Roone Arledge

BORN: July 8, 1931 • Forest Hills, New York

DIED: December 5, 2002 • New York, New York

American television producer

As the president of ABC Sports and later ABC News, Roone Arledge helped turn the smallest of the three major television networks (NBC and CBS are the other two) into a respected leader. He came up with so many original ideas and created so many new shows during his forty-year career that a Newsweek obituary described him as "the most innovative TV producer ever." As the head of ABC Sports, Arledge created many production techniques that became routine in televised sporting events, such as instant replay, slow motion, and "up close and personal" portraits of athletes. After taking over ABC's news division in 1977, he launched the careers of numerous top television journalists and created such highly rated programs as Nightline, Prime Time Live, and 20/20.

"We are going to add show business to sports!"

Changing the look of televised sports

Roone Pinckney Arledge Jr. was born on July 8, 1931, in Forest Hills, New York. He was the son of Roone Arledge Sr., a successful lawyer, and his wife Gertrude (Stritmater) Arledge. Arledge earned a bachelor's degree in business from Columbia College in 1952. He briefly attended Columbia University's School of International Affairs, but then he was drafted into the U.S. Army. During his two years of military service, he produced several radio commercials. In 1955, Arledge took a job with the NBC television network as a producer of children's and public affairs programming. In 1958, he won an Emmy Award (an annual honor recognizing excellence in television programming) as the producer of a puppet show called Hi, Mom.

In 1960, Arledge moved to the ABC television network. At that time, ABC was the smallest and least influential of the three national broadcast networks. It trailed CBS and NBC in both entertainment and news programming. In fact, it was jokingly referred to as the Almost Broadcasting Company. But young Arledge saw an advantage in ABC's weak position in the broadcast industry. In its efforts to catch up to the competition, the network was more open to bold new ideas.

Arledge started out working in the sports division. ABC Sports faced a challenge in reaching viewers because its competitors already controlled the legal rights to broadcast America's most popular sporting events. But ABC did manage to win the contract to broadcast college football games. In preparing for the start of the season, Arledge began thinking of ways that ABC Sports could make its football telecasts stand out from the competition.

Arledge came up with a plan to make the game more interesting and exciting for viewers. He described his vision in a famous memo to his colleagues, which was quoted by Charles Hirshberg in ESPN 25. Arledge proposed using portable cameras "to get the impact shots that we cannot get from a fixed camera—a coach's face as a man drops a pass in the clear—a pretty cheerleader after her hero has scored a touchdown—a coed who brings her infant baby to the game—the referee as he calls a particularly difficult play—two romantic students sharing a blanket late in the game on a cold day—the beaming face of a substitute halfback as he comes off the field after running seventy yards for a touchdown…. In short—WE ARE GOING TO ADD SHOW BUSINESS TO SPORTS!"

Creating ABC's Wide World of Sports

In 1961, Arledge used these ideas as the basis for an innovative new sports program, ABC's Wide World of Sports. Since ABC's competitors held the rights to televise all the major U.S. sporting events, Arledge decided that ABC Sports should take a different approach and focus on the wide variety of sports available in the rest of the world. He believed that these lesser-known sports might attract a solid audience, as long as the events were presented in an entertaining way. The show's well-known introduction, read by host Jim McKay (1921–), explained its mission: "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 is ABC's Wide World of Sports."

ABC Sports sent camera crews all over the world to provide coverage of such little-known events as table tennis, badminton, curling, cliff diving, and drag racing. It also showed international gymnastics and ice-skating competitions at a time when these sports received minimal coverage. The most notable aspect of Wide World of Sports was that it presented sporting events as entertainment. It was the first show to provide "up close and personal" profiles of athletes, for example, and to use technical innovations like instant replay and slow motion.

Wide World of Sports earned forty-seven Emmy Awards during its forty-year run on ABC. Its influence can be seen in many aspects of later sports broadcasting, especially in the coverage of multi-event athletic contests such as the Olympic Games. Rather than simply providing viewers with film footage of the event itself, all of the networks started offering special features that turned sports into high-quality television entertainment.

Launching Monday Night Football

In 1963, Arledge was promoted to vice president of ABC Sports. The following year, he served as executive producer for the network's telecast of the Olympic Games. As it turned out, it was the first of ten Olympic broadcasts that he would produce for ABC. Arledge introduced a number of innovations that gave the Games a broad appeal to television viewers. For instance, he produced special features that gave viewers an in-depth look at the personal background of individual athletes. He also convinced the network to move its Olympic telecasts from the afternoon, when sporting events were usually broadcast, into the evening, when more people could watch. His coverage of the 1976 Olympics attracted such a large audience that it helped lift ABC to its first number one finish in the annual TV ratings in network history.

In 1968, Arledge was promoted to president of ABC Sports. Two years later, he negotiated a deal for ABC to broadcast National Football League (NFL) games. Until this time, NFL games had always been broadcast on Sunday afternoons. Among television industry experts, conventional wisdom said that women controlled the TV set during the evening hours and that female audiences did not watch sports. But Arledge did not agree with these assumptions and believed that professional football could do well in the weekly prime-time schedule.

