LITMIR.BIZ

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      I always thought the University of California Press would be an excellent landing spot for this project. I started out working with Mary Francis, who left UCP not long after we began. But Mary left me in the expert hands of Niels Hooper and Bradley Depew, and we were able to press on without missing a beat. I am grateful to Mary, Niels, and Bradley for believing in the project and helping out with it. Thanks also to Jessica Moll, Nicholle Robertson, and Susan Ecklund for the assistance as we moved into production and copyediting. We ultimately decided to include this in the Sport in World History series. I’m glad we did. I particularly appreciated the feedback from series editors Bob, Chris, Susan, and Wayne. Thanks also to Robert Bellamy and Dick Crepeau for their comments, which helped immensely as I was putting the book together, revising, and polishing.

      Archivists and librarians are my favorite people in academe. They organize, protect, and make available the raw materials that are eventually mined to create more and different resources (that librarians then organize, protect, and make available, and so on). They often seem to know more about topics than the researchers they aid, and they are mostly content to stay behind the scenes. Almost without fail, the archivists who helped me wound up bringing materials I had not thought to consult or that weren’t obviously relevant from the catalogs. No database has the passion these folks possess for their work. Thanks to Columbia University’s Rare Book and Manuscript Library, New York University’s Special Collections, the New York Public Library, the Chicago Public Library, the Paley Center for Media, University of Southern California’s Cinematic Arts Library, the UCLA Library’s Special Collections, the LA84 Foundation Sports Library, the University of Illinois Archives, the Wisconsin Historical Society, the University of Buffalo Library’s Special Collections, the University of Massachusetts Library’s Special Collections, Vanderbilt University’s Television News Archive, the Smithsonian Archives of American Art, and the LeRoy Neiman Foundation. I want to give a special shout-out to Tara Zabor and the Neiman Foundation for helping me to secure the rights to use several Neiman images. Finally, and most of all, thanks to the University of Iowa Libraries.

      Though I traveled a good bit to write this book, the project started and ended in Iowa City. Fortunately, I’m surrounded by a bunch of benevolent geniuses who tolerate questions about and mentions of all sorts of things—often non sequiturs like “You know, Howard Cosell appeared on an episode of The Partridge Family” that make me a slightly less cute version of that kid from Jerry Maguire. Thanks to Tom Oates, Rebecca Raw, Brian Ekdale, Melissa Tully, Nick Grossman, Alyssa Prorok, Andy Todd, Erin Syoen, Kajsa Dalrymple, Jeff Kritzman, Dylan McConnell, Becca Neel, Ben Cooper, Dan Berkowitz, Frank Durham, Gigi Durham, Rachel Young, Gabe Bodzin, Andrew Willhoit, Emily Brown, Steve Bloom, Dave Dowling, Deborah Whaley, David Ryfe, Mike Gibisser, Hannah Givler, Steve Warren, Susan Birrell, Ann Haugland, Tim Havens, and Nick Yablon. Thanks also to Becky Kick, Michele Ketchum, Rosemary Zimmerman, Jennifer Cooper, Laura Kastens, Ericka Raber, and Mike Hendrickson for helping me to navigate important details concerning books, funding, and technology. Part of this research was supported by a UI College of Liberal Arts and Sciences Flexible-Load Assignment. I also had research assistance from Mallory Miranda and Eloisa Valenzuela-Mendoza. The UI School of Journalism and Mass Communication generously ponied up the money to pay for my index, which was nice because I have no idea how to put one together.

      Beyond Iowa, I benefited from questions and comments at conferences such as those of the Society for Cinema and Media Studies, the North American Society for Sport History, the American Studies Association, the International Communication Association, and the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication. Vicky Johnson, as always, offered brilliant comments as I was conceptualizing, researching, and writing the project. Frank Durham and Danny Nasset gave me feedback on my proposal. Nick Yablon read the entire manuscript and provided some insights that helped me to make improvements before I turned in the final draft. Fragments of the book were piloted in articles published in American Art and Television & New Media. I am grateful to Marie Ladino, Emily Shapiro, and Diane Negra for guidance that helped get those works into shape and eventually sharpen the book.

