Jim McKay, who died on Saturday at age 86, may have been the classiest man in sports broadcasting.
The Monkton resident once known as Jim McManus ? he changed his name to McKay when he moved to New York to begin his broadcasting career ? started as a reporter for The Baltimore Evening Sun before moving to WMAR-TV 2, where he developed his love of horse racing and wrestling.
In the late 1950s, McKay moved to New York to work for CBS, where he had modest success. In 1960, he moved from CBS to ABC where he worked as a daily variety show host, in addition to covering minor assignments for the network.
In 1961, McKay was named host of Wide World of Sports, a show intended to fill a time slot during the summer but ended up changing the sporting world forever. ABC barely was considered a network and certainly was well behind CBS and NBC in sports coverage, but Wide World of Sports is the most important sports program of our generation. McKay, a graduate of Loyola Blakefield High and Loyola College, took viewers to places and events they had never seen before ? one week broadcasting from Moscow, the next week from Monte Carlo.
What Wide World of Sports did was set up ABC?s coverage of the Olympics ? and that was where McKay truly shined. He was a host who never put himself above the event that he was covering. He also had to deal with egos like Howard Cosell, who often battled management for more air time. McKay was never pulled into those fights and remained true to form, as he was a class act on and off camera.
His defining moment as a broadcaster came while anchoring ABC?s coverage of the 1972 Summer Olympics from Munich. Palestinian terrorists kidnapped 11 members of the Israeli Olympic team. The story was covered on-site by the entire ABC team, which included Cosell and Peter Jennings.
But Roone Arledge, president of ABC Sports, stuck with McKay as the primary anchor despite having bigger stars ready to go on air. He knew McKay?s style best suited the moment. By the end of a failed rescue attempt at a nearby airport, all of the athletes were dead, as were many of the terrorists of the group “Black September.”
McKay summed up the ordeal with the haunting words: “They are all gone.”
McKay was the only person ever to win a news Emmy and a sports Emmy for the same story. He earned acclaim for his coverage of Munich but he would later say it was one of the saddest days of his life. He set the standard as a sports anchor.
McKay loved golf and he was the first to bring The British Open to American viewers and was a very underrated golf announcer. He also anchored the first national broadcast of NASCAR?s Daytona 500 and the first live broadcast of the Indy 500 ? just two of a very, very long of firsts for McKay.
I had the honor of working as a production assistant on about a dozen Wide World of Sports telecasts. A production assistant does everything from get coffee to put together statistics and paperwork for the announcers. Jim McKay was as nice to me on those broadcasts as he was to everyone else on the crew. He loved to tell stories and we all enjoyed listening to them.
Jim Williams is a seven-time Emmy Award-winning TV producer, director and writer. Check out his blog, Watch this! on www.examiner.com.
