He Is Better Than the Average McKay

Everyone has his own story, Jim McKay is saying, and that’s what makes the Olympics so great, so different from every other sporting enterprise.

There is, for instance, the tale of Billy Fiske, the first American killed in World War II, who was a star rider in the 1930s at the Cresta Run in St. Moritz, Switzerland, where the sport of skeleton--a sort of head-first luge--was developed. And there is Eddie the Eagle, the low-flying Brit at the 1988 Calgary Winter Olympics. Not to mention the Jamaican bobsled team.

And the unthinkable victory of wrestler Rulon Gardner, who won gold in Sydney, defeating the seeming man-monster from Siberia, Alexander Karelin. There is a smile and a sigh at the memory of Gardner’s triumph--as much a triumph of will as it was athletic skill.

“When you predict what kind of Olympics it’s going to be, that almost never comes true. There’s something that’s different about the Olympics. Here’s a Greco-Roman wrestler, a farm kid from Wyoming, beating the greatest Greco-Roman wrestler of all time, and Americans cared about it!

“That’s because,” and here McKay lets you in on a secret you already know, the secret that’s nonetheless worth discovering time and again, “it’s the old expression: It’s all about people. It’s all about human beings.”

Is there anyone in the history of sports television who tells a story better than McKay? For a generation, his voice came to define the Olympics on TV--from the Rome Summer Olympics in 1960, where he worked for CBS, and then through a run of 10 Games for ABC, through the Calgary Winter Olympics in 1988.

At the Munich Games in 1972, his reporting on the kidnapping and massacre of 11 Israeli athletes and coaches forever defined him even as it elevated the television medium and the notion of sports broadcasting. Even now, 30 years later, he says, “People say, ‘You did such a great job in Munich.’ They still do. They stop me at the supermarket and so on. I say, ‘Thank you.’ It’s all I can say.”

Now McKay is poised for one final Olympics run on TV. But not on ABC--this time, from Salt Lake City for NBC. ABC’s senior executives willingly agreed to share McKay with rival NBC, and he can be expected from Salt Lake to do what he does best, engage in the art of a story well told.

For instance, about halfway through the Games, according to the NBC plan, McKay will be featured doing the narration to a piece about the 1980 U.S.-Soviet Union hockey game, the “Miracle on Ice” at the Lake Placid Olympics.

“The upset is always the great story to me,” McKay says, and of the Americans’ semifinal round victory over the Soviets in 1980, he adds, “I really think it’s the greatest upset in the history of sports, anywhere, anytime.”

During the Salt Lake Games, McKay can also be expected to narrate a few other features. He says he already has done one on the icons of American figure skating, Dorothy Hamill and Peggy Fleming.

Most nights during the Games, however, the NBC plan is for McKay to appear in studio with Bob Costas, to share observations about the day’s events. “An Olympic essayist,” Costas said in a telephone interview, adding, “The idea is for people to walk away saying, ‘Only Jim McKay could have brought us that, or at least in quite that way.’”

Don Ohlmeyer, who over the years served as a producer and senior executive at ABC and NBC, said, “So much of sports television is populated by people who think it’s about statistics. It’s not about statistics. It’s about story telling.” Costas also observed, “They say the camera is a truth detector. People say if they were at the Olympics, they’d like to sit next to him and watch it.”

For instance, a few days ago, relaxing in a comfortable chair in the farmhouse he and his wife of 53 years, Margaret, share in Maryland’s horse country, McKay observed: “Tonya Harding, you saw this week, she’s going to be evicted. That’s certainly the ultimate of something. And: “The biggest change since we started covering [the Olympics] is admitting professionals. I think it been a double-edged sword. To a great extent, it has eliminated shamateurism,” the word that in the 1970s and 1980s was often used to describe professionals masquerading as amateurs to retain Olympic eligibility.

“On the other hand, there will never ever be another [1980] Team USA in hockey.” Now, he said, “We’ve got an all-star team of guys who will practice for thee days and come out and play. That’s a great loss.”

And this: “At first I thought they were bringing in hotdog skiing purely for the ratings.” But, he said, he and Margaret were watching TV one night and aerial skiing came on, and 1998 Olympic gold medalist Eric Bergoust seemed to be “a very appealing young guy. I had always thought of them as juvenile delinquents in that sport. But they look like sincere kids having a good time. So I’ve really changed my mind.”

McKay, 80, will not be asked during these Winter Olympics to do live remotes from, for instance, a snowy and wind-blown downhill course. But all involved are emphatic that his turn in Salt Lake is no nostalgia tour.

NBC Sports Chairman Dick Ebersol said, “This is in no way, shape or form a trip down memory lane.”

Jimmy Roberts, who joined NBC two years ago after several years at ABC and ESPN, said, “This game is too high stakes for Dick [Ebersol] to drop somebody out who can’t pitch. I still believe that the way Jim tells a story--well, nobody tells a story the way Jim tells a story.”

At one NBC production meeting, McKay recalls telling those assembled, “ ‘I really don’t want to be the old guy going down memory lane.’ Though there will be some of that,” he says now, “as it relates to something happening [in Salt Lake].

“I want to be a part of these Olympics from a slightly different point of view. I can’t describe it any more than that. I want to be part of the Olympic Games in Salt Lake.”

