The Last Great Network Olympics

Zeus Himself would call for a time out.

What the hell would Zeus make of Los Angeles in 1984?

Very little without a brochure. He would have to reorient himself to the updated iconography. The very year belongs not to Janus (the god of good beginnings) but to Orwell (the god of bad ends); the city, not to Athena but to some weird consortium of Evelyn Waugh, Walt Disney and the William Morris Agency.

And the games...well, the games of the XXIII rd Olympiad are symbolized not so much by an eternal flame nor by the interlocking circles of brotherhood as by a seven-foot-tall fiberglass animated Disney eagle named Sam.

God!

These games clearly would beggar the imagination of Zeus, that god who never contemplated his own image on video-tape replay nor got to proclaim his greatness to Howard Cosell. These will be the Ultimate Games of Television, a force that will hurl the electronic images of the gladiators before the eyes of two and a half billion mortals on every inhabited surface of the planet. (The other two billion, presumably, prefer old movies or reruns of I Love Lucy.)

Zeus would be stumbling upon a spectacle that could well be the last of its kind. It is almost universally agreed that there will never again be an exclusive network sporting event on the scale of the Los Angeles games. Already, some experts predict that the winning bid for rights to the 1988 games in Korea will approach one billion dollars. This begins to get into real money. No single network can absorb that kind of cost, expecting to offset it with advertising revenues. What may happen, many people believe, is that after 1984, a network will share its telecast rights--and its expenses--with a pay--cable distributor such as Home Box Office, somewhat on the model of the new United States Football League telecasts, shared by ABC and the cable system ESPN. [See box on page 177.]

So it is that the L.A. telecast will mark the last video spectacle of its kind--an Ultimate Network Games. Being the Ultimate Games, the XXIII rd Olympiad will proceed on a scale that is oblivious of mortal men. Making his way along the infinities of arterial highways that connect the games' labyrinth of venues--his heroic bare torso and his simple tunic not drawing so much as a second glance from the local citizenry--Zeus might weep for the glory that was not Greece.

One hundred forty miles separate the northernmost perimeter of L.A. Olympic competition (Lake Casitas near Santa Barbara, site of the rowing) from the southernmost (the pentathlon venue in Coto de Caza, south of Long Beach). That is almost six times the distance that Pheidippides ran between Marathon and Athens to bring news of the Athenian victory over the Persians--after which he dropped dead. From the weight lifting (at Loyola Marymount University) to the handball (in Pomona), a god would have to schlep 35 miles. Which would render him some 28 miles from the cycling, back at California State University in Dominguez Hills.

In fact, adding up the distances along the perimeter of the various venues at Los Angeles--from soccer at the Rose Bowl to equestrian events at Santa Anita Race Track to handball at California State University--Fullerton to fencing and volleyball and yachting in Long Beach to the Olympic Village on the campuses of UCLA and USC--one arrives at an unsettling realization: These Olympics will encompass more than 1000 square miles.

But mere mileage, of course, is hardly the point of the 1984 games. Mileage is of moment to only the 2500 ABC employees and the 10,000 competitors (a number equal to General Pickett's force at Gettysburg before the charge) and the few hundred thousand spectators who will actually be there. The real venue of the Los Angeles Olympics is no earthly setting. It is the eternal television screen. And on the screen, there is no distance, no separation, no sense of transit--only phenomena, unremitting and immediate.

Thus, the most Olympian competition at the 1984 Summer Olympics will not be between any two star athletes, nor even between any two rival nations. It will be between two abstractions--television and distance. And if ABC performs its intricate switchings and remote pickups to utter perfection--if the dense electronic web of microwave circuits holds and the aural interlacing of intercom voices prevails without dissolving into chaos, and if the directors can maintain their air traffic controller's concentration over endless hours without collapse; if nothing breaks--then the highest goal of this "real" competition will be realized: It will remain invisible to the audience.

