You’ve Gotta See This: It’s Been 25 Years

The words come in a rush. The speaker is excited. The tone is confidential but urgent. The message is clear: “ This you gotta see!”

And, pretty soon, Jim McKay has got you hooked, got you watching something called the “One-Shot Antelope Hunt,” or the “Demolition Derby” or two guys tap-dancing on a tree trunk in the Klondike.

You might even, God help you, find yourself watching a falcon hunt in Uzbekistan or a skater trying to break something called the 17-barrel barrier on an ice floe in Norway.

Genuine enthusiasm on camera is hard enough to come by in the seventh game of a World Series or the few moments before Super Bowl kickoff but Jim McKay can manage it over two pygmy deer at a salt lick or make a 17-barrel barrier on skates sound like something Chuck Yeager would go through in the X-1.

McKay is a walking “Guinness Book of World Records” and he has more obscure sporting marks in his head than five editions of Track & Field News. Who else would be able to get America to spend a whole afternoon watching cars bump into each other? Who else can make two guys cutting down a tree in Vancouver sound like Dempsey-Tunney?

Lots of guys can tell you how many hits Ty Cobb got but only McKay can tell you how many barrels T. Karl Milno jumped in his prime.

ABC’s “Wide World of Sports” will be 25 years old in April but it probably would have died in its crib if it hadn’t been for McKay. Jim’s trick was, he could always bring the same out-of-breath excitement to a logroll in Puget Sound as he could to the post parade of the Kentucky Derby. McKay was “Wide World of Sports” as far as the listener was concerned.

Originally conceived as a summer replacement show--translation: a show nobody’s going to watch anyway--25 years ago, “Wide World of Sports” was the brainchild of the network’s Roone Arledge, who directed his staff to comb the world and compile a list of every sporting event held everywhere.

None was too obscure, none too far-flung. A one-armed bowler in Hackensack or a mounted guy sticking a pig in Pakistan were the fodder of WWS. Whatever they could get a hand-held camera on in the deserts of Africa or the mountains of India was rolled into the living rooms of America.

It was a hard sell in 1961. The critics hooted. The advertisers balked. Even the sports junkies protested. Some guy diving off a rock shelf in Mexico into a teacup of receding water was not exactly their idea of the Final Four. Championship bowling from Paramus, N.J., was the wrong kind of bowl game for most.

But it was the steady, reassuring voice of Jim McKay that made the audacious scheme work. He would come on camera, eyes alight with adventure, the descriptions tumbling out. It wasn’t exactly a spiel. It was too honest for that. But it got you into the tent as surely as Barnum ever did.

“Wide World of Sports” has used 176 announcers in its 25 years, and half again as many producers and directors. But it was McKay, standing at the foot of a mountain or the top of a tower, who gave it form and substance for the viewer.

McKay could make a checkers game in a firehouse look like the Rose Bowl. Or, as one writer wrote: “McKay could make wrist wrestling in Petaluma sound like something you didn’t dare miss.”

The show didn’t catch on immediately. It was almost three months old before ABC took its cameras to Moscow to televise a U.S.-Soviet track meet. The vast American curiousity about Russia, plus the made-to-order superpower rivalry, pushed the ratings up and made Roone’s folly a vast hit.

McKay himself was not always sure.

“We went into this gym in Lakewood, Ohio, for a sport called gymnastics that none of us knew that much about,” McKay said. “It was a hot day, there was no air-conditioning and there were, maybe, 100 people there.

“I thought, ‘This time Roone has blown it. Who cares about a bunch of kids spinning around pipes?’ But when we got back to the shop and edited it, we knew we had something there.”

Indeed, Wide World may be said to have made gymnastics in this country. Until it came along, most people thought that uneven parallel bars were saloons on Third Avenue. But Wide World’s early programming set the stage for Olga Korbut, Nadia Comaneci, Mary Lou Retton and the others who were to become world sweethearts on the uneven parallel bars.

Sonja Henie was the first to popularize the Dresden-doll-on-a-music-box aspects of figure skating but ABC made international celebrities of Peggy Fleming, Dorothy Hamill and Linda Fratianne.

Skateboarding, body building, roller skating, Frisbee throwing, baton twirling, even chess, wrist wrestling, kick-boxing, boardsailing and ice boat racing were all fair game for Wide World’s cameras.

The show even produced the most famous skier in history. Vienko Bogatej never won an Olympic downhill or a 70-meter jump but he’s the jumper who, in one of the most spectacular end-over-end falls ever seen, comes tumbling down the landing hill in the opening sequence of Wide World while McKay intones the familiar “thrill of victory, agony of defeat” spiel.

Vienko is the agony of defeat, no pun intended, all right. “People are surprised to find he’s still alive and able to walk. Or talk,” notes McKay. “Actually, all he got was a slight concussion.”

He gets it again every time the show comes on. He’ll get it again April 26, when the show’s 25th anniversary will be shown, a kaleidoscope of the 1,300 telecasts and 3,200 segments ABC has put together over the years.

It should be good. After all, they’ve got Jim McKay to pull it together. And make the 17-barrel barrier give you goose bumps all over again.