You Can't Keep Him Down On The Farm

Today, the road all runners come,
Shoulder-high we bring you home,
And set you at your threshold down,
Townsman of a stiller town.

Smart lad, to slip betimes away
From fields where glory does not stay
And early though the laurel grows
It withers quicker than the rose.

The Los Angeles Games will be McKay's 10th Olympics and possibly his last. He will be 63 on Sept. 24, and he no longer has the steely endurance that has allowed him to traipse back and forth across the globe, week after week, more than five million miles since 1961, as the host of ABC's Wide World of Sports. He's gearing down now. Mention the '88 Winter Olympics at Calgary and there's both a twinkle in his eye and a note of caution in his voice. "Do I want to do that when I'm 66?" he asks. "I don't know. I've never been 66 before." But mention Brent Musburger's avowed interest in working the '88 Games, and he says, "I haven't really given it up yet. You get a little feeling of 'Don't rush me.' The body is still warm."

Certainly he doesn't plan to pack it in on a note like the one ABC sounded at Sarajevo. Last winter's Sarajevo Games almost finished McKay. "It was the hardest Olympics we've ever done," he says. "I never saw anything during the Games except my room and my studio. I just went back and forth." There were a rooster and a barking dog with insomnia in front of ABC's hotel, so McKay, who needs plenty of sleep to perform well, commandeered a room in the back. But though he got a bit more shut-eye, he still looked haggard. After the second night, McKay's wife, Margaret, called from their home in New York City.

"Listen," she said, "I don't know how to tell you this, but you've been looking terrible on the air. I don't know whether it's the makeup or the lighting or what, but you don't look good."

"Honey," McKay replied, "we've got the best makeup guy around; he does Peter Jennings and everybody. And I know we've got the best lighting guy in the business, because I asked for him myself. So what can I say?"

Also concerned about McKay's dour countenance was ABC president Fred Pierce, who rang up Arledge and urged him to change the lighting. McKay says the background color was responsible for his appearance, although critics suggested the problem may have been the U.S. hockey team's collapse. They really worked him over. Tom Shales of the Washington Post, for example, wrote that McKay's "silly old face fell to the floor of the studio with a thud" when the hockey team lost its opening two games. As for the mood at the outset in Sarajevo, McKay says, "It was depressing—I think we were all depressed." By Week 2, however, U.S. skier Debbie Armstrong had won a gold medal, and figure skater Kitty Carruthers (a special favorite of McKay's, for reasons we shall see) had a tear of joy on her cheek. So ABC's mood improved, as did the ratings.

One reason McKay succeeds is this: He fills the American TV viewer's need for a teacher. McKay's son, Sean McManus, the vice-president for programming at NBC Sports, recalls that when McKay was assigned to a foreign event on Wide World in the early '60s, "The first thing he'd do would be go to the living room and pull out the Encyclopaedia Britannica and read about the country he was going to. Then he'd go to the Westport [Conn.] Public Library, take out books on the country and the sport and study some more." Thus, McKay became a homeroom teacher for a nation of eager learners. It's a role he's still playing.

Arledge recognized the teacher in McKay from the moment he hired him away from CBS in 1961. McKay had a peculiar facility for making viewers care about names, places and sports they'd probably never heard of before—Valeri Brumel, Irish hurling, Olga Korbut, ski jumping from the Hannenkamm, Australian rules football. McKay, for example, was the man who taught us that 6 means perfect in figure skating and 10 means perfect in gymnastics. Assigned to the 24 hours of LeMans for Wide World in 1961, he went to a bookstore in that rural French town and dug up a book in English on the origins of the race. He read it the night before the telecast and then told us the next day about the LeMans "suitcase." It seems that in the early days of the race, drivers were required to carry suitcases in their cars. The modern-day vestige is a block of wood, cut to the size of a two-suiter, that participants have to fit someplace in the driver's compartment. McKay took us to school on the bobsled, too. He taught us that bobsledding was originally the pursuit of aristocratic couples seeking a diversion while spending their winters at the Palace Hotel in St. Moritz. He did research on the history of the sleds and told us how the husbands would put their wives aboard, give the sled a running push and then hop on themselves. Until 1908, he revealed, at least one woman had to be on each sled in all competitions.

It naturally followed that if McKay enlightened folks on Wide World, he would also serve as a beacon during the Olympics. Late one night in Innsbruck a month before the '76 Winter Games, Arledge sat for long hours in his car with McKay, trying to persuade him to become host of the Games. "The Olympics is like a whole nation sitting down and reading a book together," Arledge says. "During the day they talk about it and can't wait to get home. McKay is the teacher reading the book to them, explaining the footnotes."