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ONE

The “Almost Broadcasting Company” and the Birth of ABC Sports

Sports programming put ABC on the television map.

BERT SUGAR, journalist and historian¹

ACCORDING TO BROADCAST HISTORIAN WILLIAM BODDY, “The American television industry underwent its deepest and most lasting changes in the middle years of the 1950s.”² Of the three major networks that survived the decade, ABC—the youngest of the bunch—endured the most drastic shifts. It nearly folded, was sold to United Paramount Theaters, and was forced to develop inventive strategies to counteract its comparative feebleness. Sports became one of its chief survival techniques. The network’s annual commitment to sporting content increased 600 percent over the 1950s and culminated with its March 1961 creation of ABC Sports—the first network sports division.³ ABC Sports gave the traditionally unpopular network an identity and became the laboratory at which Roone Arledge developed his foundational aesthetic.

HARD ROCK

ABC was born the bastard child of the Radio Corporation of America’s (RCA) National Broadcasting Company. The “Second Depression” of 1937—a recession within the Great Depression that deflated what few strides the economy had made since the 1929 stock market crash—compelled the US government to intensify its scrutiny of the large trusts and monopolies blamed for the financial crisis. The film and radio industries composed high-profile targets that signaled no entity would evade inspection. The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) specifically began to investigate chain broadcasting—the practice of programming multiple radio stations to air the same content simultaneously. Its 1941 Report on Chain Broadcasting ruled that no single organization could broadcast on more than one network.

Two years later, the FCC deemed RCA’s ownership of both the NBC Red Network and the NBC Blue Network anticompetitive and forced it to sell one of the properties. Unsurprisingly, RCA owner David Sarnoff opted to unload the less popular Blue Network, which focused on public affairs programming and was limited to low-power stations in small markets. Sarnoff found an eventual buyer in Edward J. Noble, the Life Savers Corporation owner and entrepreneur who thought a radio network might compose a promotionally rich complement to his many other ventures. Noble procured NBC Blue in October 1943 for $8 million, the highest price paid for a broadcasting entity to that date. The network, which came along with 168 affiliates and 715 employees, went by “Blue” until Noble purchased and adopted the name American Broadcasting Company in June 1945. Despite the title change, ABC retained Blue’s comparative unpopularity and was distinguished only by its lower ratings, less prominent advertisers, and fewer affiliates. The network, wrote Forbes, “scraped along on the crumbs that fell from the table at which the big two were feasting.”⁴ As a result, ABC was known throughout the industry as the “Almost Broadcasting Company” and was constrained to engage in activities its competitors considered déclassé. “To get a modicum of income and to show a modest profit,” explained eventual ABC president Oliver “Ollie” Treyz, “ABC took a relaxed view of standards established by NBC and CBS. We took spots for deodorants and laxatives, which the other guys wouldn’t take.”⁵ As part of the struggling network’s efforts to subsist, ABC followed CBS’s, NBC’s, and the short-lived broadcasting upstart DuMont’s entrances into the new medium of television.

As with RCA, the FCC found Paramount Pictures Inc.—which comprised a movie studio and theater chain—to be restricting trade. The 1948 United States v. Paramount Pictures Inc. ruling, colloquially known as the Divorcement Decree, forced Paramount to separate its studio and theater arms into separate entities, Paramount Pictures Corporation and United Paramount Theaters (UPT), so it could not simply fill its theaters with the movies it produced and ignore competitors’ products. Media historian Douglas Gomery calls the ruling “one of [the twentieth] century’s more bitter and drawn-out antitrust battles,” which permanently altered Hollywood’s distribution and exhibition practices.⁶ Beyond extricating itself from Paramount Pictures, United Paramount Theaters had to reduce its theater chain from 1,395 to 650 within five years. The windfall it received from selling those theaters poised the company to collect new assets. UPT president Leonard H. Goldenson, who joined Paramount as a lawyer in 1933 and took over after the divorcement, figured television would be a sensible place to invest the proceeds given the medium’s similarities to, shared audience with, and ability to promote film.

But much to Goldenson’s chagrin, it was impossible for prospective broadcasters to secure station licenses at the time. The FCC’s Sixth Report and Order initiated a station freeze the same year as the Divorcement Decree. Originally slated for six months, the freeze extended more than three years—from September 30, 1948, until April 14, 1952. Aside from blocking potential station owners like UPT, the freeze solidified industrial hierarchies. The less popular ABC and DuMont networks continued to lose money during this period while CBS and NBC maintained their long-standing supremacy. “Given the station allocation plan contained within the FCC’s Sixth Report and Order,” explains broadcast historian Stewart Lewis Long, “most observers felt it was only a matter of time before either ABC or DuMont, or both networks, would go out of business.”⁷ Goldenson sought television stations, not necessarily ABC. But the only way he could acquire stations at this time was by purchasing an entity that already owned them. Though “only a skeleton of a network,” ABC had five stations—the maximum the FCC permitted at the time—in five of the United States’ top six markets.⁸

Noble—a notorious cheapskate who reportedly gave employees Life Savers candies as Christmas bonuses—demanded $25 million for ABC, far more than the losing venture’s projected value.⁹ He bargained with UPT by averring that CBS president William S. Paley expressed an interest in his struggling company. Though Goldenson reasonably argued that such a deal would never gain FCC approval, necessary for any acquisition involving the sale of licensed stations, the UPT president finally budged in 1951. “I knew it was too much,” Goldenson shrugged years later, “but I was also pretty sure there wouldn’t be another television network coming on the market anytime soon.” In February 1953, after a protracted hearing that included thirteen hundred pages of documents and five hundred exhibits, the FCC approved UPT’s acquisition. Goldenson initially retained ABC president Robert E. Kintner (whom he replaced with Treyz in 1956), and Noble chaired the network’s board of directors. The FCC ratified the merger in part because it determined that ABC otherwise could not realistically vie for market share without some help: “ABC has been unable to compete effectively with NBC and CBS, principally because it lacks the financial resources, the working capital, and the diversity of revenue-producing activities of the other network of companies with which they are associated.” Upon the acquisition, UPT infused ABC with $30 million it could use to secure new programming and upgrade its comparatively shabby facilities.¹⁰

ABC’s good fortune accelerated DuMont’s demise. The UPT-ABC merger “in effect sacrificed the DuMont Network in order that ABC might survive and prosper to offset the obvious dominance which NBC and CBS had gained during the ‘freeze’ years.” “The minute the FCC approved the merger our fate was sealed,” lamented DuMont president Theodore Bergman.¹¹ DuMont ceased broadcasting in 1955. ABC seized on this new void to turn its first profits. Though DuMont was even less prominent than ABC, sports programming composed one of its few strengths. DuMont’s presentation of the 1951 National Football League championship, for instance, was the earliest live national TV broadcast of professional football. DuMont also aired non-live weekend anthology programs, the outdoor show Fishing and Hunting Club (1949–50), and the first prime-time pro football broadcasts, which anticipated, respectively, ABC’s Wide World of Sports, American Sportsman, and Monday Night Football.

