ABC Sports. Travis Vogan
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Despite the NCAA’s reluctance, college football was popular enough to endure—and ultimately benefit from—television. But less prominent sports did suffer. Minor-league baseball attendance sunk by 30 percent during the 1950s, and the New Yorker’s A.J. Liebling blamed TV for eviscerating his beloved boxing: “The clients of the television companies, by putting on a free boxing show almost every night of the week, have knocked out of business the hundreds of small-city and neighborhood boxing clubs where youngsters had a chance to learn their trade and journeymen to mature their skills…. Neither advertising agencies nor brewers, least of all the networks, give a hoot if they push the Sweet Science back into a period of genre painting. When it is in a coma they will find some other way to peddle their peanuts.”3
Beyond television’s impact on boxing’s viability and quality, Liebling charged that TV broadcasts dulled the rich social experience of attending matches in crowded, smoky clubs. “Television gives you so plausible an adumbration of a fight, for nothing,” he wrote, “that you feel it would be extravagant to pay your way in. It is like the potato, which is only a succedaneum for something decent to eat but which, once introduced to Ireland, proved so cheap that the peasants gave up their grain-and-meat diet in favor of it.”4 TV, as Liebling saw it, sapped live boxing’s humanity. Regardless, television established itself as the United States’ dominant mass medium by the end of the 1950s. Accordingly, it became a permanent fixture in sports and a necessary ingredient in sports organizations’ financial health.
The youngest of the United States’ three major networks, ABC ranked a distant last among them in the 1950s. It used sports to build a distinct image and attract a steady audience. The network initially contracted its sports programming to Edgar Scherick’s Sports Programs Inc. The subcontractor then hired Arledge—who had never before worked in sports—to produce ABC’s autumn 1960 slate of college football broadcasts. The rookie producer made up for his greenness with ambition and confidence. He audaciously proclaimed that ABC would revolutionize the staid representational method guiding sports TV. It would “take viewers to the game” and provide what the network eventually branded as an “up close and personal” view of events and participants through innovations that borrowed from documentary, journalism, and even drama. As Arledge decreed, “We are going to add show business to sports!”5
Arledge aspired to capture the vitality Liebling accused the medium of depleting. ABC Sports broadcasts privileged building stories over displaying events and assumed viewers might watch the tales it packaged no matter their interest in sports. It humanized competitions by presenting them through familiar narratives (rivalries, records about to be broken, battles against the elements) and by making their participants relatable. These often-simplistic tropes—such as the pregame profile of an athlete desperately yearning to bounce back after an injury—quickly became clichés. As such, they are easy to discount as commercialized pandering. But they function through engaging the cultural codes that make TV so important. “In order for television to achieve its work,” writes media scholar Herman Gray, “it has to draw upon and operate on the basis of a kind of generalized societal common sense about the terms of the society and people’s location in it.”6 This common sense, of course, reflects existing power relations. Like all mass media, then, television has tremendous potential to reinforce and reshape culture. Arguably the medium’s most visible, durable, and valuable genre, sports TV is a key voice in the culture industries. It flexes this clout as much through the resonant stories it tells—and the ways of looking at the world they create—as through the events and people it exhibits.
ABC Sports expanded sports television’s previously narrow aesthetic scope into the realm of cinematic storytelling. It also looked beyond the genre’s traditionally rose-tinted promotional ethos to report on the sometimes-divisive social issues—many of which its sponsors and clients would have preferred that it overlook—informing and surrounding the competitions it covered, such as the Cold War tensions that marked international events and the discrimination faced by female and nonwhite athletes. These controversies made compelling narratives that lent ABC’s coverage drama and newsworthiness. ABC Sports, in fact, boldly denied broadcast partners influence over its content or personnel—a unique policy at the time that gave the network greater creative and editorial leeway than its more docile competitors. Apart from sporadic commentaries by on-air columnists like Cosell, ABC Sports remained neutral on the more prickly issues it reported. It both allowed Ali to express his dissident point of view on Wide World of Sports and made space for Ronald Reagan to recite jingoistic platitudes during its 1984 Summer Olympics coverage. But ABC Sports provided a forum that raised important questions about sport’s sociopolitical contours while demonstrating the crucial role media play in showcasing, fortifying, and questioning them.
Network television was particularly potent when ABC Sports emerged and thrived. Between the 1960s and 1980s, ABC Sports’ regular Saturday afternoon programming—from football to bowling—drew total audience numbers that rival those for the most popular programs in the fragmented, digitized, and multiplatform media environment that has replaced the network era. Not coincidentally, many of the twentieth century’s marquee sporting moments appeared via ABC airwaves and gained their status through the expansive visibility and distinctive shape ABC Sports gave them. Besides reflecting Arledge’s creative approach, these representations and the cultural work they performed grew out of ABC’s efforts to create a brand, compete for market share, and promote content—industrial priorities that extend beyond the network’s involvement in sports. Both ABC Sports’ history and the larger story of network sports television emerge from these intersecting aesthetic, cultural, and economic concerns.
Media studies scholarship has painstakingly detailed television’s profound cultural power and the historical, political, industrial, institutional, and technological contexts that inform it. However, and surprisingly, this robust body of work pays only scant attention to sports television, one of the medium’s most popular genres. Sports television is—unfortunately and shortsightedly—an intellectually suspicious section of a medium that is already traditionally dismissed as a “bad object” of scholarly inquiry.7 Despite its evidently questionable cultural status, sports television informed and, in some cases directly shaped, television programs and practices that have attracted substantial scholarly treatment—scrutiny that can be enriched by the lessons sports TV teaches. Similarly, scholarship on sport culture and history typically gives television only superficial consideration despite its crucial role in showcasing and shaping sport. When this work does comment on TV, it tends only to offer textual analyses of productions and largely ignores the industrial, institutional, and technological circumstances that make possible those ideologically loaded productions. These traditional approaches to studying television and sports, in short, miss a lot. But they can accomplish a lot when brought together. This book uses ABC Sports to demonstrate sport’s vital role in shaping what television does, and television’s crucial part in impacting what sport does. It unites these intertwined but rarely conjoined areas of study and demonstrates the fruits their articulation can yield—benefits that span far beyond this study’s scope.
This project offers a mostly chronological account of ABC Sports through a vast collection of archival sources, programming and marketing materials, popular and trade press commentary, and interviews with those who worked at and with the organization. It begins by examining the economic, industrial, and institutional circumstances that prompted ABC to invest heavily in sports during the late 1950s and charge Arledge with overseeing this programming. Chapter 2 turns to Wide World of Sports, ABC Sports’ signature show and the primary testing ground for its creative approach. The Saturday afternoon anthology possessed a meager budget that permitted it to secure rights to televise only the most marginal sports. Ski jumping and demolition derbies, for instance, were commonplace during its early years. The Cold War provided a way to dramatize many of Wide World’s prerecorded and otherwise unpopular events. The program established