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