Despite UPT’s infusion of capital and DuMont’s folding, ABC remained television’s least distinguished network. It held stations in New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, Detroit, and San Francisco but otherwise had just fourteen primary affiliates. NBC, by contrast, had sixty-three and CBS possessed thirty. ABC’s affiliates were also often on less powerful UHF stations. While CBS and NBC offered a nearly continuous stream of programming, ABC did not schedule more than two hours of content before 7:00 p.m. until 1956, and it would typically go dark after 10:30. “It was widely believed that ABC could never offer one of the top ten shows,” wrote trade journalist Martin Mayer, “simply because it couldn’t get on enough stations at enough good time periods.” As Goldenson sighed, “We had no hit shows, no stars, and nothing in prospect but struggle.” Because of its limited reach and subpar content, ABC gave discounts to those precious few sponsors it secured. Advertisers treated the network as a supplementary service that would reach additional consumers at bargain-basement rates rather than an entity that warranted consistent investment.¹² ABC was consequently dubbed “Hard Rock,” in contrast to CBS’s “Black Rock” and NBC’s “30 Rock.” As CBS’s nickname came from its jet-black headquarters and NBC’s moniker referenced its address at 30 Rockefeller Plaza, ABC was defined by its comparative misfortune.

Most of the sports ABC carried nationally during its early years were schlocky and low-budget events like wrestling and roller derby. In 1948, a group of midwestern ABC affiliates joined to showcase the NFL’s Chicago Bears and Chicago Cardinals games—broadcasts that originated from ABC’s Chicago-owned station, WBKB. This package caught the attention of Edgar Scherick, a wheeling and dealing Harvard-educated time buyer for the Dancer-Fitzgerald-Sample advertising agency. Scherick noticed that the ABC affiliates covered almost exactly the distribution region of Falstaff Beer, a St. Louis–based client whose account he managed. He arranged for Falstaff to purchase half the spots on these regional broadcasts for the discounted price of $2,000 per game—an acquisition he later proclaimed “the greatest media buy in the history of television” because of its ability to capture so inexpensively and effectively the client’s target market.¹³

Based on his success with the NFL broadcasts, Scherick persuaded Falstaff to sponsor a national Major League Baseball package starting in 1953. ABC struck a deal with the Chicago White Sox, Cleveland Indians, and Philadelphia Athletics to broadcast seventeen Saturday afternoon matches in the program titled Game of the Week. The following year it expanded to thirty weeks and added the Brooklyn Dodgers, New York Giants, and Philadelphia Phillies.¹⁴ Because of the MLB’s blackout rules, the games would appear only in markets without a major-league franchise. Faced with these constraints, Game of the Week ensured it would attract a sizable audience by hiring former MLB pitcher Jay Hanna “Dizzy” Dean as its featured announcer. Already a radio star, Dean affected a homespun persona that drew viewers regardless of the featured teams and kept them tuned in no matter the score. Despite the Falstaff-sponsored packages’ success on ABC, Scherick moved both to CBS. “They just didn’t have the good station hookups in enough cities,” he bluntly explained of ABC.¹⁵ The network’s inexpensive ad rates, Scherick indicated, did not compensate for its paltry distributional range.

ABC built on this slowly growing identification with sports by securing contracts to air boxing and, more prominently, NCAA football in 1954. Its contract with the NCAA—whose TV rights stood and remain among the most coveted in sports—included twelve contests (along with a Thanksgiving Day game) and would be carried on 150 stations. On top of the football games, the agreement included twenty-six weeks of assorted winter and spring events. ABC made this deal in part by promising the NCAA that its broadcasts would place “emphasis on promoting collegiate football and the college way of life,” an effort waged in part to offset negative publicity college sports had incurred after several recent scandals. Variety identified ABC’s sporting efforts—and the NCAA contract in particular—as a mechanism through which the network might reasonably taper the gap separating it from its competitors.¹⁶ Regardless of the NCAA deal’s prestige, ABC was unable to sell sufficient sponsorships. It mistakenly banked that General Motors, the primary sponsor of NBC’s NCAA telecasts, would continue advertising on ABC once it got college football. When General Motors declined—perhaps wary of ABC’s comparative status—the junior network was forced to lower its rates and wound up losing $1.8 million. It dropped the winter and spring programming that accompanied the football games for fear of losing even more.¹⁷ ABC’s brief and unsuccessful efforts to establish a niche in sports programming only solidified its Hard Rock status.

THE WOOLWORTH NETWORK

To help ABC form an identity in network television, Treyz commissioned preeminent Columbia University sociologist Paul Lazarsfeld to conduct a study on the habits of TV viewers. The findings were simple but telling: network television’s oligopolistic structure gave ABC space to invest in areas the other two networks were ignoring. Despite broadcast media’s pretensions to cut across and unite disparate demographics, ABC developed a philosophy that a network cannot be “all things to all people.” It counterprogrammed to attract viewers CBS and NBC underserved or altogether overlooked. “Whatever the audience is not watching at any given time makes for new possibilities,” Goldenson explained. “We are not trying to take audiences from CBS and NBC….We are trying to carve our own network character, to create new audiences.”¹⁸

ABC found that programming at CBS and NBC was built primarily around stars from the radio tradition, and, as such, appealed mostly to older audiences. “Lazarsfeld recommended we go after the young audiences,” Goldenson recalled. “We should build programs around casts of young, virile people … and create programs with stories that younger people would identify with.”¹⁹ They found that older audiences were more set in their viewing and purchasing routines and, as a result, were less likely to start watching new networks or sample new goods that might be advertised. “We’re after a specific audience,” Goldenson concluded. “The young housewife—one cut above the teenager—with two to four kids, who has to buy the clothing, the food, the soaps, the home remedies.” Although younger audiences did not have older viewers’ purchasing power, Lazarsfeld found that they spent more on average and buy more of the small-ticket products that so heavily populate mass-market advertising.²⁰ ABC formalized this process by branding itself as “the Network of the Young.” “Practically all of the programs developed and/or acquired by ABC between 1954 and 1956 were geared toward young families,” explained media researcher turned executive Fred Silverman, who broke into the industry after writing a master’s thesis on ABC’s programming strategies. ABC immediately reduced material that did not coalesce with the image it was forging, such as news and public affairs.

