Eddie Einhorn (January 3, 1936 – February 24, 2016) was minority owner and vice chairman of the
Chicago White Sox
The Chicago White Sox are an American professional baseball team based in Chicago. The White Sox compete in Major League Baseball (MLB) as a member club of the American League (AL) Central division. The team is owned by Jerry Reinsdorf, and p ...
.
Biography
Einhorn grew up in a
Jewish
Jews ( he, יְהוּדִים, , ) or Jewish people are an ethnoreligious group and nation originating from the Israelites Israelite origins and kingdom: "The first act in the long drama of Jewish history is the age of the Israelites""The ...
family in
Paterson, New Jersey
Paterson ( ) is the largest City (New Jersey), city in and the county seat of Passaic County, New Jersey, Passaic County, in the U.S. state of New Jersey.Alpine, New Jersey.
Einhorn produced the nationally syndicated radio broadcast of the
NCAA Men's Division I Basketball Championship
The NCAA Division I men's basketball tournament, branded as NCAA March Madness and commonly called March Madness, is a single-elimination tournament played each spring in the United States, currently featuring 68 college basketball teams from ...
in 1958. In 1960, he founded the
TVS Television Network
The TVS Television Network, or TVS for short, was a syndicator of American sports programming. It was one of the several "occasional" national television networks that sprang up in the early-to-mid-1960s to take advantage of the establishment o ...
to telecast
college basketball
In United States colleges, top-tier basketball is governed by collegiate athletic bodies including National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA), the National Association of Intercollegiate Athletics (NAIA), the United States Collegiate Athleti ...
games to regional networks at a time when the sport was of no interest to the national networks. The first broadcast was a semi-final game between
Bradley University
Bradley University is a private university in Peoria, Illinois. Founded in 1897, Bradley University enrolls 5,400 students who are pursuing degrees in more than 100 undergraduate programs and more than 30 graduate programs in five colleges. The ...
1960 National Invitation Tournament
The 1960 National Invitation Tournament was the 1960 edition of the annual NCAA college basketball competition.
Selected teams
Below is a list of the 12 teams selected for the tournament.
from
Madison Square Garden
Madison Square Garden, colloquially known as The Garden or by its initials MSG, is a multi-purpose indoor arena in New York City. It is located in Midtown Manhattan between Seventh and Eighth avenues from 31st to 33rd Street, above Pennsylva ...
. Einhorn helped put together the first national broadcast of college basketball for the Game of the Century between the
Houston Cougars
The Houston Cougars are the athletic teams representing the University of Houston. Informally, the Houston Cougars have also been referred to as the Coogs, UH, or simply Houston. Houston's nickname was suggested by early physical education instr ...
and
UCLA Bruins
The UCLA Bruins are the athletic teams that represent the University of California, Los Angeles. The Bruin men's and women's teams participate in NCAA Division I as part of the Pac-12 Conference and the Mountain Pacific Sports Federation (MPSF). ...
in 1968. He later sold his interest in the network and became the head of
CBS Sports
CBS Sports is the sports division of the American television network CBS. Its headquarters are in the CBS Building on W 52nd Street in Midtown Manhattan, New York City, with programs produced out of Studio 43 at the CBS Broadcast Center on W 5 ...
. Later, he would co-found subscription TV channel
Sportsvision
Sportsvision (SV) was a subscription sports television service founded by Chicago White Sox owners Jerry Reinsdorf and Eddie Einhorn and media mogul Fred Eychaner. The service broadcast live sporting events, and for much of its time of operati ...
, which, after a number of sales and restructurings, eventually became cable network
Sportschannel
SportsChannel is the collective name for a former group of regional sports networks in the United States that was owned by Cablevision, which from 1988 until the group's demise, operated it as a joint venture with NBC.
Operating from March 1, ...
.
Einhorn's TVS network carried the
World Football League
The World Football League (WFL) was an American football league that played one full season in 1974 and most of its second in 1975. Although the league's proclaimed ambition was to bring American football onto a worldwide stage, the farthest t ...
in its inaugural 1974 season. He would later emerge in the
United States Football League
The United States Football League (USFL) was a professional American football league that played for three seasons, 1983 through 1985. The league played a spring/summer schedule in each of its active seasons. The 1986 season was scheduled to be ...
; as the proposed owner of the league's dormant Chicago franchise, Einhorn was one of the most outspoken supporters of the proposed, but ultimately failed, move to fall in 1986.
He was an owner of the
IWA IWA may refer to:
Organizations International
* International Water Association
* International Webmasters Association
* International Woodworkers of America, United States and Canada
* International Workers Association, an anarcho-syndicalist fed ...
wrestling promotion in United States in 1975. The promotion was originally intended to be the first one to run cards nationally and promoted mainly in the midwest and even ran cards in the Carolinas.
Einhorn died on February 24, 2016 at the age of 80 from complications following a stroke.
During the 2016 season, the White Sox wore a memorial patch on their uniforms in honor of Einhorn, a black diamond with "Eddie" in the center in white.