Relationship between television networks and sports

As newspapers had faced radio reporting, after World War II both had to adapt to a new medium: television. Television was ready for marketing before World War II; on 17 May 1939,NBC’s Bill Stern announced the Columbia-Princeton baseball game, the first live sporting event televised in the United States. The experiment was not successful, as the black-and-white reception was extremely poor, and the single camera could not track the ball properly.World War II delayed television’s widespread use, but afterwards televisions quickly became commonplace. In 1950, about 9 percent of Americans had a television at home; by 1955, that figure had jumped to 65 percent and by 1965 to 93 percent. In 1970, 39 percent of homes contained color sets; by 1972, 64 percent did.

World War II ended the Depression; during the 1950s, disposable income was poured into sports. By 1958, jet travel enabled professional leagues to become truly national, as teams could now travel coast to coast in time to play the games of a normal season.Sports entrepreneurs and players had become used to radio; initially wary of loss of ticket sales,promoters began to see the monetary advantages of televising their product. Anxious to televise sporting events of national significance, networks viewed regular games with some suspicion, for sports were not easily managed.They did not fit neatly into a schedule. They could be rained out. No one could guarantee an edge-of-the-seat contest (nor create one, as radio announcers often had done). While stadium fans might stay to watch a dull game, viewers would rapidly turn to a competing network. These matters were important, because U.S. television networks made their profits, as radio had done, from advertisers. Roughly speaking, the difference between the costs of a particular show and the amount advertisers were willing to pay for slots during it represented the network’s profit. Soap operas could be produced cheaply and could therefore play profitably to limited audiences; sports events needed multiple cameras, special electrical equipment, and numbers of skilled personnel, all at a specific site. Networks therefore aimed their regular sports programming at weekend fans, mostly males who had played particular sports. The aim was to make these men feel they were at the stadium itself. The high ratings were earned in prime time, on weekdays; that was reserved for shows expected to attract the whole family.

But as technology changed and cameras became less cumbersome, and producers learned their craft, the sports industry learned too. Professional football had struggled to compete with the college game during the Depression; radio had not helped much. It soon became clear, however, that while baseball is hard to televise effectively, football’s larger ball and more varied but predictable plays made it riveting on television. In 1960, National Football League (NFL) owners agreed that all clubs should assign their individual television rights to the league, which would then negotiate with the networks on their behalf. In 1961, Pete Rozelle, football’s commissioner, secured antitrust exemption for these pooled agreements, and proceeded to use television to turn professional football into America’s winter game.

Rozelle understood the commercial fact that stadium crowds were simply a backdrop for television viewers. NFL owners, assured of an equal share of growing television rights money, were prepared to accept rule and schedule changes to make football a more enthralling television spectacle.But when NBC and CBS seemed likely to balk at increased payments for the limited weekend schedule,Rozelle offered ABC a special schedule of games to be played during prime time. In 1970, ABC was the poor relation of the big three networks; it was operating at a prime-time loss. Roone Arledge,president of ABC sports,was backed in his calculated gamble of attracting a family, rather than a male, football-fan audience, for Monday Night Football. Having produced and directed ABC’s college football games, in 1961 he created the Emmy Award–winning sports anthology show the Wide World of Sports, that was soon copied by other networks, and led to such spinoffs as The Superstars.

Starting with college football, Arledge had been determined to make sports entertaining for viewers who weren’t necessarily fans. He used every technological advance and every gimmick he could think of to make games come alive for those in the electronic seats. Commentators were to be teachers, not simply reporters; they were to draw in people who had never played the sport they were watching. For Wide World of Sports, Arledge hired Jim McKay, who had begun his career as a sportswriter for the Baltimore Evening Sun in 1946. In 1948,McKay moved into television and was hired by CBS in 1950, where he gained a wealth of experience in and out of sports. His broad background enabled him to pull together the varied events on Wide World of Sports; he focused on the people involved, not simply the events. He enjoyed the rapidly changing technology ABC provided and did exactly as Arledge had hoped; he made unfamiliar sports easy for Americans to watch and drew in new viewers while retaining the interest of the knowledgeable fan.

