The vast majority of team sports telecasts on all forms of television these days feature one or two reporters on the sidelines. But it wasn’t always that way.
Through the early 1970s, baseball, football, and basketball broadcasts signed on with two, usually ancient, talking heads, filling the frames that greeted audiences. Until ABC executive producer Roone Arledge had another idea.
Trying to attract a younger audience to his weekly nationally televised college football games, Arledge wanted to add a new dimension to veterans Keith Jackson and iconic former Oklahoma football coach Bud Wilkinson, who was well into his late 50s, then considered an advanced age.
Arledge invented the idea of having a college-age reporter on the football sideline. He conducted a search of college campuses around the country, and ABC wound up with 432 candidates. That number remains indelible in my mind, since I was among them and one of the two who got the job at the age of 25.
Arledge, who died in 2002, might have had the idea before 1974, when I walked down the boat dock along the Tennessee River next to Neyland Stadium in Knoxville to introduce the college football season opener between Tennessee and UCLA. But there was a technology issue, which Arledge and ABC inadvertently, and under tragic circumstances, had discovered how to solve at the 1972 Olympics in Munich.
Howard Cosell and Peter Jennings were in West Germany covering the Summer Olympic Games when nine Israeli athletes were kidnapped and two murdered by the Black September Palestinian militant organization. The broadcasters were pressed into the most challenging assignment of their careers.
They wanted to get closer to where the athletes were being held hostage to film what they saw and broadcast it live to a national audience. Cosell and Jennings were harping about the inability of any kind of broadcast signal to penetrate structures like the concrete walls in Munich, but their crew tried anyway, and learned what the wireless microphones could do. They were able to get the story back to the production truck and on to America from there.
With this discovery, ABC convened a meeting in New York of Sports, News, and Entertainment chieftains to discuss what could be done. And the first idea was “we can put a reporter on the sideline of a football game.” That became the entry point for my 50-year career as a network television sportscaster.