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| ISBN-13: | 9780520966260 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | University of California Press |
| Publication date: | 11/06/2018 |
| Series: | Sport in World History , #4 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 288 |
| File size: | 7 MB |
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CHAPTER 1
The "Almost Broadcasting Company" and the Birth of ABC Sports
Sports programming put ABC on the television map.
BERT SUGAR, journalist and historian
ACCORDING TO BROADCAST HISTORIAN WILLIAM BODDY, "The American television industry underwent its deepest and most lasting changes in the middle years of the 1950s." Of the three major networks that survived the decade, ABC — the youngest of the bunch — endured the most drastic shifts. It nearly folded, was sold to United Paramount Theaters, and was forced to develop inventive strategies to counteract its comparative feebleness. Sports became one of its chief survival techniques. The network's annual commitment to sporting content increased 600 percent over the 1950s and culminated with its March 1961 creation of ABC Sports — the first network sports division. ABC Sports gave the traditionally unpopular network an identity and became the laboratory at which Roone Arledge developed his foundational aesthetic.
HARD ROCK
ABC was born the bastard child of the Radio Corporation of America's (RCA) National Broadcasting Company. The "Second Depression" of 1937 — a recession within the Great Depression that deflated what few strides the economy had made since the 1929 stock market crash — compelled the US government to intensify its scrutiny of the large trusts and monopolies blamed for the financial crisis. The film and radio industries composed high-profile targets that signaled no entity would evade inspection. The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) specifically began to investigate chain broadcasting — the practice of programming multiple radio stations to air the same content simultaneously. Its 1941 Report on Chain Broadcasting ruled that no single organization could broadcast on more than one network.
Two years later, the FCC deemed RCA's ownership of both the NBC Red Network and the NBC Blue Network anticompetitive and forced it to sell one of the properties. Unsurprisingly, RCA owner David Sarnoff opted to unload the less popular Blue Network, which focused on public affairs programming and was limited to low-power stations in small markets. Sarnoff found an eventual buyer in Edward J. Noble, the Life Savers Corporation owner and entrepreneur who thought a radio network might compose a promotionally rich complement to his many other ventures. Noble procured NBC Blue in October 1943 for $8 million, the highest price paid for a broadcasting entity to that date. The network, which came along with 168 affiliates and 715 employees, went by "Blue" until Noble purchased and adopted the name American Broadcasting Company in June 1945. Despite the title change, ABC retained Blue's comparative unpopularity and was distinguished only by its lower ratings, less prominent advertisers, and fewer affiliates. The network, wrote Forbes, "scraped along on the crumbs that fell from the table at which the big two were feasting." As a result, ABC was known throughout the industry as the "Almost Broadcasting Company" and was constrained to engage in activities its competitors considered déclassé. "To get a modicum of income and to show a modest profit," explained eventual ABC president Oliver "Ollie" Treyz, "ABC took a relaxed view of standards established by NBC and CBS. We took spots for deodorants and laxatives, which the other guys wouldn't take." As part of the struggling network's efforts to subsist, ABC followed CBS's, NBC's, and the short-lived broadcasting upstart DuMont's entrances into the new medium of television.
As with RCA, the FCC found Paramount Pictures Inc. — which comprised a movie studio and theater chain — to be restricting trade. The 1948 United States v. Paramount Pictures Inc. ruling, colloquially known as the Divorcement Decree, forced Paramount to separate its studio and theater arms into separate entities, Paramount Pictures Corporation and United Paramount Theaters (UPT), so it could not simply fill its theaters with the movies it produced and ignore competitors' products. Media historian Douglas Gomery calls the ruling "one of [the twentieth] century's more bitter and drawn-out antitrust battles," which permanently altered Hollywood's distribution and exhibition practices. Beyond extricating itself from Paramount Pictures, United Paramount Theaters had to reduce its theater chain from 1,395 to 650 within five years. The windfall it received from selling those theaters poised the company to collect new assets. UPT president Leonard H. Goldenson, who joined Paramount as a lawyer in 1933 and took over after the divorcement, figured television would be a sensible place to invest the proceeds given the medium's similarities to, shared audience with, and ability to promote film.
