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| Wide World of Sports | |
|---|---|
 Wide World of Sports logo | |
| Genre | Sports anthology series |
| Created by | Edgar Scherick |
| Presented by | |
| Country of origin | United States |
| Original language | English |
| No. of seasons | 37 |
| Production | |
| Executive producer | Roone Arledge |
| Camera setup | Multi-camera |
| Running time | 90 minutes |
| Production company | ABC Sports |
| Original release | |
| Network | ABC |
| Release | April 29, 1961 (1961-04-29) – June 21, 1997 (1997-06-21) |
ABC's Wide World of Sports is an Americansportsanthology television program that aired onABC from April 29, 1961 to June 21, 1997, primarily on Saturday afternoons. Hosted byJim McKay, with a succession of co-hosts beginning in 1987, the title continued to be used for general sports programs on the network until 2006. In 2007,Wide World of Sports was named byTime on its list of the 100 best television programs of all time.
Weekend sports news updates on sister radio network ABC Sports Radio, operated byCumulus Media Networks, continue to be branded under the similar titleABC's World of Sports. The program also lent its name to an athletic facility atWalt Disney World, theESPN Wide World of Sports Complex, which was originally known as Disney's Wide World of Sports Complex from its opening in 1997 (one year afterThe Walt Disney Company acquired ABC and an 80% stake inESPN) until 2010.
Wide World of Sports was the creation ofEdgar Scherick through his company, Sports Programs, Inc. After selling his company to ABC, he hired a youngRoone Arledge to produce the show.
The series' April 29, 1961, debut telecast featured both thePenn andDrake Relays.Jim McKay (who hosted the program for most of its history) andJesse Abramson, thetrack and field writer for theNew York Herald Tribune, broadcast fromFranklin Field withBob Richards as thefield reporter.Jim Simpson called the action fromDrake Stadium withBill Flemming working the field.[1]
During its initial season in the spring and summer of 1961,Wide World of Sports was initially broadcast from 5:00 to 7:00 P.M.Eastern Time on Saturdays. Beginning in 1962, it was pushed to 5:00 to 6:30 P.M., and later to 4:30 to 6:00 P.M. Eastern Time to allow ABC affiliates in the Eastern andCentral Time Zones to carry local early-evening newscasts.
In 1961,Wide World of Sports covered abowling event called thePBA National Invitational in whichRoy Lown beatPat Patterson. The broadcast was so successful that in 1962, ABC Sports began covering theProfessional Bowlers Tour.
In 1964,Wide World of Sports covered theOklahoma Rattlesnake Hunt championships; the following year, ABC premiered outdoor programThe American Sportsman, which remained on the network for nearly 20 years.
In 1973, theSuperstars was first televised as a segment onWide World of Sports; the following year, theSuperstars debuted as a weekly winter series that lasted for 10 years.
In 1963, ABC Sports producers began selecting the Athlete of the Year. Its first winner wastrack and field starJim Beatty for being the first to run a sub-4-minute mile indoors. Through the years, this award was won by such now legendary athletes ofMuhammad Ali,Jim Ryun,Lance Armstrong,Mario Andretti,Dennis Conner,Wayne Gretzky,Carl Lewis andTiger Woods. The award was discontinued in 2001.
In later years, with the rise of cable television offering more outlets for sports programming,Wide World of Sports lost many of the events that had been staples of the program for many years (many, although not all, of them ended up onESPN, a sister network to ABC for most of its existence). Ultimately, its traditional anthology series was ended on June 21, 1997 after a 37-year run.[2] TheWide World of Sports name remained in use afterward as an umbrella title for ABC's weekend sports programming, starting January 3, 1998.[3]
In August 2006, ABC Sports came under the oversight of ESPN, under the relaunched banner nameESPN on ABC. TheWide World of Sports title continues to occasionally be revived for Saturday afternoon sports programming on ABC; it was used during the140th Belmont Stakes as a tribute to Jim McKay following his death in June 2008, and in 2017 it was used for the revival of theBattle of the Network Stars with a remake of the show's opening sequence. Most of ABC's sports programming sinceWide World of Sports ended as a program has been displaced from ABC and moved to ESPN; the cable network began producing its own anthology series on Saturday afternoons in 2010,ESPN Sports Saturday, which consists ofdocumentaries originally featured on ESPN'sE:60 and30 for 30 programs, and a modified version of the ESPN interactive seriesSportsNation, titledWinners Bracket.
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Wide World of Sports was intended to be a fill-in show for a single summer season, until the start of fall sports seasons, but became unexpectedly popular. The goal of the program was to showcase sports from around the globe that were seldom, if ever, broadcast on American television. It originally ran for two hours on Saturday afternoons, but was later reduced to 90 minutes.
