When CNN went on the air on June 1, 1980 one of the first newscasts was a sports bulletin where baseball and North American Soccer League highlights were shown.
During this time, Nick Charles and Fred Hickman became established as the program's co-hosts.
Sports Tonight was renamed CNN/Sports Illustrated, and was replayed many times throughout the night on CNN/SI, like ESPN was doing (and continues to do) with SportsCenter.
The program reclaimed its Sports Tonight name shortly afterwards, and when CNN pre-empted the show in late 2000[1] due to the coverage of the disputed 2000 presidential election, producers decided to differentiate the format from SportsCenter's highlights.
When the terrorist attacks occurred on September 11, 2001,[3] CNN went to all-news programming.