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to have scribbled on the back of an airline ticket while on one of his many transcontinental expeditions to secure broadcast rights—announce: “Spanning the globe to bring you the constant variety of sport. The thrill of victory. The agony of defeat. The human drama of athletic competition. This is ABC’s Wide World of Sports!”⁷ Wide World privileged this variety, thrill, agony, and drama over the competitions it showcased and used these qualities to attract interest in often unfamiliar sports.

      Launched the same year as the Bay of Pigs invasion and the Berlin Wall’s construction, Wide World presented sporting competitions as activities that showcase, but ultimately transcend, geographic and cultural borders. “One of the original concepts of Wide World of Sports,” commented Tom Moore, “was to mirror sports as the international language whereby people all over the world could better know and understand each other.”⁸ The Cold War, which historian Ban Wang calls a “narrative or moral drama,” composed a familiar way to season many of Wide World’s obscurities with intrigue.⁹ As Arledge observed, “If you had an American and a Russian, it didn’t matter what they were doing, they could have been kayaking and people would watch it.”¹⁰ Cold War narratives propelled ABC Sports and Wide World’s entwined emergence and fashioned salable touchstones that the rapidly globalizing sports television industry used to dramatize international competitions.

      Wide World established its popularity and renown by carrying a series of annual track meets between the United States and the Soviet Union from 1961 to 1965. The telecasts at once emphasized sport’s capacity to cultivate cross-cultural harmony and reassured the program’s American audience of the United States’ superiority over its Cold War nemesis. Just as important, they advertised ABC Sports as a respectable and even educational cultural institution that mediates this fellowship and vocalizes this supremacy.

      THE WASTELAND AND THE COLD WAR

      By the time Wide World premiered, television had eclipsed radio to become the United States’ most powerful mass medium—what media historian Thomas Doherty calls “the prized proscenium in American culture.”¹¹ It was simultaneously facing criticism for using public airwaves to peddle gratuitous fare that blatantly put profits over edification. FCC chair Newton Minow’s May 9, 1961, address to the National Association of Broadcasters (NAB)—delivered less than two weeks after Wide World’s debut—crystallized these plaints. “Your industry possesses the most powerful voice in America,” Minow observed. “It has an inescapable duty to make that voice ring with intelligence and with leadership.” He famously attacked the medium as a “vast wasteland” littered with “game shows, formula comedies about totally unbelievable families, blood and thunder, mayhem, violence, sadism, murder, western bad men, western good men, private eyes, gangsters, more violence, and cartoons…. And most of all, boredom.” The resolute FCC chair cautioned that station license “renewal will not be pro forma in the future.”¹² Minow caused such debate that the Associated Press annual poll of editors voted him 1961’s top newsmaker in the field of entertainment.

      Critics identified ABC as a leading perpetrator of television’s apparent degradation. The network’s youth-oriented counterprogramming compelled it to continue producing westerns and increasingly violent crime dramas like The Naked City (1958–63) and The Untouchables (1959–63) to attract and retain viewers. A December 1961 episode of ABC’s short-lived series Bus Stop (1961–62), an adaptation of a William Inge play centered on the travelers who pass through the fictional town of Sunrise, Colorado, became a lightning rod for Minowesque charges against TV. Titled “A Lion Walks among Us,” the episode starred teen idol Fabian and was directed by future “New Hollywood” auteur Robert Altman. Fabian played Luke Freeman, a handsome and charming sociopath who makes a pass at the woman who generously gives him a ride from the program’s eponymous bus stop into Sunrise. After the woman rebukes his advances and kicks him out of her car, Freeman robs and murders an elderly shopkeeper. The killer casually sings the macabre ditty “I Didn’t Hear Nobody Pray” while exiting the store and continues to croon remorselessly while in jail awaiting trial. During the eventual hearing, Freeman’s defense attorney discredits the testimony of the woman who gave Freeman a ride into town—who is also the principal witness against him and, coincidentally, the prosecuting attorney’s wife—on account of her alcoholism and Freeman’s claim that it was she, in fact, who attempted to seduce him. As a result, the young murderer is exonerated. The homicidal teen proceeds to kill his lawyer after the decidedly proficient attorney requests payment. On his way out of town, the disgraced woman again picks Freeman up and suggests they run away together. Instead, she drives off a cliff and kills them both. The unnerving episode closes biblically with 1 Peter 5:8 emblazoned on the screen: “Be sober, be vigilant. Because your adversary the devil, as a roaring lion, walketh about, seeking whom he may devour.”

      Two of Bus Stop’s sponsors, the Singer Sewing Machine Company and Brown & Williamson Tobacco, removed their advertisements from the bleak episode, and twenty-five ABC affiliates declined to clear it. Based on these concerns, the NAB Code Committee asked to prescreen the program—a request Ollie Treyz declined. The controversy provided “A Lion Walks among Us” with free publicity that got many to watch just to see what all the fuss was about.

      New York Times media critic Jack Gould panned “A Lion Walks among Us” as “a commercial exploitation of sensationalism and savagery, a depiction of the ugliness of man to furnish cheap thrills for the large numbers of young people known to tune in Bus Stop and Fabian.” The Chicago Tribune’s Larry Wolters added that “TV like this is a stimulant to crime and has no place in the living room,” and the Los Angeles Times’ Cecil Smith equated the program to “the worst in drug store fiction.”¹³ While Minow cited the twenty-five ABC affiliates’ refusal to clear “A Lion Walks among Us” as a positive indication that stations were slowly improving standards, ABC’s insistence on airing the program suggested “the Network of the Young” was uninterested in such high-minded pivots. “ABC for the last several years has been skirting the edge of acceptable programming in its concentration on so-called action drama,” Gould declared. “Now it has gone over the line.”¹⁴

      Beyond the critics, “A Lion Walks among Us” garnered the attention of the Senate Juvenile Delinquency Subcommittee chaired by Connecticut senator Thomas J. Dodd. The committee explored the link between violent media—especially TV—and youth crime. Dodd’s group located ABC as a principal cause of this epidemic. It claimed that Treyz, as well as CBS president James T. Aubrey and NBC head Robert E. Kinter—both of whom had previously worked at ABC—“learned to ‘entice’ an audience with crime and sex at the same school, ABC.” The committee specifically accused ABC’s opportunistic counterprogramming of fostering an industrial culture that would stop at nothing to secure an audience. Counterprogramming, Dodd charged, “is not a philosophy, but a hackneyed formula worn out by the pulp magazines years ago. The high regard it is given by the industry reflects a deep lack of imagination, but a deeper lack of responsibility.”¹⁵ The wave of progressively graphic programming against which the committee railed came to be known as the “Treyz trend” because of ABC’s identification with it. Treyz wound up losing his job—a position Moore overtook—in 1962 partly because of the negative reaction Bus Stop provoked. These critiques suggested ABC stood among the vast wasteland’s most desolate provinces.

      Networks and affiliates responded to widespread attacks against television’s quality—and threats to cancel licenses—by investing in and emphasizing documentary, a genre commonly identified as exceptionally thoughtful and educational.¹⁶ Even before Minow’s speech, ABC used documentary to balance its less respectable properties. In particular, Bell & Howell Close Up! (1960–63) aired a range of celebrated films, including several Drew Associates “direct cinema” productions that included the handheld camera work and synchronized sound that ABC Sports adopted and refined. Treyz, in fact, defended himself against those who decried the “Treyz trend” by arguing that documentary played as big a role on ABC as the network’s youthful and violent content.¹⁷

      A key way these network documentaries established interest was by engaging Cold War themes and promoting the

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