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as the United States’ dominant mass medium by the end of the 1950s. Accordingly, it became a permanent fixture in sports and a necessary ingredient in sports organizations’ financial health.

      The youngest of the United States’ three major networks, ABC ranked a distant last among them in the 1950s. It used sports to build a distinct image and attract a steady audience. The network initially contracted its sports programming to Edgar Scherick’s Sports Programs Inc. The subcontractor then hired Arledge—who had never before worked in sports—to produce ABC’s autumn 1960 slate of college football broadcasts. The rookie producer made up for his greenness with ambition and confidence. He audaciously proclaimed that ABC would revolutionize the staid representational method guiding sports TV. It would “take viewers to the game” and provide what the network eventually branded as an “up close and personal” view of events and participants through innovations that borrowed from documentary, journalism, and even drama. As Arledge decreed, “We are going to add show business to sports!”⁵

      Arledge aspired to capture the vitality Liebling accused the medium of depleting. ABC Sports broadcasts privileged building stories over displaying events and assumed viewers might watch the tales it packaged no matter their interest in sports. It humanized competitions by presenting them through familiar narratives (rivalries, records about to be broken, battles against the elements) and by making their participants relatable. These often-simplistic tropes—such as the pregame profile of an athlete desperately yearning to bounce back after an injury—quickly became clichés. As such, they are easy to discount as commercialized pandering. But they function through engaging the cultural codes that make TV so important. “In order for television to achieve its work,” writes media scholar Herman Gray, “it has to draw upon and operate on the basis of a kind of generalized societal common sense about the terms of the society and people’s location in it.”⁶ This common sense, of course, reflects existing power relations. Like all mass media, then, television has tremendous potential to reinforce and reshape culture. Arguably the medium’s most visible, durable, and valuable genre, sports TV is a key voice in the culture industries. It flexes this clout as much through the resonant stories it tells—and the ways of looking at the world they create—as through the events and people it exhibits.

      ABC Sports expanded sports television’s previously narrow aesthetic scope into the realm of cinematic storytelling. It also looked beyond the genre’s traditionally rose-tinted promotional ethos to report on the sometimes-divisive social issues—many of which its sponsors and clients would have preferred that it overlook—informing and surrounding the competitions it covered, such as the Cold War tensions that marked international events and the discrimination faced by female and nonwhite athletes. These controversies made compelling narratives that lent ABC’s coverage drama and newsworthiness. ABC Sports, in fact, boldly denied broadcast partners influence over its content or personnel—a unique policy at the time that gave the network greater creative and editorial leeway than its more docile competitors. Apart from sporadic commentaries by on-air columnists like Cosell, ABC Sports remained neutral on the more prickly issues it reported. It both allowed Ali to express his dissident point of view on Wide World of Sports and made space for Ronald Reagan to recite jingoistic platitudes during its 1984 Summer Olympics coverage. But ABC Sports provided a forum that raised important questions about sport’s sociopolitical contours while demonstrating the crucial role media play in showcasing, fortifying, and questioning them.

      Network television was particularly potent when ABC Sports emerged and thrived. Between the 1960s and 1980s, ABC Sports’ regular Saturday afternoon programming—from football to bowling—drew total audience numbers that rival those for the most popular programs in the fragmented, digitized, and multiplatform media environment that has replaced the network era. Not coincidentally, many of the twentieth century’s marquee sporting moments appeared via ABC airwaves and gained their status through the expansive visibility and distinctive shape ABC Sports gave them. Besides reflecting Arledge’s creative approach, these representations and the cultural work they performed grew out of ABC’s efforts to create a brand, compete for market share, and promote content—industrial priorities that extend beyond the network’s involvement in sports. Both ABC Sports’ history and the larger story of network sports television emerge from these intersecting aesthetic, cultural, and economic concerns.

      Media studies scholarship has painstakingly detailed television’s profound cultural power and the historical, political, industrial, institutional, and technological contexts that inform it. However, and surprisingly, this robust body of work pays only scant attention to sports television, one of the medium’s most popular genres. Sports television is—unfortunately and shortsightedly—an intellectually suspicious section of a medium that is already traditionally dismissed as a “bad object” of scholarly inquiry.⁷ Despite its evidently questionable cultural status, sports television informed and, in some cases directly shaped, television programs and practices that have attracted substantial scholarly treatment—scrutiny that can be enriched by the lessons sports TV teaches. Similarly, scholarship on sport culture and history typically gives television only superficial consideration despite its crucial role in showcasing and shaping sport. When this work does comment on TV, it tends only to offer textual analyses of productions and largely ignores the industrial, institutional, and technological circumstances that make possible those ideologically loaded productions. These traditional approaches to studying television and sports, in short, miss a lot. But they can accomplish a lot when brought together. This book uses ABC Sports to demonstrate sport’s vital role in shaping what television does, and television’s crucial part in impacting what sport does. It unites these intertwined but rarely conjoined areas of study and demonstrates the fruits their articulation can yield—benefits that span far beyond this study’s scope.

      This project offers a mostly chronological account of ABC Sports through a vast collection of archival sources, programming and marketing materials, popular and trade press commentary, and interviews with those who worked at and with the organization. It begins by examining the economic, industrial, and institutional circumstances that prompted ABC to invest heavily in sports during the late 1950s and charge Arledge with overseeing this programming. Chapter 2 turns to Wide World of Sports, ABC Sports’ signature show and the primary testing ground for its creative approach. The Saturday afternoon anthology possessed a meager budget that permitted it to secure rights to televise only the most marginal sports. Ski jumping and demolition derbies, for instance, were commonplace during its early years. The Cold War provided a way to dramatize many of Wide World’s prerecorded and otherwise unpopular events. The program established its popularity and culled much-needed acclaim through carrying a series of track meets between the United States and the Soviet Union that at once emphasized sports television’s capacity to cultivate international harmony and advertised ABC Sports as innovative and edifying.

      Chapter 3 discusses how ABC adapted Wide World to cover the Olympics. Wide World offered year-round promotion for the athletes who would eventually compete in the Olympics, while the high-profile quadrennial event built interest in Wide World’s weekly installments. Wide World introduced two of its biggest stars—Ali and Cosell—between ABC’s first Olympics in 1964 and 1968, when it began to cover the event consistently and bill itself as “the Network of the Olympics.” The duo’s many appearances capitalized on Ali’s polarizing views and Cosell’s similarly divisive defense of the boxer. A key thread in ABC’s coverage of the 1968 Summer Olympics in Mexico City concerned whether the United States’ African American athletes—many of whom were inspired by the outspokenness Ali exhibited on Wide World—would use the Games to protest the racism they faced in the country they represented. Tommie Smith and John Carlos’s infamous demonstration composed ABC’s biggest story of the event, much of which aired during prime time. Wide World’s creative approach, programming practices, and stars fueled ABC’s investment in and identification with the Olympics.

      Emboldened by the success its 1968 Olympics coverage enjoyed in prime time, ABC teamed with the National Football League to launch Monday Night Football in 1970. Monday Night extended Arledge’s lavish aesthetic

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