LITMIR.BIZ

FIGURE 1. This New York Times advertisement for ABC’s coverage of the 1961 US-USSR track meet emphasizes the Cold War tensions that informed the event.

      McKay set the scene at Lenin Stadium by explaining the differences that separate how Soviet and US fans consume sport. “Inside are more than 70,000,” he announced. “Most of them paid, some of them, however, are here on an incentive basis. They put out a little more in their factory or their farm this week, and thereby got free tickets.” But the remainder of ABC’s presentation stressed sport’s potential to generate unity amid antagonistic dissimilarity. As is customary at international sporting events, the teams entered the stadium side by side before their respective national anthems played. To accent this pageantry’s collaborative overtones, ABC camera operator Mike Freedman lay on the field with a “creepy peepy” to showcase the US and Soviet teams passing overhead. The low-angle shot, which framed the athletes against the sky, emphasized the track meet’s grandeur and echoed the diplomatic assurances that had been made in ABC’s ad in the New York Times.

      Complementing Freedman’s camera work, ABC recast various potential points of discord as opportunities for cross-cultural affinity. As the weather soured toward the end of the meet, McKay cheerily noted the frequency with which US events are similarly disrupted. “What started out as a beautiful day with the temperature at 85 [degrees Fahrenheit] has turned into a real summer Sunday evening thunderstorm. It happens halfway around the world just like it does in Kansas and Missouri,” he said along with shots of rain-soaked Russian spectators and ABC’s tarp-covered equipment. The instance could easily have been used to paint Moscow and Lenin Stadium in an unfriendly light. Rather, ABC employed it to stress the similarities that united Americans and Russians. The Soviet fans may procure their tickets differently, but they ultimately display the same passion for their games and face the same obstacles common in Middle America.

      ABC’s telecast deliberately elided several disagreements surrounding the competition. The AAU requested that the men’s and women’s events be scored separately—as is customary in America. The Soviets, however, wanted the scores combined—as is routine in Russia. Possessing a superior men’s team, the United States would win the men’s and lose the women’s meet with divided scoring. However, the Soviet women’s team was so dominant—a point Western commentators often used to attack communism’s deleteriously hardening impact on Russian women—that it would give the USSR an overall victory were the scores combined. Though the meet did officially score the men’s and women’s teams separately—ensuring victory for the American men and the Russian women—several Soviet newspapers persisted in reporting an overall USSR victory, which irked many US-based commentators and struck them as typical of the country’s tendency to defame their homeland.⁵⁴ “I realized,” Arledge said of the scoring quarrel, “I was experiencing the Cold War in microcosm, and that this kind of obdurate, uncompromising dispute, in which both sides in their own environment were right, characterized what went on in much more important spheres.”⁵⁵ While the US and Soviet officials quibbled about how the event would be scored, ABC focused on the meet’s capacity to transcend such comparatively petty trifles.

      Instead, Wide World joined in the AAU’s defense against Soviet critiques of US racism and gender relations by focusing in large part on sprinter Wilma Rudolph—already a star who earned a gold medal in the 1960 Rome Olympics—and broad jumper Ralph Boston. It had featured Rudolph and Boston, both of whom attended the track and field powerhouse Tennessee State University, as part of its coverage of the AAU’s National Track and Field Championships in New York City earlier in the season. Both African American athletes delivered standout performances for the US team in Moscow: Rudolph tied her hundred-meter world record time of 11.3 seconds to win the event, and Boston set a new record with his jump of 27 feet, 1¾ inches. The coverage depicted them as national heroes during a time when the overall representation of African Americans on network TV was still limited. Its celebratory representations, however, unsurprisingly failed to mention the basic civil liberties these athletic stars were still denied in the country they represented so well. Wide World thus paired its depictions of cross-cultural unity with a similarly oversimplified vision of domestic harmony.

      Though ABC isolated African Americans as the United States’ best performers, it ultimately positioned Russian high jumper Valery Brumel’s record-breaking victory over the United States’ John Thomas—another African American and a previous record holder—as the show’s climax. Brumel’s jump occurred just two months after the Soviet space program made cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin the first human to orbit Earth, a signal moment in the US-Soviet “space race” that suggested the USSR held a decisive edge. Wide World explained Brumel’s record—which he accomplished in dramatic fashion on his final attempt as the rain poured—by comparing it to Gagarin’s feat. “Valery Brumel has set a new world’s record in the high jump,” McKay noted as ABC’s cameras cut to cheering Russian fans. “At this moment,” McKay continued, “Brumel rivals Yuri Gagarin as a national hero in the Soviet Union.” Brumel’s jump was indeed a point of immense national pride that convinced the Soviet government to give him the Merited Master of Sport Award—the nation’s highest sports honor. McKay’s commentary characterized Brumel’s jump as an extension and confirmation of the USSR’s rising superiority in the space race.

      But Wide World also reassured its audience against such Cold War anxieties by appealing to ABC Sports’ technological sophistication. Up to this point in Wide World’s inaugural year, ABC used mostly locally sourced equipment and labor when producing programming abroad. It insisted, however, on transporting its own equipment to Moscow—a decision that suggested Russia did not possess the resources and expertise to create, or even assist the creation of, a production of ABC Sports’ caliber. For instance, the Russians did not have Ampex videotape recorders, which display the television video feed in a monitor as content is shot on location. Arledge claimed the Ampex Company was so worried that the Russians would steal the technology that it would only allow ABC to bring the machines if the network vowed to lock its recording heads in the US embassy’s safe each evening.⁵⁶

      McKay notes that when ABC set up the machines in the bowels of Lenin Stadium, “several thousand” spectators gathered to marvel at the technology rather than watch the live event.⁵⁷ “For the Russians, who had no video machines,” Arledge claimed of the awestruck spectators, “it was as if we’d invented fire.”⁵⁸ McKay’s and Arledge’s comments represent the Russians as a primitive bunch when it comes to telecommunications and entertainment. Indeed, McKay claimed the Russian television crews were insecure about their deficiencies and tried to copy ABC’s comparatively advanced practices. “Our every move was monitored very carefully,” he wrote. “Roone requested a camera position at field level to get tight close-ups…. After a long wait, the cameras were okayed, but when we arrived the next day, Soviet cameras were right beside ours.”⁵⁹ While the US space program may have been lagging, Wide World demonstrated that American television—and ABC in particular—was far ahead of the Soviets. The coverage and the discourses surrounding it combined to locate television as a facet of the space race that the United States was indisputably leading and to situate ABC as the organization that made evident this technological supremacy’s nationalistic implications while propelling sports television’s globalization.

      Arledge described Wide World’s coverage of the 1961 US-USSR meet as a “turning point in our acceptance as a show.” “That trip to Moscow really set up the whole odyssey of ABC’s Wide World of Sports,” McKay added.⁶⁰ At that point in the season, the program had not attracted considerable audience numbers and was facing potential

Скачать книгу