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TWO

ABC’s Wide World of Sports

“THE SEEDBED OF MODERN SPORTS

TELEVISION” AND THE COLD WAR

Wide World has given America a wider and more sophisticated view of the games people play than any other single mass media outlet.

JIM MCKAY, host, Wide World of Sports¹

Everything we do at ABC Sports evolves from the Wide World philosophy.

DENNIS LEWIN, coordinating producer,

Wide World of Sports²

“I TOLD ABC WE NEEDED A SHOW that could go everywhere on the weekends, and that’s how Wide World of Sports was born,” Edgar Scherick reflected some twenty-five years after the flagship ABC Sports program’s April 29, 1961, debut. “It wasn’t some brilliant stroke of insight that caused me to come up with the idea for the show, but more a matter of economic necessity.”³ Although professional baseball was—by leaps and bounds—the United States’ most popular spring and summer sport, Major League Baseball’s inflexible blackout rules eliminated telecasts of its games in 30 percent of the country, including the largest cities. “Rather than simply lose those markets,” Scherick noted, “we thought ‘Why not get something else in that spot, some sporting events that don’t necessarily get heavy television coverage?’”⁴

Wide World would focus on comparatively fringe sports that ABC could deliver to all affiliates no matter their location. The competitions’ generally marginal profile ensured inexpensive broadcast rights and permitted ABC to air featured events retrospectively without most viewers being aware of, or likely even caring about, their results. The ninety-minute weekly anthology’s mostly non-live format allowed ABC to schedule it in a consistent Saturday afternoon time slot that would strengthen the network’s growing association with sports and foster a regular viewership. As Arledge explained, “Our purpose was to build, in effect, a franchise not dependent upon one type of sport.”⁵ If a particular event became prohibitively expensive or did not draw, Wide World’s built-in variety allowed it to move on to something else.

ABC wagered that Wide World’s approach would compensate for its subject matter’s obscurity. “What we set out to do was get the audience involved emotionally,” Arledge said. “If they didn’t give a damn about the game, they might still enjoy the program.”⁶ Wide World fashioned this emotional involvement by combining the format of a sports show with a travelogue that emphasized the places where events occurred, the cultures surrounding them, and, above all, the people participating. It suggested featured events gained meaning from these geographic and humanistic circumstances. As the program’s famous introductory lines—which Arledge claimed to have scribbled on the back of an airline ticket while on one of his many transcontinental expeditions to secure broadcast rights—announce: “Spanning the globe to bring you the constant variety of sport. The thrill of victory. The agony of defeat. The human drama of athletic competition. This is ABC’s Wide World of Sports!”⁷ Wide World privileged this variety, thrill, agony, and drama over the competitions it showcased and used these qualities to attract interest in often unfamiliar sports.

Launched the same year as the Bay of Pigs invasion and the Berlin Wall’s construction, Wide World presented sporting competitions as activities that showcase, but ultimately transcend, geographic and cultural borders. “One of the original concepts of Wide World of Sports,” commented Tom Moore, “was to mirror sports as the international language whereby people all over the world could better know and understand each other.”⁸ The Cold War, which historian Ban Wang calls a “narrative or moral drama,” composed a familiar way to season many of Wide World’s obscurities with intrigue.⁹ As Arledge observed, “If you had an American and a Russian, it didn’t matter what they were doing, they could have been kayaking and people would watch it.”¹⁰ Cold War narratives propelled ABC Sports and Wide World’s entwined emergence and fashioned salable touchstones that the rapidly globalizing sports television industry used to dramatize international competitions.

Wide World established its popularity and renown by carrying a series of annual track meets between the United States and the Soviet Union from 1961 to 1965. The telecasts at once emphasized sport’s capacity to cultivate cross-cultural harmony and reassured the program’s American audience of the United States’ superiority over its Cold War nemesis. Just as important, they advertised ABC Sports as a respectable and even educational cultural institution that mediates this fellowship and vocalizes this supremacy.

THE WASTELAND AND THE COLD WAR

By the time Wide World premiered, television had eclipsed radio to become the United States’ most powerful mass medium—what media historian Thomas Doherty calls “the prized proscenium in American culture.”¹¹ It was simultaneously facing criticism for using public airwaves to peddle gratuitous fare that blatantly put profits over edification. FCC chair Newton Minow’s May 9, 1961, address to the National Association of Broadcasters (NAB)—delivered less than two weeks after Wide World’s debut—crystallized these plaints. “Your industry possesses the most powerful voice in America,” Minow observed. “It has an inescapable duty to make that voice ring with intelligence and with leadership.” He famously attacked the medium as a “vast wasteland” littered with “game shows, formula comedies about totally unbelievable families, blood and thunder, mayhem, violence, sadism, murder, western bad men, western good men, private eyes, gangsters, more violence, and cartoons…. And most of all, boredom.” The resolute FCC chair cautioned that station license “renewal will not be pro forma in the future.”¹² Minow caused such debate that the Associated Press annual poll of editors voted him 1961’s top newsmaker in the field of entertainment.

Critics identified ABC as a leading perpetrator of television’s apparent degradation. The network’s youth-oriented counterprogramming compelled it to continue producing westerns and increasingly violent crime dramas like The Naked City (1958–63) and The Untouchables (1959–63) to attract and retain viewers. A December 1961 episode of ABC’s short-lived series Bus Stop (1961–62), an adaptation of a William Inge play centered on the travelers who pass through the fictional town of Sunrise, Colorado, became a lightning rod for Minowesque charges against TV. Titled “A Lion Walks among Us,” the episode starred teen idol Fabian and was directed by future “New Hollywood” auteur Robert Altman. Fabian played Luke Freeman, a handsome and charming sociopath who makes a pass at the woman who generously gives him a ride from the program’s eponymous bus stop into Sunrise. After the woman rebukes his advances and kicks him out of her car, Freeman robs and murders an elderly shopkeeper. The killer casually sings the macabre ditty “I Didn’t Hear Nobody Pray” while exiting the store and continues to croon remorselessly while in jail awaiting trial. During the eventual hearing, Freeman’s defense attorney discredits the testimony of the woman who gave Freeman a ride into town—who is also the principal witness against him and, coincidentally, the prosecuting attorney’s wife—on account of her alcoholism and Freeman’s claim that it was she, in fact, who attempted to seduce him. As a result, the young murderer is exonerated. The homicidal teen proceeds to kill his lawyer after the decidedly proficient attorney requests payment. On his way out of town, the disgraced woman again picks Freeman up and suggests they run away together. Instead, she drives off a cliff and kills them both. The unnerving episode closes biblically with 1 Peter 5:8 emblazoned on the screen: “Be sober, be vigilant. Because your adversary the devil, as a roaring lion, walketh about, seeking whom he may devour.”

Two of Bus Stop’s sponsors, the Singer Sewing Machine Company and Brown & Williamson Tobacco, removed their advertisements from the bleak episode, and twenty-five ABC affiliates declined to clear it. Based on these concerns, the NAB Code Committee asked to prescreen the program—a request Ollie Treyz declined. The controversy provided “A Lion Walks among Us” with free publicity that got many to watch just to see what all the fuss was about.

New York Times media critic Jack Gould panned “A Lion Walks among Us” as “a commercial exploitation of sensationalism and savagery, a depiction of the ugliness of man to furnish cheap thrills for the large numbers of young people known to tune in Bus Stop and Fabian.” The Chicago Tribune’s Larry Wolters added that “TV like this is a stimulant to crime and has no place in the living room,” and the Los Angeles Times’ Cecil Smith equated the program to “the worst in drug store fiction.”¹³ While Minow cited the twenty-five ABC affiliates’ refusal to clear “A Lion Walks among Us” as a positive indication that stations were slowly improving standards, ABC’s insistence on airing the program suggested “the Network of the Young” was uninterested in such high-minded pivots. “ABC for the last several years has been skirting the edge of acceptable programming in its concentration on so-called action drama,” Gould declared. “Now it has gone over the line.”¹⁴

Beyond the critics, “A Lion Walks among Us” garnered the attention of the Senate Juvenile Delinquency Subcommittee chaired by Connecticut senator Thomas J. Dodd. The committee explored the link between violent media—especially TV—and youth crime. Dodd’s group located ABC as a principal cause of this epidemic. It claimed that Treyz, as well as CBS president James T. Aubrey and NBC head Robert E. Kinter—both of whom had previously worked at ABC—“learned to ‘entice’ an audience with crime and sex at the same school, ABC.” The committee specifically accused ABC’s opportunistic counterprogramming of fostering an industrial culture that would stop at nothing to secure an audience. Counterprogramming, Dodd charged, “is not a philosophy, but a hackneyed formula worn out by the pulp magazines years ago. The high regard it is given by the industry reflects a deep lack of imagination, but a deeper lack of responsibility.”¹⁵ The wave of progressively graphic programming against which the committee railed came to be known as the “Treyz trend” because of ABC’s identification with it. Treyz wound up losing his job—a position Moore overtook—in 1962 partly because of the negative reaction Bus Stop provoked. These critiques suggested ABC stood among the vast wasteland’s most desolate provinces.

