the genre. Wide World of Sports would extend the AFL package’s stylized efforts to draw viewers without featuring popular sports.
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
