Arledge’s exuberance recalled at memorial

Roone Arledge was eulogized Monday by many of the broadcasters he made famous in his tenure overseeing ABC News and ABC Sports. They remembered him less for his accomplishments that transformed television than for his exuberant approach to the business and the people who surrounded him.

Arledge, who brought show business to televised news and sports in four decades at ABC and created both “Monday Night Football” and “Nightline,” died Thursday in New York of complications from cancer. He was 71.

The crowd that filled the Episcopal St. Bartholomew’s Church on Manhattan’s Park Avenue included many of Arledge’s ABC and Disney colleagues and his family, as well as former New York Gov. Hugh Carey, News Corp. chairman Rupert Murdoch, Fox News Chairman Roger Ailes, NBC anchor Tom Brokaw, CBS anchor Dan Rather and his predecessor, Walter Cronkite. NBC Sports Chairman Dick Ebersol and former NBC West Coast President Don Ohlmeyer, Arledge proteges at ABC Sports, were among the ushers.

“Nightline” anchor Ted Koppel recalled how ABC News personnel reacted when they learned in 1977 that the ABC Sports president, who at the time was partial to an “open-necked safari jacket set off by a gold chain,” would be their new boss. “Clearly he was a dangerous man,” Koppel said.

Early in his ABC News post, Arledge “showed an unhealthy obsession with Son of Sam,” Koppel recalled, referring to the serial killer who terrorized New York the previous summer, and at one point Koppel wrote a resignation letter, which Arledge ignored. But after a private lunch a few weeks later, “I was in love,” Koppel said. He noted the way Arledge had of drawing people into his sphere, adding that often “there was not enough of him to go around.”

“World News Tonight” anchor Peter Jennings, who had early on joined Koppel in protesting Arledge’s imminent appointment at ABC News, said that “the man was no saint,” but added that “had Roone not been as interesting and complicated and compelling, most of us would not be here.” Arledge, he said, “made everything seem so possible.”

Other speakers included former “Monday Night Football” commentator Frank Gifford; “20/20” anchor Barbara Walters; ABC News President David Westin; Richard Wald, a longtime Arledge deputy at ABC News; Arledge’s son Roone Arledge Jr.; and Blackstone Group Chairman Pete Peterson, who called Arledge the “Toscanini of television.”