Networks and affiliates responded to widespread attacks against television’s quality—and threats to cancel licenses—by investing in and emphasizing documentary, a genre commonly identified as exceptionally thoughtful and educational.¹⁶ Even before Minow’s speech, ABC used documentary to balance its less respectable properties. In particular, Bell & Howell Close Up! (1960–63) aired a range of celebrated films, including several Drew Associates “direct cinema” productions that included the handheld camera work and synchronized sound that ABC Sports adopted and refined. Treyz, in fact, defended himself against those who decried the “Treyz trend” by arguing that documentary played as big a role on ABC as the network’s youthful and violent content.¹⁷

A key way these network documentaries established interest was by engaging Cold War themes and promoting the United States’ role in spreading democracy amid the proliferation of communism. As Michael Curtin observes, “This flourishing of documentary activity was part of an ambitious effort to awaken the public to its ‘global responsibilities’ and thereby consolidate popular support for decisive action overseas.”¹⁸ Many of the documentaries during Close Up’s first two seasons foregrounded foreign policy and warned against the perils of communism with titles like Yanki No! (1960), Ninety Miles to Communism (1961), Our Durable Diplomats (1961), and The Remarkable Comrades (1961). They demonstrated television’s civic utility by tapping into Cold War anxieties and suggesting the medium, as well as the networks that filled it with content, “had an important role to play in the global struggle against communism.”¹⁹ Wide World of Sports enriched ABC’s strategic involvement with documentary and Cold War nationalism.

SILK PURSES OUT OF SOW’S EARS

“I thought it was the screwiest idea I’d ever heard,” admitted Goldenson of his initial reaction to Scherick and Arledge’s pitch to develop Wide World.²⁰ Though perhaps screwy, Wide World—originally titled World of Sports—was a low-risk experiment that would compose a serviceable twenty-week summer replacement to fill weekend hours during the sports calendar’s slowest season. The program commanded relatively few resources and attracted advertisers simply because of its sporting focus. But Wide World was not unprecedented. CBS launched the similar Sunday afternoon sports anthology CBS Sports Spectacular in 1960. Moreover, the new ABC program borrowed its title from established media brands that included NBC’s Wide, Wide World (1955–58) documentary travelogue program and Sports Illustrated’s “Wonderful World of Sport” column. Ever the salesman, Scherick tacked ABC onto the program’s name so that ABC’s Wide World of Sports would sell the network every time its title was uttered.

Neither Scherick nor Arledge knew precisely which events Wide World would cover, but only that they needed to be affordable and have no blackout policies. ABC did not have a research library at the time, but Arledge had kept the keys to NBC’s reference collection, which was located on the same floor as his old office. Since he was still familiar to his former colleagues, Arledge sent production assistant Chuck Howard to use the rival network’s facilities to research potential contracts. A legal pad in hand, Howard scoured rolls of microfilm to create a compendium of events to which Arledge could start purchasing rights, such as the Frontier Days Rodeo in Cheyenne, Wyoming, and the Hydroplane Championships in Seattle. The only parameter they initially set—one that quickly fell by the wayside—was that the events had to be competitions with winners and losers rather than exhibitions. As the Philadelphia Inquirer’s Lee Winfrey put it, “Arledge and ABC were forced to the task of making silk purses out of the sow’s ears of sports.”²¹

Wide World’s first contract gave it rights to Amateur Athletic Union (AAU) competitions. Though hardly a marquee sports organization, the AAU was a recognizable institution with an identity steeped in patriotism and amateurism. While Scherick typically served as ABC Sports’ main negotiator, he sent Arledge to deal with the AAU because he suspected the organization was anti-Semitic. “The AAU had all the power in amateur sports back then,” he recalled, “and I figured we could get in on the ground floor on televising some of their events. But I’m a Jew, and, since there was still a great deal of prejudice at the time and since Arledge is a Gentile, I sent him in to do that negotiating.”²² Arledge struck a $50,000 deal for one year of the AAU’s exclusive TV rights. Wide World devoted seven of its first season’s twenty episodes in whole or part to AAU events and reinforced the alliance with its first client by adopting a logo that resembled the AAU shield (see appendix 1).

Even though it secured a promising menu of content, Treyz would not greenlight Wide World unless it presold 50 percent of its advertising spots—a policy the network enforced for most new programs at the time. If Wide World did not sell these spots by the close of business on March 31, 1961—less than a month before its scheduled premiere—Treyz would kill it. Gillette had already reserved one-quarter of Wide World’s rights, but the offbeat show was having a difficult time unloading the rest. ABC eventually found a sponsor not because of Wide World’s attractiveness but because of NCAA football’s appeal. The network’s college football coverage lost a quarter of its sponsorship after L&M Cigarettes changed ad agencies and moved away from sports. Though several advertisers were interested in the NCAA package, Scherick tied the advertising space remaining on its NCAA coverage to a quarter sponsorship of Wide World—which was considerably less costly than college football—to get the program on the air. Brown & Williamson, a stalwart of sports marketing at the time, offered to take one-eighth of the Wide World rights to get on ABC’s NCAA football package. Even with Treyz’s deadline fast approaching, Scherick refused and gambled that Wide World could find a sponsor to take the full quarter. Arledge readied himself for the disappointment of losing the show that would so neatly display his approach to sports TV, but Scherick remained hopeful. Mere minutes before Treyz’s 5:00 p.m. deadline, R.J. Reynolds begrudgingly agreed to take the Wide World spots if it was the only way to be a part of the NCAA broadcasts.²³

Wide World had content and sponsors, but no host. Scherick and Arledge sought a recognizable figure with the dexterity to handle the program’s diversity and the creativity to transform its little-known events into captivating stories. They hired the avuncular and sincere Jim McKay, who, like Arledge, was a well-read Renaissance man whose sprawling interests drove him to pursue a career in media. Born James McManus, the native Philadelphian joined the Baltimore Sun after studying journalism at Baltimore’s Loyola College—where he edited the school’s paper and was class president—and serving as captain of a navy minesweeper that escorted convoys between Trinidad and Brazil during World War II. Though sports were McManus’s main passion, he began his career as a police reporter and shortly thereafter transitioned into a television correspondent for a station the Sun owned. McManus, in fact, was the first person ever seen on Baltimore TV when he announced an October 1947 horse race from the city’s Pimlico racetrack—a production that local tastemaker H.L. Mencken panned as “a very poor show.” “I’d not give ten cents for an hour of such entertainment, even if it showed a massacre,” Mencken grumbled in his diary.²⁴ Despite Mencken’s grievances, McManus parlayed this initial assignment into a position hosting the three-hour weekday afternoon program National Sports Parade, a horse racing–focused rundown of sports news and analysis that McManus would occasionally sprinkle with a song during slow news days. He also emceed a range of daytime programming that the station used to fill out its schedule, including Traffic Court, The Johns Hopkins Science Review, Know Your Sunpapers Route Owner, and Teenage Forum.

In 1950, New York City’s WCBS-TV took notice of and hired away the affable and multitalented TV reporter to host a daytime talk and variety program titled The Real McKay. At the time, networks owned names for their talent—a practice that allowed radio programs to continue using a familiar appellation after those who adopted the title left. CBS carried this practice over into TV and owned the name Jim McKay. Producers liked The Real McKay’s resemblance to “The Real McCoy” and asked McManus to use the snappier moniker, which became his permanent professional handle. The Real McKay, according to Variety, supplied a “homey atmosphere” that “makes for relaxed and pleasant viewing.”²⁵ The program’s introductory song emphasized its lighthearted focus: “Brighten your day with The Real McKay, here’s a show just meant for you. / We’re gonna chase all your blues away. Gonna make you feel just like The Real McKay.” The show featured interviews, banter among McKay and his cohosts, and musical numbers. McKay sang “It Had to Be You” during The Real McKay’s premiere.

