Monday Night Football–themed stamp issued by the US Postal Service, 1999
Acknowledgments
It is humbling to reflect on a years-long project—one that winds up as a book that displays only my name on the cover—and realize how many others contributed. Some pitched in directly and with very specific favors and tips; some asked good questions in the midst of chatting about other topics; and some were just encouraging. Despite the size and nature of these contributions, I can say with total confidence that I could not have completed this project entirely on my own. I appreciate the support and promise to pay it forward.
But I do want to single out some folks and organizations that took the time to help out. First of all, I have to give a giant thanks to sports broadcasting legend and model Hawkeye Ken Aagaard for connecting me with some of the sources who helped me piece together this history. The book would not be nearly as good without their memories and voices, and Ken got the ball rolling by vouching for me. Thanks to Jack Gallivan, Roger Goodman, Rick Kaplan, Dennis Lewin, Robert Lipsyte, Williams Liss, John Martin, Geoff Mason, Sean McManus, Al Michaels, the late Don Ohlmeyer, Dorrance Smith, Jim Spence, Steve Solomon, Alex Wallau, Fred Williamson, and Doug Wilson.
I always thought the University of California Press would be an excellent landing spot for this project. I started out working with Mary Francis, who left UCP not long after we began. But Mary left me in the expert hands of Niels Hooper and Bradley Depew, and we were able to press on without missing a beat. I am grateful to Mary, Niels, and Bradley for believing in the project and helping out with it. Thanks also to Jessica Moll, Nicholle Robertson, and Susan Ecklund for the assistance as we moved into production and copyediting. We ultimately decided to include this in the Sport in World History series. I’m glad we did. I particularly appreciated the feedback from series editors Bob, Chris, Susan, and Wayne. Thanks also to Robert Bellamy and Dick Crepeau for their comments, which helped immensely as I was putting the book together, revising, and polishing.
Archivists and librarians are my favorite people in academe. They organize, protect, and make available the raw materials that are eventually mined to create more and different resources (that librarians then organize, protect, and make available, and so on). They often seem to know more about topics than the researchers they aid, and they are mostly content to stay behind the scenes. Almost without fail, the archivists who helped me wound up bringing materials I had not thought to consult or that weren’t obviously relevant from the catalogs. No database has the passion these folks possess for their work. Thanks to Columbia University’s Rare Book and Manuscript Library, New York University’s Special Collections, the New York Public Library, the Chicago Public Library, the Paley Center for Media, University of Southern California’s Cinematic Arts Library, the UCLA Library’s Special Collections, the LA84 Foundation Sports Library, the University of Illinois Archives, the Wisconsin Historical Society, the University of Buffalo Library’s Special Collections, the University of Massachusetts Library’s Special Collections, Vanderbilt University’s Television News Archive, the Smithsonian Archives of American Art, and the LeRoy Neiman Foundation. I want to give a special shout-out to Tara Zabor and the Neiman Foundation for helping me to secure the rights to use several Neiman images. Finally, and most of all, thanks to the University of Iowa Libraries.
Though I traveled a good bit to write this book, the project started and ended in Iowa City. Fortunately, I’m surrounded by a bunch of benevolent geniuses who tolerate questions about and mentions of all sorts of things—often non sequiturs like “You know, Howard Cosell appeared on an episode of The Partridge Family” that make me a slightly less cute version of that kid from Jerry Maguire. Thanks to Tom Oates, Rebecca Raw, Brian Ekdale, Melissa Tully, Nick Grossman, Alyssa Prorok, Andy Todd, Erin Syoen, Kajsa Dalrymple, Jeff Kritzman, Dylan McConnell, Becca Neel, Ben Cooper, Dan Berkowitz, Frank Durham, Gigi Durham, Rachel Young, Gabe Bodzin, Andrew Willhoit, Emily Brown, Steve Bloom, Dave Dowling, Deborah Whaley, David Ryfe, Mike Gibisser, Hannah Givler, Steve Warren, Susan Birrell, Ann Haugland, Tim Havens, and Nick Yablon. Thanks also to Becky Kick, Michele Ketchum, Rosemary Zimmerman, Jennifer Cooper, Laura Kastens, Ericka Raber, and Mike Hendrickson for helping me to navigate important details concerning books, funding, and technology. Part of this research was supported by a UI College of Liberal Arts and Sciences Flexible-Load Assignment. I also had research assistance from Mallory Miranda and Eloisa Valenzuela-Mendoza. The UI School of Journalism and Mass Communication generously ponied up the money to pay for my index, which was nice because I have no idea how to put one together.
Beyond Iowa, I benefited from questions and comments at conferences such as those of the Society for Cinema and Media Studies, the North American Society for Sport History, the American Studies Association, the International Communication Association, and the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication. Vicky Johnson, as always, offered brilliant comments as I was conceptualizing, researching, and writing the project. Frank Durham and Danny Nasset gave me feedback on my proposal. Nick Yablon read the entire manuscript and provided some insights that helped me to make improvements before I turned in the final draft. Fragments of the book were piloted in articles published in American Art and Television & New Media. I am grateful to Marie Ladino, Emily Shapiro, and Diane Negra for guidance that helped get those works into shape and eventually sharpen the book.
Finally, big thanks to my friends and family. You guys are always helping me out with big and small stuff—and most times you don’t even know it.
Introduction
ABC SPORTS AND NETWORK SPORTS TELEVISION
IN SEPTEMBER 1994, Sports Illustrated published a list of the forty most influential sports figures in the forty years since the magazine’s launch. Its top two selections—Muhammad Ali and Michael Jordan—were no great surprise. At the height of their respective careers, Ali and Jordan were arguably the most recognizable people on Earth. Sports Illustrated’s third-ranked selection—the American Broadcasting Company’s sports television mastermind Roone Arledge—was comparatively obscure. Arledge never fronted for global ad campaigns, had a shoe line, or divided a nation with his politics. But the magazine might have underestimated the influence of this producer and executive. During Arledge’s thirty-eight-year stint at the network, ABC built and codified the media infrastructure that made possible global sport celebrities of Ali and Jordan’s unprecedented magnitude.
ABC Sports is behind some of network sports television’s most significant practices, personalities, and moments. It created the weekend anthology Wide World of Sports, transformed professional football into a prime-time spectacle with Monday Night Football, and fashioned the Olympics into a mega media event. It helped to turn Ali, the sportscaster Howard Cosell, and the daredevil Evel Knievel into stars and captured now-iconic instances that include Tommie Smith and John Carlos’s raised-fist protest at the 1968 Olympics, the terrorist attacks at the 1972 Munich Games, Billie Jean King and Bobby Riggs’s 1973 “Battle of the Sexes” tennis match, the US hockey team’s 1980 “Miracle on Ice” victory over the Soviet Union, and the 1999 Women’s World Cup final. ABC Sports: The Rise and Fall of Network Sports Television offers a cultural and institutional history of ABC Sports from its beginnings to its 2006 rebranding as “ESPN on ABC.” It uses the division to examine network sports television’s development in the United States; the aesthetic, cultural, political, and industrial practices that mark it; and the changes it endured along with the new sports media environment it spawned.
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Sports drove TV’s ascendance into a commonplace appliance after World War II. By 1947 the trade publication Variety was hailing live sports as the new medium’s “greatest contribution.”1 But TV confronted widespread resistance among many in the sports industry who believed it would decimate ticket sales—anxieties radio and print also faced when they emerged. A 1952 report commissioned by the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) concluded that television had an “adverse effect on college
