ABC Has a Long Day at the Race : Today, It Has Regular Programming to Fall Back On

Some sporting events go on, rain or shine, but oval track auto racing isn’t one of them.

That left ABC with a major problem when it came up rain here Sunday for what was to have been the 70th running of the Indianapolis 500.

Since 1971, the network has been doing delayed telecasts of the race because the Indianapolis Motor Speedway would not permit live showings. Sunday was supposed to have been departure day. For the first time, the race was to have been televised live.

As much influence as the TV networks are accused of having on the scheduling of games and such, they have not yet found a way to control the weather.

It was raining when Jim McKay, Jim Lampley, Sam Posey and the rest of the ABC crew took to the air, and it was still mighty wet when they signed off, 5 3/4 hours later, without one lap having been run, without one race car’s engine having been fired up.

What is billed as the greatest spectacle in racing was turned into the greatest spectacle in track drying, giving ABC all that time to kill, er, fill. That gets to be wearisome for the announcers and does not ordinarily make for good television.

“It gets to be a challenge,” said a tired McKay.

He has dealt with such challenges before, though.

“The first thing that comes to mind is Munich in ‘72,” he said, alluding to his stint on the air in the wake of the terrorist attack on the Israeli team’s living quarters at the Munich Olympics. “Nothing could compare to that because of the emotional difference and because it was 16 hours.

“I thought Sam phrased it the best when he said even we, who had to report, were on an emotional roller coaster. You know, it was raining, not raining, raining. We tried not to string the people along and all we could do was tell them what was happening.

“And then the next thing, I thought, was to have some fun with it. Thank God he (Posey) wore his funny tie.”

The show consisted of interviews with drivers, former drivers, drivers’ wives, actor James Gardner and race officials, discussions among the threesome in the booth, track scenes, tapes of this year’s time trials and, ultimately, of previous races.

Nobody was pleased with the weather, but those involved were pleased with the telecast, all things considered. “I thought the guys did a terrific job,” ABC producer Chuck Howard said. “Under the circumstances I thought it was fairly interesting television because it’s obviously not an event. But I think that everybody did a damn good job and there’s no point getting too concerned about it.

“If it’s rained out tomorrow, it’s unfortunate. A lot of people came out here and we spent a lot of time and a lot of effort, and some money, in getting this thing together. Hey, you win a few and you lose a few.”

The possibility of rain here today is much stronger than it was for Sunday but that was greeted with no real alarm.

“We may get into a situation where we come on the air tomorrow and we don’t know what’s going to happen then,” Howard said. “The only difference, and it’s a major, substantial difference for us, tomorrow is obviously a weekday and we’ve got the soaps, so we don’t have to sit around here. We can bail out.

“They’re scheduled right when we come on the air (in the East). What we’ll do tomorrow if it’s raining really hard when we come on, we’ll only stay a couple of minutes and we’re going to say, ‘Hey, it’s raining like hell, it’s a major delay, we’ll keep you (informed) and we’ll go right to the soaps. And then periodically, every 10-15 minutes, we’ll come back and update. But we don’t have to stay like we did today, thank God.”

Howard said that ABC was given no advance notice of the Speedway’s decision to postpone. “The first we heard was over the PA,” he said. In fact, McKay was caught in mid-sentence by the announcement on the track PA system began.

As it was, the network remained with the telecast much longer than contractual arrangements called for. “We were only required to be on until 3:30, New York time,” Howard said. “But we planned to stay with the race as long as we had to.

“There was a time they had the track practically dry, then it started raining again. That’s when it got really discouraging. I even thought we had a shot at it after that, too. It looked like maybe not a full race, but maybe two-thirds of a race.”

Howard, among others, suggested that viewers who stayed with the telecast all the way, or for much of it, had probably gained a new insight into race drivers and would be eager to tune in again today.

“I’m not sure (the telecast) hurt tomorrow’s audience,” he said. “Some people got keyed up.”

Said McKay: “I just talked to my wife, who is not an automobile racing fan,” McKay said. “She surprised me. She said, ‘It was terrific. The longer I watched, the more I got interested in the human beings. You had a chance, for once, to really get inside these drivers and find out what they’re like and what kind of personalities they have.’

“So looking back, you could say it was fun. I would say that the biggest complaint I had was that there was no air in the booth, and your brain begins to slow down. . . . We each got one pit stop.” Philosophizing, Howard said: “Actually, we were overdue. We haven’t lost (a race to rain) since 1973. We’ve been lucky since then. We’ve had a couple of years where it rained the day before and it rained the day after and we still got a race in.

“You can’t go on and do live television and not have some of these things. You have lousy baseball games, you have lousy football games. You gotta put up with Cosell. Life goes on.”