Arledge’s Creativity, Calm Captivated Young Ebersol

When Roone Arledge and his young assistant, Dick Ebersol, finally left the ABC studios in Munich, West Germany, on the morning of Sept. 5, 1972, the only people still left inside were janitors, sweeping floors. It was just before dawn.

Just a few hours before, Mark Spitz had won his seventh gold medal at the Olympic swimming pool. Arledge and Ebersol went outside and, under a dark night sky, lingered for perhaps 20 minutes, reveling in the Olympic action and ABC’s coverage. They stood in a driveway, near some dumpsters, the fence to the Olympic village just a few yards away.

Finally, Arledge’s driver pointed to his Mercedes and said, “Come on. The kid at least needs some sleep. Let me take you home.” So they left -- and as they turned the corner, the Palestinian terrorists who would forever change the Olympic movement climbed out of the dumpsters, scaled the fence and headed for 31 Connollystrasse, where much of the Israeli team was sleeping.

In a remarkable career that forever changed sports, as well as television, Arledge -- just as he was that day in 1972 -- always, it seemed, had a knack for being ahead of the story. Arledge, 71, died Thursday in New York of complications from cancer.

Much of what seems commonplace today in the American broadcast landscape is attributable in large measure to Arledge:

* Sports broadcast in prime-time hours.

* Innovations such as hand-held cameras, sideline microphones, instant replay, slow-motion replay and, in the booth, three announcers.

* And, perhaps most important, a commitment to storytelling -- to the “Up Close and Personal”-style of broadcasting that has come to dominate the Olympics in particular.

“Before Roone, sports wasn’t on Broadway in American life,” said Ebersol, for the last several years chairman of NBC Sports. “But the explosion followed. It has never stopped since.”

From 1967 until 1974, Ebersol worked closely with Arledge, initially as ABC’s first Olympic researcher, then, beginning in 1970, as Arledge’s assistant.

No one could have been a better, and more influential, mentor, Ebersol said.

No one could have been so imaginative, searching always for a new idea.

Ebersol said Arledge was responsible for making sports a prime-time event, first by showing network executives that there was a prime-time audience for the Olympics, in Mexico City in 1968, then a few years later with “Monday Night Football,” which ABC and CBS turned down before Arledge -- at great personal risk -- got ABC to sign off on.

“Roone laid his career on the line,” Ebersol said. “He said, ‘This will work. I guarantee this will work.’ ”

In the early 1970s, Ebersol said, “Sports as we know it in the United States was a good business, but it wasn’t a gigantic business. By Roone bringing it to prime time, he encouraged so many other people to see the unscripted drama in sports. And the money followed.

“Without Roone, there wouldn’t be an ESPN today. Who would care?

“There wouldn’t be countless 24-hour sports stations on radio. Because who would care?”

For all the hard work and dedication to craft, Ebersol said, no one could have been more fun than Arledge.

Arledge was a teller of stories rooted in all he had done and seen and read. He loved to nurse a glass of wine, preferably red, preferably French. He delighted in a cigar, preferably Cuban.

When he became Arledge’s personal assistant, Ebersol said, he would get a phone call in his apartment every morning at 7:30. It was Howard Cosell, the in-your-face ABC announcer. “He’d say, ‘You were the last one with Roone last night, at some restaurant. What did he say about x and y?’ ” Later, Arledge would call.

“After two weeks, my girlfriend at the time said, ‘Something’s got to give.’ The next day, I told Cosell to stop calling me in the morning.”

Arledge was notoriously horrible at returning phone calls. It wasn’t that he was being intentionally rude, Ebersol said. Rather, he was too busy reading books or newspapers or watching movies to bother with the daily grind.

“This was the best-read news and sports executive who ever lived,” Ebersol said. “He just wouldn’t give into having the minutiae of corporate life interfere with him. He would miss countless board meetings and stuff.”

Arledge went to ABC to produce college football -- prepping at a show on NBC that featured Shari Lewis and her Lamb Chop puppet, Ebersol said. He arrived at ABC with what was then a revolutionary idea -- to put show biz in sports, as Ebersol put it, to “take the fan to the game, to take the viewer to the game.”

In 1961, Arledge created “Wide World of Sports,” which would prove to be one of the most popular TV sports shows ever, along with its notable tag line -- the promise to bring viewers “the thrill of victory and the agony of defeat.”

That sense of unscripted drama is ultimately what led Arledge to create the “Up Close and Personal” segments -- on the theory that TV ought to personalize the athlete, especially in Olympic sports that typically aren’t closely followed in non-Olympic years because, as Ebersol said, “once you personalized the athlete, you get a sense of drama.”

That idea also underpinned Ebersol’s first ABC job, as Olympic researcher. “Basically,” he said, “I was going to spend a year and a half roaming the world, getting to know the athletes ... so that the announcers could talk about these people on the air like characters in a drama. All Roone’s idea.

“This curiosity pervaded everything with Roone. If I was to think of two qualities other than the fun he was, it was his curiosity and his calm.”

Never was that sense of calm more evident than on Sept. 5, 1972, in the hours that followed the Palestinian terrorists’ takeover of the Israeli compound at the athletes’ village in Munich.

Shortly after the terrorists announced themselves, Arledge was back in the control room. “He was in a business with people who scream and yell,” Ebersol said. “He was the calmest producer in the world.”

At one point, Ebersol said, German authorities pulled the plug on cameras that had afforded a view looking down into the village. “It took Roone two seconds to take some cameras that had been in the studio, open the doors, move them outside and focus them 100-150 yards down,” on the same scene.

Arledge “had to get up once and calm down Howard,” meaning Cosell, who wanted air time, Ebersol said. “He got Howard out of the control room. Howard was probably angry about it for years afterward. But Roone defused it. He knew Howard was not right to put on the air; he was overwrought.”

As the ordeal progressed, Ebersol said, Arledge “was the calmest source, vetting every piece of information before it was passed on to Jim,” meaning anchor Jim McKay. Late in the day, for instance, some other news outlets went with a story -- which turned out to be untrue -- that the hostages had been freed; ABC did not.

ABC’s coverage of the Munich massacre subsequently earned a variety of sports and news journalism awards.

In 1977, Arledge was tabbed to take over ABC’s news operations.

Ebersol recalled that critics said at the time, referring to ABC News, “They’ll make it ‘Wide World of News,’ with Howard Cosell.

“Yet the evidence was there -- on Sept. 5, 1972 -- that he could do it better than anyone ever had.”