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
