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Roone Arledge




Roone Arledge (July 8, 1931 - December 5, 2002) was a sports broadcasting
pioneer and chairman of ABC News from 1977 until his death.

Roots

Arledge was born the son of a North Carolina lawyer who moved to New York
City in search of opportunity. He grew up a smart, but sheltered upper
middle class kid. In school on Long Island, he wrestled, and played
baseball. Upon graduation, he decided that sportswriting was what he wanted
to do in life, and applied to Columbia University.

There, he discovered that Columbia's journalism program was a graduate
program -- not an undergraduate one. Even so, Arledge liked what he saw, and
enrolled in a liberal-arts program. His classmates included Max Frankel, who
would eventually win a Pulitzer Prize in 1973 for his work as editorial page
editor of the New York Times; Larry Grossman, who became president of the
Public Broadcasting System in 1976, and later went on to head NBC News; and
Richard Wald, another president of NBC News that Arledge would later
persuade to come over to ABC News as a senior vice-president.

After receiving a bachelor's degree in 1952, Arledge enrolled in graduated
studies at Columbia's School of International Affairs. Restless with
graduate studies, he went looking for a job where he could use his college
degree, and obtained an entry-level job at the DuMont television network.
Military service intervened, and after Arledge's discharge, he learned the
network had folded and he had no job to return to.

Contacts he made at DuMont paid off with a stage manager's job at NBC's New
York City station, WRCA (later WNBC). One of his assignments there was to
help produce a children's puppet show hosted by Shari Lewis. In 1958, the
program won a New York City Emmy award.

Even with that success, Arledge wanted to tinker with programming ideas.
With what was then the avante-garde magazine Playboy as his model, Arledge
convinced his superiors at WRCA to let him film a pilot of a show he called,
"For Men Only." While his superiors liked the pilot, they told him WRCA
couldn't find a place in the programming schedule for it. But the WRCA
weatherman, Pat Hernon, who hosted the pilot episode of "For Men Only",
began showing the kinescope to people around New York City who might want
the program. One of them was a former account executive at the ad agency
Dancer Fitzgerald & Sample, Edgar J. Scherick, who as far as Hernon knew,
was doing something at ABC.

Assistant Producer

Scherick, had joined the fledgling ABC television network when he persuaded
it to purchase Sports Programming Inc. Scherick had formed this company
after leaving CBS when the network would not make him the head of sports
programming, choosing instead William C. McPhail, a former baseball
public-relations agent. Before ABC Sports even became a formal division of
the network, Scherick and ABC programming chief Tom Moore pulled off
spectacular programming deals involving the most popular American sporting
events.

While Scherick wasn't interested in "For Men Only", he recognized the talent
Arledge had. Arledge realized ABC was the organization he was looking to
join. The lack of a formal organization would offer him the opportunity to
claim real power when the network matured. So, he signed on with Scherick as
an assistant producer.

Several months before ABC began broadcasting NCAA college football games,
Arledge sent Scherick a remarkable memo, filled with youthful exuberance,
and television production concepts which sports broadcasts have adhered to
since. Previously, network sporting broadcasts had consisted of simple
set-ups and focused on the game itself The genius of Arledge in this memo
was not that he offered another way to broadcast the game to the sports fan.
The genius was to recognize television had to take the sports fan to the
game. In addition, Arledge was intelligent enough to realize that the
broadcasts needed to attract, and hold the attention of women viewers. At
age 29 on September 17, 1960 put his vision into reality with ABC's first
NCAA college football broadcast from Birmingham, Alabama, between Alabama
Crimson Tide and the Georgia Bulldogs. Sports broadcasting has not been the
same since.

Flying high

Arledge had demolished the barrier between television cameras and subject
material with his NCAA college football production values. And Ed Scherick
had a problem. Scherick wanted a low-budget (as in inexpensive broadcasting
rights) sports program that could attract and retain an audience. He hit
upon the idea of broadcasting track and field events sponsored by the
Amateur Athletic Union. While Americans were not exactly fans of track and
field events, Scherick figured Americans understood games.

So in January 1961, Scherick called Arledge into his office, and asked him
to attend the annual AAU board of governors meeting. While he was shaking
hands, Scherick said, if the mood seemed right, might he cut a deal to
broadcast AAU events on ABC? It seemed a tall assignment, but as Scherick
said years later, "Roone was a gentile and I was not." Arledge came back
with a deal for ABC to broadcast all AAU events for $50,000 a year.

Next, Scherick and Arledge divided up their NCAA college football sponsor
list. They then telephoned their sponsors and said in so many words,
"Advertise on our new sports show coming up in April, or forget about buying
commercials on NCAA college football this fall." The two persuaded enough
sponsors to advertise, though it took them to the last day of a deadline
imposed by ABC programming to do it.

Wide World of Sports suited Scherick's plans exactly. By exploiting the
speed of jet transportation and flexibility of videotape, Scherick was able
to undercut NBC and CBS's advantages in broadcasting live sporting events.
In that era, with communications nowhere nearly universal as they are today,
ABC was able to safely record events on videotape for later broadcast
without worrying about an audience finding out the results. Scherick only
had one individual in mind to produce the show: Roone Arledge. Scherick
stole host Jim McKay away from CBS.

Arledge, his colleague Chuck Howard, and McKay made up the show on a
week-by-week basis the first year it was broadcast. In that era, the mere
fact that an event was being covered on television gave Arledge and McKay
breathing space television producers today can only dream about. Arledge had
a genius for the dramatic story line that unfolded in the course of a game
or event. McKay's honest curiosity and reporter's bluntness gave the show an
emotional appeal which attracted viewers who might not otherwise watch a
sporting event.

He personally produced all ten ABC Olympic broadcasts, as well as creating
the primetime Monday Night Football and coined ABC's famous "Thrill of
victory, agony of defeat" tagline -- although ABC insiders of that era
attribute the authorship to legendary sports broadcaster Jim McKay.

But more importantly from Arledge's perspective, Wide World of Sports
allowed him to demonstrate his ability as an administrator as well as
producer. Arledge did not gain a formal title as president of ABC Sports
until 1968, even though Scherick left his position to assume a position of
vice president for programming at ABC in 1964.

Honors

Arledge was selected by Life magazine as one of the the "100 Most Important
Americans of the 20th Century". Sports Illustrated ranked him number three
in a list of "the 40 individuals who have most significantly altered or
elevated the world of sports in the last four decades".

He was the winner of 37 Emmy Awards and in 1990 was inducted into the
Television Academy Hall of Fame.

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