When I’m a the Final Four for women’s lacrosse, a state championship game, a national tournament, or a convention, I often find myself talking to people about past comparisons to today’s events in a storytelling style similar to that of legendary broadcaster Jim McKay, who died yesterday in central Maryland.
You see, before there were reality shows, blogs, and travel shows on cable TV, McKay’s signature show, Wide World Of Sports, was all of that and more.
McKay would do the occasional stunt, such as hitting a golf ball over the Berlin Wall or stand on a floating log for a lumberjack competition.
But he was also very important in terms of how the world is seen. He broadcast from a Soviet-dominated Eastern Europe, and even brought live television from Moscow, Prague, and other places around the world.
As the show evolved, the offerings were found more and more on tape, and the events were as varied as martial arts exhibitions (including a man catching a bullet in his teeth), barrel jumping on ice skates, and the Harlem Globetrotters.
But if you scan today’s high-dollar, high-profile athletic events on TV over the cable universe, they were all covered in some way by the early days of Wide World of Sports.
Five weeks after Wide World’s first show, the offering was an F.A. Cup final from England. Today, there are entire networks devoted to coverage of soccer.
The NCAA Division I men’s basketball tournament, that three-week smorgasbord of sports which has brought us terms as “bracketology,” “Valpo,” and “the 5-12 game,” might not be where it is today without Wide World of Sports being the first network to show the tournament in March 1962.
NASCAR racing, now on five different networks, was first on WWoS in 1963, with a condensed version of the Daytona 500. A year earlier, McKay brought his cameras to Monaco for a Formula 1 Grand Prix. Still earlier, the network broadcast the Indy 500 pole qualification.
The America’s Cup, which was sprung into prominence by ESPN in the 1980s, had its start through McKay as well, first broadcast in September 1962.
A year later, the network would show the Little League World Series from Williamsport, Pa. Today, the tournament and its coverage has expanded to sometimes uncomfortable levels.
Heavyweight boxing these days is almost exclusively a pay-per-view enterprise, but McKay was able to snare an exclusive replay of a Theater Network Television broadcast of Cassius Clay’s stunning knockout of Sonny Liston. The world first got a look at a young lawyer turned sportscaster named Howard Cosell.
McKay also shepherded in gymnastics, track, swimming, and figure skating competitions, all of which helped set the network up for broadcasting the Olympics. McKay was on camera for an astounding 12 Olympic Games.
McKay, along with producers Don Ohlmeyer and Roone Arledge, and hosts of camera and sound people, helped amp up the world of sports broadcasting in ways Leni Reifenstahl could have only dreamt of 25 years earlier. The ABC team captured sound and pictures from places you might never have imagined.
Indeed, in the 1970s, it was a big deal if ski-racing coverage included shots all the way from the starthouse down to the bottom. But what ABC did was emulated by other broadcasters of sporting events. And sports TV viewers will notice the minute details to which the sports division paid so much attention.
Many will remember McKay, who along with Cosell changed the face of sports journalism and, I think, actually made it better than some of the pap that passes for journalism these days.
Regrettably, with the passing of Cosell, Arledge, and now McKay, an entire era is now gone.