Regardless of these shifts, ABC routinely lost its most successful programs. Goldenson opined that sponsors “brought us only their poor programming. They took their best ones to the other networks and when a good one developed at ABC they took that one away.” This is precisely what happened with Game of the Week. Scherick debuted it on ABC and moved it to CBS after it became a hit with the potential to attract a larger audience than ABC could deliver. The migration of programs, Treyz explained, prevented ABC’s lineup from demonstrating “any central network thinking, philosophy or point of view.”²¹

ABC prioritized fostering viewing patterns that would stabilize its nascent identity over providing quality content. “First we build a habit factor,” Goldenson said, “get them used to watching us, then we can do something about upgrading the programming. We’re not interested in the critics.” To be sure, critics already had little positive to report about ABC. “The real strength and vitality of television,” Goldenson continued, “is in your regular week-in and week-out programs, the strength of motion pictures was always the habit of going to motion pictures on a regular basis, and that habit was, in part, taken away from motion pictures by television.”²² Goldenson thought TV could similarly become a “habit medium” around which consumers organize their everyday routines. ABC wound up teaming with Hollywood studios to nurture these behaviors.

ABC first joined the Walt Disney Company—an organization that possessed a vast archive of content perfect for young audiences. Disney was seeking revenue to help fund its Disneyland theme park, a dream Walt Disney had been pursuing for years. Most investors, however, considered the venture too risky. Disney identified television as a potential partner after producing two successful Christmas specials: One Hour in Wonderland (1950) for NBC and The Walt Disney Christmas Show (1951) for CBS. It approached all three networks about building a sustained partnership, but only ABC expressed interest. At the time, the network’s live clearance rate was only 34 percent. Its consequent amenability to non-live content made Disney’s filmed programming a good fit. This material would also be a boon for UPT, since it would advertise a studio whose productions were routinely exhibited in the company’s theaters.

Disneyland debuted October 27, 1954. The weekly program showcased classic Disney cartoons and original pieces organized around the theme park’s fanciful worlds (Adventureland, Fantasyland, Frontierland, and Tomorrowland). The agreement between ABC and Disney initially called for twenty programs, for which ABC paid $ 50,000 each. The contract also had ABC invest $500,000 in Disney’s amusement park, which gave it 35 percent ownership and all profits from Disneyland’s concession sales for ten years while helping its partner guarantee the additional loans it needed to complete the project.²³ The deal—which was the biggest programming package in network TV up to that point—gave ABC Disneyland’s first refusal rights for seven years.

Fortune celebrated Disneyland as “an immediate and smashing success.” The show was the network’s first top ten hit, which Goldenson called “a turning point in our progress.” Disneyland attracted nearly half of ABC’s advertising sales in 1954 and lured additional sponsors to the programs surrounding it. Just as important, ABC’s seven-year contract with Disney ensured that its partner could not simply leave for another network once the show became a sensation.²⁴

Goldenson viewed ABC’s Disney alliance as a potential source of prestige that would enable the network to benefit from its partner’s favorable brand and association with the film industry. Moreover, ABC took advantage of the non-live program’s potential to be rerun, scheduled flexibly, and infused with commercial breaks. Disneyland’s first year on the air included twenty-five weeks of reruns, twelve weeks of second repeats, and an unprecedented number of commercials. Each of Disneyland’s episodes also devoted ten to twenty minutes to promoting Disney’s theme park and related products. The following year, ABC and Disney expanded on Disneyland with The Mickey Mouse Club, a similarly successful afternoon program that the trade magazine Television dubbed “TV’s most important show” shortly after its debut because it so effectively attracted young viewers.²⁵

Allured by ABC and Disney’s prosperous deal, MGM and Warner Brothers partnered with the network to create MGM Parade and Warner Brothers Presents, both of which premiered in 1955 and sold out their advertising spots before even hitting the airwaves. While MGM Parade composed a series of short subjects and trailers for MGM’s upcoming releases, Warner Brothers Presents provided rotating series that adapted the Warner Brothers films Casablanca (1942), Cheyenne (1947), and King’s Row (1942). Cheyenne, the most popular of the bunch, featured the adventures of gallant frontiersman Cheyenne Bodie and sparked a glut of television westerns like Maverick (ABC, 1957–62), Bonanza (NBC, 1959–73), and Rawhide (CBS, 1959–65). Reflecting Disneyland, each Warner Brothers Presents episode initially included a six-minute segment called “Behind the Camera” that introduced viewers to the studio’s stars and teased the company’s upcoming films.

With Disneyland airing on Tuesday evenings and Warner Brothers Presents on Wednesdays, ABC began to achieve the programming regularity and youthful identity that Goldenson and Treyz sought to cultivate after the merger. The collaborations with high-profile Hollywood studios also set the network apart from CBS and NBC. In 1955, ABC produced only 14 percent of its material, while CBS and NBC manufactured roughly 50 percent of their programs. Despite creating such a small proportion of its programming, ABC’s clearance rate increased 24 percent between 1954 and 1955.²⁶ Taking notice of this success, CBS and NBC began establishing similar Hollywood partnerships. The programming model soon became standard practice across network TV.

Critics, however, expressed befuddlement at ABC’s willingness to let content providers so brazenly shop their wares. Goldenson responded to these grievances by appealing to the commercial network’s business imperatives. “We’re in the Woolworth business,” he said, “not in Tiffany’s. Last year Tiffany made only $30,000.” With a thinly veiled jab at CBS—the so-called Tiffany Network—Goldenson admitted that ABC put profits over prestige. The network’s focus on mainstream, promotion-laden entertainments like children’s programming and westerns fashioned a brand that—like Woolworth—served the populace rather than lofty cultural goals. “We study public taste hard and carefully,” Treyz asserted. “We gear ourselves entirely to what the public wants. And the public wants cowboys. The proof: we’re getting the audiences, and we’re getting the sponsors. The big two is now the big three.”²⁷

“A NEW ERA”

ABC built on its Hollywood collaborations by reinvesting in sports. At the time, network sports programming operated out of news departments—a connection that 1950s sports television’s stark aesthetics reflected. Tom Moore, ABC’s vice president for programming, who worked as public relations director for Hollywood’s Forest Lawn Cemetery before joining the network, argued that sports would bolster ABC’s counterprogramming. “I made a pitch to them,” Moore said. “Let’s go all out for sports. Let’s make this the sports network. The other two guys are underrating it.”²⁸ He argued that sports had the unique potential to enhance the network’s Woolworth-inspired efforts. “Advertisers find sports moves merchandise out of proportion to their ratings,” he said. “They will pay more for a sports viewer than for any other.”²⁹ He also reasoned that live sports’ immediacy would prompt stations to clear space for ABC’s broadcasts whether or not they were ABC affiliates. Though he found Moore’s pitch persuasive, ABC News president John Daly had no interest in overseeing this additional content. Goldenson consequently put Moore in charge of the task. The already overextended Moore contracted Scherick’s fledgling company Sports Programs Incorporated (SPI) to produce and package ABC’s sports offerings.

