for the US team in Moscow: Rudolph tied her hundred-meter world record time of 11.3 seconds to win the event, and Boston set a new record with his jump of 27 feet, 1¾ inches. The coverage depicted them as national heroes during a time when the overall representation of African Americans on network TV was still limited. Its celebratory representations, however, unsurprisingly failed to mention the basic civil liberties these athletic stars were still denied in the country they represented so well. Wide World thus paired its depictions of cross-cultural unity with a similarly oversimplified vision of domestic harmony.
Though ABC isolated African Americans as the United States’ best performers, it ultimately positioned Russian high jumper Valery Brumel’s record-breaking victory over the United States’ John Thomas—another African American and a previous record holder—as the show’s climax. Brumel’s jump occurred just two months after the Soviet space program made cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin the first human to orbit Earth, a signal moment in the US-Soviet “space race” that suggested the USSR held a decisive edge. Wide World explained Brumel’s record—which he accomplished in dramatic fashion on his final attempt as the rain poured—by comparing it to Gagarin’s feat. “Valery Brumel has set a new world’s record in the high jump,” McKay noted as ABC’s cameras cut to cheering Russian fans. “At this moment,” McKay continued, “Brumel rivals Yuri Gagarin as a national hero in the Soviet Union.” Brumel’s jump was indeed a point of immense national pride that convinced the Soviet government to give him the Merited Master of Sport Award—the nation’s highest sports honor. McKay’s commentary characterized Brumel’s jump as an extension and confirmation of the USSR’s rising superiority in the space race.
But Wide World also reassured its audience against such Cold War anxieties by appealing to ABC Sports’ technological sophistication. Up to this point in Wide World’s inaugural year, ABC used mostly locally sourced equipment and labor when producing programming abroad. It insisted, however, on transporting its own equipment to Moscow—a decision that suggested Russia did not possess the resources and expertise to create, or even assist the creation of, a production of ABC Sports’ caliber. For instance, the Russians did not have Ampex videotape recorders, which display the television video feed in a monitor as content is shot on location. Arledge claimed the Ampex Company was so worried that the Russians would steal the technology that it would only allow ABC to bring the machines if the network vowed to lock its recording heads in the US embassy’s safe each evening.56
McKay notes that when ABC set up the machines in the bowels of Lenin Stadium, “several thousand” spectators gathered to marvel at the technology rather than watch the live event.57 “For the Russians, who had no video machines,” Arledge claimed of the awestruck spectators, “it was as if we’d invented fire.”58 McKay’s and Arledge’s comments represent the Russians as a primitive bunch when it comes to telecommunications and entertainment. Indeed, McKay claimed the Russian television crews were insecure about their deficiencies and tried to copy ABC’s comparatively advanced practices. “Our every move was monitored very carefully,” he wrote. “Roone requested a camera position at field level to get tight close-ups…. After a long wait, the cameras were okayed, but when we arrived the next day, Soviet cameras were right beside ours.”59 While the US space program may have been lagging, Wide World demonstrated that American television—and ABC in particular—was far ahead of the Soviets. The coverage and the discourses surrounding it combined to locate television as a facet of the space race that the United States was indisputably leading and to situate ABC as the organization that made evident this technological supremacy’s nationalistic implications while propelling sports television’s globalization.
Arledge described Wide World’s coverage of the 1961 US-USSR meet as a “turning point in our acceptance as a show.” “That trip to Moscow really set up the whole odyssey of ABC’s Wide World of Sports,” McKay added.60 At that point in the season, the program had not attracted considerable audience numbers and was facing potential cancellation. “We did receive a lot of favorable comments,” McKay adds. “Not only for going to the Soviet Union, but also for bringing all of our own equipment. People began to talk about Wide World as a permanent fixture at ABC.” Most important, the trip convinced Moore, who joined the Wide World crew in Moscow, to keep the program on the air despite its initially underwhelming ratings.61 Shortly after the meet, ABC renewed Wide World for a full fifty-two-week run starting in January 1962. The program’s extension into the autumn months would compensate for the absence of NCAA football broadcasts, which ABC lost after the 1961 season and did not regain until 1966.
By the end of Wide World’s first season, Variety reported that the program that almost did not secure enough advertisers to make it on ABC’s weekend schedule had sponsors “backed up trying to get onto the show” for its sophomore season.62 Its 1962 Emmy Award nomination in the category of Outstanding Achievement in Public Affairs was the first such recognition a sports program received and demonstrated Wide World’s rare ability to straddle the sport, news, and documentary genres. The New York Times expanded on this decoration by citing Wide World as “one of the programs adding prestige to the medium” as a whole.63
Wide World continued to bill itself as a site that mediates sport’s global meaning after its debut season. It hired a collection of expert celebrity commentators, including the British Formula One racing driver Stirling Moss, figure skater Dick Button, and swimmer Lynn Burke, who became the first female TV sports commentator when Wide World recruited her to participate in its coverage of the 1961 AAU Women’s Swimming and Diving Championships. As with its coverage of women’s sports, ABC was ahead of its competitors when it came to hiring female commentators. Though not an official policy, it typically only allowed women to comment on women’s sports—a form of segregation it did not impose on its male talent when covering women’s events that remains commonplace in sports media.64
Wide World also started giving out an Athlete of the Year Award in 1962 (see appendix 2). Like Sports Illustrated’s Sportsman of the Year—which the magazine based on Time’s Man of the Year honor—Wide World’s Athlete of the Year suggests the TV program has the authority to organize and assess sport’s significance. Its more inclusive title also advertises Wide World’s willingness to recognize both men and women athletes (though women received the honor infrequently) who participate in activities that Sports Illustrated often overlooked.
Wide World paired this cultivation of expertise with an amplification of its formal and technological daring. It created a floating TV studio on a sixty-foot fishing trawler named the Whitestone to cover the 1962 America’s Cup yacht race off the coast of Rhode Island. “Equipment aboard included a fourteen-by-eight-foot control room, housing all necessary audio and video equipment and a video-tape recorder; two TV cameras, mounted on special platforms; and a micro-wave dish, set up on the Whitestone’s decks to pick up pictures from a camera in a helicopter, which also covered the race.” After ABC recorded each segment of the race from the trawler, the helicopter gathered the tapes and delivered them to Newport, Rhode Island. They were then flown to Providence, where a video unit was set up to feed the tape over rented phone lines to New York, and then to the rest of the country.65 As with the 1961 US-USSR track meet, Wide World made sure its audience was aware of this state-of-the-art and arduous production process.
In a different but similarly imaginative direction, Wide World hired Robert Riger to film, photograph, and sketch events. The de facto artist-in-residence humanized further the program’s aspirations and showcased a different perspective from ABC’s cameras. In particular, Riger developed a dual action camera that simultaneously shoots motion picture film and still pictures so scenes can be displayed in real time and later broken down into split-second intervals.
Wide World brought these intensified practices to bear for its return to Lenin Stadium to tape the 1963 US-USSR meet, for which it again used its own equipment.