As in Baltimore, McKay was a utility player for CBS during The Real McKay’s short run and after its 1951 cancellation. Most notably, he served as a reporter for CBS’s Morning Show opposite Walter Cronkite. He also moderated a public affairs program titled Youth Takes a Stand (1954–55), manned the quiz show Make the Connection (1955), and served as a reporter on the courtroom drama The Verdict Is Yours from 1957 until it relocated to Los Angeles and left him behind in 1960. Sports assignments were sprinkled throughout his duties, such as a short evening report called Sports Spot, horse races, the Little League World Series, and radio commentary on the 1956 Melbourne Olympics. McKay’s most prominent early moment with CBS was securing an interview with English track star Roger Bannister for The Morning Show as the runner arrived unannounced in New York City just days after becoming the first person to clock a mile in under four minutes. Bannister was set to appear on the CBS game show I’ve Got a Secret later in the day. Despite resistance from the game show’s producers, McKay intercepted the runner at the airport and conducted a live interview (without divulging the impending game show appearance). As it turned out, Bannister, a clean-living physician, refused to appear on I’ve Got a Secret after learning that a cigarette company sponsored it. McKay’s furtive interview turned out to be the only footage of Bannister CBS was able to air.

McKay also freelanced for Sports Programs Inc.’s first production, the 1956 opening of Long Island’s Roosevelt Raceway Harness Track. McKay’s work so impressed Scherick that the SPI owner promised to find him a sports program that would complement his storytelling prowess and gentlemanly demeanor: “I used to say to him, ‘Jim, sit tight. I’m gonna get a literate sports show for you.’” McKay, as Scherick identified, possessed the ability to situate sport within its cultural contexts that would come in handy when he joined ABC Sports. “I’m as interested in the front page as I am in the sports page,” he told Sports Illustrated. Incidentally, McKay submitted a proposal to Sports Illustrated shortly after the magazine’s 1954 launch to create and host a program like Wide World.²⁶

McKay’s most visible opportunity at CBS came in 1960 when the network assigned him to work its coverage of the Squaw Valley Winter Olympic Games, much of which aired prerecorded in prime time. The overworked television reporter, however, suffered a nervous breakdown and was forced to take a hiatus. Worried he might be fired if CBS discovered his malady involved mental health—still very much stigmatized at the time—McKay told the network he had pneumonia. “The [CBS] studio and New York itself began to feel like my enemies,” he recollected. “Most of the time, all I could do was cry, for no apparent reason.”²⁷ Sean McManus—McKay’s son who eventually became president of CBS Sports—recalls that his father somberly puttered around the house and built model ships like those he once captained to pass the time during this difficult stretch.²⁸ McKay began to see a therapist and reorient. But he missed the Winter Olympics and feared that he may have ruined his career until CBS sports director Bill MacPhail asked him to participate in the network’s coverage of the Rome Summer Olympics later that year. McKay posted up in a rented studio in Grand Central Terminal and reported on taped footage of events immediately after it arrived by jet from Italy.

Though his commentary on the Rome Olympics was successful, McKay worked only occasionally for CBS after The Verdict Is Yours left New York. He did nothing for the network, in fact, between the Olympics and the April 1961 Master’s Golf Tournament. Meanwhile, Arledge and Scherick were scrambling to find a host for their recently approved program. Despite Scherick’s long-standing affinity for McKay, the CBS sportscaster was not ABC’s first choice. The network originally sought a better-known personality who would lend star power to the quirky program, such as Curt Gowdy or Chris Schenkel (both of whom eventually worked for ABC Sports). But Arledge noted that “most of the top announcers were tied up with baseball” during the spring.²⁹ Arledge phoned McKay with an offer while he was in Augusta, Georgia, covering the Master’s. He explained that Wide World was a summer replacement that “would involve a fair amount of travel”—a description both Arledge and McKay later laughingly dismissed as a gross understatement. Given that he had no other prospects lined up, McKay was inclined to accept Arledge’s offer. But he wanted to consult his wife, Margaret—also a respected journalist whom he met at the Sun—before making a commitment. Arledge, however, insisted that ABC needed an immediate answer. “We’re having a press conference in a half an hour to announce who the host of the show is gonna be,” he told McKay, “and if it’s gonna be you we gotta have a deal.”³⁰ McKay asked for $1,000 per show plus expenses. Arledge—who was not privy to McKay’s dire job prospects and limited negotiating leverage—agreed, hung up, and began publicizing him as the program’s host. “He was more than an announcer,” Howard said of McKay. “He was articulate; he wrote his own stuff. Plus, he was available.”³¹

McKay extensively researched the sport he would be covering and the place where he would travel for each Wide World installment. As Sean McManus recalled, “The first thing he’d do would be to go to the living room and pull out the Encyclopedia Britannica and read about the country he was going to. Then we’d go to the Westport [Connecticut] Public Library, take out books on the country and the sport and study some more.” McKay created files on different sports and locations that he used throughout his career to pepper his commentary with historical and cultural factoids. “It was an educational process for him,” Sean McManus explains of his father, “one that he took really seriously because he believed his role was more than a sports commentator, it was a travel guide.”³² McKay, as Sports Illustrated’s William Taaffe put it, became “a homeroom teacher for a nation of eager learners,” thoughtfully mediating their televised encounters with unfamiliar lands and peoples. The Los Angeles Times called McKay the “Marco Polo of sports” because of his endless journeys.³³ But his first trip for Wide World—just three weeks after joining ABC Sports—was back to his hometown for the University of Pennsylvania relay races.

Immediately capitalizing on its AAU contract, Wide World’s debut featured live coverage of the Penn relays and the Drake University relays in Des Moines, Iowa. McKay reported from Philadelphia alongside New York Herald track reporter Jesse Abramson and former Olympic pole vaulter Bob Richards, while Wide World correspondents Bill Flemming and Jim Simpson were on the scene in Des Moines. The inaugural broadcast was forced to be slightly less dynamic than Arledge would have preferred after a Philadelphia rainstorm damaged three of ABC’s six cameras and waterlogged parts of the track. ABC built excitement by alternating between the two races. Segments focusing on the Penn relays ended by reminding viewers of an exciting upcoming event in Philadelphia just before cutting to Drake, and vice versa. This technique strove to create a lively pace and keep viewers for the program’s duration. Though Wide World’s maiden voyage survived the rainfall, the program attracted little attention—positive or negative.

Wide World expanded on this tame debut with more adventurous sports like auto racing, demolition derbies, barrel jumping, and surfing—seemingly anything to which it could acquire reasonable rights. It also regularly broadcast women’s sports during a time when they were rarely on national TV outside of the Olympics, roller derby, and novelty wrestling matches. “We did women’s sports on a large scale right from the beginning,” McKay bragged.³⁴ But Wide World’s coverage of women’s athletics—most of which were initially AAU events—was first and foremost a consequence of its need for affordable content and paled in comparison to the frequency with which it aired men’s sports. Moreover, the women’s competitions it did feature overwhelmingly privileged stereotypically feminine sports like figure skating, gymnastics, and diving that did not upset gender norms. While Wide World lent women’s sports visibility, it also tacitly reinforced assumptions regarding which types of women’s sporting activities merited attention.