The savvy and opportunistic Scherick had continued to build expertise in sports programming since handling ABC’s professional football and baseball broadcasts earlier in the decade. After taking these packages from ABC and delivering them to CBS at a considerable rate increase, the Tiffany Network hired him in May 1956 as its “sports specialist in charge of all sports program sales.” Just four months into his CBS tenure, Scherick noticed that his new employer was not planning to renew Big Ten college basketball. Scherick thought he could sell the basketball broadcasts on a regional basis like his Falstaff-sponsored midwestern baseball telecasts.³⁰ The salesman phoned Big Ten commissioner Tug Wilson and made his pitch: “You’re getting cancelled by CBS,” he said. “You’ll never make it as a national vehicle but you can make it as a regional one and I can clear the regional network and sell it so that Big Ten basketball can have a very fruitful and long life.”³¹ Once the Big Ten agreed, Scherick left CBS to form SPI. He took with him CBS producer Jack Lubell and hired Chet Simmons as an assistant. Scherick rented a grimy two-room office on Manhattan’s West Forty-Second Street where he and the hard-drinking Lubell, according to Simmons, “would fight like cats and dogs.”³² Simmons once walked into the office to find Lubell choking Scherick in a fit of blind rage. “Lubell literally lifted Scherick off the floor with his hands around Ed’s neck,” Simmons said. “I thought Jack was going to kill him, because all the while Scherick was making these gurgling noises with his tongue hanging out. Finally, Jack let him go…. I don’t even recall what they were battling about because they were always scrapping, but it wouldn’t have shocked me if a murder had been committed.”³³

Shortly after forming, SPI teamed with Dick Bailey’s Sports Network Inc. (SNI), which also launched in 1956 and specialized in providing telephone lines for sports TV productions. SNI handled technical operations while SPI took care of sales. With SNI’s assistance, SPI became ABC’s de facto sports department. But even after Moore recruited Scherick and company, ABC’s slate of sports content was lean. It programmed only seventy-six hours of sports in 1958, which placed it last among the networks.³⁴ ABC also reneged on the contracts to broadcast big-ticket events like the 1960 Winter Olympics and the Gator Bowl after deciding it would not be able to recoup its contract expenditures—decisions that lowered its credibility among potential clients.

The safety razor company Gillette, which was more closely associated with sports media than any other business at the time, paved the way for ABC’s sustained entry into big-time sports. Gillette underwrote Gillette Cavalcade of Sports, a series of sports programming that started on the radio in 1941, and variations of it like Friday Night Fights, which NBC debuted in 1944. Lou Maxon—head of Gillette’s advertising division—described Friday Night Fights as the “backbone” of his client’s marketing efforts.³⁵ A combination of declining ratings and boxing’s associations with the criminal underworld compelled NBC to cancel the program in 1960.³⁶ Left without a home for its prized program, Gillette offered to give ABC its $8 million annual sports advertising budget if the network attached Gillette to its Wednesday evening fight package and moved the program to Fridays. While Moore and Scherick badly wanted the capital, Alka-Seltzer and Kool cigarettes were already sponsoring the network’s weekly boxing show. With the ABC board’s blessing, the media executives hammered out a pact to move the sponsors to different programs so it could accept the Gillette payout. It was not, however, able to shift the fights to Friday evenings—an alteration Gillette believed would create continuity with its canceled NBC program—and instead scheduled it on Saturday nights. Outside of the boxing package, Gillette would let ABC use the money for any sports programming it saw fit except horse races and roller derby.³⁷ The infusion provided a war chest that empowered ABC to pursue broadcast contracts not previously possible given its limited budget.

The network made NCAA football its first target, a sport ABC had not carried since its disastrous experience in 1954. NBC held the NCAA contract at the time and had been renewing it for several years without competition from CBS, which was primarily committed to pro football in the fall. While the Gillette contract was substantial, ABC’s suddenly enlarged budget was still not vast enough to survive a bidding war with its deep-pocketed rival. Scherick cannily reasoned that ABC would only be able to get the rights if it kept secret its intention to bid. After consulting a series of informants, he discovered that Tom Gallery, the NBC executive in charge of the network’s sports activities at the time, typically brought two envelopes to blind biddings like those the NCAA held. One packet contained a low bid—typically 1 percent higher than the previous year’s contract—and the other contained a higher offer. “If NBC got the slightest inkling that we were in the game,” Scherick explained, “they’d come in with their high bid. We were pretty sure we could top their low bid. Their high bid would be way beyond us.”³⁸ The stakes were particularly steep because 1960 marked the first time the NCAA would sell its rights for two seasons.

Scherick then conjured up a strategy that could have been lifted from a cheap spy thriller. He would scour ABC to locate “the most innocuous fellow we can find, someone who could melt into the wallpaper,” and use this unassuming character as a Trojan horse to deliver the network’s shocking bid.³⁹ He found Stanton Frankle, a self-effacing and bookish accountant of average height and build. Scherick carefully instructed Frankle that he would go to the bidding meeting at New York’s Royal Manhattan Hotel with ABC’s offer and a document that ABC’s lawyers drew up to guarantee that the recently flush network could afford its bid. He told Frankle to keep a low profile at the meeting, and not to lie if anyone asked about his affiliation. Frankle’s main assignment was to keep an eye on Gallery, make sure he had no competitors, and register ABC’s bid only after the NBC executive submitted his network’s presumably lower offer.

