LITMIR.BIZ

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in New York City just days after becoming the first person to clock a mile in under four minutes. Bannister was set to appear on the CBS game show I’ve Got a Secret later in the day. Despite resistance from the game show’s producers, McKay intercepted the runner at the airport and conducted a live interview (without divulging the impending game show appearance). As it turned out, Bannister, a clean-living physician, refused to appear on I’ve Got a Secret after learning that a cigarette company sponsored it. McKay’s furtive interview turned out to be the only footage of Bannister CBS was able to air.

      McKay also freelanced for Sports Programs Inc.’s first production, the 1956 opening of Long Island’s Roosevelt Raceway Harness Track. McKay’s work so impressed Scherick that the SPI owner promised to find him a sports program that would complement his storytelling prowess and gentlemanly demeanor: “I used to say to him, ‘Jim, sit tight. I’m gonna get a literate sports show for you.’” McKay, as Scherick identified, possessed the ability to situate sport within its cultural contexts that would come in handy when he joined ABC Sports. “I’m as interested in the front page as I am in the sports page,” he told Sports Illustrated. Incidentally, McKay submitted a proposal to Sports Illustrated shortly after the magazine’s 1954 launch to create and host a program like Wide World.²⁶

      McKay’s most visible opportunity at CBS came in 1960 when the network assigned him to work its coverage of the Squaw Valley Winter Olympic Games, much of which aired prerecorded in prime time. The overworked television reporter, however, suffered a nervous breakdown and was forced to take a hiatus. Worried he might be fired if CBS discovered his malady involved mental health—still very much stigmatized at the time—McKay told the network he had pneumonia. “The [CBS] studio and New York itself began to feel like my enemies,” he recollected. “Most of the time, all I could do was cry, for no apparent reason.”²⁷ Sean McManus—McKay’s son who eventually became president of CBS Sports—recalls that his father somberly puttered around the house and built model ships like those he once captained to pass the time during this difficult stretch.²⁸ McKay began to see a therapist and reorient. But he missed the Winter Olympics and feared that he may have ruined his career until CBS sports director Bill MacPhail asked him to participate in the network’s coverage of the Rome Summer Olympics later that year. McKay posted up in a rented studio in Grand Central Terminal and reported on taped footage of events immediately after it arrived by jet from Italy.

      Though his commentary on the Rome Olympics was successful, McKay worked only occasionally for CBS after The Verdict Is Yours left New York. He did nothing for the network, in fact, between the Olympics and the April 1961 Master’s Golf Tournament. Meanwhile, Arledge and Scherick were scrambling to find a host for their recently approved program. Despite Scherick’s long-standing affinity for McKay, the CBS sportscaster was not ABC’s first choice. The network originally sought a better-known personality who would lend star power to the quirky program, such as Curt Gowdy or Chris Schenkel (both of whom eventually worked for ABC Sports). But Arledge noted that “most of the top announcers were tied up with baseball” during the spring.²⁹ Arledge phoned McKay with an offer while he was in Augusta, Georgia, covering the Master’s. He explained that Wide World was a summer replacement that “would involve a fair amount of travel”—a description both Arledge and McKay later laughingly dismissed as a gross understatement. Given that he had no other prospects lined up, McKay was inclined to accept Arledge’s offer. But he wanted to consult his wife, Margaret—also a respected journalist whom he met at the Sun—before making a commitment. Arledge, however, insisted that ABC needed an immediate answer. “We’re having a press conference in a half an hour to announce who the host of the show is gonna be,” he told McKay, “and if it’s gonna be you we gotta have a deal.”³⁰ McKay asked for $1,000 per show plus expenses. Arledge—who was not privy to McKay’s dire job prospects and limited negotiating leverage—agreed, hung up, and began publicizing him as the program’s host. “He was more than an announcer,” Howard said of McKay. “He was articulate; he wrote his own stuff. Plus, he was available.”³¹

      McKay extensively researched the sport he would be covering and the place where he would travel for each Wide World installment. As Sean McManus recalled, “The first thing he’d do would be to go to the living room and pull out the Encyclopedia Britannica and read about the country he was going to. Then we’d go to the Westport [Connecticut] Public Library, take out books on the country and the sport and study some more.” McKay created files on different sports and locations that he used throughout his career to pepper his commentary with historical and cultural factoids. “It was an educational process for him,” Sean McManus explains of his father, “one that he took really seriously because he believed his role was more than a sports commentator, it was a travel guide.”³² McKay, as Sports Illustrated’s William Taaffe put it, became “a homeroom teacher for a nation of eager learners,” thoughtfully mediating their televised encounters with unfamiliar lands and peoples. The Los Angeles Times called McKay the “Marco Polo of sports” because of his endless journeys.³³ But his first trip for Wide World—just three weeks after joining ABC Sports—was back to his hometown for the University of Pennsylvania relay races.

      Immediately capitalizing on its AAU contract, Wide World’s debut featured live coverage of the Penn relays and the Drake University relays in Des Moines, Iowa. McKay reported from Philadelphia alongside New York Herald track reporter Jesse Abramson and former Olympic pole vaulter Bob Richards, while Wide World correspondents Bill Flemming and Jim Simpson were on the scene in Des Moines. The inaugural broadcast was forced to be slightly less dynamic than Arledge would have preferred after a Philadelphia rainstorm damaged three of ABC’s six cameras and waterlogged parts of the track. ABC built excitement by alternating between the two races. Segments focusing on the Penn relays ended by reminding viewers of an exciting upcoming event in Philadelphia just before cutting to Drake, and vice versa. This technique strove to create a lively pace and keep viewers for the program’s duration. Though Wide World’s maiden voyage survived the rainfall, the program attracted little attention—positive or negative.

      Wide World expanded on this tame debut with more adventurous sports like auto racing, demolition derbies, barrel jumping, and surfing—seemingly anything to which it could acquire reasonable rights. It also regularly broadcast women’s sports during a time when they were rarely on national TV outside of the Olympics, roller derby, and novelty wrestling matches. “We did women’s sports on a large scale right from the beginning,” McKay bragged.³⁴ But Wide World’s coverage of women’s athletics—most of which were initially AAU events—was first and foremost a consequence of its need for affordable content and paled in comparison to the frequency with which it aired men’s sports. Moreover, the women’s competitions it did feature overwhelmingly privileged stereotypically feminine sports like figure skating, gymnastics, and diving that did not upset gender norms. While Wide World lent women’s sports visibility, it also tacitly reinforced assumptions regarding which types of women’s sporting activities merited attention.

      Arledge pointed out that Wide World’s mostly non-live format demanded heightened stylization. “There’s just no comparison in the built-in excitement and tension of an event that is live, no matter who wins, because you just don’t know what’s going to happen,” he said. “If the results are known … then showmanship and creative ability is much more important.”³⁵ Wide World highlighted its innovations to underscore the effort it put into production, such as the underwater camera it used to cover the 1961 AAU men’s swimming and diving championships. The program introduced camera operator Dale Barringer and transformed his assignment into a subplot for the event coverage. “And here, our underwater cameraman Dale Barringer getting ready to go down by the deep six,” McKay commented as Barringer collected his camera—an enormous cylindrical unit with waterproof casing and Plexiglas plates at either end—and disappeared below the surface. “There’s his camera, a long metal object that was specially designed and perfected this week by Ralph Elmore, one of our engineers.” As the broadcast cut from a bird’s-eye view of the race to Barringer’s camera, McKay announced, “That’s the way it looks to frogman Dale Barringer on the bottom of the pool.”³⁶

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