But much to Goldenson's chagrin, it was impossible for prospective broadcasters to secure station licenses at the time. The FCC's Sixth Report and Order initiated a station freeze the same year as the Divorcement Decree. Originally slated for six months, the freeze extended more than three years — from September 30, 1948, until April 14, 1952. Aside from blocking potential station owners like UPT, the freeze solidified industrial hierarchies. The less popular ABC and DuMont networks continued to lose money during this period while CBS and NBC maintained their long-standing supremacy. "Given the station allocation plan contained within the FCC's Sixth Report and Order," explains broadcast historian Stewart Lewis Long, "most observers felt it was only a matter of time before either ABC or DuMont, or both networks, would go out of business." Goldenson sought television stations, not necessarily ABC. But the only way he could acquire stations at this time was by purchasing an entity that already owned them. Though "only a skeleton of a network," ABC had five stations — the maximum the FCC permitted at the time — in five of the United States' top six markets.
Noble — a notorious cheapskate who reportedly gave employees Life Savers candies as Christmas bonuses — demanded $25 million for ABC, far more than the losing venture's projected value. He bargained with UPT by averring that CBS president William S. Paley expressed an interest in his struggling company. Though Goldenson reasonably argued that such a deal would never gain FCC approval, necessary for any acquisition involving the sale of licensed stations, the UPT president finally budged in 1951. "I knew it was too much," Goldenson shrugged years later, "but I was also pretty sure there wouldn't be another television network coming on the market anytime soon." In February 1953, after a protracted hearing that included thirteen hundred pages of documents and five hundred exhibits, the FCC approved UPT's acquisition. Goldenson initially retained ABC president Robert E. Kintner (whom he replaced with Treyz in 1956), and Noble chaired the network's board of directors. The FCC ratified the merger in part because it determined that ABC otherwise could not realistically vie for market share without some help: "ABC has been unable to compete effectively with NBC and CBS, principally because it lacks the financial resources, the working capital, and the diversity of revenue-producing activities of the other network of companies with which they are associated." Upon the acquisition, UPT infused ABC with $30 million it could use to secure new programming and upgrade its comparatively shabby facilities.
ABC's good fortune accelerated DuMont's demise. The UPT-ABC merger "in effect sacrificed the DuMont Network in order that ABC might survive and prosper to offset the obvious dominance which NBC and CBS had gained during the 'freeze' years." "The minute the FCC approved the merger our fate was sealed," lamented DuMont president Theodore Bergman. DuMont ceased broadcasting in 1955. ABC seized on this new void to turn its first profits. Though DuMont was even less prominent than ABC, sports programming composed one of its few strengths. DuMont's presentation of the 1951 National Football League championship, for instance, was the earliest live national TV broadcast of professional football. DuMont also aired non-live weekend anthology programs, the outdoor show Fishing and Hunting Club (1949–50), and the first prime-time pro football broadcasts, which anticipated, respectively, ABC's Wide World of Sports,American Sportsman, and Monday Night Football.
Despite UPT's infusion of capital and DuMont's folding, ABC remained television's least distinguished network. It held stations in New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, Detroit, and San Francisco but otherwise had just fourteen primary affiliates. NBC, by contrast, had sixty-three and CBS possessed thirty. ABC's affiliates were also often on less powerful UHF stations. While CBS and NBC offered a nearly continuous stream of programming, ABC did not schedule more than two hours of content before 7:00 p.m. until 1956, and it would typically go dark after 10:30. "It was widely believed that ABC could never offer one of the top ten shows," wrote trade journalist Martin Mayer, "simply because it couldn't get on enough stations at enough good time periods." As Goldenson sighed, "We had no hit shows, no stars, and nothing in prospect but struggle." Because of its limited reach and subpar content, ABC gave discounts to those precious few sponsors it secured. Advertisers treated the network as a supplementary service that would reach additional consumers at bargain-basement rates rather than an entity that warranted consistent investment. ABC was consequently dubbed "Hard Rock," in contrast to CBS's "Black Rock" and NBC's "30 Rock." As CBS's nickname came from its jet-black headquarters and NBC's moniker referenced its address at 30 Rockefeller Plaza, ABC was defined by its comparative misfortune.
