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renowned documentary The Violent World of Sam Huff (1960), Wide World increased the number of cameras beyond what was typically used for football broadcasts and placed wireless microphones inside several players’ pads to provide an inside view of the already TV-friendly league’s game. The segment, which publicized ABC’s coverage of the upcoming AFL season, paid nearly as much attention to the network’s cameras and microphones as it did to the featured event.³⁷

      Wide World’s nomadic format added mystique to its technological prowess. It used the locations it visited—and the cultures that mark them—as characters that further dramatize and personalize events. The 1961 Le Mans auto race, for example, was not only an exciting competition but a glimpse into a quaint French community that is annually transformed by an exhilarating twenty-four-hour competition. “The first time we did the Grand Prix road race in Le Mans,” Arledge noted, “we tried to handle it like Moby Dick, going for more than a race, for the soul of Le Mans. We filmed at great length a Mass that a priest said right on the course. We dramatized the prospect of death and the grueling effects of the race.”³⁸ Similarly, Wide World presented the 1962 Southern 500 in Darlington, South Carolina, as a folksy affair that occurs in a “small town … a long way from any place.” It characterized the race as “the southern version of the station wagon tailgate of the Ivy Leagues” that turns the isolated region into a festive tourist destination for a weekend. The program would also sometimes employ the far-off locations and marginal sports to comic effect, as when McKay cheerily opened coverage of the World Lumberjack Championships in Hayward, Wisconsin, while balancing on a floating log (which ABC Sports crew members stabilized off camera) like a competitive logroller.

      Though often playful, Wide World strove to treat its subject matter with dignity—a practice it developed after some regretful slipups. McKay recalled a case in which he treated a two-time demolition derby winner sarcastically during a postevent interview. “Well, Mr. Lucky,” McKay said, “how do you account for winning the World Championship two years in a row?” The driver earnestly attributed his success to religious faith. “I had committed an unforgivable bit of gaucherie,” McKay repentantly admitted, “looking down on this man in a condescending manner during what he considered the greatest moment of his life.” “We don’t go to an event in order to be big city sophisticates,” Arledge added.³⁹ Wide World suggested that although not all cultures partake in the same sports, these varied activities hold the same significance for those who participate in them. In doing so, the educational show nurtured deeper understanding of and identification with people who—like the games they play—otherwise might seem odd.

      Wide World basked in its commitment to sport’s “constant variety”—however esoteric—in a tongue-in-cheek advertisement it placed in Variety: “If centaur racing should ever be revived in Greece, you’ll see it on ABC television.”⁴⁰ Like many news programs, it incorporated a flattened globe into its logo to assert that nothing stood beyond its ambit. It also suggested a spirit of humanism informed its globe-trotting. As Arledge explained, “If we could present these great spectacles to the American people in a meaningful way, we could provide attractive television entertainment, broaden the knowledge and perspective of the viewer, and maybe even make an occasional contribution to understanding among people of the world.”⁴¹ Though Wide World cast its cosmopolitanism as apolitical, the program was made from an unmistakably American point of view and built an audience through engaging dominant attitudes about the United States’ place in the world during the Cold War. The annual US-Soviet track and field competitions, which Arledge called the “gem” of Wide World’s agreement with the AAU, embodied this tension.⁴²

      SPANNING THE IRON CURTAIN

      The AAU-sponsored track meets began in 1958 as the product of the US-USSR Exchange Agreement signed by Soviet ambassador Georgi Zarubin and William S.B. Lacy, President Dwight D. Eisenhower’s special assistant on East-West exchanges. The pact instituted bilateral interactions spanning science, industry, art, and athletics.⁴³ Sport historian Joseph M. Turrini claims the meets, which alternated between the United States and the Soviet Union and ran intermittently through 1985, composed “the most important and visible of the Cold War sport competitions that emerged in the late 1950s and 1960s” aside from the Olympics.⁴⁴ Unlike the Olympics, which include dozens of competing countries, the meets “provided a direct and undiluted competition between the two countries that mirrored the bipolar perspective that pervaded the Cold War period.”⁴⁵

      The meets also furnished a way for the United States to combat Soviet critiques that used America’s endemic racial discrimination to undermine the country’s democratic appeals. A National Security Council task force on international communism surmised that the United States could offset this propaganda by allowing nonwhites to represent it on the international stage. “We should make more extensive use of nonwhite American citizens,” the group advised; “outstanding Negroes in all fields should be appealed to in terms of the higher patriotism to act as our representatives.”⁴⁶ The coed events would also contrast Soviet charges that US women were unfairly fettered to the domestic sphere.

      The US Information Agency (USIA) saw US-produced global TV broadcasts as potentially improving America’s international repute.⁴⁷ Wide World’s track meet coverage contributed to these efforts. But ABC also knew the competitions’ resonance with Cold War tensions would draw an unusually broad audience to the fledgling program. It leveraged the annual events’ narrative potential to transform them into “the cornerstone of televised track in the United States.”⁴⁸

      Wide World billed the 1961 US-USSR track meet from Moscow’s Lenin Stadium as the peak of its first season and the culmination of three previous track meets it had featured up to that point. McKay opened the program by mentioning the broadcast’s position as the first US-made sports TV production from the Soviet Union: “For the first time, an American television network has brought its own television cameras into the Soviet Union. The occasion: classic track and field competition between the United States and Russia.” ABC transported fifty staff and twenty tons of equipment—including two Ampex videotape machines, five camera units, and a twenty-five-hundred-watt portable generator—to document the two-day event and edit it down to ninety minutes. It also spent $100,000 on the broadcast, an increase of about $60,000 over the typical cost of its international productions, to set the meet apart.⁴⁹

      “In those days,” Arledge reminisced in a documentary commemorating Wide World’s fortieth anniversary, “you didn’t fly into the Soviet Union with 20 tons of equipment and expect a friendly greeting. Lenin Stadium and the Soviet Union in 1961 was the inner center of the enemy.” ABC’s crew and equipment were almost unable to gain entry into Russia. The Russians were so slow to approve the network’s travel that Arledge posted a staff member at the USSR’s Washington, DC, embassy to wait for the decision and pressure the Russians to make it. When word did not come, Arledge gambled by sending the program’s personnel and gear to Amsterdam, from where they would be able to arrive in Moscow quickly once the approval was levied, which eventually happened just in time to cover the meet.

      McKay described invasive security protocols once they did get to Moscow and portrayed the city as a drab place devoid of the liveliness one might expect from a major international metropolis.⁵⁰ The ABC crew deplaned in an empty hangar and was transported into Moscow proper by army trucks. While driving into the city, they passed a World War II tank trap left intact to signal how close Nazi forces advanced toward Moscow before the Russian military defeated the invaders. In no uncertain terms, the monument signaled the communist center’s unfriendliness to outsiders—a sentiment that was not lost on the ABC Sports crew. McKay likened their hotel—where authorities assigned him, Arledge, and another producer to share a single room—to “a great house that had been inherited by someone who didn’t have the funds to keep it up.”⁵¹ Their bags arrived separately after being searched, and McKay suspected the KGB had tampered with his shoes, which mysteriously fell apart as he was leaving town. These portrayals paint Moscow as a peculiar and hostile locale—certainly the most foreign of the faraway locations Wide World had visited. “The only real signs of life and enthusiasm we found on that trip to

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