NEW YORK - Imagine no pro football, basketball or hockey.

Imagine no Mark McGwire and Sammy Sosa, in a world where players were seen as a raucous underclass of roustabouts.

Imagine no landmark games, and no instant replays to brand great moments on the country's psyche. Imagine no agents, no endorsements.

You're imagining sports at the start of the 20th century, when games were little more than recreation, light years from today's multibillion-dollar industry.

How did sports evolve from pastime to big time? How did we go from the sandlot game to the Super Bowl half-time show, with sponsors snapping up commercial time at $50,000 per second?

Many factors changed the picture. There were monumental personalities - like Babe Ruth and Muhammad Ali - whose style and athletic talents electrified fans.

There was a decade-by-decade increase in leisure time, allowing people to play and watch sports such as golf and tennis.

And there was the phenomenal growth of the mass media: first, radio broadcasting college football nationwide and then TV, where routine game coverage was transformed forever by Roone Arledge.

"I found in sports a combination of drama, grace and beauty, from the heroic highs of winning to the terrible lows of losing," said Arledge, the longtime ABC Sports executive. "Certain things were common - the settings, the people who try to achieve and how difficult that is, the human drama of people. Those elements are always there."

In programs like "Wide World of Sports" and Olympic coverage, he used the technology of television to put a human face on the athletes, to show their off-the-field lives, their family struggles.

Said Dick Ebersol of NBC Sports: "It wasn't sports anymore. Here are the people who do the jumping and running, the 'up-close and personal.' He was taking people like Jean-Claude Killy in the Winter Olympics and George Foreman in the Summer Olympics and making them personalities."

And when NBC and CBS turned down a prime-time series of NFL games, ABC scooped it up. Now entering its 30th year, "Monday Night Football" is the longest running prime-time entertainment series in TV history.

"Roone saw two things," Ebersol said. "Sports was ready for prime time and the athletes should be portrayed as personalities, not just sports figures. ... He turned the way sports are done inside out."

With it, sports turned inside out. Television paid huge rights fees to cover events. Most recently, four networks - Fox, CBS, ABC and ESPN - paid $17.6 billion for eight years of NFL games.

Athletes like Ali and Michael Jordan became world figures. Leagues doubled and sometimes tripled in size.

It's easy to forget that it wasn't always this way. In 1900 America, baseball was the only sport played on an organized basis. And then, it wasn't always so organized, with player raids by rival leagues often disrupting operations.

"Baseball was beginning to come of age from 1900 to 1914," said Benjamin Rader, a professor of history at the University of Nebraska. "The major leagues began building parks of concrete and steel instead of gerry-built wood stadiums that often moved from one place to another. It suggested permanence."

The players were vagabonds, shuttling from team to team and league to league. And the owners were constantly battling the athletes and each other. Baseball historian David Nemec believes things haven't changed much.

"The owners were industrialists who owned public utilities. They weren't sportsmen, they were businessmen, in it to turn a profit and make their businesses more profitable," Nemec said. "Still, it was the only pro sport a guy could play to make a living."

As troubled as baseball was, it was ahead of other sports. Football was a college activity, reserved for rivalries like Yale vs. Harvard. It wasn't until 1920 that George Halas, Art Rooney and others met in a Canton, Ohio, automobile showroom and began the NFL.

Barely a decade had passed since Dr. James Naismith wandered into the YMCA gym at Springfield, Mass., in 1891, looked up at the balconies and asked a custodian to nail up a couple of peach baskets, one at each end.

Two years after Naismith's decision, Frederick Arthur, formally known as Lord Stanley of Preston, bought a handsome trophy to be presented to the amateur hockey champions of Canada. It would become the NHL's prized Stanley Cup.

Even though the NHL did not get under way until 1917, the NFL until 1920 and the NBA until 1946, each sport bid for attention earlier, and splinter leagues and barnstorming teams existed everywhere.

Richard Lapchick, director of Northeastern University's Center for the Study of Sports in Society, recalls the tales his father told of playing professional basketball.

"During the Depression, they couldn't afford hotel rooms," he said. "They'd drive all night from town to town. The size of the team depended on the number of players they could squeeze in their car. If they got seven in, two would share the driving while five slept."

