Scherick then conjured up a strategy that could have been lifted from a cheap spy thriller. He would scour ABC to locate “the most innocuous fellow we can find, someone who could melt into the wallpaper,” and use this unassuming character as a Trojan horse to deliver the network’s shocking bid.39 He found Stanton Frankle, a self-effacing and bookish accountant of average height and build. Scherick carefully instructed Frankle that he would go to the bidding meeting at New York’s Royal Manhattan Hotel with ABC’s offer and a document that ABC’s lawyers drew up to guarantee that the recently flush network could afford its bid. He told Frankle to keep a low profile at the meeting, and not to lie if anyone asked about his affiliation. Frankle’s main assignment was to keep an eye on Gallery, make sure he had no competitors, and register ABC’s bid only after the NBC executive submitted his network’s presumably lower offer.
On the day of the bidding, Scherick sent Frankle by limousine to the Royal Manhattan. He was so concerned that the plan might go awry that he sent a backup in a separate limo should the accountant be intercepted or otherwise incapacitated. Scherick reportedly told the understudy that “if he should see Stanton Frankle fall injured in the streets, he should let Frankle lie where he fell and proceed to the consummation of the mission.”40 Frankle made it to the meeting unscathed and in time for NCAA director of TV programming Asa Bushnell to open the bidding. Just as Scherick predicted, Gallery scanned the room to check for competitors. When he did not see anyone familiar, he took one of two envelopes from his jacket pocket and submitted it to Bushnell. The bid was for $5.2 million, a predictable 10 percent higher than NBC was paying per season. Frankle made his move. “My name is Stanton Frankle,” he said to Bushnell as he handed him an envelope. “I represent the American Broadcasting Company and here is our bid.” ABC offered $6,251,114 for the two-year contract—a sizable chunk of the Gillette cash. When asked why he tacked on the extra $1,114 to the massive bid, Scherick flippantly claimed that he did not want to seem “chintzy.”41
Gallery, who had begun to treat the annual bidding as a convivial formality en route to resuming his network’s business with college football, was stunned. So was the NCAA, which was not thrilled about the prospect of giving its most coveted TV contract to the third-ranked network but could hardly turn down the extra million dollars ABC offered. “The NCAA would as soon as have had a Martian descend and bid as give their games to ABC,” Scherick explained. “The NCAA was used to the crème de la crème, NBC, and viewed ABC as a guttersnipe organization.” But the money was enough to motivate the NCAA to swallow its pride and sign with the Almost Broadcasting Company.42
As Moore proclaimed, “The acquisition by ABC-TV of NCAA rights marks a new era in the field of sports programming for ABC.” Beyond college football, ABC used the Gillette funds for rights to produce baseball, additional boxing, and the bowling program Make That Spare—a non-live “accordion” show it would place before or after NCAA football to round out its Saturday schedule. Los Angeles Times sportswriter Don Page claimed that ABC’s increased commitment to sports caused NBC “to shed its prize feathers” and suggested it might need to replace its peacock corporate mascot with a turkey as a result of this industrial power shift.43 Based on its acquisition of the desirable NCAA football contract, ABC started receiving station clearances in non-ABC markets. As Moore explained, “My argument to the top brass was ‘you let us get into college sports and we’ll get the games cleared in markets where ABC has no affiliates because the public doesn’t give a good goddamn about a station’s loyalty to NBC or CBS.”44
“THE MARK TWAIN OF TV SPORTS”
Concerned about ABC’s ability to set its sports programming apart, Scherick and Moore sought to pair the network’s contracts to air marquee sporting events with an engaging way of presenting them. To help develop this approach, Scherick hired Arledge, a twenty-nine-year-old NBC producer whose primary experience up to that point was in children’s programming. Arledge was a stocky, redheaded, and bespectacled attorney’s son from Forest Hills, Long Island.45 The inquisitive and private-schooled youngster developed an eclectic body of interests that included drama, literature, politics, geography, and sports. He indulged these curiosities by pursuing a liberal arts degree at Columbia. “I wanted to be a writer,” he recalled, “but I couldn’t decide whether I wanted to write sports, government, philosophy, or theater.”46 Arledge took courses on the great works of literature with celebrity professors Mark Van Doren and Lionel Trilling, who instilled in him a keen appreciation of and ability to analyze narrative. The serial overachiever served as president of his Phi Gamma Delta fraternity and edited the school’s yearbook, The Columbian, during his senior year. He wound up directing his interests toward a specialization in government and politics. Arledge also briefly did some graduate work at Columbia’s School of International Affairs, where he focused on the Near East and Middle East and assisted with the scholarly journal it published.47
Upon graduation, Arledge decided the communications industry might best foster his catholic passions and writing-heavy skill set. He had a promising connection in DuMont programming chief James Caddigan, a former Paramount Pictures employee. Arledge met Caddigan while working as a headwaiter over the summer at the Wayside Inn in Chatham, Massachusetts. Caddigan and his family entered the restaurant just as it was about to close. Rather than turn them away—which would have been firmly within his rights—Arledge left the kitchen open so the family could dine. Caddigan remembered Arledge’s generosity when the freshly minted college grad applied for a job at DuMont in December 1952 and hired him as an assistant to the associate director of programming and production.
Arledge barely had time to learn the ropes at DuMont before being drafted into the military in March 1953. Until December 1954, he served at Maryland’s Aberdeen Proving Ground, where he ran the radio and television section of the base’s Public Information Office and, as he noted in his résumé, was “responsible for the dissemination of information concerning the United States Army Ordnance Corps and its weapons, training and other features.”48 Though there were protections in place guaranteeing soldiers the jobs they left after being drafted, DuMont’s broadcasting wing was practically defunct when Arledge was discharged, and the company had nothing for him. Arledge threatened legal action and sent an enraged letter to Caddigan. “I deserve better treatment than to be notified by your secretary that you had left word that was nothing available for me,” he seethed to his unresponsive former boss. “It looks as if the whole DuMont policy has been to keep me hanging.”49
But not regaining the DuMont job proved a blessing in disguise. Arledge shortly found work as a floor manager at NBC’s New York City affiliate WRCA-TV, where his first wife, Joan, served as one David Sarnoff’s secretaries. In his letter of application, Arledge suggested his “main field of interest and experience has always been in the area of public service programming. My educational background, combined with the experience I have gained in the actual staging of television programs could best be utilized in News and Special Events Television Programming.” Though his entry-level position amounted to little more than grunt work, Arledge optimistically told professional colleague Orrin Dunlap that “advancement from this position is very good and that I will have a chance eventually to do some creative work.”50 Arledge quickly worked his way up to director, producer, and unit manager. He oversaw an assortment of programs, including the Rockefeller Center Christmas tree lighting ceremony featuring Olympic figure skater Dick Button, whom he eventually hired as an expert commentator for ABC Sports. But Arledge’s primary job was producing ventriloquist Shari Lewis’s morning children’s puppet show Hi Mom!, which starred the precocious sock puppet Lamb Chop. Though Hi Mom! got Arledge his first Emmy Award, the high-minded Ivy Leaguer divulged “it would have been even nicer … had it been acquired for producing something meatier than a morning kids show.”51
Arledge’s diverse ambitions and hopes for rapid career advancement drove him to explore a variety of TV genres. He wrote a teleplay titled Nothing to Hide in 1955, sold an adaptation of Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol to CBS, produced the informational