      Finally, big thanks to my friends and family. You guys are always helping me out with big and small stuff—and most times you don’t even know it.

Introduction

      ABC SPORTS AND NETWORK SPORTS TELEVISION

      IN SEPTEMBER 1994, Sports Illustrated published a list of the forty most influential sports figures in the forty years since the magazine’s launch. Its top two selections—Muhammad Ali and Michael Jordan—were no great surprise. At the height of their respective careers, Ali and Jordan were arguably the most recognizable people on Earth. Sports Illustrated’s third-ranked selection—the American Broadcasting Company’s sports television mastermind Roone Arledge—was comparatively obscure. Arledge never fronted for global ad campaigns, had a shoe line, or divided a nation with his politics. But the magazine might have underestimated the influence of this producer and executive. During Arledge’s thirty-eight-year stint at the network, ABC built and codified the media infrastructure that made possible global sport celebrities of Ali and Jordan’s unprecedented magnitude.

      ABC Sports is behind some of network sports television’s most significant practices, personalities, and moments. It created the weekend anthology Wide World of Sports, transformed professional football into a prime-time spectacle with Monday Night Football, and fashioned the Olympics into a mega media event. It helped to turn Ali, the sportscaster Howard Cosell, and the daredevil Evel Knievel into stars and captured now-iconic instances that include Tommie Smith and John Carlos’s raised-fist protest at the 1968 Olympics, the terrorist attacks at the 1972 Munich Games, Billie Jean King and Bobby Riggs’s 1973 “Battle of the Sexes” tennis match, the US hockey team’s 1980 “Miracle on Ice” victory over the Soviet Union, and the 1999 Women’s World Cup final. ABC Sports: The Rise and Fall of Network Sports Television offers a cultural and institutional history of ABC Sports from its beginnings to its 2006 rebranding as “ESPN on ABC.” It uses the division to examine network sports television’s development in the United States; the aesthetic, cultural, political, and industrial practices that mark it; and the changes it endured along with the new sports media environment it spawned.

      • • •

      Sports drove TV’s ascendance into a commonplace appliance after World War II. By 1947 the trade publication Variety was hailing live sports as the new medium’s “greatest contribution.”¹ But TV confronted widespread resistance among many in the sports industry who believed it would decimate ticket sales—anxieties radio and print also faced when they emerged. A 1952 report commissioned by the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) concluded that television had an “adverse effect on college football attendance.” That same year, the Radio-Television Manufacturers Association—a group devoted to boosting the medium—trumpeted TV as “a constructive force” that “helps to stimulate new interest” in sports and that “promotes while it entertains.”²

      Despite the NCAA’s reluctance, college football was popular enough to endure—and ultimately benefit from—television. But less prominent sports did suffer. Minor-league baseball attendance sunk by 30 percent during the 1950s, and the New Yorker’s A.J. Liebling blamed TV for eviscerating his beloved boxing: “The clients of the television companies, by putting on a free boxing show almost every night of the week, have knocked out of business the hundreds of small-city and neighborhood boxing clubs where youngsters had a chance to learn their trade and journeymen to mature their skills…. Neither advertising agencies nor brewers, least of all the networks, give a hoot if they push the Sweet Science back into a period of genre painting. When it is in a coma they will find some other way to peddle their peanuts.”³

      Beyond television’s impact on boxing’s viability and quality, Liebling charged that TV broadcasts dulled the rich social experience of attending matches in crowded, smoky clubs. “Television gives you so plausible an adumbration of a fight, for nothing,” he wrote, “that you feel it would be extravagant to pay your way in. It is like the potato, which is only a succedaneum for something decent to eat but which, once introduced to Ireland, proved so cheap that the peasants gave up their

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