The Futility Infielder

If you're a fan of televised sports -- hell, if you own a TV set -- you owe it to yourself to note the passing of TV executive Roone Arledge, who died on Thursday. Arledge was a visionary who revolutionized the televising of sports, most notably by bringing it into weekday prime time, ushering in the era of sports as big business. He created "ABC's Wide World of Sports," as elementary to the American sporting lexicon as the tagline he coined: "the thrill of victory and the agony of defeat." He produced 10 Olympics, including some of the most controversial Olympic moments such as the fist-raising salute by athletes Tommie Smith and John Carlos in 1968 and the disruption of the 1972 Summer Olympics in Munich by Arab terrorists who took hostage and murdered 11 Israeli athletes.

But the creation he'll be most remembered for in the sporting world is "Monday Night Football." MNF brought sports into prime-time TV on a weekly basis and introduced innovations such as instant replays, slow motion and freeze frames, on-field mikes, hand-held cameras and sophisticated graphics, innovations which we now take for granted. But beyond his technical advances came the real story, which was Arledge's grasp on the power of providing the game -- any game -- with a narrative structure. From his New York Times obituary, which runs an astounding five pages on the web:

One of the signature touches that Mr. Arledge brought to the programs he later produced he learned in these courses: the importance of narrative and the role of the hero. Years later, ABC announcers were taught to emphasize what Mr. Arledge called the ``story line'' of whatever game they were covering and to focus on a star whose personal story could transcend the outcome of the events itself. The ``up close and personal'' biography of an athlete, which ABC's Olympic coverage invented to introduce viewers to obscure foreign athletes, became the template for personalizing the stories of stars in every sport.

Another important facet of Arledge's legacy is infusing the role of the sports announcer with the expectation of journalistic integrity; under him, announcers were no longer subject to league approval and beholden to their control. That journalistic impulse became a foundation for his handling the Munich crisis, as ABC Sports oversaw 17 hours of coverage.

Arledge eventually went from being president of ABC Sports to being president of ABC News, where he made his mark with extensive late-night coverage of the Iran hostage crisis (creating the show "Nightline" in the process), and built up the network's news division into a powerhouse with shows such as "20/20" and "World News Tonight". In short, he was one of the major players of the late 20th century; Life magazine cited him as one of its 100 most important Americans of the 20th century in 1990.

Not that the developments he spearheaded have been entirely for good. In truth, many of them turned out to be Pandora's Boxes. His prime-time sports strategy "opened the door to the entire era of sports as big business," noted his protege Dick Ebersol. "All of the money the athletes are making, all the big money in sports, none of that would be happening if not for Roone,'' said Ebersol. As Arledge himself put it early on, "In short, we are going to add show business to sports!'' Those who rail at the loss of daytime World Series games or bemoan the presence 24-hour news and sports networks, who blanch at the astronomical salaries of athletes or stifle the urge to vomit during an up-close-and-personal profile, might be justified in aiming a certain amount of blame on Arledge's "innovations."

But that's not the point. Arledge didn't just revolutionize television, he televised a revolution in which the power of the medium became the real story. His ideas and innovations were often TOO powerful in the wrong hands, done to mind-numbing excess or filled with tabloid squalor by those with lower standards. That's not his fault. He was a man with the vision and integrity to do it the right way.