolies, the loyal devotees of the Barstool empire, could win upwards of $25,000 by correctly choosing the night’s winners. All they had to do was download the official Barstool mobile app and make their picks.

There was significant pre-match chatter within the Barstool community: debate about betting odds, conversation about fitness regimes, lots of trash talking. In the days leading up to the fight Billy Football told the celebrity gossip website TMZ he was confident he’d come out on top: “I think I’m gonna shock Jose. . . . He’s gonna end up respecting me and hopefully at the end of it, we can go hunting Big Foot together.” Then, as fight day approached, Canseco ramped up his Twitter usage. On January 14 he wrote, “Retweet if you’re tired of @barstoolsports being on the internet.” A week later it was, “15 days until I knock @Billyhottakes senseless.” Then there were some tweets about cryptocurrency, a “RIP” for baseball legend Hank Aaron, who had just passed away, and a promotion for a company that makes honey. On fight day Canseco penned a tweet with his own name listed twenty times, followed by “1ST ROUND KNOCKOUT.” Then a few more tweets and one final pitch: “20 minutes until showtime. It’s only $19.99 to have the Friday night you’ve had this year [sic]. Don’t miss this.”

It would have been easy to miss. Although the buildup had lasted weeks, the actual fight lasted less than fifteen seconds. After the bell the fighters shuffled to the middle of the ring. Billy Football threw a right; Canseco, a left. Both men started swinging wildly until Canseco moved in for a clinch, stumbled to the ground, and ended up in a corner. Billy Football hovered over him, connected on a couple of shots to the head, and the ref blew the whistle. Canseco winced in pain and tapped out. The fight was over.

Over the next few days Jose Canseco would claim that he had hurt his shoulder. Portnoy tweeted that this was nonsense, that Canseco had taken a dive and had swindled Barstool out of a million dollars. The Barstool Sportsbook account sent out a tweet saying that anybody who had bet on Jose Canseco would get their money back. Canseco was more than happy to engage with this post-match discourse: “You and your Barstool minions need to put down the marijuana and focus on your failing business #CrumblingEmpire.” Eventually Portnoy and Canseco moved on. The Stoolies, too, found some other piece of absurdity to occupy their time.

Not me. While it’d be easy to dismiss this fight as another pointless internet occurrence—such occurrences happen all the time, every minute of every day—something about this particular event stayed with me. I couldn’t stop thinking about it: the participants, the consumers, the promotion. There were a few reasons why. One: I grew up a big Jose Canseco fan. I had books filled with Canseco baseball cards, a drawer filled with Canseco T-shirts, and walls covered with Canseco posters. It was disorienting and kind of sad to see my childhood idol reduced to a punching bag in a hastily prepared Barstool pay-per-view. Two: I talk about Barstool Sports often. Many of my students at Elon University are part of the loyal Barstool contingent, and I’ve found that teaching them the intricacies of the sports media industry becomes much easier if I throw some Barstool anecdotes into the mix. And three: as someone who has spent his entire life immersed within sports media—first as a fan, then as an employee at ESPN, and now as a college professor—I couldn’t help but notice that this match occurred almost exactly one hundred years after a particularly notable fight, Jack Dempsey vs. Georges Carpentier. As one of the first sporting events to be broadcast over the radio, Dempsey/Carpentier is considered a watershed moment in the evolution of mass communication (it’s often included in introductory media textbooks) and is sometimes referred to as the beginning of the modern-day sports media industry.

A hundred years; two fights; different in almost every way. The first was between a draft dodger and a fighter pilot, was attended by thousands of people wearing suits, and was relayed by antenna into theaters equipped with radios so that those not in attendance could gather and listen to the action live. The second was between a disgraced baseball player and an intern for a digital media brand, was attended by nobody because of lingering fears from an ongoing global pandemic, and was made available to stream exclusively via pay-per-view. As someone who spends a lot of time thinking about both sports and media for a living, I couldn’t help but feel that these two events were bookends to a narrative that hadn’t yet been properly told. How did we go from Dempsey vs. Carpentier to Jose Canseco vs. Billy Football? What had happened in between to link these two events? And what does this evolutionary arc—a maturation that contains its fair share of unparalleled absurdity—tell us about ourselves as sports fans—or even as human beings?

Those questions are the genesis of this book, a history of the sports media industry from 1921 to 2021. From the radio broadcast of the Dempsey/Carpentier match in 1921, the launch of Sports Illustrated (SI) in 1954, and the emergence of ESPN in 1979 to the rise of talk radio in the 1980s, the explosion of the sports blogosphere (and Barstool) in the mid-2000s, and the onset of legal online sports wagering in the 2010s, the following chapters tell the story of how and why the sports media industry grew to become one of the most important and profitable components of the global entertainment landscape.

Woven throughout these stories is an equally important tale about purpose, about why we read about, listen to, and watch sports in the first place.