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THREE

“The Network of the Olympics”

STARRING MUHAMMAD ALI AND

HOWARD COSELL

I wasn’t sure if Wide World was a weekly Olympics or if the Olympics was a two week Wide World.

DENNIS LEWIN, ABC Sports producer¹

The Olympics is the biggest sports event on earth and it is worth every penny—every single million bucks—you have to spend to get it. Because then your network is “The Olympic Network” and people see your image as something special.

ROONE ARLEDGE²

JUST AS IMPORTANT AS COMPOSING the “backbone” of ABC Sports’ practices and the “seedbed of modern sports television,” Wide World formed the basis from which ABC fashioned the Olympics into sports TV’s biggest spectacle. ABC became the first US network to gain exclusive Olympics rights when it secured the contract to air the 1960 Winter Games from Squaw Valley, California. It planned to make Squaw Valley the first nationally televised Olympiad and hoped to parlay the broadcast license into a deal to carry the more popular Rome Summer Games later that year. But ABC’s plans suddenly swiveled when CBS purchased the Rome contract for $394,000.³ An infuriated Ollie Treyz wrote to Squaw Valley Olympic Organizing Committee (OOC) chairperson Prentis Hale that the Rome rights “were very much a part of our understanding in connection with the rights to your Squaw Valley project.” He threatened that ABC would “be forced to withdraw from any participation in such winter Olympic Games” if it did not also get Rome. Hale responded by maintaining that his committee simply agreed to “use our best efforts to assist ABC in obtaining Rome TV” and insisting that “our contract with you for Squaw TV included no provision” for Rome and “remains in effect regardless.”⁴ ABC ultimately decided the cost to telecast Squaw Valley—roughly $100,000 including rights and production costs—was too great without Rome and killed the deal, a move that reportedly made the Squaw Valley Committee “hoppin’ mad.”⁵

CBS paid $50,000 for Squaw Valley shortly after ABC dropped out. Its broadcasts, mostly brief taped highlights run late in the evening, yielded middling ratings. But CBS satisfied sponsors by attracting a disproportionately moneyed audience and generated goodwill by providing what Variety called a “noble public service.” The network’s modest but unprecedented Olympics coverage—according to sport historian Allen Guttmann—“proved that the games were marvelously telegenic.”⁶