Professional and major collegiate sports continued to expand in popularity during the decade, and they continued to be lavishly paid for by television programmers eager to attract an audience. Television became critical to sports, for it provided the money that made huge salaries possible or, in the college world, allowed major football and basketball programs to build state-of-the-art facilities for their athletes. Televised sports received a big boost through the 1980s with the growing popularity of the ESPN cable-television station, which played an important role in popularizing a variety of sports. Even the Olympics fell under the spell of TV money; ABC paid a record $225 million to broadcast the 1984 Los Angeles summer games.

Not everyone appreciated the role that TV played in sports. One critic claimed that TV "helps make money-grubbing freaks of its heroes. It even modifies and distorts the way sports are...