On the day of the bidding, Scherick sent Frankle by limousine to the Royal Manhattan. He was so concerned that the plan might go awry that he sent a backup in a separate limo should the accountant be intercepted or otherwise incapacitated. Scherick reportedly told the understudy that “if he should see Stanton Frankle fall injured in the streets, he should let Frankle lie where he fell and proceed to the consummation of the mission.”⁴⁰ Frankle made it to the meeting unscathed and in time for NCAA director of TV programming Asa Bushnell to open the bidding. Just as Scherick predicted, Gallery scanned the room to check for competitors. When he did not see anyone familiar, he took one of two envelopes from his jacket pocket and submitted it to Bushnell. The bid was for $5.2 million, a predictable 10 percent higher than NBC was paying per season. Frankle made his move. “My name is Stanton Frankle,” he said to Bushnell as he handed him an envelope. “I represent the American Broadcasting Company and here is our bid.” ABC offered $6,251,114 for the two-year contract—a sizable chunk of the Gillette cash. When asked why he tacked on the extra $1,114 to the massive bid, Scherick flippantly claimed that he did not want to seem “chintzy.”⁴¹

Gallery, who had begun to treat the annual bidding as a convivial formality en route to resuming his network’s business with college football, was stunned. So was the NCAA, which was not thrilled about the prospect of giving its most coveted TV contract to the third-ranked network but could hardly turn down the extra million dollars ABC offered. “The NCAA would as soon as have had a Martian descend and bid as give their games to ABC,” Scherick explained. “The NCAA was used to the crème de la crème, NBC, and viewed ABC as a guttersnipe organization.” But the money was enough to motivate the NCAA to swallow its pride and sign with the Almost Broadcasting Company.⁴²

As Moore proclaimed, “The acquisition by ABC-TV of NCAA rights marks a new era in the field of sports programming for ABC.” Beyond college football, ABC used the Gillette funds for rights to produce baseball, additional boxing, and the bowling program Make That Spare—a non-live “accordion” show it would place before or after NCAA football to round out its Saturday schedule. Los Angeles Times sportswriter Don Page claimed that ABC’s increased commitment to sports caused NBC “to shed its prize feathers” and suggested it might need to replace its peacock corporate mascot with a turkey as a result of this industrial power shift.⁴³ Based on its acquisition of the desirable NCAA football contract, ABC started receiving station clearances in non-ABC markets. As Moore explained, “My argument to the top brass was ‘you let us get into college sports and we’ll get the games cleared in markets where ABC has no affiliates because the public doesn’t give a good goddamn about a station’s loyalty to NBC or CBS.”⁴⁴

“THE MARK TWAIN OF TV SPORTS”

Concerned about ABC’s ability to set its sports programming apart, Scherick and Moore sought to pair the network’s contracts to air marquee sporting events with an engaging way of presenting them. To help develop this approach, Scherick hired Arledge, a twenty-nine-year-old NBC producer whose primary experience up to that point was in children’s programming. Arledge was a stocky, redheaded, and bespectacled attorney’s son from Forest Hills, Long Island.⁴⁵ The inquisitive and private-schooled youngster developed an eclectic body of interests that included drama, literature, politics, geography, and sports. He indulged these curiosities by pursuing a liberal arts degree at Columbia. “I wanted to be a writer,” he recalled, “but I couldn’t decide whether I wanted to write sports, government, philosophy, or theater.”⁴⁶ Arledge took courses on the great works of literature with celebrity professors Mark Van Doren and Lionel Trilling, who instilled in him a keen appreciation of and ability to analyze narrative. The serial overachiever served as president of his Phi Gamma Delta fraternity and edited the school’s yearbook, The Columbian, during his senior year. He wound up directing his interests toward a specialization in government and politics. Arledge also briefly did some graduate work at Columbia’s School of International Affairs, where he focused on the Near East and Middle East and assisted with the scholarly journal it published.⁴⁷

Upon graduation, Arledge decided the communications industry might best foster his catholic passions and writing-heavy skill set. He had a promising connection in DuMont programming chief James Caddigan, a former Paramount Pictures employee. Arledge met Caddigan while working as a headwaiter over the summer at the Wayside Inn in Chatham, Massachusetts. Caddigan and his family entered the restaurant just as it was about to close. Rather than turn them away—which would have been firmly within his rights—Arledge left the kitchen open so the family could dine. Caddigan remembered Arledge’s generosity when the freshly minted college grad applied for a job at DuMont in December 1952 and hired him as an assistant to the associate director of programming and production.

Arledge barely had time to learn the ropes at DuMont before being drafted into the military in March 1953. Until December 1954, he served at Maryland’s Aberdeen Proving Ground, where he ran the radio and television section of the base’s Public Information Office and, as he noted in his résumé, was “responsible for the dissemination of information concerning the United States Army Ordnance Corps and its weapons, training and other features.”⁴⁸ Though there were protections in place guaranteeing soldiers the jobs they left after being drafted, DuMont’s broadcasting wing was practically defunct when Arledge was discharged, and the company had nothing for him. Arledge threatened legal action and sent an enraged letter to Caddigan. “I deserve better treatment than to be notified by your secretary that you had left word that was nothing available for me,” he seethed to his unresponsive former boss. “It looks as if the whole DuMont policy has been to keep me hanging.”⁴⁹

But not regaining the DuMont job proved a blessing in disguise. Arledge shortly found work as a floor manager at NBC’s New York City affiliate WRCA-TV, where his first wife, Joan, served as one David Sarnoff’s secretaries. In his letter of application, Arledge suggested his “main field of interest and experience has always been in the area of public service programming. My educational background, combined with the experience I have gained in the actual staging of television programs could best be utilized in News and Special Events Television Programming.” Though his entry-level position amounted to little more than grunt work, Arledge optimistically told professional colleague Orrin Dunlap that “advancement from this position is very good and that I will have a chance eventually to do some creative work.”⁵⁰ Arledge quickly worked his way up to director, producer, and unit manager. He oversaw an assortment of programs, including the Rockefeller Center Christmas tree lighting ceremony featuring Olympic figure skater Dick Button, whom he eventually hired as an expert commentator for ABC Sports. But Arledge’s primary job was producing ventriloquist Shari Lewis’s morning children’s puppet show Hi Mom!, which starred the precocious sock puppet Lamb Chop. Though Hi Mom! got Arledge his first Emmy Award, the high-minded Ivy Leaguer divulged “it would have been even nicer … had it been acquired for producing something meatier than a morning kids show.”⁵¹

Arledge’s diverse ambitions and hopes for rapid career advancement drove him to explore a variety of TV genres. He wrote a teleplay titled Nothing to Hide in 1955, sold an adaptation of Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol to CBS, produced the informational program Tax Party, worked on a quiz show named Opportunity Knocks, and did freelance productions that ranged from promotional films for American Airlines to features for the Nassau, Bahamas, travel bureau.⁵² Arledge teamed with his Columbia classmate Larry Grossman to write a proposal for Masterpiece, a ninety-minute program that would dramatize the “stories of the world’s greatest masterworks of art, music and literature and the men who created them,” such as Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel fresco, Beethoven’s “Eroica,” and Walt Whitman’s “Drum Taps.”⁵³ Grossman, who went on to run PBS and oversee the similar public television franchise Masterpiece Theater, claimed that he and Arledge conjured up the show in a noble effort “to save television from triviality.”⁵⁴

Arledge went in a different direction with For Men Only, a variety program geared toward urban male sophisticates that he described as a combination of Playboy, True, Sport, and Field & Stream magazines. He recruited the dapper NBC weatherman Pat Hernon to host a self-funded pilot, which featured Sports Illustrated artist Robert Riger sharing drawings of a Carmen Basilio prizefight, sportscaster Marty Glickman narrating a segment on track and field, a feature on jazz, and a shapely young woman periodically parading in front of the camera in a bathing suit. The production team extended For Men Only’s flagrantly macho subject matter behind the camera by passing around a bottle of scotch while filming the sample episode.

