“I have a 2-year-old grandchild, and we’re going to Disney World,” said Einhorn, a minority owner and vice chairman of the Chicago White Sox. “I’ve been to enough of them, anyway.”
Einhorn, 77, was not going to Atlanta, but thousands flocked there this weekend, and millions more tuned in to see whether Michigan would crack Syracuse’s zone or Wichita State could pull one more upset. As he gazed out the window of the owner’s box at U.S. Cellular Field last week, Einhorn could not help chuckling.
“I didn’t know it would ever get this big,” he said. “But it shows I was right.”
Long before office pools, ESPN and network television had any interest, Einhorn, a 1960 Northwestern law school graduate, thought college basketball might have a future as a national sport. He founded TVS Television Network and set about convincing coaches, athletic directors and TV executives. They eventually agreed.
In 2010, CBS and Turner Sports signed a 14-year, $10.8 billion contract to broadcast the N.C.A.A. men’s tournament.
Einhorn began broadcasting the early rounds of the tournament when there was no market for the games. Even for his first championship game, between Ohio State and Cincinnati in 1961, he said he paid the N.C.A.A. only $6,000 for the rights, but he could not find a station outside Ohio and Kentucky to show the game.
“He was ahead of his time, plain and simple,” said the broadcaster Dick Enberg, who called games for TVS and introduced Einhorn when he was inducted into the National Collegiate Basketball Hall of Fame in 2011.
Bryant Gumbel added: “It wasn’t that long ago that no one was interested in putting these games on TV. It doesn’t seem possible now, but nobody cared.”
A native of Paterson, N.J., Einhorn had his first taste of college basketball as a teenager, taking the train into Manhattan to see New York University, Long Island University and St. John’s, among others, play at Madison Square Garden. He became interested in broadcasting as an undergraduate at the University of Pennsylvania, where he was an announcer and the sports director at WXPN, the campus radio station.
When Temple made the Final Four in 1956, Einhorn was sent to Evanston, Ill., by a local station, which gave him an introduction to Walter Byers, then the N.C.A.A.’s executive director, and Wayne Duke, Byers’s assistant. From them, Einhorn learned a valuable lesson about the nonexclusive broadcast rights of N.C.A.A. tournament games.
“Anybody could carry them,” he said, explaining that two stations in the same market could show a game. “I started out by getting games on the rival stations. Obviously, you can’t do that now.”
While at Northwestern, Einhorn founded a radio network, charging stations $100 to pick up each game. He also produced a nationally syndicated radio broadcast of the 1958 championship, all while doing his business from a post office box and a pay phone in the hall of his dormitory. After law school, he graduated to television.
“I wanted to keep doing what I loved,” Einhorn said. “I looked around and said every school is getting thousands of new fans every year just through graduation, so there has to be something here.”
In 1965, Einhorn and TVS secured the rights to the Southeastern Conference, not that it was especially lucrative or that the universities were necessarily ready for television. Once, he arrived at a site to find his equipment drying on a patch of grass outside the gym because of a rainstorm and flood. He recalled another early trip to Mississippi State, where he tried to explain that even though the game was scheduled for a 2 p.m. tip-off, it would be a few minutes later to allow for a commercial after the introductions.
“I had to get one of my guys to set their clock back a few minutes,” Einhorn said. “They couldn’t understand it.”