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ABC Sports. Travis Vogan
Читать онлайн.Название ABC Sports
Год выпуска 0
isbn 9780520966260
Автор произведения Travis Vogan
Серия Sport in World History
Издательство Ingram
With Disneyland airing on Tuesday evenings and Warner Brothers Presents on Wednesdays, ABC began to achieve the programming regularity and youthful identity that Goldenson and Treyz sought to cultivate after the merger. The collaborations with high-profile Hollywood studios also set the network apart from CBS and NBC. In 1955, ABC produced only 14 percent of its material, while CBS and NBC manufactured roughly 50 percent of their programs. Despite creating such a small proportion of its programming, ABC’s clearance rate increased 24 percent between 1954 and 1955.26 Taking notice of this success, CBS and NBC began establishing similar Hollywood partnerships. The programming model soon became standard practice across network TV.
Critics, however, expressed befuddlement at ABC’s willingness to let content providers so brazenly shop their wares. Goldenson responded to these grievances by appealing to the commercial network’s business imperatives. “We’re in the Woolworth business,” he said, “not in Tiffany’s. Last year Tiffany made only $30,000.” With a thinly veiled jab at CBS—the so-called Tiffany Network—Goldenson admitted that ABC put profits over prestige. The network’s focus on mainstream, promotion-laden entertainments like children’s programming and westerns fashioned a brand that—like Woolworth—served the populace rather than lofty cultural goals. “We study public taste hard and carefully,” Treyz asserted. “We gear ourselves entirely to what the public wants. And the public wants cowboys. The proof: we’re getting the audiences, and we’re getting the sponsors. The big two is now the big three.”27
“A NEW ERA”
ABC built on its Hollywood collaborations by reinvesting in sports. At the time, network sports programming operated out of news departments—a connection that 1950s sports television’s stark aesthetics reflected. Tom Moore, ABC’s vice president for programming, who worked as public relations director for Hollywood’s Forest Lawn Cemetery before joining the network, argued that sports would bolster ABC’s counterprogramming. “I made a pitch to them,” Moore said. “Let’s go all out for sports. Let’s make this the sports network. The other two guys are underrating it.”28 He argued that sports had the unique potential to enhance the network’s Woolworth-inspired efforts. “Advertisers find sports moves merchandise out of proportion to their ratings,” he said. “They will pay more for a sports viewer than for any other.”29 He also reasoned that live sports’ immediacy would prompt stations to clear space for ABC’s broadcasts whether or not they were ABC affiliates. Though he found Moore’s pitch persuasive, ABC News president John Daly had no interest in overseeing this additional content. Goldenson consequently put Moore in charge of the task. The already overextended Moore contracted Scherick’s fledgling company Sports Programs Incorporated (SPI) to produce and package ABC’s sports offerings.
The savvy and opportunistic Scherick had continued to build expertise in sports programming since handling ABC’s professional football and baseball broadcasts earlier in the decade. After taking these packages from ABC and delivering them to CBS at a considerable rate increase, the Tiffany Network hired him in May 1956 as its “sports specialist in charge of all sports program sales.” Just four months into his CBS tenure, Scherick noticed that his new employer was not planning to renew Big Ten college basketball. Scherick thought he could sell the basketball broadcasts on a regional basis like his Falstaff-sponsored midwestern baseball telecasts.30 The salesman phoned Big Ten commissioner Tug Wilson and made his pitch: “You’re getting cancelled by CBS,” he said. “You’ll never make it as a national vehicle but you can make it as a regional one and I can clear the regional network and sell it so that Big Ten basketball can have a very fruitful and long life.”31 Once the Big Ten agreed, Scherick left CBS to form SPI. He took with him CBS producer Jack Lubell and hired Chet Simmons as an assistant. Scherick rented a grimy two-room office on Manhattan’s West Forty-Second Street where he and the hard-drinking Lubell, according to Simmons, “would fight like cats and dogs.”32 Simmons once walked into the office to find Lubell choking Scherick in a fit of blind rage. “Lubell literally lifted Scherick off the floor with his hands around Ed’s neck,” Simmons said. “I thought Jack was going to kill him, because all the while Scherick was making these gurgling noises with his tongue hanging out. Finally, Jack let him go…. I don’t even recall what they were battling about because they were always scrapping, but it wouldn’t have shocked me if a murder had been committed.”33
Shortly after forming, SPI teamed with Dick Bailey’s Sports Network Inc. (SNI), which also launched in 1956 and specialized in providing telephone lines for sports TV productions. SNI handled technical operations while SPI took care of sales. With SNI’s assistance, SPI became ABC’s de facto sports department. But even after Moore recruited Scherick and company, ABC’s slate of sports content was lean. It programmed only seventy-six hours of sports in 1958, which placed it last among the networks.34 ABC also reneged on the contracts to broadcast big-ticket events like the 1960 Winter Olympics and the Gator Bowl after deciding it would not be able to recoup its contract expenditures—decisions that lowered its credibility among potential clients.
The safety razor company Gillette, which was more closely associated with sports media than any other business at the time, paved the way for ABC’s sustained entry into big-time sports. Gillette underwrote Gillette Cavalcade of Sports, a series of sports programming that started on the radio in 1941, and variations of it like Friday Night Fights, which NBC debuted in 1944. Lou Maxon—head of Gillette’s advertising division—described Friday Night Fights as the “backbone” of his client’s marketing efforts.35 A combination of declining ratings and boxing’s associations with the criminal underworld compelled NBC to cancel the program in 1960.36 Left without a home for its prized program, Gillette offered to give ABC its $8 million annual sports advertising budget if the network attached Gillette to its Wednesday evening fight package and moved the program to Fridays. While Moore and Scherick badly wanted the capital, Alka-Seltzer and Kool cigarettes were already sponsoring the network’s weekly boxing show. With the ABC board’s blessing, the media executives hammered out a pact to move the sponsors to different programs so it could accept the Gillette payout. It was not, however, able to shift the fights to Friday evenings—an alteration Gillette believed would create continuity with its canceled NBC program—and instead scheduled it on Saturday nights. Outside of the boxing package, Gillette would let ABC use the money for any sports programming it saw fit except horse races and roller derby.37 The infusion provided a war chest that empowered ABC to pursue broadcast contracts not previously possible given its limited budget.
The network made NCAA football its first target, a sport ABC had not carried since its disastrous experience in 1954. NBC held the NCAA contract at the time and had been renewing it for several years without competition from CBS, which was primarily committed to pro football in the fall. While the Gillette contract was substantial, ABC’s suddenly enlarged budget was still not vast enough to survive a bidding war with its deep-pocketed rival. Scherick cannily reasoned that ABC would only be able to get the rights if it kept secret its intention to bid. After consulting a series of informants, he discovered that Tom Gallery, the NBC executive in charge of the network’s sports activities at the time, typically brought two envelopes to blind biddings like those the NCAA held. One packet contained a low bid—typically 1 percent higher than the previous year’s contract—and the other contained a higher