Most of the sports ABC carried nationally during its early years were schlocky and low-budget events like wrestling and roller derby. In 1948, a group of midwestern ABC affiliates joined to showcase the NFL's Chicago Bears and Chicago Cardinals games — broadcasts that originated from ABC's Chicago-owned station, WBKB. This package caught the attention of Edgar Scherick, a wheeling and dealing Harvard-educated time buyer for the Dancer-Fitzgerald-Sample advertising agency. Scherick noticed that the ABC affiliates covered almost exactly the distribution region of Falstaff Beer, a St. Louis–based client whose account he managed. He arranged for Falstaff to purchase half the spots on these regional broadcasts for the discounted price of $2,000 per game — an acquisition he later proclaimed "the greatest media buy in the history of television" because of its ability to capture so inexpensively and effectively the client's target market.
Based on his success with the NFL broadcasts, Scherick persuaded Falstaff to sponsor a national Major League Baseball package starting in 1953. ABC struck a deal with the Chicago White Sox, Cleveland Indians, and Philadelphia Athletics to broadcast seventeen Saturday afternoon matches in the program titled Game of the Week. The following year it expanded to thirty weeks and added the Brooklyn Dodgers, New York Giants, and Philadelphia Phillies. Because of the MLB's blackout rules, the games would appear only in markets without a major-league franchise. Faced with these constraints, Game of the Week ensured it would attract a sizable audience by hiring former MLB pitcher Jay Hanna "Dizzy" Dean as its featured announcer. Already a radio star, Dean affected a homespun persona that drew viewers regardless of the featured teams and kept them tuned in no matter the score. Despite the Falstaff-sponsored packages' success on ABC, Scherick moved both to CBS. "They just didn't have the good station hookups in enough cities," he bluntly explained of ABC. The network's inexpensive ad rates, Scherick indicated, did not compensate for its paltry distributional range.
ABC built on this slowly growing identification with sports by securing contracts to air boxing and, more prominently, NCAA football in 1954. Its contract with the NCAA — whose TV rights stood and remain among the most coveted in sports — included twelve contests (along with a Thanksgiving Day game) and would be carried on 150 stations. On top of the football games, the agreement included twenty-six weeks of assorted winter and spring events. ABC made this deal in part by promising the NCAA that its broadcasts would place "emphasis on promoting collegiate football and the college way of life," an effort waged in part to offset negative publicity college sports had incurred after several recent scandals. Variety identified ABC's sporting efforts — and the NCAA contract in particular — as a mechanism through which the network might reasonably taper the gap separating it from its competitors. Regardless of the NCAA deal's prestige, ABC was unable to sell sufficient sponsorships. It mistakenly banked that General Motors, the primary sponsor of NBC's NCAA telecasts, would continue advertising on ABC once it got college football. When General Motors declined — perhaps wary of ABC's comparative status — the junior network was forced to lower its rates and wound up losing $1.8 million. It dropped the winter and spring programming that accompanied the football games for fear of losing even more. ABC's brief and unsuccessful efforts to establish a niche in sports programming only solidified its Hard Rock status.