The best evidence that this is so is that McKay does not, under any circumstances, need to be part of the Olympic Games in Salt Lake.

He and Margaret--in her full-time working days, she was a newspaper reporter--live a content and quiet life. If she sleeps in while he’s downstairs in the morning with some orange juice and the paper, he gets twitchy without her after about half an hour and goes to wake her up. He says he simply loves her company.

He says they sometimes don’t do a whole lot. They watch some TV (sports, the news, “The West Wing” on NBC and sometimes “The Sopranos” on HBO, though “sometimes it’s too violent for Margaret.”) They dote on their three grandchildren. He said, “Someone once said that the reason grandparents and grandchildren get along so well is because they’re united against a common enemy.”

For four decades, McKay traveled the world--millions of miles for ABC and, especially, “Wide World of Sports.” McKay was the first U.S. network sports commentator to visit mainland China; in 1991, he interviewed Fidel Castro in Cuba. In recent years, he has hosted ABC’s coverage of the British Open golf tournament and thoroughbred racing’s Triple Crown.

McKay has long admired many golfers and jockeys. “For one thing,” he said, “they’re almost always in beautiful surroundings.” For another, “The athletes--by which I mean the golfers and the jockeys--have no yearly salary. They earn what they get.”

From all the miles and through all the years, the most indelible memory, of course, is Munich.

For 16 agonizing hours, as Sept. 5, 1972, crept into the next morning, McKay anchored ABC’s ongoing coverage of the kidnapping and murders.

A little-known fact is that McKay was stuck wearing a pair of wet bathing trunks under his pants. He’d gone swimming on the morning of Sept. 5 and dashed to the studio when he got word of what happened--not even taking time to change.

Never was McKay’s dedication to his craft more evident than during that long day and night.

“The main thing was, you were concentrating on doing your job,” he recalls. “Yes, I felt the emotion. I felt it very much. But my job was to report on the facts and not report anything not true.”

He said he was also motivated by the knowledge that one of the 11 hostages was American-born--David Berger, a weightlifter, whose parents were in the Cleveland suburb of Shaker Heights. They had to be watching ABC, McKay said, desperately seeking news of any sort about their son’s fate.

“I was going to be the guy who tells his family whether he’s alive or dead,” McKay said. “That was on my mind all day.”

At one point, a report flashed over the news-service wires that the hostages had been freed. ABC could not secure confirmation and never ran that report.

Instead, the opposite turned out to be true--after a firefight at a military airport near Munich, all the hostages were dead. This is how McKay reported it:

“We’ve just gotten the final word. When I was a kid, my father used to say our greatest hopes and worst fears are seldom realized. Our worst fears have been realized tonight.

“They have now said that there were 11 hostages. Two were killed in their rooms this morning--excuse me, yesterday morning. Nine were killed at the airport tonight.

“They’re all gone.”

Jim Lampley, who began his broadcasting career in 1974 with ABC and in Salt Lake will work his 11th Olympics, said McKay’s reporting from Munich marked nothing less than a “major communications advance.”

“What Jim accomplished in Munich was the triumph of the realist amid the worst possible story and circumstances--to be able in a compassionate, sympathetic way to tell the kind of story that American sports fans didn’t want to hear or connect to, and do it in a way that we all understood it and felt it as deeply as he did.”

McKay said, “The only thing, thinking back, that embarrassed me and still does, it shouldn’t, but it does--the biggest forward push my career ever got was the tragedy in Munich. It doesn’t feel good that the thing that helped you the most was one of the worst disasters, still is, that ever happened in sport.”

McKay’s work in Munich won him two Emmy awards--one for sports, one for news. In 1995, he was inducted into the Television Academy Hall of Fame. Last year, he was given the Paul White Award by the Radio and TV News Directors Associates; previous winners include Edward R. Murrow and Walter Cronkite.

It’s normal for McKay to downplay his achievements. Lampley and others said McKay is personally quite shy.

“Jim is an introvert, naturally shy, largely embarrassed by tribute or credit,” Lampley said. “But he is intensely proud of what he’s done and intensely proud of the journalistic disciplines he learned as he began his career ... that produce objectivity, detachment, something on the order of real truth.

“He believes very strongly he’s followed that road with faithful self-discipline and that’s something in which he takes great pride.”

McKay said he hates cocktail parties--is no good at small talk. Margaret, he said, once gave him advice about how to get through them: “Jim, when you can’t think of something to say about somebody, interview them.”

As much as he hates the small talk, however, he loves the encounter, the connection with other people. And the thrill of discovery. Which, he said, reminded him of a story.

One time, years ago, he had been dispatched to Switzerland to cover a skiing event. When it ended, he and a young production assistant went to Zurich to stay the night. The next morning, they took a taxi to the airport, and as they headed down a main boulevard, the young assistant asked McKay, why do you keep doing turning your head?

“I said, ‘I’m just looking down the side streets.’ And then I thought, that’s what we do. We don’t just look down the main boulevards.”

McKay paused in the telling of the tale, drew a breath and made it plain he still thinks of himself as the cub reporter he was long ago at the Baltimore Evening Sun, long before he got into TV, making $35 a week, $28.50 after taxes, just a humble guy searching for the truth: “We look down the side streets. And we see.”