Jim McKay, RIP

The sportscaster who all baby boomers remember for his intoning of the great tag “the thrill of victory … the agony of defeat,” and for his heroic, gritty coverage of the catastrophic 1972 Munich Olympics, where 11 Israeli athletes were murdered by Palestinian terrorists while the German authorities looked on, died last week.

The New York Times remembers:

Mr. McKay was a hype-averse optimist and poetic storyteller who left analysis and brickbats to co-workers like Dick Button, Peggy Fleming, Donna de Varona, Jackie Stewart and Bill Hartack.

Emotion occasionally slipped through objectivity. After an American athlete won a gold medal in the 1984 Summer Olympics in Los Angeles, Mr. McKay said: “If I said I was an objective reporter, I’d be lying through my teeth. I think when an American wins, you’re excited. And why not?”

Indeed—the Olympics is all about (friendly) competition among nations, after all, and so even the NYT can forgive the likeable McKay his occasional loss of objectivity.

No matter. As Peter Alfano wrote in The New York Times during those Olympics, television allowed Mr. McKay “to play Uncle Sam for two weeks.”

But what McKay is really famous for is the storyteller’s gift, which he brought (with great relish) to ABC’s Wide World of Sports and, eventually, to the network’s Olympics coverage, with its “up close and personal” featurettes.*** McKay and his longtime boss, ABC’s legendary Roone Arledge, were in fact collaborators in creating enticing and entertaining and often exciting television.

From the NYT’s 2002 obituary of Arledge:

With Mr. McKay as host, [Wide World of Sports]  filled a latent hunger for sports in an entire generation of viewers by ‘’spanning the globe” in the phrase that Mr. Arledge and Mr. McKay came up with, to bring viewers ”the human drama of athletic competition: the thrill of victory, the agony of defeat.” [e.a.]

The most interesting aspect of Arledge’s (and McKay’s) success was how they filled that “latent” hunger for sports: they adapted an ancient form of storytelling—the journey of the hero—for a new medium (television).

After describing a host of production techniques that would be brought to coverage of the [Olympics], including cameras on jeeps, hand-held cameras, boom microphones for sound, and even the use of helicopters, Mr. Arledge effectively summed up his philosophy, one that would ultimately transform television. ”In short, we are going to add show business to sports,” he said. [e.a.]

They did bring showbiz to sports—and, eventually, to the “news” too—and it worked. Most interesting of all was where Arledge got the idea: as a college student [e.a.]:

Mr. Arledge attended Columbia University, beginning in 1949, and came under the influence of some of the outstanding faculty in the English department, notably Lionel Trilling and Mark Van Doren.

Two of the signature touches that Mr. Arledge brought to the programs he later produced he learned in these courses: the importance of narrative and the role of the hero. Years later the announcers of ABC Sports were taught to emphasize what Mr. Arledge called the story line of whatever game they were covering and to focus on a star whose personal story could transcend the outcome of the events itself. The ‘up close and personal’ biography of an athlete, which ABC’s Olympic coverage invented to introduce viewers to obscure foreign athletes, became the template for personalizing the stories of stars in every sport.

Interesting stuff, and McKay was as instrumental as Arledge in changing the face of TV. But McKay was, more than anything, a mensch and a powerful role model.

ETP’s Rachel Sklar reports:

I had read a great and moving article about [McKay] a year and a half ago that I remembered well. It was by his son, CBS News & Sports president Sean McManus, on the back essay page of Best Life magazine. …

McManus said that there had been “probably 1,500 letters and telegrams” about [his coverage of the Munich massacre] waiting for McKay when they returned, including one from Walter Cronkite. Years later, McManus was named president of CBS News, and his father cried when he told him that Cronkite had called him “boss.”

In the essay, McManus said that his father “always told me a man had to live up to his job…I try to follow not only my dad’s words, but his example: As long as I do the job I’m asked to do, everything else will be all right.”

Jim McKay, RIP.

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***Eventually this kind of soft-focus coverage of sports, meant to attract women viewers to the Olympics—a strategy that succeeded—would send real sports fans away in droves, but that’s a story for another day.