Guest Posts on County 10 are provided by contributors and the opinions, thoughts, and comments within are their own and may not necessarily reflect those of County 10.
“Spanning the globe to bring you the constant variety of sport… the thrill of victory… and the agony of defeat… the human drama of athletic competition… This is ABC’s Wide World of Sports!”
It was a Saturday afternoon show that “Boomers” and a few “Gen Xers” either loved or hated. I loved it.
The venerable announcer Jim McKay brought sports, many mainstream and many more obscure, to the small screen for 36 seasons.
Wide World of Sports premiered in April 1961 and bid farewell on June 21, 1997.
There were spinoffs in the 1970s and 1980s. The Superstars featured some of the greatest professional athletes competing against each other in sports they were unfamiliar with.
Imagine the multimillionaires of today risking injury in a made-for-television event that paid only a few thousand dollars. Agents would never allow it.
But in its heyday, you could watch heavyweight champion Joe Frazier competing in bicycle racing and swimming.
One of the more memorable events had the Kansas City Royals, led by future Baseball Hall of Fame third baseman George Brett, against the Dallas Cowboys in a tug of war. The Royals eventually won after an epic 50-minute battle. It was spectacular.
To be fair to the Cowboys, they balanced the team by weight. There were two more Royals than Cowboys to keep the weight even.
The “Fight of the Century,” the 1971 bout between Joe Frazier and Muhammad Ali, was broadcast a couple of weeks after the fight on “Wide World of Sports.”
It was memorable for me because I won a dollar bet from my eighth-grade PE teacher, Mr. Stevens, on the fight. I learned a little about power as well. He had me doing “the circuit” every day for a week after paying off his bet.
Frazier was a favorite on ABC.
Two performances stand out from “Smokin’ Joe.”
In one episode, Joe was entered in a 50-meter freestyle swimming race. He made it almost 10 yards before sinking to the bottom of the pool. The compact, densely muscled heavyweight couldn’t swim, not a stroke. Lifeguards dived into the pool and pulled the gasping Frazier to the side of the pool.
Frazier almost drowned on that February 25, 1973, broadcast.
Not to be outdone, Joe was on a bicycle relay team. Each leg was four laps around a 400-meter track, roughly a mile.
Joe’s team was behind when his leg came up. His legs were like locomotive pistons, driving him down the track. He made up the gap and flew into the lead. He still had two and a half laps to go.
He hit the wall in the same way his right uppercut often hit his opponents in the ring. He was barely able to finish. He’d lost the lead and was in last place when he staggered across the line.
Entertaining? You bet. Real sport? Sure, as real as the NBA.
Wide World of Sports was a hallmark of its time.
Today there are channels for every professional team, whether it’s baseball, basketball or football. You can catch every game without ever leaving the couch.
Sports, every imaginable sport, have become ubiquitous. You can’t escape them. Back in February, we ate at the Carriage Inn in Westmoreland County after one of our granddaughter Jayne’s basketball games.
The restaurant was an older, “homestyle” place with wooden tables and white cotton tablecloths. On the big screen in our dining room was a Double-A minor league baseball game from New Orleans. Yep, even the minor leagues have wall-to-wall video coverage.
It wasn’t that way a couple of generations ago. You had the “Game of the Week,” and if you weren’t a fan of the teams playing, well, tough.
Does anyone remember watching the Denver television sports reporters complaining each week about how the Broncos didn’t make the Monday Night Football highlights?
Now every player has his own media specialist. Some have subscription-only channels. It boggles the mind.
Jim McKay didn’t have that problem. His producers just gathered sporting events and put together a weekly show.
I remember watching “Motorized Bar Stool Racing Championships” one Saturday afternoon. Yes, there were a lot of crashes as they turned corners too sharp and the laws of physics took over the top-heavy bar stools.
There was trapshooting, rowing, curling, and dozens of other events you never heard of before. In one episode, they were on location in New Guinea with a group of natives diving out of tall trees toward the jungle floor with vines wrapped around their feet.
A generation later, bungee jumping arrived.
The venue was a moneymaker for ABC. The spinoffs were even more profitable. Who could forget Joyce DeWitt competing against Farrah Fawcett in the Battle of the Network Stars?
My favorite event was a 200-meter dash between a very cocky Robert Conrad and the nerdy Gabe Kaplan.
Their two teams were tied at the end of the competition, and Conrad got a bit aggressive with Kaplan, poking him in the chest and making “man-to-man” comments on the two of them running the long sprint to determine the winning team.
Kaplan just smiled.
When the gun sounded, Kaplan destroyed him, winning by almost 30 meters. Conrad avoided the camera after the race.
Another fascinating competition was an elevated military press. The bar and weights were placed on a rack about five feet off the ground.
The two finalists were Franz Klammer and Oakland Raiders Hall of Fame tight end Dave Casper.
Klammer was 6-0 and 185 pounds, with most of that weight in his powerful legs.
Casper, the former Notre Dame All-American, was 6-4 and 245. He towered over the smaller Austrian skier.
They began the lifting competition. Klammer bounced the bar into the air with his legs, locked his arms and handled the weight. Casper just hammered the bar, brute force style.
At 275 pounds, Klammer failed to lift the bar. Casper grunted, heaved and the bar went up uneven before he recovered and won the event.
The ABC announcers tried to give Casper a gold medal for the event, but he refused, handing the medal to Klammer, acknowledging the power of the smaller man.
It was an act of unexpected sportsmanship and true competition.
We could use a little more of that these days.