ABC Sports. Travis Vogan

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 from the clams themselves, which are rather long and ugly,” wrote the delegation from Ocean Shores, “but the contestants. Ocean Shores is in a very goofy area where many of the inhabitants are scruffy old beachcombers, or woodsmen, or Indians from the Quinault Reservation. Put these in harness with some nice young things in minimal bathing suits and we will have some interesting shots.”¹⁰⁰ Wide World passed on the clam digging. But its coverage of events like log rolling and rattlesnake hunting created an environment where the prospect of televised clamming was imaginable, if not entirely feasible.

THREE

       “The Network of the Olympics”

      STARRING MUHAMMAD ALI AND

      HOWARD COSELL

      I wasn’t sure if Wide World was a weekly Olympics or if the Olympics was a two week Wide World.

      DENNIS LEWIN, ABC Sports producer¹

      The Olympics is the biggest sports event on earth and it is worth every penny—every single million bucks—you have to spend to get it. Because then your network is “The Olympic Network” and people see your image as something special.

      ROONE ARLEDGE²

      JUST AS IMPORTANT AS COMPOSING the “backbone” of ABC Sports’ practices and the “seedbed of modern sports television,” Wide World formed the basis from which ABC fashioned the Olympics into sports TV’s biggest spectacle. ABC became the first US network to gain exclusive Olympics rights when it secured the contract to air the 1960 Winter Games from Squaw Valley, California. It planned to make Squaw Valley the first nationally televised Olympiad and hoped to parlay the broadcast license into a deal to carry the more popular Rome Summer Games later that year. But ABC’s plans suddenly swiveled when CBS purchased the Rome contract for $394,000.³ An infuriated Ollie Treyz wrote to Squaw Valley Olympic Organizing Committee (OOC) chairperson Prentis Hale that the Rome rights “were very much a part of our understanding in connection with the rights to your Squaw Valley project.” He threatened that ABC would “be forced to withdraw from any participation in such winter Olympic Games” if it did not also get Rome. Hale responded by maintaining that his committee simply agreed to “use our best efforts to assist ABC in obtaining Rome TV” and insisting that “our contract with you for Squaw TV included no provision” for Rome and “remains in effect regardless.”⁴ ABC ultimately decided the cost to telecast Squaw Valley—roughly $100,000 including rights and production costs—was too great without Rome and killed the deal, a move that reportedly made the Squaw Valley Committee “hoppin’ mad.”⁵

      CBS paid $50,000 for Squaw Valley shortly after ABC dropped out. Its broadcasts, mostly brief taped highlights run late in the evening, yielded middling ratings. But CBS satisfied sponsors by attracting a disproportionately moneyed audience and generated goodwill by providing what Variety called a “noble public service.” The network’s modest but unprecedented Olympics coverage—according to sport historian Allen Guttmann—“proved that the games were marvelously telegenic.”⁶