There are no guarantees that the system will, in fact, hold. On the contrary, Los Angeles' very infrastructure seems to throw itself against success. ABC broadcasting to the nation--that is no problem. ABC broadcasting to itself--that will be something else. Since great swatches of distance will separate the dozens of network production crews, a fail-safe internal-communications system will be indispensable. But Los Angeles is nothing if not a communications hive. The over-air frequencies are saturated with users, and the area's hills and canyons defy long-range, line-of-sight transmission in any event.

A solution appeared to present itself in the form of Pacific Telephone & Telegraph. By one of those coincidences that normally materialize only in Hollywood spy-caper films, the phone company just happened to be in the process of installing a fiber-optics network linking most of the sites designated as Olympic venues. Fiber optics are thin ribbons of pure glass--just hundredths of an inch in diameter--capable of transmitting data in the form of light. Even aural information can be encoded at one end, transformed into light and decoded at the other. Pacific Telephone & Telegraph invited ABC to tap into its new fiber-optics network--all 300 miles of it--at what P.T. & T. considered a nominal cost: just $15,000,000 above ABC's projected budget for internal communications.

The Los Angeles games will, in sum, be a marriage of a scope that the gods of Olympus never foresaw: the most protean pageant in the history of sports wedded to the most leviathan deployment of circuitry, audio and video hardware, rolling (and airborne) stock, plus engineering, production, on-air and managerial manpower for any self-contained event short of a shooting war in the history of mankind's first century of broadcasting. Zeus, Hurler of Thunder and Lightning, who had struck down 100-headed Typhon with the Bolt That Never Sleeps (a feat that might or might not have qualified him for the javelin throw, Venue Two, Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum), would stand abashed, fidgeting anxiously with his tunic hem, before the owned-and-leased ranks of ABC inventory:

• TV cameras numbering 207--or 157 more than will be needed to telecast the Winter Olympics at Sarajevo;

• Video-tape machines numbering 140, with 83 in the field and 57 at the broadcast center;

• Character generators (those keyboard devices for flashing names, statistics and bulletin information on the screen) numbering 31, including some with capabilities so revolutionary that ABC classified them as top secret before they were unveiled;

• Mobile units (mostly studio-equipped vans but also some helicopters and a blimp or two) numbering at least 25, with a collective retail value of $100,000,000 and comprising nearly every major mobile unit in the United States;

• Five "flash units," a sort of rapid-deployment force--mobile vans and helicopters capable of telecasting live or on tape from point of origin by means of microwave relay--plus additional units from ABC News, that will be kept on 24-hour alert, ready to rush to a location that both ABC and Olympic officials pray will never materialize: the site of a breaking news event, which (given the pattern of past Olympics' breaking news) would likely mean a defection, a gesture of class or nationalistic protest or an act of terrorism;

• An electronically powered vehicle (still on the drawing board as late as 1983) capable of propelling itself along a thoroughfare for as long as two and a half hours, supporting heavy cameras, mikes and power supplies for telecasting a marathon race, without discharging gasoline fumes into the runners' faces;

• And, perhaps most prodigious of all, a self-contained complex of studio control rooms, complete with camera-switching consoles, monitor screens, microphones and telephones for communicating with producers in the field and also containing the principal studio set for the Olympics' ABC host, Jim McKay--a complex known to ABC insiders as the Little Olympic Village--that was constructed in Los Angeles, taken apart and shipped to New York, where it was reassembled for testing, then torn down again for shipping to Sarajevo for use in covering the winter games, after which it will be disassembled again and shipped back to Los Angeles for summer 1984. And Olympus didn't even have a lousy press box.

Finally, if Zeus were lucky and did not mind waiting a few aeons for his phone calls to be returned, he might come face to face with a real god.

Namely, the Great God Roone.

Half human, half television executive; powerful in battle; Creator of the Concept of the Isolated Camera and Keeper of Monday Night Football; ruler of the terrible triple-headed Gifford/Meredith/Cosell (before whose mighty yawps all lesser sportscasters are as stone); his fingers and wrists and neck bejeweled with gold--he who was weaned in ABC Sports and, having struck down the powerful gods of CBS and NBC Sports, ascended into ABC News, whence he would return, fulfilling prophecy, to lead his legions in this culmination of video history--this most titanic and final of all great sporting odysseys on the network-television airwaves.