In 1970, Arledge launched a new sports program called Monday Night Football. Building on the success of Wide World of Sports, he continued to offer viewers a combination of sports and entertainment. For instance, Arledge put together an unusual team in the broadcast booth in order to increase viewer interest in the games. He combined Howard Cosell (1918–1995)—a hard-driving, opinionated journalist who tended to stir up strong feelings (both positive and negative) in TV audiences—with Don Meredith (1938–)—a funny, relaxed former quarterback for the Dallas Cowboys. The team also included an experienced play-by-play announcer, first Keith Jackson and later Frank Gifford (1930–). The Monday Night Football announcers became the talk of the nation on Tuesday mornings, as viewers discussed the interactions among the three very different personalities.

Before long, Monday Night Football became so popular that restaurants and sports bars across the country started hosting parties around it. For many years, the program included special appearances by prominent athletes, entertainers, and politicians, who promoted their projects as they chatted with the show's hosts. Monday Night Football remained a winner in the ratings into the 2000s, despite numerous changes in the hosts who occupied the broadcast booth.

Taking charge of ABC News

Arledge's record in turning ABC Sports into a ratings success convinced network management to make him the president of ABC News in 1977 (he also remained president of ABC Sports). Up to this point, ABC had lagged behind the other broadcast networks in news coverage, and management hoped that Arledge could improve this situation. But his appointment upset many people in the news division. Arledge did not have a background in journalism, and he had gained a reputation over the years for creating flashy, dramatic sports telecasts. Many people worried that he did not understand the seriousness of the news and would tend to emphasize entertainment over journalism.

Despite such doubts, however, Arledge quickly began putting his successful ideas to work on the news division. He reshaped ABC's news coverage by adding attractive graphics, introducing the new practice of split-screen interviews (which divided the screen so that viewers could see the interviewer and interviewee at the same time), expanding news coverage to new time periods, and raiding other networks to hire top journalistic talent. Some of the television anchors (news presenters) whose careers he helped launch include Peter Jennings (1938–2005), Ted Koppel (1940–), David Brinkley (1920–2003), Barbara Walters (1931–; see entry), Sam Donaldson (1934–), and Diane Sawyer (1945–). Arledge also created several new programs that combined news and entertainment, such as 20/20 and Prime Time Live.

In 1979, ABC launched a late-night news program to provide viewers with updates on the Iran hostage crisis. Earlier that year, revolutionaries in the Middle Eastern nation of Iran had overthrown the U.S.-supported government. The new leader, Ayatollah Khomeini (1902–2003), had encouraged his followers to demonstrate against American and Israeli interests. In November a group of Iranian students captured the U.S. Embassy in the capital city of Tehran and took fifty-two American diplomats and citizens hostage. Most of these people were held for over a year before they were finally released in early 1981.

Sportscaster Howard Cosell

Howard Cosell is one of the most famous sports broadcasters in the history of television. He earned both fans and critics with his intellectual approach to sports and his willingness to express his opinion. In fact, a survey of television viewers conducted by TV Guide in the 1970s named Cosell both the most popular and least popular sportscaster in the United States.

Cosell was born as Howard William Cohen on March 25, 1918, in Winston-Salem, North Carolina. His family name was originally Kozel, but it had been changed to Cohen when his father immigrated to the United States from Poland. Cosell changed it back, with a slightly different English spelling, around 1940.

Cosell's family moved to Brooklyn, New York, when he was a child. He was an excellent student, and he served as a sportswriter for his high school newspaper. Cosell earned a law degree from New York University in 1941 and opened a law office in New York City. Specializing in labor issues, he represented several actors and athletes, including the famous New York Giants baseball player Willie Mays. Another client of Cosell's law practice was Little League Baseball of New York. In 1953 the ABC radio network asked Cosell to host a program in which Little League players would interview Major League Baseball stars. The show attracted a great deal of attention, partly because Cosell provided the children with interesting questions to ask.

In 1956 Cosell gave up his law practice to work for ABC full time. By the 1960s he had become one of the network's main announcers for television coverage of boxing matches and the Olympic Games. Cosell was very different in appearance and manner from most TV sportscasters of that time. He spoke with a strong Brooklyn accent, for instance, and often showed off his intelligence by using big words. Unlike the good-looking former athletes who often served as TV commentators, Cosell was not considered physically attractive and had never played competitive sports. Cosell also provided viewers with unusually in-depth coverage of various issues in sports. When people objected to his hard-hitting approach, he always insisted, "I'm just telling it like it is."