Arledge pointed out that Wide World’s mostly non-live format demanded heightened stylization. “There’s just no comparison in the built-in excitement and tension of an event that is live, no matter who wins, because you just don’t know what’s going to happen,” he said. “If the results are known … then showmanship and creative ability is much more important.”³⁵ Wide World highlighted its innovations to underscore the effort it put into production, such as the underwater camera it used to cover the 1961 AAU men’s swimming and diving championships. The program introduced camera operator Dale Barringer and transformed his assignment into a subplot for the event coverage. “And here, our underwater cameraman Dale Barringer getting ready to go down by the deep six,” McKay commented as Barringer collected his camera—an enormous cylindrical unit with waterproof casing and Plexiglas plates at either end—and disappeared below the surface. “There’s his camera, a long metal object that was specially designed and perfected this week by Ralph Elmore, one of our engineers.” As the broadcast cut from a bird’s-eye view of the race to Barringer’s camera, McKay announced, “That’s the way it looks to frogman Dale Barringer on the bottom of the pool.”³⁶ Similarly, the final episode of Wide World’s inaugural year covered a preseason AFL match between the Buffalo Bills and the San Diego Chargers. Reflecting CBS’s renowned documentary The Violent World of Sam Huff (1960), Wide World increased the number of cameras beyond what was typically used for football broadcasts and placed wireless microphones inside several players’ pads to provide an inside view of the already TV-friendly league’s game. The segment, which publicized ABC’s coverage of the upcoming AFL season, paid nearly as much attention to the network’s cameras and microphones as it did to the featured event.³⁷

Wide World’s nomadic format added mystique to its technological prowess. It used the locations it visited—and the cultures that mark them—as characters that further dramatize and personalize events. The 1961 Le Mans auto race, for example, was not only an exciting competition but a glimpse into a quaint French community that is annually transformed by an exhilarating twenty-four-hour competition. “The first time we did the Grand Prix road race in Le Mans,” Arledge noted, “we tried to handle it like Moby Dick, going for more than a race, for the soul of Le Mans. We filmed at great length a Mass that a priest said right on the course. We dramatized the prospect of death and the grueling effects of the race.”³⁸ Similarly, Wide World presented the 1962 Southern 500 in Darlington, South Carolina, as a folksy affair that occurs in a “small town … a long way from any place.” It characterized the race as “the southern version of the station wagon tailgate of the Ivy Leagues” that turns the isolated region into a festive tourist destination for a weekend. The program would also sometimes employ the far-off locations and marginal sports to comic effect, as when McKay cheerily opened coverage of the World Lumberjack Championships in Hayward, Wisconsin, while balancing on a floating log (which ABC Sports crew members stabilized off camera) like a competitive logroller.

Though often playful, Wide World strove to treat its subject matter with dignity—a practice it developed after some regretful slipups. McKay recalled a case in which he treated a two-time demolition derby winner sarcastically during a postevent interview. “Well, Mr. Lucky,” McKay said, “how do you account for winning the World Championship two years in a row?” The driver earnestly attributed his success to religious faith. “I had committed an unforgivable bit of gaucherie,” McKay repentantly admitted, “looking down on this man in a condescending manner during what he considered the greatest moment of his life.” “We don’t go to an event in order to be big city sophisticates,” Arledge added.³⁹ Wide World suggested that although not all cultures partake in the same sports, these varied activities hold the same significance for those who participate in them. In doing so, the educational show nurtured deeper understanding of and identification with people who—like the games they play—otherwise might seem odd.

Wide World basked in its commitment to sport’s “constant variety”—however esoteric—in a tongue-in-cheek advertisement it placed in Variety: “If centaur racing should ever be revived in Greece, you’ll see it on ABC television.”⁴⁰ Like many news programs, it incorporated a flattened globe into its logo to assert that nothing stood beyond its ambit. It also suggested a spirit of humanism informed its globe-trotting. As Arledge explained, “If we could present these great spectacles to the American people in a meaningful way, we could provide attractive television entertainment, broaden the knowledge and perspective of the viewer, and maybe even make an occasional contribution to understanding among people of the world.”⁴¹ Though Wide World cast its cosmopolitanism as apolitical, the program was made from an unmistakably American point of view and built an audience through engaging dominant attitudes about the United States’ place in the world during the Cold War. The annual US-Soviet track and field competitions, which Arledge called the “gem” of Wide World’s agreement with the AAU, embodied this tension.⁴²

SPANNING THE IRON CURTAIN

The AAU-sponsored track meets began in 1958 as the product of the US-USSR Exchange Agreement signed by Soviet ambassador Georgi Zarubin and William S.B. Lacy, President Dwight D. Eisenhower’s special assistant on East-West exchanges. The pact instituted bilateral interactions spanning science, industry, art, and athletics.⁴³ Sport historian Joseph M. Turrini claims the meets, which alternated between the United States and the Soviet Union and ran intermittently through 1985, composed “the most important and visible of the Cold War sport competitions that emerged in the late 1950s and 1960s” aside from the Olympics.⁴⁴ Unlike the Olympics, which include dozens of competing countries, the meets “provided a direct and undiluted competition between the two countries that mirrored the bipolar perspective that pervaded the Cold War period.”⁴⁵

The meets also furnished a way for the United States to combat Soviet critiques that used America’s endemic racial discrimination to undermine the country’s democratic appeals. A National Security Council task force on international communism surmised that the United States could offset this propaganda by allowing nonwhites to represent it on the international stage. “We should make more extensive use of nonwhite American citizens,” the group advised; “outstanding Negroes in all fields should be appealed to in terms of the higher patriotism to act as our representatives.”⁴⁶ The coed events would also contrast Soviet charges that US women were unfairly fettered to the domestic sphere.

The US Information Agency (USIA) saw US-produced global TV broadcasts as potentially improving America’s international repute.⁴⁷ Wide World’s track meet coverage contributed to these efforts. But ABC also knew the competitions’ resonance with Cold War tensions would draw an unusually broad audience to the fledgling program. It leveraged the annual events’ narrative potential to transform them into “the cornerstone of televised track in the United States.”⁴⁸

Wide World billed the 1961 US-USSR track meet from Moscow’s Lenin Stadium as the peak of its first season and the culmination of three previous track meets it had featured up to that point. McKay opened the program by mentioning the broadcast’s position as the first US-made sports TV production from the Soviet Union: “For the first time, an American television network has brought its own television cameras into the Soviet Union. The occasion: classic track and field competition between the United States and Russia.” ABC transported fifty staff and twenty tons of equipment—including two Ampex videotape machines, five camera units, and a twenty-five-hundred-watt portable generator—to document the two-day event and edit it down to ninety minutes. It also spent $100,000 on the broadcast, an increase of about $60,000 over the typical cost of its international productions, to set the meet apart.⁴⁹

“In those days,” Arledge reminisced in a documentary commemorating Wide World’s fortieth anniversary, “you didn’t fly into the Soviet Union with 20 tons of equipment and expect a friendly greeting. Lenin Stadium and the Soviet Union in 1961 was the inner center of the enemy.” ABC’s crew and equipment were almost unable to gain entry into Russia. The Russians were so slow to approve the network’s travel that Arledge posted a staff member at the USSR’s Washington, DC, embassy to wait for the decision and pressure the Russians to make it. When word did not come, Arledge gambled by sending the program’s personnel and gear to Amsterdam, from where they would be able to arrive in Moscow quickly once the approval was levied, which eventually happened just in time to cover the meet.

McKay described invasive security protocols once they did get to Moscow and portrayed the city as a drab place devoid of the liveliness one might expect from a major international metropolis.⁵⁰ The ABC crew deplaned in an empty hangar and was transported into Moscow proper by army trucks. While driving into the city, they passed a World War II tank trap left intact to signal how close Nazi forces advanced toward Moscow before the Russian military defeated the invaders. In no uncertain terms, the monument signaled the communist center’s unfriendliness to outsiders—a sentiment that was not lost on the ABC Sports crew. McKay likened their hotel—where authorities assigned him, Arledge, and another producer to share a single room—to “a great house that had been inherited by someone who didn’t have the funds to keep it up.”⁵¹ Their bags arrived separately after being searched, and McKay suspected the KGB had tampered with his shoes, which mysteriously fell apart as he was leaving town. These portrayals paint Moscow as a peculiar and hostile locale—certainly the most foreign of the faraway locations Wide World had visited. “The only real signs of life and enthusiasm we found on that trip to Moscow were at the scenes of the event,” McKay remembered.⁵² He observed that Russian authorities went to great lengths to make Lenin Stadium appear state of the art and well maintained—in contrast to the otherwise unkempt city—since it would be on display for a US audience.

Capitalizing on this Cold War unease, ABC promoted the broadcast as both a political and a technological feat. “Russia & U.S. thaw down to a simple track,” read an advertisement the network placed in the New York Times. “The first sports event ever to eventuate from Moscow over Yankee teevee!” (figure 1).⁵³

FIGURE 1. This New York Times advertisement for ABC’s coverage of the 1961 US-USSR track meet emphasizes the Cold War tensions that informed the event.

