You Can't Keep Him Down On The Farm

"Oh, really?" McKay said. "So what's the score going to be?"

"Twenty-eight to 28," she replied.

That indeed was the score. "Something," McKay says today, "was destined even then."

Now, 35 years later, Margaret handles all the family income, which totals more than $1 million a year when McKay's honoraria for speeches to the likes of IBM executives are added to his network salary. She decorates their homes, schedules his engagements, cooks the food, handles all the details.

In the booth, though, his attention to minutiae somehow locks in. He sits there for hours telling stories on camera, even while Arledge chats with him through his earplug. He can shift direction with astonishing deftness. Let's say ABC is coming out of a commercial. Arledge says to McKay over the earplug, "O.K., Jim, we're going back to gymnastics, and I'll be counting you down...10, nine, eight, seven, six—Stand by, gymnastics—five, four, three—Hold it! We're going to diving—two, one—Go, Jim!" Instantly, the red light comes on, and McKay's voice fills the studio. "You're looking at America's Bruce Kimball on the platform with Greg Louganis still to come...."

Late on the final afternoon of the '68 Games in Mexico City, McKay and producer Chuck Howard were at the stadium preparing to televise the closing ceremonies at 8 p.m. ABC was on the air from the television center downtown, but the stadium was empty and quiet, with just a few technicians on the field. Suddenly the phone rang. It was Arledge with an urgent message. "Chuck, you're not going to believe this," he said, "but we've just lost all power in the television center. The only place in Mexico we can get a picture out of is the stadium, so we're going to have to throw it to you."

Within seconds McKay was on the air, lyrically describing the spirit of the Games, recalling Bob Beamon's record long jump, discussing the black power salutes of John Carlos and Tommie Smith and otherwise passing on the torch to Munich for 1972. Some 45 minutes later Arledge called back. "Chuck, tell Jim I'm sorry," he said, "but we still don't have anything down here. He must really be running out, isn't he?"

"Roone," Howard said, "he has hardly begun to say hello."

McKay has four homes—the one in Westport, another in North Key Largo, Fla., an apartment on Fifth Avenue in New York and the farm in the Maryland hunt country north of Baltimore. The wherewithal to accumulate these holdings didn't all come from McKay; Margaret, who wrote a syndicated Washington political column under the name McManus for years, invested shrewdly in real estate. His latest passion is raising thoroughbreds, a pursuit touted to him by Darby Dan Farms owner John W. Galbreath. McKay has two mares, a 3-year-old filly that has raced twice and finished out of the money, and a foal of excellent parentage that will be named Clap Hands. If Clap Hands were to run in the 1987 Kentucky Derby, McKay says with relish, he would have to remove himself from the telecast to avoid a conflict of interest.

Though McKay came to TV early in its history, when he was only 26, he was a late bloomer when it came to celebrity. The truth is, it took him the better part of three decades in television to feel he was making it. In World War II he was a lieutenant and captain of a minesweeper that escorted convoys from Trinidad to Brazil. Afterward, he became a cityside reporter for the Sun, where one day in 1947, two editors announced to the newsroom that the paper was starting its own TV station, WMAR. McKay had been in the debating society and president of the drama club at Loyola College in Baltimore, so he was among those tapped to go on the air. McKay became the host of a three-hour afternoon show called The Sports Parade, doing songs and interviews and unfailingly reporting the results from Pimlico. Then three years later a WCBS executive named Dick Swift asked McKay if he wanted to move to New York to do The Real McKay. During that show's run McKay also reported the sports on the station's 6 and 11 o'clock news.