What chance would a mere Zeus have against a god such as this?

•

These Ultimate Television Olympics may prove to be more than the sum of their micro electric and competitive parts. They may stand as an archive, a 16-day summing up of a certain moment in American time. And they may mark, as well, the denouement of a 40-year romance between American television and American sports. (RCA-owned cameras actually transmitted two baseball games as far back as 1939, but World War Two deferred the real beginning of the television age until 1944.)

On the eve of the 1984 Olympics, America is a nation seemingly stupefied by sports. Consider a random survey of the figures: a two-billion-dollar contract between the three major networks and the National Football League (with the resulting advent of the $345,000 N.F.L. commercial minute); network TV-radio revenues of $2,000,000 for each of the 26 (!) major-league baseball clubs, plus a total of $65,000,000 in various local broadcasting rights; a six-year contract worth $1,722,000 signed by a head coach--Jackie Sherrill at Texas A & M University--to help ensure the school's chance at premium TV revenues for football telecasts; a combined $260,000,000 football-rights package signed by CBS, ABC and the National Collegiate Athletic Association; an average salary for professional basketball players of $246,000; product-endorsement fees totaling $3,000,000 a year for tennis superstar Bjorn Borg....One could go on.

By the early Eighties, ABC Sports' total billings had climbed to nearly $350,000,000 a year. NBC Sports' was at around $300,000,000 and CBS Sports' was at $250,000,000. Behind each of those budgets stand capital assets that would rank their network's sports division alone among the country's 600 leading corporations. In terms of monetary power, those three sports divisions now rival the dozens of leagues and franchises they cover.

Chronologically, this moment spans the decades between the end of industrial America--a demise triggered by the consequences of World War Two--and the onset of the Data Age, an era that already has begun to separate a technological elite from the rest of society, with consequences for the individual identity that are as yet unknown. Spiritually, the moment spans an epoch of intense, agnostic, nuclear-addled confusion. The novelist Walker Percy has identified it in terms of what it lacks: religious faith, community, fidelity, chivalry, an intolerance for the culture's decadence, a will for redemption.

Percy is a Southerner, as may be apparent, and his abiding theme is that society presently languishes in a kind of moral hiatus between the bankrupt end of an old cultural order and the beginning of some revolutionary new one. This picture of a spiritually sterile postwar American landscape is not particularly original in itself. But it superimposes quite neatly upon a corresponding development since the end of World War Two--an explosion in the popular culture's yearning preoccupation with sports.

The evidence hardly needs recounting: the cultural and political deification of athletes; the tortuous and almost prayerful pressure upon the hundreds of college teams to "be number one"; the compulsive rise in offertory sports gambling; the semireligious significance bestowed upon the Super Bowl; the frenetic construction of mosque like domed stadiums from New Orleans to Seattle; and, perhaps most telling of all, a citizenry that seems bent on internalizing the sporting gods' grandeur by living out a liturgical style. Americans dress themselves in numeraled team jerseys and team hats; they speak to one another in neo-Gregorian athletic jargon; they elect former players and professed worshipers of players to high political office. They often seem to see America's place in geopolitics through a prism of athletic revelation. And they emulate the manners and the physical style of the famous athlete gods--gliding and juking on the worst ghetto basketball courts, swearing and screaming on the best suburban tennis courts. Even their children must conform to the elect: Eight-year-old sons are conscripted into "pro-style" football leagues with play-offs in Honolulu; their sisters enter training under the icon of Peggy Fleming or Tracy Austin.

All this evidence of a secular sports religion, a filling up of spiritual gaps, is familiar. What is not so familiar--nor so well understood--is television's role in the postwar ascendancy of sports.

Most people, when they think about the relationship of TV to sports, assume (as an article of faith) that Imperial Television moved aggressively to absorb and "colonize" sports, as television is seen to have colonized nearly everything else in its path.

The truth is more complex than that. A careful examination of the history of TV and sports since World War Two shows that sports, as often as not, colonized television--that they forced their way into the mainstream of TV programing only after decades of indifference and active hostility on the parts of the highest network executives.