Hernon knew Scherick from previous jobs and slipped the sports packager a copy of Arledge’s production in hopes that he might find For Men Only suitable for ABC or have recommendations for where else they might shop it. Scherick had no interest in For Men Only, but he thought it showed some potential. “I recognized the talent in Roone as soon as I saw that kinescope,” he recalled. “It was another attempt to do a sports magazine show…. But it was done with nice flair and I liked its production.”⁵⁵ He consequently took a meeting with Arledge at SPI’s cramped and disheveled office, which Arledge later likened to a “bookie joint.” During the meeting Scherick explained his arrangement with ABC and their joint efforts to make a push in sports. He then tested Arledge’s sports knowledge by having the producer identify the athletes whose pictures hung crooked and dusty on the walls. Arledge knew all those Scherick asked him to name—and later expressed relief that Scherick did not quiz him on the several athletes he did not recognize. Scherick offered him a job on the spot to produce ABC’s NCAA football games for an annual salary of $10,000. Arledge started on May 1, 1960—just in time to begin preparations for college football.

Though his new position was hardly a step up, Arledge was elated to leave his days at Hi Mom! behind. “I finally got my fill of early morning hours and puppets and decided to live like a gentleman,” he wrote in a letter announcing his career change to the Leo Burnett advertising agency’s Hooper White. “As you can see from the letterhead I have left NBC to go work in the field I have always preferred.” He giddily concluded the note by gloating that his “first assignment is a rough one. I have to go to San Francisco this weekend to watch the Giants and Dodgers play baseball.” “It’s a pleasure,” Arledge wrote to another colleague, “not to have to get up at 5am and look at puppets.” The producer made clear that he was moving on to bigger and better things. But several of Arledge’s associates warned that working in sports would harm his professional credibility. “There’s nothing creative you can do in sports,” he later said in mocking imitation of this unsolicited advice.⁵⁶ But, as he demonstrated with For Men Only, Arledge viewed sports as part of a cultural tapestry that included music, fashion, and cuisine and that deserved the comparatively dignified treatment these topics commonly received.

In fact, Arledge’s main complaint with 1950s sports television was that it did not appreciate this richness. “When I got into it in 1960, televising sports amounted to going out on the road, opening three or four cameras, and trying not to blow any plays. They were barely documenting the game, but just the marvel of seeing a picture was enough to keep people glued to their sets.”⁵⁷ He noticed sports TV’s singular power after witnessing NBC’s telecast of the Baltimore Colts’ sudden death overtime victory over the New York Giants in the 1958 NFL Championship—a contest now commonly referred to as the “greatest game ever played”—enthrall a national audience. But Arledge thought these spectacles could be dramatized and personalized in ways that would increase their already vast viewership. They relied, he thought, too much on the events and not enough on the people, places, and circumstances that made them worth televising in the first place. For instance, Arledge recalled taking his wife to a Notre Dame–Army football game and being surprised to discover her engrossment. But he soon realized that she was not interested in the game so much as the marching band, cheerleaders, and fellow onlookers. This experience reminded Arledge of how Sports Illustrated’s photos and drawings highlighted sport’s emotion-laden details and atmosphere. He thought he could do the same with television. “The action on the field is only half of what’s going on,” he told TV Guide. “The peripheral action is just as important…. There’s something impersonal about 100,000 people, but if you can see the reaction of just one cheerleader when a touchdown is made or the look on the face of one fan when a player drops the ball, then you really know what’s going on.”⁵⁸ Arledge sought to emphasize the drama surrounding sporting events to amplify their spectacular status and to attract those, like his wife, who might not care about games but were interested in the stories and personalities they harbor.

While Arledge’s new position in sports may not have impressed his more elitist peers, Scherick’s decision to put the greenhorn producer in charge of ABC’s highest-profile sports account was a big gamble. Scherick admitted that Arledge’s “experience did not warrant” the position “at all.”⁵⁹ Gillette and the NCAA were fretful when word leaked in the trade press that Arledge—with whom neither entity was familiar—was slated to oversee the autumn games. To soothe their anxieties, Scherick said that he, not Arledge, would personally helm the telecasts—a promise he had no intention of keeping.

Because of the brouhaha surrounding Arledge’s hiring, Scherick asked his new employee to pen an internal memo explaining how he aimed to produce sports telecasts and how this approach would distinguish ABC’s college football coverage. The document—which Arledge claimed to have typed out over a couple of beers on a Sunday afternoon—became a de facto mission statement for ABC’s “up close and personal” aesthetic. In fact, the questionable new hire’s manifesto was eventually distributed in pamphlet form to all new ABC Sports employees. “Heretofore,” Arledge wrote, “television has done a remarkable job of bringing the game to the viewer—now we are going to take the viewer to the game.” He maintained that ABC would achieve this transportation by filtering NCAA football games through story lines that introduce the campuses where contests occur and include profiles of the otherwise faceless competitors. It would adopt a battery of innovations (handheld cameras, slow motion, split screens, crane shots, etc.) to display games and explain the feelings competitors bring to and experience during them. For instance, he argued that the handheld camera, which he referred to as a “creepy peepy” and borrowed from NBC’s coverage of the 1960 Republican National Convention, would “get the impact shots we cannot get from a fixed camera … all the excitement, wonder, jubilation and despair that make this America’s Number One sports spectacle and a human drama to match bullfights and heavyweight championships in intensity.” “In short,” Arledge wrote, “we are going to add show business to sports!...In addition to the natural suspense and excitement of the actual game, we have a supply of human drama that would make the producer of a dramatic show drool.” He closed his bombastic memorandum by promising that this style would install ABC as the leader in networks sports TV. “We will be setting the standards that everyone will be talking about and that others in the industry will spend years trying to equal.”⁶⁰ The proclamation was enough to convince Gillette and the NCAA that Scherick hired a producer with vision, if not experience.

