Sports Tonight (American TV program)
US television series
Sports Tonight is an American sports news television program that aired on CNN from 1980 to 2001, and on CNN/SI from December 12, 1996 to the channel's demise on May 15, 2002. It normally aired at 11 p.m. ET/10 p.m. CT.
History
The early years
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. Later, a nightly program called Sports Tonight went on the air in late night. During this time, Nick Charles and Fred Hickman became established as the program's co-hosts. In addition, CNN aired a weekend program called Sports Saturday and Sports Sunday.
One of the program's most popular features was called "Play of the Day" (later known as the "Replay of the Day"), which showed a highlight (i.e., a spectacular play) from that day's action.
The 1990s and the end
In 1996, CNN launched a new station called CNN/SI. 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 due to the coverage of the disputed 2000 presidential election, producers decided to differentiate the format from SportsCenter's highlights.
“Sports Tonight (American TV program)” enters the record as uS television series. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Sports, Tonight and American can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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Reception evidence should be dated and situated: later canonical status may differ sharply from the work’s initial circulation. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 20, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q7579794. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1980, 2001, 1996 and 2002.
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This entry incorporates text from “Sports Tonight (American TV program)” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.