McKay set the scene at Lenin Stadium by explaining the differences that separate how Soviet and US fans consume sport. “Inside are more than 70,000,” he announced. “Most of them paid, some of them, however, are here on an incentive basis. They put out a little more in their factory or their farm this week, and thereby got free tickets.” But the remainder of ABC’s presentation stressed sport’s potential to generate unity amid antagonistic dissimilarity. As is customary at international sporting events, the teams entered the stadium side by side before their respective national anthems played. To accent this pageantry’s collaborative overtones, ABC camera operator Mike Freedman lay on the field with a “creepy peepy” to showcase the US and Soviet teams passing overhead. The low-angle shot, which framed the athletes against the sky, emphasized the track meet’s grandeur and echoed the diplomatic assurances that had been made in ABC’s ad in the New York Times.

Complementing Freedman’s camera work, ABC recast various potential points of discord as opportunities for cross-cultural affinity. As the weather soured toward the end of the meet, McKay cheerily noted the frequency with which US events are similarly disrupted. “What started out as a beautiful day with the temperature at 85 [degrees Fahrenheit] has turned into a real summer Sunday evening thunderstorm. It happens halfway around the world just like it does in Kansas and Missouri,” he said along with shots of rain-soaked Russian spectators and ABC’s tarp-covered equipment. The instance could easily have been used to paint Moscow and Lenin Stadium in an unfriendly light. Rather, ABC employed it to stress the similarities that united Americans and Russians. The Soviet fans may procure their tickets differently, but they ultimately display the same passion for their games and face the same obstacles common in Middle America.

ABC’s telecast deliberately elided several disagreements surrounding the competition. The AAU requested that the men’s and women’s events be scored separately—as is customary in America. The Soviets, however, wanted the scores combined—as is routine in Russia. Possessing a superior men’s team, the United States would win the men’s and lose the women’s meet with divided scoring. However, the Soviet women’s team was so dominant—a point Western commentators often used to attack communism’s deleteriously hardening impact on Russian women—that it would give the USSR an overall victory were the scores combined. Though the meet did officially score the men’s and women’s teams separately—ensuring victory for the American men and the Russian women—several Soviet newspapers persisted in reporting an overall USSR victory, which irked many US-based commentators and struck them as typical of the country’s tendency to defame their homeland.⁵⁴ “I realized,” Arledge said of the scoring quarrel, “I was experiencing the Cold War in microcosm, and that this kind of obdurate, uncompromising dispute, in which both sides in their own environment were right, characterized what went on in much more important spheres.”⁵⁵ While the US and Soviet officials quibbled about how the event would be scored, ABC focused on the meet’s capacity to transcend such comparatively petty trifles.

Instead, Wide World joined in the AAU’s defense against Soviet critiques of US racism and gender relations by focusing in large part on sprinter Wilma Rudolph—already a star who earned a gold medal in the 1960 Rome Olympics—and broad jumper Ralph Boston. It had featured Rudolph and Boston, both of whom attended the track and field powerhouse Tennessee State University, as part of its coverage of the AAU’s National Track and Field Championships in New York City earlier in the season. Both African American athletes delivered standout performances for the US team in Moscow: Rudolph tied her hundred-meter world record time of 11.3 seconds to win the event, and Boston set a new record with his jump of 27 feet, 1¾ inches. The coverage depicted them as national heroes during a time when the overall representation of African Americans on network TV was still limited. Its celebratory representations, however, unsurprisingly failed to mention the basic civil liberties these athletic stars were still denied in the country they represented so well. Wide World thus paired its depictions of cross-cultural unity with a similarly oversimplified vision of domestic harmony.

Though ABC isolated African Americans as the United States’ best performers, it ultimately positioned Russian high jumper Valery Brumel’s record-breaking victory over the United States’ John Thomas—another African American and a previous record holder—as the show’s climax. Brumel’s jump occurred just two months after the Soviet space program made cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin the first human to orbit Earth, a signal moment in the US-Soviet “space race” that suggested the USSR held a decisive edge. Wide World explained Brumel’s record—which he accomplished in dramatic fashion on his final attempt as the rain poured—by comparing it to Gagarin’s feat. “Valery Brumel has set a new world’s record in the high jump,” McKay noted as ABC’s cameras cut to cheering Russian fans. “At this moment,” McKay continued, “Brumel rivals Yuri Gagarin as a national hero in the Soviet Union.” Brumel’s jump was indeed a point of immense national pride that convinced the Soviet government to give him the Merited Master of Sport Award—the nation’s highest sports honor. McKay’s commentary characterized Brumel’s jump as an extension and confirmation of the USSR’s rising superiority in the space race.

But Wide World also reassured its audience against such Cold War anxieties by appealing to ABC Sports’ technological sophistication. Up to this point in Wide World’s inaugural year, ABC used mostly locally sourced equipment and labor when producing programming abroad. It insisted, however, on transporting its own equipment to Moscow—a decision that suggested Russia did not possess the resources and expertise to create, or even assist the creation of, a production of ABC Sports’ caliber. For instance, the Russians did not have Ampex videotape recorders, which display the television video feed in a monitor as content is shot on location. Arledge claimed the Ampex Company was so worried that the Russians would steal the technology that it would only allow ABC to bring the machines if the network vowed to lock its recording heads in the US embassy’s safe each evening.⁵⁶

McKay notes that when ABC set up the machines in the bowels of Lenin Stadium, “several thousand” spectators gathered to marvel at the technology rather than watch the live event.⁵⁷ “For the Russians, who had no video machines,” Arledge claimed of the awestruck spectators, “it was as if we’d invented fire.”⁵⁸ McKay’s and Arledge’s comments represent the Russians as a primitive bunch when it comes to telecommunications and entertainment. Indeed, McKay claimed the Russian television crews were insecure about their deficiencies and tried to copy ABC’s comparatively advanced practices. “Our every move was monitored very carefully,” he wrote. “Roone requested a camera position at field level to get tight close-ups…. After a long wait, the cameras were okayed, but when we arrived the next day, Soviet cameras were right beside ours.”⁵⁹ While the US space program may have been lagging, Wide World demonstrated that American television—and ABC in particular—was far ahead of the Soviets. The coverage and the discourses surrounding it combined to locate television as a facet of the space race that the United States was indisputably leading and to situate ABC as the organization that made evident this technological supremacy’s nationalistic implications while propelling sports television’s globalization.

Arledge described Wide World’s coverage of the 1961 US-USSR meet as a “turning point in our acceptance as a show.” “That trip to Moscow really set up the whole odyssey of ABC’s Wide World of Sports,” McKay added.⁶⁰ At that point in the season, the program had not attracted considerable audience numbers and was facing potential cancellation. “We did receive a lot of favorable comments,” McKay adds. “Not only for going to the Soviet Union, but also for bringing all of our own equipment. People began to talk about Wide World as a permanent fixture at ABC.” Most important, the trip convinced Moore, who joined the Wide World crew in Moscow, to keep the program on the air despite its initially underwhelming ratings.⁶¹ Shortly after the meet, ABC renewed Wide World for a full fifty-two-week run starting in January 1962. The program’s extension into the autumn months would compensate for the absence of NCAA football broadcasts, which ABC lost after the 1961 season and did not regain until 1966.

By the end of Wide World’s first season, Variety reported that the program that almost did not secure enough advertisers to make it on ABC’s weekend schedule had sponsors “backed up trying to get onto the show” for its sophomore season.⁶² Its 1962 Emmy Award nomination in the category of Outstanding Achievement in Public Affairs was the first such recognition a sports program received and demonstrated Wide World’s rare ability to straddle the sport, news, and documentary genres. The New York Times expanded on this decoration by citing Wide World as “one of the programs adding prestige to the medium” as a whole.⁶³

Wide World continued to bill itself as a site that mediates sport’s global meaning after its debut season. It hired a collection of expert celebrity commentators, including the British Formula One racing driver Stirling Moss, figure skater Dick Button, and swimmer Lynn Burke, who became the first female TV sports commentator when Wide World recruited her to participate in its coverage of the 1961 AAU Women’s Swimming and Diving Championships. As with its coverage of women’s sports, ABC was ahead of its competitors when it came to hiring female commentators. Though not an official policy, it typically only allowed women to comment on women’s sports—a form of segregation it did not impose on its male talent when covering women’s events that remains commonplace in sports media.⁶⁴

Wide World also started giving out an Athlete of the Year Award in 1962 (see appendix 2). Like Sports Illustrated’s Sportsman of the Year—which the magazine based on Time’s Man of the Year honor—Wide World’s Athlete of the Year suggests the TV program has the authority to organize and assess sport’s significance. Its more inclusive title also advertises Wide World’s willingness to recognize both men and women athletes (though women received the honor infrequently) who participate in activities that Sports Illustrated often overlooked.

