Arledge Always Was Picture Perfect

Every sports fan owes a huge debt to Roone Arledge, who created and developed “Wide World of Sports” and “Monday Night Football” for ABC.

But Arledge, who died Thursday, might not have had the chance to revolutionize TV sports if he hadn’t been hired to produce NCAA football games for Sports Programs, Inc., which was later bought by ABC and became ABC Sports. The man who hired him, Edgar Scherick, died Monday.

As Bert Randolph Sugar wrote in his book, “The Thrill of Victory: The inside story of ABC Sports,” Scherick had been impressed with Arledge’s work at NBC and invited Arledge to come to his office, which Scherick had decorated with dozens of pictures of athletes.

“Scherick had already decided that Arledge had the skill to produce the NCAA games,” Sugar wrote. “However, before hiring him, he wanted to put Arledge to the supreme test.

‘Do you know anything about sports?’ Arledge told him that he was a sports fanatic.

“ ‘All right,’ ” said Scherick, jumping up. “ ‘Here’s the test.’ And with that, he began waving at the pictures on his walls with all the gusto of a traffic cop in Rome. ‘Who’s that?’ demanded Scherick. And Arledge would answer. ‘Who’s that?’ And again, Arledge had the answer.

“This rapid fire game of ‘Show and Tell’ continued until every picture on the wall was pointed out. Arledge correctly identified each and every one. Scherick sat back in his seat and said, ‘I think you can produce these games.’ ”

Trivia time: What were the first events televised by “Wide World of Sports”?

Soft sell: “Wide World of Sports” almost didn’t make it to the air. In an interview with ABC Sports online last year, Arledge said ABC executives warned that if half the ads weren’t sold it wouldn’t air, meaning he would lose the rights to work events such as the British Open golf tournament.

“Nobody wanted Wide World of Sports. They’d never heard of it. They didn’t know what it was,” Arledge said. “In fact, I’m not even sure if we had a name at that point, but they loved NCAA football. And they set up this thing where in order to get [ads] into NCAA football, you had to buy part of Wide World ... .

“Finally, R.J. Reynolds called at five minutes to five. End of business on that day, that Friday, and said they would take it, reluctantly. They had no real interest in it but they would take it just to get into NCAA football. And so a program whose 40th anniversary we’re celebrating came within five minutes of not getting on.”

Trivia answer: The Penn Relays, hosted by Jim McKay, and the Drake Relays, hosted by Bill Fleming, on April 29, 1961.

And finally: Remember Vinko Bogataj? He’s the ski jumper whose spectacular fall illustrated the “agony of defeat” in the introduction to “Wide World of Sports.”

“When I was covering a ski jumping competition in Slovenia some years ago, I had the opportunity to meet Vinko Bogataj, who is alive and well,” ABC commentator Terry Gannon said last year on abc.com. “But on the way to his meeting with us, he had a fender-bender with four old ladies in a compact car, who chased him furiously to the parking lot of our hotel.

“Vinko was quick-witted enough to say upon arriving, ‘Every time I’m on ABC, I crash.’ He survived that one just fine, too.”

-- Helene Elliott