Further, this extended indifference--followed by an era of inept and wholesale exploitation of sports' basest marketing appeal--changed and cheapened a source of video content that many serious critics now regard as the content most naturally suited to television's peculiar capacities.

In other words, televised sports achieved their gigantic rapport with the public largely in spite of television.

There was one resounding exception to that general pattern, however: the ABC television network, particularly in the several years before and after Roone Arledge assumed control of ABC Sports.

Because of its historic competitive disadvantage in relation to its older, more established rivals. ABC was virtually forced into a series of long-shot gambles in sports programing, gambles that CBS and NBC disdained. Arledge inherited the early, paradoxical success of those gambles, and he also inherited a freewheeling, almost piratical approach to programing that came to define ABC's corporate style.

But Arledge did far more than inherit. A man prodigiously equipped to exploit his particular moment in time, he created a new legitimacy for games on television. Before he stepped into the picture in 1960 as a smart, unterrified 29-year-old, sports were something the networks covered virtually with fingers held to their corporate noses. Sports weren't--well, they weren't Jack Benny. They weren't Edward R. Murrow. They weren't all the things that had made radio so fashionable. Clearly, they held little promise as main-line TV fare.

It took a succession of visionary but anonymous advertising men to force-feed the first generation of prepackaged sports telecasts to the network airwaves. (Anybody ever heard of A. Craig Smith of Gillette? All right, anybody ever heard of Sharpie the Parrot? The Gillette Cavalcade of Sports?)

Arledge was the first network regular to appreciate the power inherent in TV sports, and he created a wholly original idiom that brilliantly released that power. His underdog network, ABC, gambled on his vision and won; ABC rode TV sports to parity with its richer, complacent rivals over a dramatic 16-year haul that climaxed in 1976. In that year, buoyed partly by its triumphant telecasts of the Montreal Olympics, ABC leaped from last place to first among the big three for the first time in its history.

Arledge's coup was astonishing. More astonishing still was the fact that CBS and NBC were nearly 15 years in taking the hint. (Sure, CBS was the ancient network of the N.F.L. and NBC had its blue-chip bowl games and the world series. But they covered those events mainly as though they were breaking news stories; in fact, sports at those networks were a generally despised appendage of the news divisions.) Not until the early Seventies did the older networks begin to copy ABC Sports' formula in earnest. By then, a new surge of post-Watergate, post-Vietnam public appetite for pleasure and self-fulfillment had catapulted games--and athletes--into the forefront of the pop culture. Billie Jean King and Bobby Riggs, Evel Knievel, Muhammad Ali, Sugar Ray Leonard, Joe Namath, John McEnroe, Jim Palmer--all those stars, and others, became part of America's video household, as famous as prime-time sitcom characters or anchor men. Sports salaries exploded, domed stadiums sprouted like metallic mushrooms upon the landscape and telecast rights soared in value, like oil-rich emirates in the Middle East.

Arledge's idiom had intersected with history. Not only had he created a complex and far-reaching apparatus for covering games; more significantly still, he had developed a unified and fundamental theory of television itself--a theory that took into account the ancient principles of dramaturgy as well as the most contemporary sensibilities of a video audience.

Its hallmarks were a high respect for the power of story upon the human imagination; a probing visual intimacy with the subject matter; a relentless, even obsessive preoccupation with the smallest detail; and--most quixotic and mystical of all--an abiding sense of ABC itself as an unseen but always involved character in whatever event it was transmitting. That event might be a sporting match, or it might be (as Arledge's idiom spread) a newscast, or a live breaking story, or a documentary, or a morning or late-night discussion show. The self-referencing quality of ABC News and ABC Sports--both of which Arledge has headed since 1977--may have been the most important subliminal key to his programing's success. Like most of his innovations, it was widely ridiculed by critics and competitors--and, inevitably, imitated, made standard.

Looming over all the video architecture he had constructed was the one supreme event within which Arledge had perfected his idiom. The event that had come to be associated with his name. His event. The Olympics.

