WHILE history likely will unduly flatter Howard Cosell as the signature voice of ABC Sports during its formative years and beyond, the truth, for what it’s worth, tells a different story. Jim McKay, the on-air antithesis of the me-stricken Cosell, was the voice of ABC Sports.
McKay, today from 4-6 p.m., hosts “ABC’s Wide World of Sports 40th Anniversary Special.” Today is Wide World’s 40th anniversary, to the day. On April 29, 1961, it debuted with coverage of the Penn Relays from Philly and the Drake Relays from Des Moines.
And while NBC, America’s reigning Olympic caretaker, was pre-disposed to present the Olympics on tape in 1996 and 2000, the Penn and Drake Relays, 40 years ago, aired live. McKay, as he was throughout the show’s heyday, was the host.
“We began as a limited, 20-week run show,” said McKay, nearly 80. “ABC had just lost baseball and we were launched essentially as summer-only programming. But it was brought back in January, then stuck.”
Sports anthology shows such as Wide World, “The CBS Sports Spectacular” and NBC’s “SportsWorld” have vanished. They no longer meet with the wants and needs of commercial, over-the-air TV. The big, ratings-approved stuff – figure skating championships, for example – are presented in prime time. The little stuff – lumberjack competitions from Oregon – can be found on ESPN2 at 3 a.m., if at all.
But Wide World’s special legacy lies in its special treatment of the subject. The sports it presented – from bobsledding in the Italian Alps to dog sledding in Alaska – generally put small value in winning or losing.
Despite Wide World’s ingrained narrative intro – “The Thrill of victory, the agony of defeat” – McKay reminds us that, “We almost always concentrated on people, the humanity within all sports, everywhere.”
Thus it was the other side of Wide World’s intro – “Spanning the globe to bring you the constant variety of sports” – that provided the fascination.
Wide World introduced many Americans to gymnastics in the tiny-dancer form of Olga Korbut. (Eeerily, they come even smaller, today.) The popularity of auto racing as TV fare was seeded on Wide World. For no apparent reason, I still like to say, “Chris Economaki.” And I can still hear high-pitched Scotsman Jackie Stewart rolling his R’s and hollering, “They’re really flying now, Jim!”
Wide World’s globe-spanning created riveting travelogues from far, far away. In Tokyo, en route to China, McKay purchased a sleeve of golf balls and a pitching wedge, then, on his third try, lofted a shot over The Great Wall.
Wide World’s technical crews were mad scientists with cameras and microphones. Whatever worked, stuck. And still sticks. Its human-interest features, especially with athletes from other continents, were adopted and sustained by ABC’s Olympics unit as “Up Close and Personal” segments.
McKay recalls that the Russian high-jumper Valery Brumel, the 1964 Olympic gold medalist, was introduced to American audiences as a real, live human being, and not as a Soviet robot. “He became a popular athlete here. We cut into some of that Cold War frost.”
Oh, there were some inglorious moments. During the ’70s, Wide World went for the visceral, ratings-rationalized sell by featuring Evel Knievel riding motorcycles or rockets that he attempted to launch over canyons, craters and small townhouse communities.
And McKay says the weirdest thing he covered for Wide World was in the ’60s: Soviet motorcycle racing – on ice – in Dynamo Stadium. “Agony-of-defeat” ski-jumper Vinko Bogataj, the guy who wipes out in the show’s open since 1970, may have even given some inspiration to the birth of ABC/ESPN’s youth-targeted, danger-desensitizing Xtreme Games.
But Wide World succeeded in nobler endeavors, including international diplomacy. It was, beginning in 1961 with the USA-USSR track meet in Moscow, an Iron Curtain-buster. Stops were made in China, the USSR, East Germany, Cuba.
In Havana, in 1971 for a U.S.-Cuba volleyball match, McKay sat down for a rare-at-the-time American TV chat with Fidel Castro. “He went on,” McKay said with resurrected pain, “for 3½ hours.”
And Wide World took risks. “We left for the ’61 track meet in Moscow without clearance to enter the country,” said McKay. “We took all the equipment half-way, to Amsterdam, on the gamble that we’d be cleared.”
McKay doesn’t know whether he was followed by Soviet-bloc agents during those trips. “Hey, if you’re any good at following people, the people will never know.” But he does recall the time that two Western TV technicians were convinced that they were being tailed by KGB agents in Moscow.
“When these guys got back to their hotel room, one of them looked under his bed and found a black box with wires coming out of it. Just as they suspected – the KGB had their room bugged!
“So one of them said, ‘I’ll show these sons of guns!’ So he took some wire cutters and sliced right through all that wiring. A second later, they heard this big crash in the room below them. The wires had been connected to a chandelier.”