The economics were different, too. "In 20 years, his cumulative salary was what Chris Webber made in the first quarter of his first (NBA) game," Lapchick said.

By the 1920s, sports were establishing a real foothold in the fabric of the country. It was the Golden Age of Ruth and Jack Dempsey, Bobby Jones and Bill Tilden, Red Grange and Sonia Henie. Bill Winston, a professor of sociology at Eckerd College, said 1920 was a turning point for the country, too.

"That was the first year we were more urban than rural," he said. "Baseball came from an agricultural past. That caused a significant change in the way we view sports."

Ruth may have been most responsible for that. He dragged baseball from the dead ball to the long ball, hitting 60 home runs in 1927, a mark surpassed only three times since. He had a presence that compelled people to pay attention. Radio broadcasting, then in its infancy, greatly broadened the audience.

"When Ruth stepped forward, attendance shot up," Nemec said. "The New York teams became prominent."

Dempsey's raw power as heavyweight champion made him a boxing hero. Jones and Tilden dominated golf and tennis. Grange was the cornerstone of the NFL and Henie the figure skating darling of the Olympics.

With sports flourishing, the NHL expanded to 10 teams - now it has 27 with three more to be added in the next two years.

Golf and tennis found fans, too. When Jones won golf's Grand Slam in 1930, he was given a ticker-tape parade up Broadway. When Don Budge did the same thing in tennis in 1938, there was no parade, but plenty of satisfaction.

Budge, now 83, has seen the game change dramatically. "The rackets are faster and the balls are slower," he said. The biggest change is money.

"When I won Wimbledon, I got zero," Budge said. "I got a trophy. Now it's half a million dollars."

Byron Nelson, 87, tells a similar story. In 1945, he won 18 golf tournaments including an unbelievable 11 in a row. Some of the purses were so small the PGA doesn't bother listing them. His career earnings: $182,000.

And what was his reward for the 11-match winning streak?

"Well, I got some Wheaties," he said, recalling the cereal's decision to put him on the box. "But not until I won seven or eight in a row."

There were no sporting goods company contracts, no television money for the Murdoch-Budge-Nelson generation of athletes.

But it was in the middle of the 20th century, after World War II, that sports moved up big time.

An Associated Press poll chose Jim Thorpe as the football player and male athlete of the half-century. Thorpe, an American Indian, declared the world's greatest athlete when he won the pentathlon and decathlon in the 1912 Olympics, played professional baseball and football for 20 years.

The female athlete of the half-century was Babe Didriksen Zaharias, winner of the women's javelin and 80-meter hurdles at the 1932 Olympics. She was also a champion golfer, winning 14 straight tournaments from 1946-47.

Sports in the first half of the century was largely the province of white men. Henie and Zaharias were among the first women to make an impact. Later, tennis star Billie Jean King led an assault on the status quo and Title IX laws guaranteed equal opportunity for women in college sports.

Like women, blacks were largely excluded from organized sports except in boxing, where first Jack Johnson and then Joe Louis ruled as heavyweight champions.

That changed in 1947, when Jackie Robinson became the first black man to play major league baseball. Robinson integrated baseball 11 years after track star Jesse Owens made history at the 1936 Olympics at Berlin. Owens won four gold medals and broke or tied Olympic records nine times.

Owens' performance helped make the Olympics a quadrennial celebration of sports that became a major property for TV networks.

"Olympics is the single best brand in the world," said NBC's Ebersol.

"We got Sydney and Salt Lake City in August 1995 for $1.25 billion. Then, 31/2 months later, we got the unnamed games for 2004, 2006 and 2008 for $2.3 billion. That's $3.5 billion before you get into production costs, which is another $100 million per games. So, it is more than $4 billion in expenses.

With the money television pours into sports, the industry has changed dramatically. Athletes were once flattered when fans asked for autographs. Now they get big fees for signing at shows organized by promoters. It is part of a big bucks landscape that includes huge contracts like $126 million for teenage basketball player Kevin Garnett and $105 million for pitcher Kevin Brown.

If some fans are turned off, others view these things simply as part of what defines sports as a mega-industry now.

There's no going back. Sports cannot return to a time, if it ever really existed, of simple games played by simple heroes.

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