By 1984, ABC will have telecast nine of the past 14 Olympics. Before 1960, there were no Olympics on television. In 1960, CBS telecast filmed highlights and a few live events in the games from Squaw Valley and from Rome. There was little discernible audience enthusiasm. It became apparent to the network executives of the time that TV audiences were interested only in sporting events that had already implanted themselves in the public consciousness: familiar blue-chip attractions such as the world series and the Rose Bowl and heavyweight-title bouts.

But in the following year, 1961, Arledge's own mentor, a shrewd and unsung programmer named Edgar Scherick, bequeathed to him an experimental Saturday-afternoon format, a potpourri of filmed and video-taped events--the sorts of events most people had never bothered to follow: rodeos and demolition derbies and wrist-wrestling matches, plus a few major amateur track meets. The point of the experimental show was that it was cheap to produce. It would give ABC a weekly sports presence on the air and save money--if it worked. The show's name was Wide World of Sports. Its host was a short, obscure Baltimore television personality named Jim McManus--or Jim McKay, as he preferred to be known.

Rival networks sneered at Wide World of Sports. NBC made a particular point--which it drove home for years--of being the network of live sports coverage. Nevertheless, within a few years, Arledge had crafted Wide World of Sports into one of the most popular--and profitable--shows on all of television. Among the events that Wide World covered were Amateur Athletic Union track-and-field competitions, events considered to be utterly without following by TV audiences.

The A.A.U. coverage led Arledge and ABC into the Olympics and from last place to first in the ratings. In that same year, the U.S. Olympic Committee officially credited ABC with bringing about a "significant increase in contributions for the Olympic movement and in evoking interest on the part of U.S. citizens wanting to become participants" in the next winter games. The committee reported that within one month of the telecasts from Innsbruck, Austria, it had received more than 33,000 requests for Olympic patches, plus 250 letters a day requesting information on such matters as how to apply for positions on the bobsled and the luge teams.

That curve of interest continued to climb through Montreal, Lake Placid and into 1984: The People's Republic of China, which had stonily ignored Olympic competition for 50 years, announced that it would send 30 athletes to Mr. Arledge's Los Angeles games. Then the People's Republic reconsidered. It would send 300.

Thus, these Ultimate Games of Television, these Olympics of $500,000,000 in total costs and $616,000,000 in projected ABC revenues, these Olympics of the $500,000 commercial minute and the two and a half billion projected audience, these Olympics that will summon Russia and China, England and Argentina and all those other lions and lambs, even as the ancient Olympics were said to have halted wars for their duration--these Olympics will be the logical extension of young Roone Arledge's cost-cutting mandate back in 1961. They will be the ultimate Wide World of Sports.

•

This, then, is the American context for Arledge's return to his bootstrap days as a hands-on line producer of a live sporting event: 187 and a half hours of coverage over 16 days, from 7:30 A.M. in Los Angeles until 2:30 A.M. in New York. Not even Arledge, famous for his feats of sleep deprivation during these occasions, will be able to oversee every hour of coverage, of course. But he plans to work at least one full shift every broadcast day.

Whatever the essence of Arledge's peculiar video genius, by the early Eighties, it had led him and his network from the slough of obscurity to a pre-eminent position in global telecommunications. In the summer of 1984, ABC Sports will be at the peak of its influence and prestige. Not only will the network be responsible for the American coverage of the games, it will originate the video and some audio signals for transmission to at least 130 countries around the world as well.

This world-wide transmission duty presents untold logistical problems for Arledge's Special Projects people in Los Angeles--the language barriers alone will require a translation system that eclipses that of the United Nations. And it is expensive. No less than $70,000,000 of ABC's total $225,000,000 rights payment will go toward financing an international broadcast center, plus cameras, mikes and dozens of commentator booths to be used exclusively by foreign announcers. (Each country will pay for its own telecast rights, but the money will not go to ABC; it will go to the Los Angeles Olympic Organizing Committee, which has set for itself the Olympian goal of running the games without a deficit.)

