ABC’s coverage of the 1972 Munich Olympics amplified its reputation as the Network of the Olympics and took advantage of the consistent space Monday Night forged for sports in prime time. But Munich was overshadowed by the Palestinian terrorist group Black September taking as hostage and eventually killing eleven members of Israel’s Olympic team. ABC Sports’ marathon coverage of the incident became the department’s most celebrated achievement to date. This success eventually convinced ABC to entrust Arledge with its languishing news division in 1977, which he revamped by modifying the recipe he developed at ABC Sports. Chapter 5 uses Munich to explore how ABC Sports composed a template through which the network reinvented ABC News, and network sports TV more broadly.
ABC Sports capitalized on the notoriety it achieved during the 1970s by licensing an eclectic collection of items and producing nonsports programming. Along these lines, the subsidiary demonstrated that it did not need preexisting events to create popular sports television by developing made-for-TV specials, including Billie Jean King and Bobby Riggs’s Battle of the Sexes, Evel Knievel’s bone-shattering stunts, and The Superstars, which featured athletes competing in sports outside their areas of expertise. Though commercially successful, these programs were widely belittled as “TrashSports” that degraded the respectability ABC Sports had steadily built. Amid ABC Sports’ investment in TrashSports, the division became embroiled in a scandal surrounding the 1977 US Boxing Championships, in which elements of the competition were fabricated to ensure its value as a TV spectacle. Chapter 6 examines how ABC’s brand extensions and involvement in TrashSports took its sports programming to lengths that no longer necessitated preexisting events and uses the controversial Boxing Championships to investigate the limits to which ABC could manufacture engaging sporting content.
Cable outlets emerged in the mid-1970s and used the practices ABC Sports had established to gain a toehold in the new industry. To mitigate the effects of this competition, ABC acquired majority ownership of ESPN, the first all-sports cable channel and the biggest threat to its market share. But traditionally reliable ABC Sports programs like Wide World and Monday Night sank in popularity as the sports TV market expanded. Adding to these changes—and reflecting the upsurge of corporate consolidation that marked the 1980s—Capital Cities Communications acquired ABC in 1985 and implemented a swell of budgetary, procedural, and personnel changes that saw ABC Sports give up both Arledge and the Olympics. Chapter 7 considers how these shifts altered ABC Sports’ previously secure place within the reconstituted American Broadcasting Company, sports TV, and popular culture while contextualizing the broader industrial transformation they foretold.
As ABC Sports’ metamorphosis continued, ESPN established itself as TV’s most lucrative cable outlet and one of the most recognizable brands in media—sports or otherwise. ESPN’s rising value prompted the Walt Disney Company to purchase Capital Cities in 1996. Immediately after the acquisition, Disney began to position ESPN as the company’s featured sports TV brand while it adjusted to the Web-driven and convergent sports media ecosystem that was replacing the network era ABC Sports represented. These changes culminated in 2006 when Disney moved Monday Night to ESPN and rebranded all ABC Sports programming as “ESPN on ABC.” The book concludes by tracing Disney’s reinvention of ABC Sports in the image of ESPN and probing the network division’s scattered remnants in postnetwork media culture.
In telling ABC Sports’ cultural and institutional history, this project touches on several topics that have inspired their own books, documentaries, and even big-budget feature films like Ali (2001), Munich (2005), and Battle of the Sexes (2017). It sheds new light on these familiar subjects by reading them through the lens of ABC and sports television. Likewise, it offers a more nuanced treatment of ABC Sports figures and programs that have received individualized treatment—Roone Arledge, Howard Cosell, Monday Night Football, and so on—by piecing together the broader cultural contexts out of which they emerged and avoiding the nostalgia, selective memory, and cronyism that marks the memoirs and popular histories that compose most of the literature on these topics. Moreover, it demonstrates sports television’s intimate relationship to and influence on other TV genres and the broader industry—connections scholarship on sports media has been slow to identify. This book, then, explains how ABC Sports grew out of and reshaped the diverse circumstances surrounding it and suggests historical approaches to understanding such media institutions should tend carefully to these intersecting contexts and how they change over time.
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“One of the happiest relationships in American society is that between sports and the media,” wrote James Michener in 1976. “This interface is delightfully symbiotic, since each helped the other survive.”8 Today, this remains truer than ever. However, sport and media’s relationship has become more complex in the internet-driven media landscape that has replaced the network era ABC Sports dominated. Live sports broadcasts maintain special status as appointment viewing in an industry increasingly organized around on-demand content. But alternatives have emerged that allow consumers to skirt traditional distribution channels and enable content providers to serve as their own media producers. The economics and cultural meanings of sports television have changed apace.
Tracing sports TV’s emergence, properties, and transformation, then, demands careful scrutiny of the diverse elements that constitute it. The history of ABC Sports helps to do this work. Network sports television is a shared site of cultural production that informed which types of people receive popular media attention, propelled the Super Bowl into a veritable national holiday, and cemented the Olympics’ status as a global festival on which entire nations pin their geopolitical identities and aspirations. ABC Sports was the key institutional force in establishing sports TV’s conventions, visibility, and power. The storied network sports division tells a larger story about sport, media, and culture from the 1950s into the present.
ONE
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