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
