politically uncertain Cold War conditions—a point it made in part through accentuating the United States’ comparative technological advancement and situating ABC Sports as an exemplar of it.
WIDENING WIDE WORLD
By the time Wide World stopped carrying the US-USSR track meets, ABC Sports had firmly established itself as Arledge’s creative domain. Arledge and Chet Simmons initially shared leadership duties after Scherick left ABC Sports. Arledge guided the creative activities, and Simmons oversaw the business arrangements. But Simmons grew disillusioned as Arledge’s star rose and his partner demonstrated little interest in the increasingly unwieldy balance sheets Simmons had to manage. “We had a hard time running [ABC Sports] because we were always over budget,” Simmons recalled. “And there was mostly an inclination to support the creative side and not care about the side that I was dealing with. And I began to feel that perhaps there was something more out there than arguing with Arledge over budgets.”91 Simmons left in 1964 to run sports programming at NBC, where he stayed until departing to become ESPN’s first president in 1979. Though Arledge ran ABC Sports alone after Simmons quit, he was not formally named president until it became an official subsidiary in 1968.
ABC Sports created spin-offs of its signature show to broaden its audience. Extending Wide World’s third episode—which covered the Professional Bowlers Association World Championship in Paramus, New Jersey—ABC launched Pro Bowlers Tour in 1962. Described as a “Main Street and Midwest” counterpart to Wide World’s preoccupation with the unfamiliar, the slow-paced winter and spring program visited different bowling alleys each weekend to showcase one of North America’s most popular “participant sports.”92 More exotically, Wide World expanded on a 1963 segment that featured Americans Joe Brooks and Curt Gowdy in a trout fishing competition against Argentinian fishermen in the Andes Mountains to create American Sportsman in 1965. Hosted by Gowdy, the program featured big-game hunting and fishing around the world with celebrity guests (who often had some business relationship with ABC that their appearances benefited). Gowdy fished for salmon in Iceland with Bing Crosby and hunted sable antelope in Zambia with Ted Williams. After critiques from animal rights activists, the program shifted focus from hunting to wildlife conservation.
Though their scopes varied drastically, Pro Bowlers Tour and American Sportsman both complemented Wide World’s globe-trotting, and they were less expensive to produce than the already economical program that inspired them. Confined to indoor alleys, bowling tournaments require fewer cameras and production staff to cover than most of Wide World’s events, and American Sportsman’s voyages into the wilderness did not demand broadcast licenses. As Gowdy put it, “We don’t have to pay rights fees to fool will Mother Nature.”93 The shows rounded out a weekend programming block centered on Wide World.
ABC also created Wide World–related products that reached beyond television. Compiled by Riger, Wide World’s briefly published yearbooks commemorated the program’s most interesting moments and elaborated on its production practices. Riger opened the 1964 yearbook by explaining that its combination of print, photographs, and drawings will allow readers to understand and appreciate moments that pass by quickly on television. The yearbooks emphasized Wide World’s sophistication and artistry. “The spontaneity of sports offers the greatest opportunity for television to express itself as a new, valid art form,” wrote Robert Trachinger in a short essay. “What the stage and proscenium is to the theater, what film stock and the sound stage are to the movies, the remote and the sports remote, in particular, is to television.”94 Wide World, Trachinger contends, brings into focus and extends TV’s inventiveness.
Along these lines, ABC Sports published Wide World–themed encyclopedias, record books, and quiz books that reinforced its educational value by suggesting the program organized public knowledge of sport and broadened viewers’ intellectual horizons. “Wide World has also created its own generation of sports fans,” the quiz book explains, “knowledgeable and intelligent, weaned on the penetrating, expert coverage of athletics, both amateur and professional that has become the trademark of this popular network series…. These are sophisticated sports fans.”95 The books indicate that this enlightened brand of sports fan—and the knowledge that makes it possible—would not exist apart from ABC Sports and Wide World.
“THE BACKBONE OF OUR WHOLE
SPORTS ACTIVITY”
ABC Sports’ advertising billings increased twentyfold between 1960 and 1967.96 Wide World’s year-round presence, accolades, and promotion of other ABC Sports properties spurred this growth. “We consider the show the backbone of our whole sports activity,” Arledge asserted. “If we had the rights to every major sports event in the universe we would still consider Wide World of Sports our number one show.”97
Wide World overshadowed CBS’s and NBC’s similar programs and forced the rival networks to define their sports offerings in contrast to its popular format. CBS Sports’ Bill MacPhail claimed his network focused only on marquee sports. “We are only interested in quality sports,” he said, “you won’t find us carrying any of those barrel-jumping contests.” NBC began marketing itself as “the Network of Live Sports.” “I don’t really consider them sports shows,” NBC Sports executive Carl Lindemann said of Wide World and ABC’s other taped programs. “We concentrate on live events because my management believes that the real drama is in live.”98 While ABC built its network identity through counterprogramming against CBS and NBC, the still third-place network’s renowned sports coverage had competitors scrambling to find a niche in the genre it had come to dominate.
Aside from installing ABC atop sports television’s industrial hierarchies, Wide World built interest in sports that previously garnered scant media attention. Its regular coverage of surfing, for example, anticipated and influenced Bruce Brown’s documentary travelogue Endless Summer (1966), which similarly spanned the globe to showcase the world’s best surfing spots. Brown, in fact, parlayed his filmmaking experience into a gig as a Wide World cameraman. In 1971, Steve McQueen starred in Le Mans—an action film centered on the race that Wide World’s annual coverage put on American sports fans’ radar. Three years later, German filmmaker Werner Herzog released The Great Ecstasy of the Woodcarver Steiner, a meditative documentary on prodigious Swiss ski jumper and erstwhile artist Walter Steiner. Ski jumping, with its combination of graceful aerial soaring and violent crashes, was a Wide World staple. Herzog’s film, produced for German television, resembles Wide World’s humanistic format. But it contrasts the program’s typical reliance on predictable athletic narratives by highlighting Steiner’s inscrutability. At one point it calls attention to—and turns its nose up at—Wide World’s apparent comparative superficiality by including footage of an unprepared ABC Sports correspondent asking Steiner inane questions that ignore the artistic and philosophical concerns animating Herzog’s documentary. Though very different, these films all demonstrate the awareness Wide World gave to previously fringe sports and the program’s impact on media culture beyond US sports television.
The program also inflated broadcast rights fees and led sports promoters to presume that TV outlets would be willing to pay top dollar for nearly any event. While in Acapulco to cover the 1962 Water Ski Championships, ABC Sports producers sought out some local cliff divers whose jumps would make a compelling way to set the scene. When asked what price the divers required, a representative said the group sought $100,000 because it was planning its own television special. Arledge immediately rejected the outlandish demand. A few minutes after Arledge’s rebuff, the spokesperson returned and said the group would perform for $10 per dive—including practice jumps.99 ABC started receiving invitations to bid on rights to events that were beyond even Wide World’s ample range, such as the International Pro-Am Clam-Digging Championship in Ocean Shores, Washington. “The color comes not