Wide World paired this cultivation of expertise with an amplification of its formal and technological daring. It created a floating TV studio on a sixty-foot fishing trawler named the Whitestone to cover the 1962 America’s Cup yacht race off the coast of Rhode Island. “Equipment aboard included a fourteen-by-eight-foot control room, housing all necessary audio and video equipment and a video-tape recorder; two TV cameras, mounted on special platforms; and a micro-wave dish, set up on the Whitestone’s decks to pick up pictures from a camera in a helicopter, which also covered the race.” After ABC recorded each segment of the race from the trawler, the helicopter gathered the tapes and delivered them to Newport, Rhode Island. They were then flown to Providence, where a video unit was set up to feed the tape over rented phone lines to New York, and then to the rest of the country.⁶⁵ As with the 1961 US-USSR track meet, Wide World made sure its audience was aware of this state-of-the-art and arduous production process.

In a different but similarly imaginative direction, Wide World hired Robert Riger to film, photograph, and sketch events. The de facto artist-in-residence humanized further the program’s aspirations and showcased a different perspective from ABC’s cameras. In particular, Riger developed a dual action camera that simultaneously shoots motion picture film and still pictures so scenes can be displayed in real time and later broken down into split-second intervals.

Wide World brought these intensified practices to bear for its return to Lenin Stadium to tape the 1963 US-USSR meet, for which it again used its own equipment. Less than one year removed from the Cuban Missile Crisis, relations between the competing nations were even icier than in 1961. At the time of the meet, W. Averell Harriman—ambassador at large for the Kennedy administration and a Kremlin expert—was in Moscow negotiating with Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev the Partial Test Ban Treaty, an agreement designed to decelerate the US-Soviet arms race. In a gesture of goodwill, and despite their reportedly tense talks earlier in the week, Khrushchev invited Harriman to join him at the track meet in a private viewing box. Khrushchev opted to attend the meet with Harriman rather than see off a Chinese delegation that had been visiting Moscow. “Normally,” McKay claimed, “Khrushchev would have been [at the airport] with school children and flowers and protestations of Socialist solidarity…. Instead, on this particular afternoon, he decided to go to a track meet with the American.”⁶⁶

In a dispatch to the United States, Harriman reported that “tears seemed to well up in” Khrushchev’s eyes “when our two flags were being carried side by side around the track with the two teams walking arm-in-arm.”⁶⁷ Khrushchev’s emotions continued to run high as the politicians watched Brumel break his own high jump record, an achievement that moved an overwhelmed Khrushchev to embrace Harriman in euphoria. Wide World’s presentation announced Khrushchev’s attendance and cut to his box immediately after Brumel’s jump to show his reaction. The image it displayed was uncharacteristically hazy—the kind of shot that would normally end up on the carefully edited program’s cutting-room floor. But it was indispensable to Wide World’s appeals to the track meet’s ability to soothe tensions between states that were otherwise at odds. Arledge, in fact, later named the grainy shot “the single most important image I have ever broadcast.”⁶⁸ “Their nations had come to the brink of annihilation,” he added of Khrushchev and Harriman, “and it wasn’t too much of an exaggeration to say that they’d had the fate of the world in their hands all that week…. But now because of the simple feat of a man jumping over a bar, they were hugging each other. That, for me, was ABC’s Wide World of Sports.”⁶⁹ Harriman claimed that Khrushchev’s jolly mood continued after—and likely because of—Brumel’s spectacular jump. The Soviet leader invited Harriman to join him for dinner. “He was most cordial throughout,” Harriman reported, “and attempted to impress upon me his desire for closer collaboration in a wider field” and a “future shorn of much of the existing tension and suspicion” between the United States and Russia.⁷⁰ “Track races, [Khrushchev] commented, were far better than arms races.”⁷¹ Harriman reported that the meet accelerated these improved relations between the political adversaries—a diffusion ABC exhibited and indirectly aided.

ABC built on the peacekeeping the 1963 meet bespoke by naming Brumel Wide World’s second Athlete of the Year. Given Wide World’s American audience, the program’s decision to recognize Brumel advertises its worldliness while suggesting it places athletic excellence over nationalism. It also promotes the annual US-USSR meets as key events on its schedule. The Soviets were so flattered by Brumel’s decoration that they permitted him passage to New York City for the ceremony ABC held in his honor. With USIA director Carl T. Rowan delivering the keynote address and Soviet ambassador Anatoly Dobrynin in attendance, the ABC-curated ceremony doubled as a conspicuous display of diplomacy that reinforced Wide World’s position as an entity capable of mediating genial international exchanges. ABC Sports even produced a short commemoration of Brumel’s honor that it aired on the following week’s edition of Wide World.⁷²

Wide World’s 1965 US-USSR track meet from Kiev—the final US-USSR meet the program aired—continued this diplomacy, amplified the annual competition’s status, and reinforced ABC Sports’ reputation for pushing the aesthetic and technological envelope. It was the first live TV broadcast from the USSR—an achievement Arledge named “a milestone in television and quite possibly the most important advance in sports telecasting in history.”⁷³ Because of the time difference, ABC displaced its regularly scheduled weekend morning lineup to make room for the historic telecast. It consequently expended the additional promotional resources necessary to alert viewers to the program’s unusual time slot and banked on their being intrigued enough by the meet’s established popularity and live presentation to watch the episode outside of Wide World’s normal schedule. “The satellite will change people’s viewing habits,” Arledge wagered. “They won’t care that the event is not coming over at 2pm Saturday; they’ll rather watch a live track meet from Russia at 11am.”⁷⁴ ABC publicized the global spectacle as the highlight of its 1965 season in an advertisement that claimed the unprecedented broadcast would “add a new dimension to imaginative sports coverage techniques.”⁷⁵

Wide World used the Early Bird satellite, which launched into orbit less than three months prior, for the July 31 telecast. It piloted the nascent technology with live coverage of the Le Mans and the Irish Derby Sweepstakes horse race earlier in the season. The Le Mans broadcast encountered glitches that temporarily blocked ABC’s image feed and forced the network to put up a standby card and present only its audio commentary. ABC’s broadcast of the Irish Sweepstakes the following week, however, went smoothly and allowed Wide World to work out what kinks remained before Kiev.

Wide World again planned to produce the meet with its own personnel and gear. But Arledge discovered that it could only be aired live if ABC agreed to share Russian equipment and relinquish some control over the production, even though, as he pointed out, it would not even be televised in Russia. “We knew we would rather cover the meet live without having complete control of production than tape it and fly it back,” he recalled with a hint of lingering disappointment.⁷⁶ Arledge collaborated with Russian television authorities to guarantee the coverage would give equal attention to the American and Soviet competitors. He noted, however, that the Russians’ inferior facilities made the already difficult production more challenging than it would have been were he given free rein to use his own equipment and staff. ABC initially planned to use an experimental Russian satellite, in addition to the Early Bird, that fed pictures from Moscow to Helsinki and then to the United states, but the Russian technicians were unable to tie the feed into a suitable foreign ground station. ABC instead devised a dual system of satellites and landlines that would be able to get around its host nation’s limited facilities.