The reward for this particular expense and these particular headaches lies in the (continued on page 174)Network Olympics(continued from page 76) area of raw power. For the first time in human history, a single communications source will exercise control of an information stream influencing the thoughts of more than half of the people on the planet.

Not that Arledge is content to let things go at that. The world-wide signal that ABC originates from Los Angeles will, in Arledge's scale of priorities, be of only secondary importance. His main mission is to create and orchestrate a visual mural of the games for his distinct American audience--an audience that will, after all, be exposed to more than 1870 minutes of commercials at a cost of up to $250,000 for every 30 prime-time seconds.

A little something extra was in order. Thus, Arledge's production minions will, in effect, be generating two 1984 Olympics telecasts--one for the world, one for the United States only.

Each Olympic venue will be double-covered. Cameras transmitting signals to the international broadcast center (from which foreign producers will select and edit their own sequence of images from a vast menu of monitoring screens) will mingle with supplemental cameras "Americanizing" each event for the domestic feed. At a basketball game at the Forum, the world and the United States will follow the basic flow of the game. Only Americans will glimpse intimate close-ups of the U.S. coach, Bobby Knight, as he crouches in a huddle during a time out.

The 1984 Olympic Games in Los Angeles, then, will be pervaded by what Lionel Trilling once called "instruments of precision." By a vast and digital grid of cables, endless lenses like a maze of gaze; by eavesdropping mikes for ambient sound; by switches and levers and wires in the ground. It will be as if the very earth and air were regarding the athletes, their every motion and utterance in finitized by some omniscient Orwellian presence in this year of Orwell.

But of all the instruments to be deployed for these Ultimate Television Olympics, none will surpass the complexity of the human instrument who will sit down before the main control console at TV Center, Prospect and Talmadge avenues, to command the American telecast every evening in prime time.

Arledge's hands-on presence at the controls of ABC's live coverage may not seem exceptional to a living-room viewer of television sports. (Isn't that what executive producers are supposed to do--produce?) Within the television industry, however, such an act is not only astonishing, it is tantamount to a suspension of corporate etiquette. (Not that either of Arledge's counterparts at CBS or NBC could claim the training or talent to run a sports telecast if he had somehow been seized with the urge.)

For Arledge is not only an "executive producer" of ABC Sports--something of an honorific, truth to tell, for at least the past decade--he is also the president of ABC Sports. And of another division, known as ABC News, besides. (In which capacity he will be charged with the small matter of overseeing coverage of the Democratic National Convention, which will occur shortly before the Olympics, and of the Republican National Convention, which will unfold shortly thereafter.)

For a television-network executive of Arledge's rank to descend into the gritty combat zone of on-line production is an act roughly comparable to that of a U.S. President showing up to help lift sandbags at the banks of a flooded river--and not just to lift one or two ceremonial bags but to oversee their supply of sand and personally direct the height and the calibration of the wall and, in the end, transform the floodwaters into a lovely municipal lake.

It just isn't done.

But that kind of gesture is the essence of Arledge's intervention in the muddled and mismanaged history of network-television sports. It is the essence of the imprimatur that his stewardship has long since left upon the American popular culture. Arledge's many and intricate layers of contribution to video technique have been reductively pigeonholed by various critics (and network rivals) as "showmanship," as "electronic razzle-dazzle," as "showbiz hype." There is truth in all those capsule summations. There is basis for the persistent argument that Arledge carried many of his techniques to excess--whatever relative meaning the word excess may have in the context of American commercial television. There is even a compelling argument for debate on whether some of those same techniques, transplanted finally to the ABC News division, have advanced or stood in the way of the public interest.

But overlooked in those reductions and their ancillary arguments is the elemental fact that Arledge, in the years since 1960 and to a degree not readily apparent from the vantage point of the video-saturated Eighties, reinvented television. The 1984 games in Los Angeles will be a summation of all that he has accomplished. In a certain manner of speaking, Roone Arledge invented these Ultimate Games in the same sense that he reinvented television.

Small wonder that he wants to put his fingers, once again, on their controls.

"Arledge's main mission is to create and orchestrate a visual mural of the games for his audience."