the United States and the Soviet Union than Wide World’s previously tape-delayed presentations. “The world had really become a pearl in the broad hand of communication,” he concluded.80 As he made apparent, it was ABC Sports—not simply TV—that realized this political potential. The network braved Cold War anxieties to establish a global sports telecommunications grid that brought together geographically, culturally, and politically disparate groups with an unprecedented degree of intimacy.
Amid his utopian reverie, Arledge briefly mentioned that Wide World was publicizing the upcoming Thunderbird Golf Championship, which was scheduled to air on ABC after the track meet, from Kiev. The promotion further illustrates television’s wondrous potential to transcend space, as American viewers received a reminder about an upcoming US-based program from a different continent. Arledge, however, also gestured toward the irony of advertising an event that took place at suburban New York City’s posh Westchester Country Club—a locale he described as a “bastion of capitalism”—from a communist state. “It is undoubtedly the first time that a major golf championship has ever been promoted from the Soviet Union,” he observed.81 The live promo, Arledge implied, transformed the Soviet Union into an unwitting participant in US commercial television and the capitalist culture that supports it. While the US-Soviet collaboration heralded live television’s potential to bond radically different groups, Arledge indicated that these technologized unions are ultimately driven by and serve US-based corporate interests. This ABC coverage assured viewers that TV’s globalized “hand of communication” is a thoroughly American appendage.
By the time of its Kiev broadcast, critics had installed Wide World as a TV program of exceptional quality—a sophisticated contrast to since-canceled ABC programs like The Untouchables and Bus Stop. Variety claimed that even though ABC’s network competitors held rights to “most of the ‘marquee’ sports,” Wide World gave the younger and still less prominent network equal respectability. The program, Variety enthused, “lead[s] the field” of sports TV and stands “as a proving ground for technical innovation.”82 The globe-trotting show, according to Sports Illustrated’s Richard Hoffer, elevated the medium that Minow disparaged a little over one month after its debut. “The Saturday sloth,” Hoffer wrote of sports TV’s implied male viewer, “was often disturbed in his anticipation of the ski-flying championships by a historical travelogue on Oslo that was—how else can we say it?—literate.” Wide World creates scenes, effused the Los Angeles Times, “that would make Michelangelo flip his easel.”83
The anthology program, added TV critic Hal Humphrey, “has done a lot toward de-isolating Americans who cared for nothing but baseball or football.”84 Arledge, in fact, claimed Wide World was driven more by an effort to broaden sports fans’ horizons than to generate revenues. He separated himself from his bottom line–oriented peers—a strategy he frequently employed to stress his comparative thoughtfulness and artistry—by boasting, “I can put stuff on the air I know isn’t going to get a rating. We can do things just because we think they should be done.”85 Accordingly, ABC marketed the show as “not only entertaining, but educational” and referred specifically to the US-USSR track meets to make this claim.86 France’s Cannes Television News Festival recognized Wide World’s edifying cosmopolitanism by awarding the program its 1966 prize for live TV. The most prominent recognition of Wide World’s value came with the 1966 George Foster Peabody Award it received in the category of International Understanding. It was the first Peabody given to a sports program. The accolade—which Wide World collected shortly after its live broadcast from Kiev—suggests the US-USSR meets stimulated the program’s acknowledgment as an exceptional representative of TV’s capacity to foster global connections and cross-cultural affinity.
Wide World’s US-USSR track meet coverage ended after Kiev. The Soviet Union boycotted the event from 1966 through 1968 in protest of the United States’ military involvement in Vietnam.87 When the meets resumed in 1969, CBS purchased away ABC’s television rights.88 The Cold War, however, continued to serve an important role on Wide World, which featured various other US-Soviet competitions and continued to visit locales that were off-limits to most Americans. The program made seventy trips to communist nations between its debut and the toppling of the Berlin Wall in 1989. In 1971 it sent a crew to Havana to cover a men’s volleyball match between the United States and Cuba—the first sports broadcast from Havana to air on US television since the countries severed diplomatic ties ten years prior. Because Americans were not allowed passage to Cuba, ABC used a Canadian crew fronted by ABC News correspondent (and future star anchor) Peter Jennings. Like the US-USSR track meets, the broadcast underlined Cuba’s difference from the United States and gestured toward sport’s potential to reconcile these politically unfriendly nations. Jennings secured an interview with Fidel Castro before and after the match, which Cuba won. Though Castro was typically presented as a menacing threat—the enemy face of the Bay of Pigs Invasion and Cuban Missile Crisis—Jennings’s interview presented a good-humored statesman who graciously took time to speak with the American media outlet and even joked around after his translator bungled a question. While it humanized Cuba’s enigmatic leader, the program also presented his beautiful island nation as frozen in time since the communist revolution. ABC Sports’ state-of-the-art cameras and large crew constituted an unusually glitzy presence in the out-of-date country fit to attract the attention of its prime minister.
Shortly after ABC stopped carrying the US-USSR meets, Arledge expressed interest in “the opportunity to do a sports program from China. It might erase some of the barriers between our two peoples,” he conjectured.89 He finally received the chance in 1977 when Wide World became the first US-based sports TV program to visit communist China to cover a gymnastics meet in Peking. Wide World’s introduction to the country predictably opens with McKay in front of the Great Wall backed by traditional Chinese music. It transitions to a shot of Tiananmen Square, which McKay describes as the city’s “nerve center” where residents congregate each morning to exercise. The image switches from early morning calisthenics to a mass of bicycles traveling through the square as McKay explains that the people of Peking “get more exercise by riding their bikes to work because there is no such thing as an automobile owned by a private citizen in the People’s Republic.” The introductory scene emphasizes Peking’s contrast to the United States’ car-heavy urban centers and, perhaps more pointedly, highlights the broader cultural differences between China’s communist uniformity and America’s capitalist individuality—a characteristic the automobile symbolizes. In fact, Wide World featured an auto race from Riverside, California, the previous weekend. Taken together, the consecutive installments show the vast cultural, economic, and technological differences that make cars largely forbidden in China and enable them to be used for sport in the United States.
McKay delivers his introduction to Tiananmen Square from a crowded street crammed with onlookers gazing curiously at the sportscaster and ABC’s cameras. Their astonishment at the network’s unfamiliar technology echoes the Russian spectators’ fascination with ABC’s Ampex machines in 1961 and similarly emphasizes the United States’ dominant position in the global economy. His introduction then takes an abrupt and curious turn by outlining the densely populated city’s readiness for war. “The holocaust that would be caused by an atom or hydrogen bomb in this city boggles the human mind,” McKay notes. He uses this ominous factoid as an excuse to showcase the entrance to an underground air-raid shelter capable of housing “some 10,000 people for a day or two. It’s Peking’s way of saying, ‘we’re ready whatever happens,’” McKay explains with a stern gaze. The introduction depicts Peking’s citizens as prepared for the hardships of modern warfare, but unfamiliar with the affordances of modern technology.
Ranging from friendly to wary, Wide World’s depictions of Cold War rivals like Russia, Cuba, and China created what Derek Gregory calls “imaginative geographies,” or, politically interested ways of structuring understandings of spaces that cannot be directly experienced.90 They promoted international exchange as they reinforced and capitalized