For Monday Night Football, Arledge drew on all his sports experience. The program was conceived of as entertainment, not simply as the translation of a stadium event to the TV screen. Rather than the weekend games’ two announcers, three were employed; one of them, Howard Cosell, was chosen not for his football expertise but to make new viewers care about what they were seeing. Rapidly, he became a household name; excoriated by the knowledgeable, his nasal voice and erudite determination to “tell it like it is” undermined the jock culture of regular sports broadcasting, precisely as it was intended to do. The by-play between him and the irreverent “Dandy Don”Meredith, ex-Cowboys quarterback, increased the fun—and earned Meredith an Emmy.

Monday Night Football was the harbinger of things to come. If a television show is to garner high ratings, and thus to be attractive to high-paying advertisers, it must draw together viewers who share very few common interests. Advertisers have become increasingly sophisticated and want to be assured that a show is being watched not simply by large numbers of people,but by those whose age, income, and educational background will predispose them to buy certain products. Network television sporting events must therefore be presented in a format that is familiar to viewers, and that does not necessarily demand their full attention. The fragmentation of audiences cable television introduced put further pressure on networks to make their sports programming attractive to more than jocks—who would frequently tune in to ESPN. Networks therefore make demands on sports organizations; publicity and dollars are exchanged for some control over scheduling, commercial breaks, and guaranteed levels of performance. Nowhere is this “takeand-give” clearer than in U.S. television networks’ relationship with the International Olympic Committee (IOC).

In 1960, CBS paid $50,000 for the rights to the Winter Olympics in Squaw Valley, California, and $394,000 for the Summer Olympics in Rome. In contrast, NBC agreed to pay $705 million for the Sydney, Australia, Summer Games alone, to be held in 2000. What has made the Games worth so much more in 40 years? Changes in technology have been one reason, but the Cold War and changes in television producers’ axioms have had more to do with it. During the Cold War, the competition between the United States and communist countries, particularly the athletic powerhouses of East Germany and the Soviet Union, allowed television to capitalize on Americans’ need to win. Medals become symbolic markers of national superiority. The abrupt collapse of the communist system took away that dimension of the Games, but the habit of thinking of the Games as important had been established. Now it had to be kept up.

Television sports programming was originally based on the proposition that U.S. audiences want to watch events while they are happening. Immense effort, therefore, went into trying to bring live Olympic coverage to the United States.But the different Olympic venues made this difficult, and very inconvenient when time zones abroad did not fit prime time in the United States. In 1964,NBC managed to broadcast the opening ceremonies from Tokyo live, although it was not until late summer that anyone knew whether pictures beamed via the satellite Syncam III would be of network quality. Film was flown in from Tokyo for the events themselves.

Live coverage presented other problems. In 1988, five goals were missed in two separate U.S. hockey games because no allowance was made at the site for the commercial breaks all U.S. networks required. Nothing could be substituted if bad weather caused postponement of events, as happened frequently at Albertville. Live coverage was also immensely costly. Audience research conducted by CBS led to the discovery that “high profile” events were watched less for the result than for their intrinsic interest; so in 1984 ABC experimented with tape-delayed coverage from Sarajevo. In 1994, NBC decided that all events from Lillehammer would be taped.

Now the Olympics could be scripted like any other TV show. Skating, the event viewers liked best, was shown somehow each evening even when no competition was scheduled. Events such as the cross-country relay, dreary for most Americans,were cast in a format regular television viewers understood. Specific segments of the race, taken from different camera angles, were spliced seamlessly together. A commentary was fitted to the tape, drawing on such human interest stories (not relevant to the race the spectators were watching) as the heroism of one competitor whose brother had disappeared on the trail during training. The suspense techniques of soap opera were used to turn the event into a familiar living room drama.The whole was overlaid with a jazzy musical soundtrack. What was televised, in short, was not the cross-country relay, but a made-for-TV version quite different from what anyone at the site would have experienced.

Purists deplore such editing. But if the Olympics cannot be made familiar to, and comfortable for,most U.S. viewers, those viewers will simply change channels. Other countries televise the Games differently; the constraints on their programming are also different. For as U.S. interest in the Games has increased, so networks have each regarded televising them as a demonstration of technical expertise and communications superiority. Networks have been willing to lose money on the Games, as they compete with each other for public acclaim, which they believe will translate into regular programming ratings.