for him,” Sean McManus explains of his father, “one that he took really seriously because he believed his role was more than a sports commentator, it was a travel guide.”32 McKay, as Sports Illustrated’s William Taaffe put it, became “a homeroom teacher for a nation of eager learners,” thoughtfully mediating their televised encounters with unfamiliar lands and peoples. The Los Angeles Times called McKay the “Marco Polo of sports” because of his endless journeys.33 But his first trip for Wide World—just three weeks after joining ABC Sports—was back to his hometown for the University of Pennsylvania relay races.
Immediately capitalizing on its AAU contract, Wide World’s debut featured live coverage of the Penn relays and the Drake University relays in Des Moines, Iowa. McKay reported from Philadelphia alongside New York Herald track reporter Jesse Abramson and former Olympic pole vaulter Bob Richards, while Wide World correspondents Bill Flemming and Jim Simpson were on the scene in Des Moines. The inaugural broadcast was forced to be slightly less dynamic than Arledge would have preferred after a Philadelphia rainstorm damaged three of ABC’s six cameras and waterlogged parts of the track. ABC built excitement by alternating between the two races. Segments focusing on the Penn relays ended by reminding viewers of an exciting upcoming event in Philadelphia just before cutting to Drake, and vice versa. This technique strove to create a lively pace and keep viewers for the program’s duration. Though Wide World’s maiden voyage survived the rainfall, the program attracted little attention—positive or negative.
Wide World expanded on this tame debut with more adventurous sports like auto racing, demolition derbies, barrel jumping, and surfing—seemingly anything to which it could acquire reasonable rights. It also regularly broadcast women’s sports during a time when they were rarely on national TV outside of the Olympics, roller derby, and novelty wrestling matches. “We did women’s sports on a large scale right from the beginning,” McKay bragged.34 But Wide World’s coverage of women’s athletics—most of which were initially AAU events—was first and foremost a consequence of its need for affordable content and paled in comparison to the frequency with which it aired men’s sports. Moreover, the women’s competitions it did feature overwhelmingly privileged stereotypically feminine sports like figure skating, gymnastics, and diving that did not upset gender norms. While Wide World lent women’s sports visibility, it also tacitly reinforced assumptions regarding which types of women’s sporting activities merited attention.
Arledge pointed out that Wide World’s mostly non-live format demanded heightened stylization. “There’s just no comparison in the built-in excitement and tension of an event that is live, no matter who wins, because you just don’t know what’s going to happen,” he said. “If the results are known … then showmanship and creative ability is much more important.”35 Wide World highlighted its innovations to underscore the effort it put into production, such as the underwater camera it used to cover the 1961 AAU men’s swimming and diving championships. The program introduced camera operator Dale Barringer and transformed his assignment into a subplot for the event coverage. “And here, our underwater cameraman Dale Barringer getting ready to go down by the deep six,” McKay commented as Barringer collected his camera—an enormous cylindrical unit with waterproof casing and Plexiglas plates at either end—and disappeared below the surface. “There’s his camera, a long metal object that was specially designed and perfected this week by Ralph Elmore, one of our engineers.” As the broadcast cut from a bird’s-eye view of the race to Barringer’s camera, McKay announced, “That’s the way it looks to frogman Dale Barringer on the bottom of the pool.”36 Similarly, the final episode of Wide World’s inaugural year covered a preseason AFL match between the Buffalo Bills and the San Diego Chargers. Reflecting CBS’s renowned documentary The Violent World of Sam Huff (1960), Wide World increased the number of cameras beyond what was typically used for football broadcasts and placed wireless microphones inside several players’ pads to provide an inside view of the already TV-friendly league’s game. The segment, which publicized ABC’s coverage of the upcoming AFL season, paid nearly as much attention to the network’s cameras and microphones as it did to the featured event.37
Wide World’s nomadic format added mystique to its technological prowess. It used the locations it visited—and the cultures that mark them—as characters that further dramatize and personalize events. The 1961 Le Mans auto race, for example, was not only an exciting competition but a glimpse into a quaint French community that is annually transformed by an exhilarating twenty-four-hour competition. “The first time we did the Grand Prix road race in Le Mans,” Arledge noted, “we tried to handle it like Moby Dick, going for more than a race, for the soul of Le Mans. We filmed at great length a Mass that a priest said right on the course. We dramatized the prospect of death and the grueling effects of the race.”38 Similarly, Wide World presented the 1962 Southern 500 in Darlington, South Carolina, as a folksy affair that occurs in a “small town … a long way from any place.” It characterized the race as “the southern version of the station wagon tailgate of the Ivy Leagues” that turns the isolated region into a festive tourist destination for a weekend. The program would also sometimes employ the far-off locations and marginal sports to comic effect, as when McKay cheerily opened coverage of the World Lumberjack Championships in Hayward, Wisconsin, while balancing on a floating log (which ABC Sports crew members stabilized off camera) like a competitive logroller.
Though often playful, Wide World strove to treat its subject matter with dignity—a practice it developed after some regretful slipups. McKay recalled a case in which he treated a two-time demolition derby winner sarcastically during a postevent interview. “Well, Mr. Lucky,” McKay said, “how do you account for winning the World Championship two years in a row?” The driver earnestly attributed his success to religious faith. “I had committed an unforgivable bit of gaucherie,” McKay repentantly admitted, “looking down on this man in a condescending manner during what he considered the greatest moment of his life.” “We don’t go to an event in order to be big city sophisticates,” Arledge added.39 Wide World suggested that although not all cultures partake in the same sports, these varied activities hold the same significance for those who participate in them. In doing so, the educational show nurtured deeper understanding of and identification with people who—like the games they play—otherwise might seem odd.
Wide World basked in its commitment to sport’s “constant variety”—however esoteric—in a tongue-in-cheek advertisement it placed in Variety: “If centaur racing should ever be revived in Greece, you’ll see it on ABC television.”40 Like many news programs, it incorporated a flattened globe into its logo to assert that nothing stood beyond its ambit. It also suggested a spirit of humanism informed its globe-trotting. As Arledge explained, “If we could present these great spectacles to the American people in a meaningful way, we could provide attractive television entertainment, broaden the knowledge and perspective of the viewer, and maybe even make an occasional contribution to understanding among people of the world.”41 Though Wide World cast its cosmopolitanism as apolitical, the program was made from an unmistakably American point of view and built an audience through engaging dominant attitudes about the United States’ place in the world during the Cold War. The annual US-Soviet track and field competitions, which Arledge called the “gem” of Wide World’s agreement with the AAU, embodied this tension.42
SPANNING THE IRON CURTAIN
The AAU-sponsored track meets began in 1958 as the product of the US-USSR Exchange Agreement signed by Soviet ambassador Georgi Zarubin and William S.B. Lacy, President Dwight D. Eisenhower’s special assistant on East-West exchanges. The pact instituted bilateral interactions spanning science, industry, art, and athletics.43 Sport historian Joseph M. Turrini claims the meets, which alternated between the United States and the Soviet Union and ran intermittently through 1985, composed “the most important and visible of the Cold War sport competitions that emerged in the late 1950s and 1960s” aside from the Olympics.44 Unlike the