Arledge insisted that his ornate method would amount to more than eye-catching bells and whistles. Rather, it would probe—and even create—sport’s meanings. “You’ve got to distinguish between a legitimate journalistic device and a gimmick,” he said.⁶¹ The producer prohibited ABC’s partners from approving announcers or censoring coverage, affordances other networks permitted that he contended would compromise ABC’s integrity. As Arledge asserted, “We have to insist in our reporting, just as our news departments do in covering a space shot, that we name our own reporters, that we cover what we want to cover, that leagues or organizations do not tell us how much we can cover or what we can cover.”⁶²

Arledge’s innovations prompted Film Comment’s Bruce Berman to name him the “D.W. Griffith of sports TV.” Along these lines, ESPN’s Ralph Wiley called Arledge “the Mark Twain of TV sports. The greatest storyteller that ever was, at least in this country. The author of the book from which all other American sports TV are [sic] made.”⁶³ The producer did not discourage the many designations of him as a savant. A ferociously competitive workaholic behind the scenes, Arledge affected a suave persona punctuated by the glamorous friends he kept, the pipes he smoked, and the pinky rings, safari jackets, and aviator glasses he donned. His carefully curated image—an embodiment of the postwar “good life” that Playboy curated for affluent male professionals—made it no surprise that this was the mind behind a repertoire eclectic enough to include Masterpiece, For Men Only, and NCAA football. When Arledge assumed control over ABC Sports in 1964, he had his name appended to the closing credits of all its productions—whether or not he directly participated in their creation. Like a signature on a painting, this uncommon sports television practice positioned ABC Sports’ programming as polished artworks comparable to films and situated Arledge as an auteur rather than a technician.

But Arledge was not completely alone in authoring many of the advances for which he is credited. In 1926, radio personality Graham McNamee encouraged sportscasters “make each of your listeners, though miles away from the sport, feel that he or she, too, is there with you in that press stand.”⁶⁴ Arledge’s stated desire to “take the viewer to the game” was therefore in place for decades before he entered the profession. The producer’s contemporaries were also using TV’s expanding palette of technological tools to develop similarly stylized approaches. Arledge hired director Andy Sidaris in 1960 to work the NCAA games after Sidaris sent him a letter of application proposing to use a combination of handheld cameras, halftime highlights, and shots of the atmosphere surrounding the games to create “unusual and exciting” telecasts that would appeal to both men and women.⁶⁵ The practices Sidaris proposed mirror those Arledge laid out in his memo. Sidaris—who wound up working under Arledge for the next twenty-five years—also has the dubious distinction of developing the “honey shot,” a titillating cut to an attractive female spectator designed to pique and sustain male viewers’ interest that is also often credited to Arledge. “I’d rather see a great looking body than a touchdown anytime,” Sidaris, a self-described “dirty old man” admitted. More specifically, Arledge took credit for pioneering the instant replay and slow motion, which NBC’s Tony Verna and ABC’s Robert Trachinger both claim to have conceived. “Roone is like the Russians,” Verna sniped. “He likes to say he invented the hot dog and motherhood.”⁶⁶ While Arledge never claimed to operate in a creative vacuum, he willingly allowed these myths to persist and clearly benefited from them.

Arledge paired his auteur persona with an evasive but looming management style. He was difficult to reach and sometimes would be inaccessible for days on end. Arledge did not like to deliver bad news and sometimes simply avoided conflicts in hopes that they would resolve without his intervention—a strategy that usually backfired. While generally evasive, he would reportedly give employees hours of undivided attention when they finally caught him. He also insisted on keeping a conspicuous red “Roone phone” at each production site that gave him a direct line to call in suggestions and, perhaps most important, to give the impression he was always scrutinizing his staff. “You knew dad was watching,” ABC director Roger Goodman noted.⁶⁷ Despite these unorthodox practices, Arledge’s staffers were fiercely loyal and many—such as Sidaris; directors Chet Forte and Doug Wilson; engineer Julius “Julie” Barnathan; and producers Chuck Howard, Dennis Lewin, Geoff Mason, and Jim Spence—remained in his employ for decades and became industry icons in their own right. Others, such as Dick Ebersol and Don Ohlmeyer, left ABC to become high-ranking media executives elsewhere after apprenticing under Arledge. As football player turned ABC Sports commentator Frank Gifford said, “Vince Lombardi and Roone Arledge are the two men I’ve known in my life who could make me go the extra yard.”⁶⁸ Like Lombardi, Arledge was a merciless competitor. “The man is totally unscrupulous. A jackal,” said a rival sports TV executive. “Beneath that Howdy Doody face lurks one of the most ruthless, opportunistic guys in the business.” Arledge, who enjoyed toying with competitors and had a reputation for driving up prices for properties that he did not even want, responded to such charges by matter-of-factly acknowledging, “If you don’t have the rights, you can’t do the show.”⁶⁹ The ends, the Machiavellian sports television executive calmly indicated, justified the means.

SHOW BUSINESS SPORTS

To lend credibility to ABC’s NCAA broadcasts, Scherick hired established sportscaster Curt Gowdy as play-by-play announcer and former University of Missouri and NFL quarterback Paul Christman as color commentator. Upon Arledge’s urging, Scherick also brought in Bob Neal to serve as network sports television’s first sideline reporter—another innovation that stuck. The night before ABC’s debut game, Arledge delivered a presentation that outlined the network’s production plan to his staff as well as to Gillette and NCAA representatives. An apparently inspired Moore felt moved to join in on the speech: “We do not want a football game like NBC. I want to see the good-looking gals! The chrysanthemums! The cheerleaders! The fans! The players sitting on the bench! I want to see the apprehension of the guy about to go into the game! I want to see the head coach pacing! I want you to capture the story of the game!” “I sure hope in the middle of all this stuff that you get around to showing some football, too,” interrupted Christman—a hardened industry veteran accustomed to more hemmed-in productions.⁷⁰

ABC’s first game featured Alabama and Georgia on September 17, 1960. Its coverage presented the game as a duel between Alabama’s legendary coach Paul “Bear” Bryant and Georgia’s flashy quarterback Fran Tarkenton. The narrative Arledge created of the wise veteran taking on and ultimately defeating the impetuous and gun-slinging young man reflected the popular westerns that ABC aired in prime time during the week. Arledge expanded on these cinematic practices later in the season by opening a Pittsburgh and Penn State game with a shot from a hospital rooftop near the University of Pittsburgh stadium. The aerial establishing shot emphasized the event’s grandeur in a way that evokes so many epic Hollywood films’ opening moments. ABC also strove to enhance coaches’ and players’ participation in its narratives by having them provide the now-standard halftime interviews—a request the NCAA initially denied. “Our coaches are just that,” huffed NCAA television committee chair Rix Yard, “not actors.”⁷¹ While the coaches may not have been actors, they were quickly becoming characters in the Saturday afternoon sporting dramas ABC built.