Usually,Wide World featured two or three events per show. These included many types not previously seen on American television, such ashurling,rodeo,curling,jai-alai,firefighter's competitions, wrist wrestling,powerlifting,surfing,logger sports,demolition derby, slow pitchsoftball,barrel jumping, andbadminton.NASCARGrand National/Winston Cup racing was aWide World of Sports staple until the late 1980s, when it became a regularly scheduled sporting event on the network. Traditional Olympic sports such asfigure skating,skiing,gymnastics and track and field competitions were also regular features of the show. Another memorable regular feature in the 1960s and 1970s wasMexican cliff diving. The lone national television broadcast of theContinental Football League was aWide World of Sports broadcast of the 1966 championship game; ABC paid the league $500 for a rights fee, a minuscule sum by professional football standards.
Wide World of Sports was the first American television program to air coverage of – among events –Wimbledon (1961), theIndianapolis 500 (highlights starting in 1961; a longer-form version in 1965), theNCAA Men's Basketball Championship (1962), theDaytona 500 (1962), theU.S. Figure Skating Championships (1962), the first color broadcast of theMonaco Grand Prix (1967), theLittle League World Series (1961),The British Open Golf Tournament (1961), theX-Games (1995) and theGrey Cup (1962).They also featured Irish curling and the demolition derby from Islip, New York.
The program's introductory sequence was accompanied by a stirring, brassy musical fanfare (composed byCharles Fox), set over amontage of sports clips and accompanying narration written byStanley Ralph Ross and voiced by McKay:
Spanning the globe to bring you the constant variety of sport... the thrill of victory... and the agony of defeat... the human drama of athletic competition... This isABC's Wide World of Sports!
The melodramatic introduction became a nationalcatchphrase that is often heard to this day. While "the thrill of victory" had several symbols over the decades,Slovenianski jumperVinko Bogataj, whose dreadful misjump and crash during a competition on March 21, 1970, was featured from the early 1970s onward heard over the sentence "...and the agony of defeat." Bogataj became a hard-luck hero of sorts, and an affectionate icon for stunningfailure. Previously, the footage played with that phrase was that of another ski jumper who made a long, almost successful jump, but whose skis lost vertical alignment shortly before landing, leading to a crash.
Later in the 1990s, an additional clip was added to the "agony of defeat" sequence after Bogataj's accident: footage of a crash byAlessandro Zampedri,Roberto Guerrero andEliseo Salazar during the1996 Indianapolis 500 showed a car flipping up into thecatch fence. The "oh no!" commentary that accompanies it, however, is dubbed from commentary byBenny Parsons ofSteve Grissom's crash in the 1997Primestar 500 (part of the NASCAR Winston Cup series). Bogataj's mishap is also commemorated inRich Hall's bookSniglets as "agonosis", which is defined as "thesyndrome of tuning in onWide World of Sports every weekend just to watch the skier rack himself."
From September 19, 1964, until December 28, 1991, aCanadian version was aired by theCTV Television Network. Licensed by ABC, the CTV broadcast included a mix of content from the American show, and segments produced by CTV and its affiliates.[7] The series ended in 1991, when the network launched the newCTV Sports Presents.[8]
In Australia, theNine Network produced its own version from 1981 to 1999 and from 2008 to 2016,Nine's Wide World of Sports, which has since become the all-encompassing brand for all of Nine's sport coverage. It was also originally a sports anthology series, but also featured professional sporting competitions. It, along with Nine'scricket coverage, also inspired a series of parodies, released as audio albums byBilly Birmingham, under the nom-de-plum ofThe Twelfth Man.
A program partly inspired by the U.S. version, known asDeporTV, El Ancho Mundo del Deporte (DeporTV, the Wide World of Sports) debuted onCanal 13, at the time the Mexican government's public television channel (which later becameImevisión) on January 6, 1974. The program continues to air on Imevisión's successorTV Azteca, becoming one of the longest-running programs in the country. It was hosted byJosé Ramón Fernández from its inception until 2006, and is currently hosted by Antonio Rosique, Luis García Postigo and Christian Martinolli. The program "El Ancho Mundo del Deporte" was aired in Monterrey Mexico in the state government owned Canal 28 from 1985 to 1991. This was possible in an exchange with Imevisión since the NFL national broadcast in Mexico for that national network was originated in Monterrey (Fernando Von Rossum Garza and Jose "Pepe" Espinoza). The hosts in the Monterrey version of "El Ancho Mundo del Deporte" were Javier Hector Gutierrez, Rubén Pizarro, Alejandro Campos, Martha Vigil and Carlos Gutierrez.
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