THE WOOLWORTH NETWORK
To help ABC form an identity in network television, Treyz commissioned preeminent Columbia University sociologist Paul Lazarsfeld to conduct a study on the habits of TV viewers. The findings were simple but telling: network television's oligopolistic structure gave ABC space to invest in areas the other two networks were ignoring. Despite broadcast media's pretensions to cut across and unite disparate demographics, ABC developed a philosophy that a network cannot be "all things to all people." It counterprogrammed to attract viewers CBS and NBC underserved or altogether overlooked. "Whatever the audience is not watching at any given time makes for new possibilities," Goldenson explained. "We are not trying to take audiences from CBS and NBC. ... We are trying to carve our own network character, to create new audiences."
ABC found that programming at CBS and NBC was built primarily around stars from the radio tradition, and, as such, appealed mostly to older audiences. "Lazarsfeld recommended we go after the young audiences," Goldenson recalled. "We should build programs around casts of young, virile people ... and create programs with stories that younger people would identify with." They found that older audiences were more set in their viewing and purchasing routines and, as a result, were less likely to start watching new networks or sample new goods that might be advertised. "We're after a specific audience," Goldenson concluded. "The young housewife — one cut above the teenager — with two to four kids, who has to buy the clothing, the food, the soaps, the home remedies." Although younger audiences did not have older viewers' purchasing power, Lazarsfeld found that they spent more on average and buy more of the small-ticket products that so heavily populate mass-market advertising. ABC formalized this process by branding itself as "the Network of the Young." "Practically all of the programs developed and/or acquired by ABC between 1954 and 1956 were geared toward young families," explained media researcher turned executive Fred Silverman, who broke into the industry after writing a master's thesis on ABC's programming strategies. ABC immediately reduced material that did not coalesce with the image it was forging, such as news and public affairs.
Regardless of these shifts, ABC routinely lost its most successful programs. Goldenson opined that sponsors "brought us only their poor programming. They took their best ones to the other networks and when a good one developed at ABC they took that one away." This is precisely what happened with Game of the Week. Scherick debuted it on ABC and moved it to CBS after it became a hit with the potential to attract a larger audience than ABC could deliver. The migration of programs, Treyz explained, prevented ABC's lineup from demonstrating "any central network thinking, philosophy or point of view."
ABC prioritized fostering viewing patterns that would stabilize its nascent identity over providing quality content. "First we build a habit factor," Goldenson said, "get them used to watching us, then we can do something about upgrading the programming. We're not interested in the critics." To be sure, critics already had little positive to report about ABC. "The real strength and vitality of television," Goldenson continued, "is in your regular week-in and week-out programs, the strength of motion pictures was always the habit of going to motion pictures on a regular basis, and that habit was, in part, taken away from motion pictures by television." Goldenson thought TV could similarly become a "habit medium" around which consumers organize their everyday routines. ABC wound up teaming with Hollywood studios to nurture these behaviors.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "ABC Sports"
by .
Copyright © 2018 Travis Vogan.
Excerpted by permission of UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS.
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Table of Contents
List of IllustrationsAcknowledgments
Introduction: ABC Sports and Network Sports Television
1. The “Almost Broadcasting Company” and the Birth of ABC Sports
2. ABC’s Wide World of Sports: “The Seedbed of Modern Sports Television” and the Cold War
3. “Th e Network of the Olympics”: Starring Muhammad Ali and Howard Cosell
4. Monday Night Football, Brian’s Song, and the Roots of the Prime-Time TV Event
5. Th e News from Munich on the “Arledge Broadcasting Company”
6. “What in the Wide, Wide World of Sports Is Going On Here?”: Trash Sports and Scandal
7. “No More Sacred Cows”: The End of ABC Sports’ Golden Age
Conclusion: From Wide World of Sports to the Worldwide Leader in Sports
Appendix 1: Wide World of Sports Inaugural Season Schedule, 1961
Appendix 2: ABC’s Wide World of Sports Athlete of the Year
Appendix 3: Top Fifteen Television Audiences of All Time as of Roots’ Premiere
Appendix 4: Top Ten Most-Watched Wide World of Sports Episodes
Abbreviations
Notes
Index