Because the AFL so urgently needed TV’s money and publicity, it was amenable to ABC’s efforts to combine coverage with “show business.” Variety called the AFL “the league that television built,” and Broadcasting reported that it was “organized with TV in mind.”77 The league eliminated the fair catch rule and instituted a two-point conversion after touchdowns to make its games more exciting. It also built familiarity with its lesser-known players by affixing names to the backs of jerseys so TV viewers could identify them, an implementation ABC’s telecasts assisted by including graphics that introduced players and their statistics.
The AFL’s reliance on TV made it relatively untroubled by its games’ mostly low attendance. Rather than impose blackout policies to protect ticket sales, it wagered that ABC’s dynamic coverage might lure fans to the stadium. But Arledge still thought it important to give the impression that AFL matchups took place in vibrant atmospheres like Notre Dame and Alabama. He bunched the scattered smattering of fans who did show near midfield to “provide the appearance of a reasonably full house” and avoided shots that tracked the ball through the air after kickoffs and punts, “because to do so would reveal endless rows of empty seats.”78 Instead, ABC cut directly from the kicker to the receiver or had camera operators pan along the ground. The network also took liberties to stage—and even restage—events. When a Dallas Texans game began before ABC’s cameras were rolling, the volatile Jack Lubell thundered onto the field screaming at the lead official: “You cocksucker, never again kick off until I tell you you can kick off! Do you understand?”79 Commentator Jack Buck smoothly described Lubell’s disturbance as that of an irate fan who interrupted the game. The teams kicked off again, and ABC’s cameras captured the game in its entirety. This brand of sports television—which those in the industry sarcastically called “AFL coverage”—treated the players as actors and the fans as extras in a methodically staged drama based on reality, but not entirely beholden to it. The AFL’s agreeability toward television, according to Arledge, gave ABC “the freedom to try new things” and develop its style.80
Variety expressed amazement at how quickly ABC’s AFL telecasts, which attracted roughly 80 percent of the ratings that CBS’s NFL broadcasts achieved, sold out their advertising spots.81 This success demonstrated that there was sufficient room on TV for the new league as well as for ABC’s approach to covering sports. Fans may not have been buying tickets, but they were watching the games—at least ABC’s version of them.
ABC’s American Football League coverage reversed the logic that traditionally guided sports television. Rather than telecasting sports because they were popular, ABC would make sports popular by telecasting them. ABC posted an advertisement in Broadcasting to showcase its ability to create such striking made-for-TV spectacles. “Every Sunday, come September,” it reads, “a conservatively estimated turnout of 15,000,000 fans will take their ABC-TV seats (on the 50-yard line) and follow the AFL’s exciting brand of football.” The ad reminds potential sponsors that “AFL football, with its razzle-dazzle, wide-open style of play that is made to order for home screens, delivers … responsive families in concentrated strength.”82 As ABC indicates, fan attendance at AFL games was irrelevant to their potential to deliver a reliable and diverse TV audience. It suggests the sport is better appreciated via ABC’s virtual seats than a stadium’s bleachers. The AFL’s dependence on ABC illustrated the beginnings of a broader industrial shift in which television became sports organizations’ primary revenue source and, as a result, increasingly dictated how events were staged in order to suit the medium’s creative and economic motives.
Shortly after ABC began its NCAA football and AFL packages, Broadcasting reported that the network was for the first time “on the CBS-TV and NBC-TV level in sports billing.” That same year, Variety declared ABC a “major sports network,” and the New York Times observed that the network’s heightened emphasis on sports “enhance[d] even more its varsity standing among the networks.” But because ABC still had no coverage in a significant portion of the United States, it remained a distant third. While acknowledging this disadvantage, ABC insisted that “where viewers have a choice of three networks they choose ABC-TV first.” It located its sports coverage as the key factor that attracted this relatively small but rising viewership.83
Though ABC soon lost the contracts to air both NCAA football and the AFL, its football coverage was promising enough to compel the network to acquire SPI from Scherick in March 1961 for a tax-free transfer of ten thousand shares (a value of roughly $500,000 that transformed Scherick into the network’s second-largest individual stockholder) and to create ABC Sports, a programming banner and division that grew into a fully autonomous subsidiary by 1968.84 While ABC’s early sports offerings privileged autumn, the network needed year-round content to solidify its identification with the genre. Wide World of Sports would extend the AFL package’s stylized efforts to draw viewers without featuring popular sports.
TWO
ABC’s Wide World of Sports
“THE SEEDBED OF MODERN SPORTS
TELEVISION” AND THE COLD WAR
Wide World has given America a wider and more sophisticated view of the games people play than any other single mass media outlet.
JIM MCKAY, host, Wide World of Sports1
Everything we do at ABC Sports evolves from the Wide World philosophy.
DENNIS LEWIN, coordinating producer,
Wide World of Sports2
“I TOLD ABC WE NEEDED A SHOW that could go everywhere on the weekends, and that’s how Wide World of Sports was born,” Edgar Scherick reflected some twenty-five years after the flagship ABC Sports program’s April 29, 1961, debut. “It wasn’t some brilliant stroke of insight that caused me to come up with the idea for the show, but more a matter of economic necessity.”3 Although professional baseball was—by leaps and bounds—the United States’ most popular spring and summer sport, Major League Baseball’s inflexible blackout rules eliminated telecasts of its games in 30 percent of the country, including the largest cities. “Rather than simply lose those markets,” Scherick noted, “we thought ‘Why not get something else in that spot, some sporting events that don’t necessarily get heavy television coverage?’”4
Wide World would focus on comparatively fringe sports that ABC could deliver to all affiliates no matter their location. The competitions’ generally marginal profile ensured inexpensive broadcast rights and permitted ABC to air featured events retrospectively without most viewers being aware of, or likely even caring about, their results. The ninety-minute weekly anthology’s mostly non-live format allowed ABC to schedule it in a consistent Saturday afternoon time slot that would strengthen the network’s growing association with sports and foster a regular viewership. As Arledge explained, “Our purpose was to build, in effect, a franchise not dependent upon one type of sport.”5 If a particular event became prohibitively expensive or did not draw, Wide World’s built-in variety allowed it to move on to something else.
ABC wagered that Wide World’s approach would compensate for its subject matter’s obscurity. “What we set out to do was get the audience involved emotionally,” Arledge said. “If they didn’t give a damn about the game, they might still enjoy the program.”6 Wide World fashioned this emotional involvement by combining the format of a sports show with a travelogue that emphasized the places where events occurred, the