The “Almost Broadcasting Company” and the Birth of ABC Sports
Sports programming put ABC on the television map.
BERT SUGAR, journalist and historian1
ACCORDING TO BROADCAST HISTORIAN WILLIAM BODDY, “The American television industry underwent its deepest and most lasting changes in the middle years of the 1950s.”2 Of the three major networks that survived the decade, ABC—the youngest of the bunch—endured the most drastic shifts. It nearly folded, was sold to United Paramount Theaters, and was forced to develop inventive strategies to counteract its comparative feebleness. Sports became one of its chief survival techniques. The network’s annual commitment to sporting content increased 600 percent over the 1950s and culminated with its March 1961 creation of ABC Sports—the first network sports division.3 ABC Sports gave the traditionally unpopular network an identity and became the laboratory at which Roone Arledge developed his foundational aesthetic.
HARD ROCK
ABC was born the bastard child of the Radio Corporation of America’s (RCA) National Broadcasting Company. The “Second Depression” of 1937—a recession within the Great Depression that deflated what few strides the economy had made since the 1929 stock market crash—compelled the US government to intensify its scrutiny of the large trusts and monopolies blamed for the financial crisis. The film and radio industries composed high-profile targets that signaled no entity would evade inspection. The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) specifically began to investigate chain broadcasting—the practice of programming multiple radio stations to air the same content simultaneously. Its 1941 Report on Chain Broadcasting ruled that no single organization could broadcast on more than one network.
Two years later, the FCC deemed RCA’s ownership of both the NBC Red Network and the NBC Blue Network anticompetitive and forced it to sell one of the properties. Unsurprisingly, RCA owner David Sarnoff opted to unload the less popular Blue Network, which focused on public affairs programming and was limited to low-power stations in small markets. Sarnoff found an eventual buyer in Edward J. Noble, the Life Savers Corporation owner and entrepreneur who thought a radio network might compose a promotionally rich complement to his many other ventures. Noble procured NBC Blue in October 1943 for $8 million, the highest price paid for a broadcasting entity to that date. The network, which came along with 168 affiliates and 715 employees, went by “Blue” until Noble purchased and adopted the name American Broadcasting Company in June 1945. Despite the title change, ABC retained Blue’s comparative unpopularity and was distinguished only by its lower ratings, less prominent advertisers, and fewer affiliates. The network, wrote Forbes, “scraped along on the crumbs that fell from the table at which the big two were feasting.”4 As a result, ABC was known throughout the industry as the “Almost Broadcasting Company” and was constrained to engage in activities its competitors considered déclassé. “To get a modicum of income and to show a modest profit,” explained eventual ABC president Oliver “Ollie” Treyz, “ABC took a relaxed view of standards established by NBC and CBS. We took spots for deodorants and laxatives, which the other guys wouldn’t take.”5 As part of the struggling network’s efforts to subsist, ABC followed CBS’s, NBC’s, and the short-lived broadcasting upstart DuMont’s entrances into the new medium of television.
As with RCA, the FCC found Paramount Pictures Inc.—which comprised a movie studio and theater chain—to be restricting trade. The 1948 United States v. Paramount Pictures Inc. ruling, colloquially known as the Divorcement Decree, forced Paramount to separate its studio and theater arms into separate entities, Paramount Pictures Corporation and United Paramount Theaters (UPT), so it could not simply fill its theaters with the movies it produced and ignore competitors’ products. Media historian Douglas Gomery calls the ruling “one of [the twentieth] century’s more bitter and drawn-out antitrust battles,” which permanently altered Hollywood’s distribution and exhibition practices.6 Beyond extricating itself from Paramount Pictures, United Paramount Theaters had to reduce its theater chain from 1,395 to 650 within five years. The windfall it received from selling those theaters poised the company to collect new assets. UPT president Leonard H. Goldenson, who joined Paramount as a lawyer in 1933 and took over after the divorcement, figured television would be a sensible place to invest the proceeds given the medium’s similarities to, shared audience with, and ability to promote film.
But much to Goldenson’s chagrin, it was impossible for prospective broadcasters to secure station licenses at the time. The FCC’s Sixth Report and Order initiated a station freeze the same year as the Divorcement Decree. Originally slated for six months, the freeze extended more than three years—from September 30, 1948, until April 14, 1952. Aside from blocking potential station owners like UPT, the freeze solidified industrial hierarchies. The less popular ABC and DuMont networks continued to lose money during this period while CBS and NBC maintained their long-standing supremacy. “Given the station allocation plan contained within the FCC’s Sixth Report and Order,” explains broadcast historian Stewart Lewis Long, “most observers felt it was only a matter of time before either ABC or DuMont, or both networks, would go out of business.”7 Goldenson sought television stations, not necessarily ABC. But the only way he could acquire stations at this time was by purchasing an entity that already owned them. Though “only a skeleton of a network,” ABC had five stations—the maximum the FCC permitted at the time—in five of the United States’ top six markets.8
Noble—a notorious cheapskate who reportedly gave employees Life Savers candies as Christmas bonuses—demanded $25 million for ABC, far more than the losing venture’s projected value.9 He bargained with UPT by averring that CBS president William S. Paley expressed an interest in his struggling company. Though Goldenson reasonably argued that such a deal would never gain FCC approval, necessary for any acquisition involving the sale of licensed stations, the UPT president finally budged in 1951. “I knew it was too much,” Goldenson shrugged years later, “but I was also pretty sure there wouldn’t be another television network coming on the market anytime soon.” In February 1953, after a protracted hearing that included thirteen hundred pages of documents and five hundred exhibits, the FCC approved UPT’s acquisition. Goldenson initially retained ABC president Robert E. Kintner (whom he replaced with Treyz in 1956), and Noble chaired the network’s board of directors. The FCC ratified the merger in part because it determined that ABC otherwise could not realistically vie for market share without some help: “ABC has been unable to compete effectively with NBC and CBS, principally because it lacks the financial resources, the working capital, and the diversity of revenue-producing activities of the other network of companies with which they are associated.” Upon the acquisition, UPT infused ABC with $30 million it could use to secure new programming and upgrade its comparatively shabby facilities.10
ABC’s good fortune accelerated DuMont’s demise. The UPT-ABC merger “in effect sacrificed the DuMont Network in order that ABC might survive and prosper to offset the obvious dominance which NBC and CBS had gained during the ‘freeze’ years.” “The minute the FCC approved the merger our fate was sealed,” lamented DuMont president Theodore Bergman.11 DuMont ceased broadcasting in 1955. ABC seized on this new void to turn its first profits. Though DuMont was even less prominent than ABC, sports programming composed one of its few strengths. DuMont’s presentation of the 1951 National Football League championship, for instance, was the earliest live national TV broadcast of professional football. DuMont also aired non-live weekend anthology programs, the outdoor show Fishing and Hunting Club (1949–50), and the first prime-time pro football broadcasts, which anticipated, respectively, ABC’s Wide World of Sports, American Sportsman, and Monday Night Football.
Despite UPT’s infusion of capital and DuMont’s folding, ABC remained television’s least distinguished network. It held stations in New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, Detroit, and San Francisco but otherwise had just fourteen primary affiliates. NBC, by contrast,