Cosell first came to fame by covering the sport of boxing. In the minds of many TV viewers, his career became linked with that of Muhammad Ali, a great fighter who reached the height of his talent and popularity in the 1960s and 1970s. Cosell interviewed Ali on television countless times during these years. The two men often teased and insulted each other on camera, but they developed a deep mutual respect and friendship behind the scenes. Cosell stopped covering boxing in 1982, following an especially brutal and one-sided match between heavyweight champion Larry Holmes and challenger Randall "Tex" Cobb. Afterward, Cosell openly criticized the sport and called for it to be outlawed.

Cosell is probably best known as the longtime co-host of Monday Night Football. This innovative program, which started in 1970, marked the first time that a television network tried to air regular-season sporting events during the weekday evening hours known as prime time. In order to compete against the entertainment programs airing on other channels, ABC selected a team of hosts whose widely differing personalities often made their interactions more interesting than the game itself. Cosell especially clashed with co-host Don Meredith, a funny, laid-back former quarterback for the Dallas Cowboys. Cosell finally quit Monday Night Football in 1984.

The following year Cosell started hosting a newsmagazine program called Sportsbeat on ABC. Although the show received praise from critics, it went off the air after only three months. Television insiders claimed that ABC executives canceled the show out of anger at Cosell, who had criticized many co-workers in his 1985 book I Never Played the Game. Cosell never worked in TV again. He wrote several other books, including Cosell on Cosell, Like It Is, and What's Wrong with Sports. After suffering from poor health for the last decade of his life, Cosell died on April 23, 1995, in New York City.

During the hostage crisis, Arledge reserved a nightly time slot for news bulletins. Anchor Ted Koppel discussed current events and interviewed prominent people from around the world. Once the hostage situation was resolved, Arledge decided to turn it into a regular news program called Nightline. From 1981 into the 2000s, Nightline received critical praise for covering complex issues, particularly regarding foreign affairs. Even though it faced tough competition from entertaining late-night talk shows hosted by Johnny Carson, Jay Leno, and David Letterman, Nightline became the highest-rated program in its time slot in 1995. "I'm prouder of that show than of almost anything I've ever done," Arledge told Newsweek. "It gives us a dimension no other network has ever had."

Over the course of his long career as a television executive, Arledge won thirty-six Emmy Awards. In 1990, he was inducted into both the Academy of Television Arts and Sciences Hall of Fame and the U.S. Olympic Hall of Fame. In addition, a Life magazine poll released that year listed him among the one hundred most important Americans of the twentieth century. In 1994, Sports Illustrated ranked Arledge third (behind boxer Muhammad Ali and basketball player Michael Jordan) among individuals who had the greatest impact on the world of sports since 1950. Arledge was promoted to chairman of ABC News in 1997, but his influence began to decline when he was diagnosed with cancer. He died on December 5, 2002, at the age of 71.

For More Information

BOOKS

Arledge, Roone. Roone: A Memoir. New York: HarperCollins, 2003.

Cosell, Howard, with Peter Bonventre. I Never Played the Game. New York: William Morrow, 1986.

Gunther, Marc. The House That Roone Built: The Inside Story of ABC News. Boston: Little, Brown, 1994.

Gunther, Marc, and B. Carter. Monday Night Mayhem: The Inside Story of ABC's Monday Night Football. New York: William Morrow, 1988.

Hirshberg, Charles. ESPN 25: 25 Mind-Bending, Eye-Popping, Culture-Morphing Years of Highlights. New York: Hyperion, 2004.

Kindred, Dave. Sound and Fury: Two Powerful Lives, One Fateful Friendship. New York: Free Press, 2006.

Powers, Ron. Supertube: The Rise of Television Sports. New York: Coward-McCann, 1984.

Rader, Benjamin G. In Its Own Image: How Television Has Transformed Sports. New York: Free Press, 1984.

Spence, Jim, and Dave Giles. Up Close and Personal: The Inside Story of Network Television Sports. New York: Atheneum, 1988.

PERIODICALS

Alter, Jonathan. "Roone Arledge: July 8, 1931–December 5, 2002." Newsweek, December 16, 2002.

Arledge, Roone. "It's Sport … It's Money … It's TV." Sports Illustrated, April 25, 1966.

Jicha, Tom. "The Sporting Life: Monday Night Football Revitalized the Game and the Network." Television Week, May 19, 2003.

Roberts, Randy. "Roone Arledge and the Rise of Televised Sports." USA Today, January 1992.

"Roone Arledge on ABC's Wide World of News." Broadcasting and Cable, October 10, 1994.

Rubinstein, Julian. "The Emperor of the Air." New York Times Magazine. December 29, 2002.

Shapiro, Leonard. "Howard Cosell Dies at 77." Washington Post, April 24, 1995.

WEB SITES

Baran, Stanley J. "Sports and Television." Museum of Broadcast Communications. http://www.museum.tv/archives/etv/S/htmlS/sportsandte/sportsandte.htm (accessed on May 23, 2006).

Tedesco, John. "Roone Arledge." Museum of Broadcast Communications. http://www.museum.tv/archives/etv/A/htmlA/arledgeroon/arledgeroon.htm (accessed on May 23, 2005).