The process of building the collaborative, intercontinental live broadcast—which Arledge detailed in a Wide World yearbook ABC published in 1964 and 1965—was remarkably intricate. The image and sound tracks were shuttled via separate landlines from Kiev, where McKay was commenting live on the scene, to Rome, where ABC conscripted the assistance of Radiotelevisione Italiana. Bill Flemming contributed from a rented studio in Rome, where an ABC director had the sportscaster alternate between the live feed and taped segments to guarantee a seamless broadcast and fill in any gaps. Had they lost the audio from McKay but retained the video from Kiev, for instance, Flemming could still provide commentary from the Italian studio. From Rome, the program was delivered via satellite to Andover, Maine, then to New York City, where ABC had another standby studio and archived material ready in case it lost the picture. Finally, it was fed to the rest of the United States. “Technically there were about 100 different places where things could have gone wrong,” Arledge wrote. “It was amazing that nothing did.” ABC further advertised this unprecedented technological feat by including in its 1965 yearbook a map that traced the television feed’s circuitous route from Kiev to American living rooms.

Alongside the map, it placed a Riger sketch of five-thousand-meter competitors Bob Shul and Pyotr Bolotnikov sharing a sportsmanlike embrace after Bolotnikov beat the favored American. Arledge indicated that ABC’s collaboration with Soviet TV mirrored the runners’ fellowship—a display he likened to Khrushchev and Harriman’s unexpected hug two years prior. Despite their low-grade technology, “the Russians,” he noted, “with a few exceptions of hometown enthusiasm, did very objective coverage and showed Americans as well as Russians, following all details of our plan.”⁷⁷

Arledge identified the live broadcast as “a forerunner of the direction international television must take.”⁷⁸ More important, he claimed the achievement demonstrated sports television’s sociopolitical utility. “It gives us an opportunity,” he said, “to help the people of the world understand one another through the medium of television and through the medium of sports.”⁷⁹ Arledge suggested the live broadcast fostered an even more intimate communion between the United States and the Soviet Union than Wide World’s previously tape-delayed presentations. “The world had really become a pearl in the broad hand of communication,” he concluded.⁸⁰ As he made apparent, it was ABC Sports—not simply TV—that realized this political potential. The network braved Cold War anxieties to establish a global sports telecommunications grid that brought together geographically, culturally, and politically disparate groups with an unprecedented degree of intimacy.

Amid his utopian reverie, Arledge briefly mentioned that Wide World was publicizing the upcoming Thunderbird Golf Championship, which was scheduled to air on ABC after the track meet, from Kiev. The promotion further illustrates television’s wondrous potential to transcend space, as American viewers received a reminder about an upcoming US-based program from a different continent. Arledge, however, also gestured toward the irony of advertising an event that took place at suburban New York City’s posh Westchester Country Club—a locale he described as a “bastion of capitalism”—from a communist state. “It is undoubtedly the first time that a major golf championship has ever been promoted from the Soviet Union,” he observed.⁸¹ The live promo, Arledge implied, transformed the Soviet Union into an unwitting participant in US commercial television and the capitalist culture that supports it. While the US-Soviet collaboration heralded live television’s potential to bond radically different groups, Arledge indicated that these technologized unions are ultimately driven by and serve US-based corporate interests. This ABC coverage assured viewers that TV’s globalized “hand of communication” is a thoroughly American appendage.

By the time of its Kiev broadcast, critics had installed Wide World as a TV program of exceptional quality—a sophisticated contrast to since-canceled ABC programs like The Untouchables and Bus Stop. Variety claimed that even though ABC’s network competitors held rights to “most of the ‘marquee’ sports,” Wide World gave the younger and still less prominent network equal respectability. The program, Variety enthused, “lead[s] the field” of sports TV and stands “as a proving ground for technical innovation.”⁸² The globe-trotting show, according to Sports Illustrated’s Richard Hoffer, elevated the medium that Minow disparaged a little over one month after its debut. “The Saturday sloth,” Hoffer wrote of sports TV’s implied male viewer, “was often disturbed in his anticipation of the ski-flying championships by a historical travelogue on Oslo that was—how else can we say it?—literate.” Wide World creates scenes, effused the Los Angeles Times, “that would make Michelangelo flip his easel.”⁸³

The anthology program, added TV critic Hal Humphrey, “has done a lot toward de-isolating Americans who cared for nothing but baseball or football.”⁸⁴ Arledge, in fact, claimed Wide World was driven more by an effort to broaden sports fans’ horizons than to generate revenues. He separated himself from his bottom line–oriented peers—a strategy he frequently employed to stress his comparative thoughtfulness and artistry—by boasting, “I can put stuff on the air I know isn’t going to get a rating. We can do things just because we think they should be done.”⁸⁵ Accordingly, ABC marketed the show as “not only entertaining, but educational” and referred specifically to the US-USSR track meets to make this claim.⁸⁶ France’s Cannes Television News Festival recognized Wide World’s edifying cosmopolitanism by awarding the program its 1966 prize for live TV. The most prominent recognition of Wide World’s value came with the 1966 George Foster Peabody Award it received in the category of International Understanding. It was the first Peabody given to a sports program. The accolade—which Wide World collected shortly after its live broadcast from Kiev—suggests the US-USSR meets stimulated the program’s acknowledgment as an exceptional representative of TV’s capacity to foster global connections and cross-cultural affinity.

Wide World’s US-USSR track meet coverage ended after Kiev. The Soviet Union boycotted the event from 1966 through 1968 in protest of the United States’ military involvement in Vietnam.⁸⁷ When the meets resumed in 1969, CBS purchased away ABC’s television rights.⁸⁸ The Cold War, however, continued to serve an important role on Wide World, which featured various other US-Soviet competitions and continued to visit locales that were off-limits to most Americans. The program made seventy trips to communist nations between its debut and the toppling of the Berlin Wall in 1989. In 1971 it sent a crew to Havana to cover a men’s volleyball match between the United States and Cuba—the first sports broadcast from Havana to air on US television since the countries severed diplomatic ties ten years prior. Because Americans were not allowed passage to Cuba, ABC used a Canadian crew fronted by ABC News correspondent (and future star anchor) Peter Jennings. Like the US-USSR track meets, the broadcast underlined Cuba’s difference from the United States and gestured toward sport’s potential to reconcile these politically unfriendly nations. Jennings secured an interview with Fidel Castro before and after the match, which Cuba won. Though Castro was typically presented as a menacing threat—the enemy face of the Bay of Pigs Invasion and Cuban Missile Crisis—Jennings’s interview presented a good-humored statesman who graciously took time to speak with the American media outlet and even joked around after his translator bungled a question. While it humanized Cuba’s enigmatic leader, the program also presented his beautiful island nation as frozen in time since the communist revolution. ABC Sports’ state-of-the-art cameras and large crew constituted an unusually glitzy presence in the out-of-date country fit to attract the attention of its prime minister.

Shortly after ABC stopped carrying the US-USSR meets, Arledge expressed interest in “the opportunity to do a sports program from China. It might erase some of the barriers between our two peoples,” he conjectured.⁸⁹ He finally received the chance in 1977 when Wide World became the first US-based sports TV program to visit communist China to cover a gymnastics meet in Peking. Wide World’s introduction to the country predictably opens with McKay in front of the Great Wall backed by traditional Chinese music. It transitions to a shot of Tiananmen Square, which McKay describes as the city’s “nerve center” where residents congregate each morning to exercise. The image switches from early morning calisthenics to a mass of bicycles traveling through the square as McKay explains that the people of Peking “get more exercise by riding their bikes to work because there is no such thing as an automobile owned by a private citizen in the People’s Republic.” The introductory scene emphasizes Peking’s contrast to the United States’ car-heavy urban centers and, perhaps more pointedly, highlights the broader cultural differences between China’s communist uniformity and America’s capitalist individuality—a characteristic the automobile symbolizes. In fact, Wide World featured an auto race from Riverside, California, the previous weekend. Taken together, the consecutive installments show the vast cultural, economic, and technological differences that make cars largely forbidden in China and enable them to be used for sport in the United States.

McKay delivers his introduction to Tiananmen Square from a crowded street crammed with onlookers gazing curiously at the sportscaster and ABC’s cameras. Their astonishment at the network’s unfamiliar technology echoes the Russian spectators’ fascination with ABC’s Ampex machines in 1961 and similarly emphasizes the United States’ dominant position in the global economy. His introduction then takes an abrupt and curious turn by outlining the densely populated city’s readiness for war. “The holocaust that would be caused by an atom or hydrogen bomb in this city boggles the human mind,” McKay notes. He uses this ominous factoid as an excuse to showcase the entrance to an underground air-raid shelter capable of housing “some 10,000 people for a day or two. It’s Peking’s way of saying, ‘we’re ready whatever happens,’” McKay explains with a stern gaze. The introduction depicts Peking’s citizens as prepared for the hardships of modern warfare, but unfamiliar with the affordances of modern technology.