ABC repeatedly made clear its responsibility for this stylized coverage. “The greatest contribution we can make,” Arledge claimed, “is getting people aware of production.”⁷² ABC telecasts called deliberate attention to their inventively crafted status to ensure viewers knew they were not simply watching sports TV, but ABC productions. They would frequently showcase the network’s many camera operators and control room to emphasize ABC’s labors to offer a cutting-edge sports media experience. “It was important for people to understand that we’re trying to do things differently,” Lewin remarked. “If we had the latest slo-mo machine we would make a point of it, if we had the overhead crane we would tell people how high it was and show the guy dangling from it.”⁷³ ABC also made sure that its brand and trademarks were prominent throughout broadcasts. During the first season of its NCAA football package, the network agreed to plug UCLA’s marching band if it played songs and made halftime formations that celebrated ABC and its sponsors—a reflection of ABC’s promotion-friendly deals with Disney and Warner Brothers.⁷⁴

ABC purchased the contract to televise the upstart American Football League the same year it began broadcasting NCAA football. The AFL was formed by a cadre of millionaires who responded to the NFL’s continual refusals to grant them expansion franchises by starting their own league. The fledgling operation needed television’s revenues and exposure to get off the ground. As with Disneyland, ABC was the only network desperate enough to show interest in the new league. “They told me that if we would take them on they had a chance,” Moore noted.⁷⁵ After negotiating with the AFL owners, who had far less bargaining power than the network’s typical clients, ABC settled on a five-year deal for $2,125,000 annually, which provided the AFL with roughly $300,000 per game that aired. ABC tailored its weekly coverage to regional audiences by broadcasting one eastern and one western game. Moreover, the initial contract would escalate yearly only if the broadcasts met advertising targets, a condition that provided ABC with some insurance. The deal, according to sport historians David A. Klatell and Norman Marcus, gave ABC “the inexpensive programming it was seeking” and provided the AFL “a life-line, albeit a fragile one.” By 1966—and with the aid of ABC’s TV coverage—the AFL ate away at enough of its competitor’s market share to force a merger.⁷⁶

Because the AFL so urgently needed TV’s money and publicity, it was amenable to ABC’s efforts to combine coverage with “show business.” Variety called the AFL “the league that television built,” and Broadcasting reported that it was “organized with TV in mind.”⁷⁷ The league eliminated the fair catch rule and instituted a two-point conversion after touchdowns to make its games more exciting. It also built familiarity with its lesser-known players by affixing names to the backs of jerseys so TV viewers could identify them, an implementation ABC’s telecasts assisted by including graphics that introduced players and their statistics.

The AFL’s reliance on TV made it relatively untroubled by its games’ mostly low attendance. Rather than impose blackout policies to protect ticket sales, it wagered that ABC’s dynamic coverage might lure fans to the stadium. But Arledge still thought it important to give the impression that AFL matchups took place in vibrant atmospheres like Notre Dame and Alabama. He bunched the scattered smattering of fans who did show near midfield to “provide the appearance of a reasonably full house” and avoided shots that tracked the ball through the air after kickoffs and punts, “because to do so would reveal endless rows of empty seats.”⁷⁸ Instead, ABC cut directly from the kicker to the receiver or had camera operators pan along the ground. The network also took liberties to stage—and even restage—events. When a Dallas Texans game began before ABC’s cameras were rolling, the volatile Jack Lubell thundered onto the field screaming at the lead official: “You cocksucker, never again kick off until I tell you you can kick off! Do you understand?”⁷⁹ Commentator Jack Buck smoothly described Lubell’s disturbance as that of an irate fan who interrupted the game. The teams kicked off again, and ABC’s cameras captured the game in its entirety. This brand of sports television—which those in the industry sarcastically called “AFL coverage”—treated the players as actors and the fans as extras in a methodically staged drama based on reality, but not entirely beholden to it. The AFL’s agreeability toward television, according to Arledge, gave ABC “the freedom to try new things” and develop its style.⁸⁰

Variety expressed amazement at how quickly ABC’s AFL telecasts, which attracted roughly 80 percent of the ratings that CBS’s NFL broadcasts achieved, sold out their advertising spots.⁸¹ This success demonstrated that there was sufficient room on TV for the new league as well as for ABC’s approach to covering sports. Fans may not have been buying tickets, but they were watching the games—at least ABC’s version of them.

ABC’s American Football League coverage reversed the logic that traditionally guided sports television. Rather than telecasting sports because they were popular, ABC would make sports popular by telecasting them. ABC posted an advertisement in Broadcasting to showcase its ability to create such striking made-for-TV spectacles. “Every Sunday, come September,” it reads, “a conservatively estimated turnout of 15,000,000 fans will take their ABC-TV seats (on the 50-yard line) and follow the AFL’s exciting brand of football.” The ad reminds potential sponsors that “AFL football, with its razzle-dazzle, wide-open style of play that is made to order for home screens, delivers … responsive families in concentrated strength.”⁸² As ABC indicates, fan attendance at AFL games was irrelevant to their potential to deliver a reliable and diverse TV audience. It suggests the sport is better appreciated via ABC’s virtual seats than a stadium’s bleachers. The AFL’s dependence on ABC illustrated the beginnings of a broader industrial shift in which television became sports organizations’ primary revenue source and, as a result, increasingly dictated how events were staged in order to suit the medium’s creative and economic motives.

Shortly after ABC began its NCAA football and AFL packages, Broadcasting reported that the network was for the first time “on the CBS-TV and NBC-TV level in sports billing.” That same year, Variety declared ABC a “major sports network,” and the New York Times observed that the network’s heightened emphasis on sports “enhance[d] even more its varsity standing among the networks.” But because ABC still had no coverage in a significant portion of the United States, it remained a distant third. While acknowledging this disadvantage, ABC insisted that “where viewers have a choice of three networks they choose ABC-TV first.” It located its sports coverage as the key factor that attracted this relatively small but rising viewership.⁸³

Though ABC soon lost the contracts to air both NCAA football and the AFL, its football coverage was promising enough to compel the network to acquire SPI from Scherick in March 1961 for a tax-free transfer of ten thousand shares (a value of roughly $500,000 that transformed Scherick into the network’s second-largest individual stockholder) and to create ABC Sports, a programming banner and division that grew into a fully autonomous subsidiary by 1968.⁸⁴ While ABC’s early sports offerings privileged autumn, the network needed year-round content to solidify its identification with the genre. Wide World of Sports would extend the AFL package’s stylized efforts to draw viewers without featuring popular sports.