ABC Sports. Travis Vogan

since the countries severed diplomatic ties ten years prior. Because Americans were not allowed passage to Cuba, ABC used a Canadian crew fronted by ABC News correspondent (and future star anchor) Peter Jennings. Like the US-USSR track meets, the broadcast underlined Cuba’s difference from the United States and gestured toward sport’s potential to reconcile these politically unfriendly nations. Jennings secured an interview with Fidel Castro before and after the match, which Cuba won. Though Castro was typically presented as a menacing threat—the enemy face of the Bay of Pigs Invasion and Cuban Missile Crisis—Jennings’s interview presented a good-humored statesman who graciously took time to speak with the American media outlet and even joked around after his translator bungled a question. While it humanized Cuba’s enigmatic leader, the program also presented his beautiful island nation as frozen in time since the communist revolution. ABC Sports’ state-of-the-art cameras and large crew constituted an unusually glitzy presence in the out-of-date country fit to attract the attention of its prime minister.

      Shortly after ABC stopped carrying the US-USSR meets, Arledge expressed interest in “the opportunity to do a sports program from China. It might erase some of the barriers between our two peoples,” he conjectured.⁸⁹ He finally received the chance in 1977 when Wide World became the first US-based sports TV program to visit communist China to cover a gymnastics meet in Peking. Wide World’s introduction to the country predictably opens with McKay in front of the Great Wall backed by traditional Chinese music. It transitions to a shot of Tiananmen Square, which McKay describes as the city’s “nerve center” where residents congregate each morning to exercise. The image switches from early morning calisthenics to a mass of bicycles traveling through the square as McKay explains that the people of Peking “get more exercise by riding their bikes to work because there is no such thing as an automobile owned by a private citizen in the People’s Republic.” The introductory scene emphasizes Peking’s contrast to the United States’ car-heavy urban centers and, perhaps more pointedly, highlights the broader cultural differences between China’s communist uniformity and America’s capitalist individuality—a characteristic the automobile symbolizes. In fact, Wide World featured an auto race from Riverside, California, the previous weekend. Taken together, the consecutive installments show the vast cultural, economic, and technological differences that make cars largely forbidden in China and enable them to be used for sport in the United States.

      McKay delivers his introduction to Tiananmen Square from a crowded street crammed with onlookers gazing curiously at the sportscaster and ABC’s cameras. Their astonishment at the network’s unfamiliar technology echoes the Russian spectators’ fascination with ABC’s Ampex machines in 1961 and similarly emphasizes the United States’ dominant position in the global economy. His introduction then takes an abrupt and curious turn by outlining the densely populated city’s readiness for war. “The holocaust that would be caused by an atom or hydrogen bomb in this city boggles the human mind,” McKay notes. He uses this ominous factoid as an excuse to showcase the entrance to an underground air-raid shelter capable of housing “some 10,000 people for a day or two. It’s Peking’s way of saying, ‘we’re ready whatever happens,’” McKay explains with a stern gaze. The introduction depicts Peking’s citizens as prepared for the hardships of modern warfare, but unfamiliar with the affordances of modern technology.

      Ranging from friendly to wary, Wide World’s depictions of Cold War rivals like Russia, Cuba, and China created what Derek Gregory calls “imaginative geographies,” or, politically interested ways of structuring understandings of spaces that cannot be directly experienced.⁹⁰ They promoted international exchange as they reinforced and capitalized on the host nations’ mysteriousness. Simultaneously, Wide World reassured its American viewership of the United States’ leading status in global hierarchies during 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