Ranging from friendly to wary, Wide World’s depictions of Cold War rivals like Russia, Cuba, and China created what Derek Gregory calls “imaginative geographies,” or, politically interested ways of structuring understandings of spaces that cannot be directly experienced.⁹⁰ They promoted international exchange as they reinforced and capitalized on the host nations’ mysteriousness. Simultaneously, Wide World reassured its American viewership of the United States’ leading status in global hierarchies during politically uncertain Cold War conditions—a point it made in part through accentuating the United States’ comparative technological advancement and situating ABC Sports as an exemplar of it.

WIDENING WIDE WORLD

By the time Wide World stopped carrying the US-USSR track meets, ABC Sports had firmly established itself as Arledge’s creative domain. Arledge and Chet Simmons initially shared leadership duties after Scherick left ABC Sports. Arledge guided the creative activities, and Simmons oversaw the business arrangements. But Simmons grew disillusioned as Arledge’s star rose and his partner demonstrated little interest in the increasingly unwieldy balance sheets Simmons had to manage. “We had a hard time running [ABC Sports] because we were always over budget,” Simmons recalled. “And there was mostly an inclination to support the creative side and not care about the side that I was dealing with. And I began to feel that perhaps there was something more out there than arguing with Arledge over budgets.”⁹¹ Simmons left in 1964 to run sports programming at NBC, where he stayed until departing to become ESPN’s first president in 1979. Though Arledge ran ABC Sports alone after Simmons quit, he was not formally named president until it became an official subsidiary in 1968.

ABC Sports created spin-offs of its signature show to broaden its audience. Extending Wide World’s third episode—which covered the Professional Bowlers Association World Championship in Paramus, New Jersey—ABC launched Pro Bowlers Tour in 1962. Described as a “Main Street and Midwest” counterpart to Wide World’s preoccupation with the unfamiliar, the slow-paced winter and spring program visited different bowling alleys each weekend to showcase one of North America’s most popular “participant sports.”⁹² More exotically, Wide World expanded on a 1963 segment that featured Americans Joe Brooks and Curt Gowdy in a trout fishing competition against Argentinian fishermen in the Andes Mountains to create American Sportsman in 1965. Hosted by Gowdy, the program featured big-game hunting and fishing around the world with celebrity guests (who often had some business relationship with ABC that their appearances benefited). Gowdy fished for salmon in Iceland with Bing Crosby and hunted sable antelope in Zambia with Ted Williams. After critiques from animal rights activists, the program shifted focus from hunting to wildlife conservation.

Though their scopes varied drastically, Pro Bowlers Tour and American Sportsman both complemented Wide World’s globe-trotting, and they were less expensive to produce than the already economical program that inspired them. Confined to indoor alleys, bowling tournaments require fewer cameras and production staff to cover than most of Wide World’s events, and American Sportsman’s voyages into the wilderness did not demand broadcast licenses. As Gowdy put it, “We don’t have to pay rights fees to fool will Mother Nature.”⁹³ The shows rounded out a weekend programming block centered on Wide World.

ABC also created Wide World–related products that reached beyond television. Compiled by Riger, Wide World’s briefly published yearbooks commemorated the program’s most interesting moments and elaborated on its production practices. Riger opened the 1964 yearbook by explaining that its combination of print, photographs, and drawings will allow readers to understand and appreciate moments that pass by quickly on television. The yearbooks emphasized Wide World’s sophistication and artistry. “The spontaneity of sports offers the greatest opportunity for television to express itself as a new, valid art form,” wrote Robert Trachinger in a short essay. “What the stage and proscenium is to the theater, what film stock and the sound stage are to the movies, the remote and the sports remote, in particular, is to television.”⁹⁴ Wide World, Trachinger contends, brings into focus and extends TV’s inventiveness.

Along these lines, ABC Sports published Wide World–themed encyclopedias, record books, and quiz books that reinforced its educational value by suggesting the program organized public knowledge of sport and broadened viewers’ intellectual horizons. “Wide World has also created its own generation of sports fans,” the quiz book explains, “knowledgeable and intelligent, weaned on the penetrating, expert coverage of athletics, both amateur and professional that has become the trademark of this popular network series…. These are sophisticated sports fans.”⁹⁵ The books indicate that this enlightened brand of sports fan—and the knowledge that makes it possible—would not exist apart from ABC Sports and Wide World.

“THE BACKBONE OF OUR WHOLE

SPORTS ACTIVITY”

ABC Sports’ advertising billings increased twentyfold between 1960 and 1967.⁹⁶ Wide World’s year-round presence, accolades, and promotion of other ABC Sports properties spurred this growth. “We consider the show the backbone of our whole sports activity,” Arledge asserted. “If we had the rights to every major sports event in the universe we would still consider Wide World of Sports our number one show.”⁹⁷

Wide World overshadowed CBS’s and NBC’s similar programs and forced the rival networks to define their sports offerings in contrast to its popular format. CBS Sports’ Bill MacPhail claimed his network focused only on marquee sports. “We are only interested in quality sports,” he said, “you won’t find us carrying any of those barrel-jumping contests.” NBC began marketing itself as “the Network of Live Sports.” “I don’t really consider them sports shows,” NBC Sports executive Carl Lindemann said of Wide World and ABC’s other taped programs. “We concentrate on live events because my management believes that the real drama is in live.”⁹⁸ While ABC built its network identity through counterprogramming against CBS and NBC, the still third-place network’s renowned sports coverage had competitors scrambling to find a niche in the genre it had come to dominate.

Aside from installing ABC atop sports television’s industrial hierarchies, Wide World built interest in sports that previously garnered scant media attention. Its regular coverage of surfing, for example, anticipated and influenced Bruce Brown’s documentary travelogue Endless Summer (1966), which similarly spanned the globe to showcase the world’s best surfing spots. Brown, in fact, parlayed his filmmaking experience into a gig as a Wide World cameraman. In 1971, Steve McQueen starred in Le Mans—an action film centered on the race that Wide World’s annual coverage put on American sports fans’ radar. Three years later, German filmmaker Werner Herzog released The Great Ecstasy of the Woodcarver Steiner, a meditative documentary on prodigious Swiss ski jumper and erstwhile artist Walter Steiner. Ski jumping, with its combination of graceful aerial soaring and violent crashes, was a Wide World staple. Herzog’s film, produced for German television, resembles Wide World’s humanistic format. But it contrasts the program’s typical reliance on predictable athletic narratives by highlighting Steiner’s inscrutability. At one point it calls attention to—and turns its nose up at—Wide World’s apparent comparative superficiality by including footage of an unprepared ABC Sports correspondent asking Steiner inane questions that ignore the artistic and philosophical concerns animating Herzog’s documentary. Though very different, these films all demonstrate the awareness Wide World gave to previously fringe sports and the program’s impact on media culture beyond US sports television.

The program also inflated broadcast rights fees and led sports promoters to presume that TV outlets would be willing to pay top dollar for nearly any event. While in Acapulco to cover the 1962 Water Ski Championships, ABC Sports producers sought out some local cliff divers whose jumps would make a compelling way to set the scene. When asked what price the divers required, a representative said the group sought $100,000 because it was planning its own television special. Arledge immediately rejected the outlandish demand. A few minutes after Arledge’s rebuff, the spokesperson returned and said the group would perform for $10 per dive—including practice jumps.⁹⁹ ABC started receiving invitations to bid on rights to events that were beyond even Wide World’s ample range, such as the International Pro-Am Clam-Digging Championship in Ocean Shores, Washington. “The color comes not from the clams themselves, which are rather long and ugly,” wrote the delegation from Ocean Shores, “but the contestants. Ocean Shores is in a very goofy area where many of the inhabitants are scruffy old beachcombers, or woodsmen, or Indians from the Quinault Reservation. Put these in harness with some nice young things in minimal bathing suits and we will have some interesting shots.”¹⁰⁰ Wide World passed on the clam digging. But its coverage of events like log rolling and rattlesnake hunting created an environment where the prospect of televised clamming was imaginable, if not entirely feasible.