You Can't Keep Him Down On The Farm

In the mid-'50s, McKay—now nicknamed Burrhead after the crew cut he would wear for years after it had gone out of fashion—became the moderator of Youth Takes a Stand, a public affairs show for teenagers. He also did The Verdict Is Yours, a courtroom program in which the judge and lawyers were real, the jurors were non-actors, but the witnesses were actors who improvised their lines. McKay was the reporter who would turn to the camera and, in a hushed voice, recap the proceedings before each commercial break. Verdict was shown nationwide on CBS and for a while ruled the roost in the daytime ratings.

However, McKay wasn't altogether happy being an entertainer. He wanted to be another Cronkite, or at least an Eric Sevareid. "I thought I had the talent to be a news anchorman," he says. "I'm as interested in the front page as I am in the sports page, and reporting is reporting. There's no real difference in technique to reporting sports or news. You just find out the facts and present them."

Strangely, McKay then considered himself a news anchor-in-the-making even though he'd never done more than a smattering of TV news in Baltimore and never got closer to CBS News than Youth Takes a Stand. "I was on the fringes of the news department, and I kept trying to push that way, but it just wasn't happening, and sports opportunities kept coming up," McKay says. Even today there's a tinge of wistfulness in his voice when he talks about news. "The only time it ever could have happened would have been immediately after Munich. A lot of people, television editors, asked me about it then. But for better or worse, you become identified in people's minds. The public probably wouldn't have accepted it."

There was a time in the '50s, Sean recalls, when McKay was at loose ends—between shows, without the late-night sportscasts, with virtually no money coming in. He sat at the dining room table assembling model ships from kits. Then late in the '50s, McKay became CBS's voice at the Masters. It was a prestigious assignment, and for the first time he was recognized as a sports reporter. One of the viewers who noticed him was Arledge, the new young president of then tiny ABC Sports.

"I saw several things," Arledge says. "One was his manner of presentation. He came closer to the news in the sense of Murrow/Cronkite drama than anyone else in sports. There are some people who can make something dramatic by the inflections of their voices, without shouting. He's not just somebody yelling at you. He has a sense of words, a sense of the drama of the moment. A lot of people who do sports play-by-play or commentary in general, they just don't have that. It has more to do with your intellect than your voice, but it also has to do with your voice."

McKay was at the '61 Masters when Arledge called. The offer was for McKay to become host of a summer replacement show called Wide World of Sports. It would focus on esoteric subjects, involve some travel and could very well be canceled after 20 weeks. Burrhead, now pushing 40, still harbored ideas of following Cronkite. But Margaret thought Arledge's offer was a good idea. "For one thing," she said, "you won't have any competition. I've listened to sportscasters, and most of them aren't any good."

McKay didn't feel fully accepted, even at ABC, until well after Munich. "There have been times in his career of great insecurity," Sean says. "He wasn't always sure he was as good or could be as good as he wanted. It took him a long time. There were other people on a faster track. He hasn't been a really confident person for all that long. Yes, he had my mother saying 'You're better than they are, Jimmy,' and 'Yes, this is right for you,' and 'Yes, you can be Number One in your field.' But I'm not sure he felt all that comfortable until recently."

Has McKay lost something the last few Olympics? It's a fair question, especially in view of the fact that he'll work only the prime-time telecasts in Los Angeles, or 81½ of the 180 hours ABC carries. The carping against both McKay and ABC began increasing four years ago during the Lake Placid Games, when McKay also looked overly tired, seemed unaccountably distracted and was accused of glossing over the town's horrendous transportation problems. McKay says his only concern is TV's lethal bandwagon effect. In sports TV, it's cruelly axiomatic that once viewers begin to think you've lost it, you've lost it. Schenkel's career at ABC fell sharply and inexplicably after '72. Curt Gowdy wore well on NBC for years; then, overnight, people started to joke about his forgetting names.

"I don't feel I have to make my way or prove anything," McKay says. "Obviously, it would hurt my ego if suddenly they didn't want me anymore. It would hurt anybody in any business, I think. But take Gowdy. One day Curt was one of the very top guys in the business, and the next day it became popular to rap him. Once that snowball gets rolling, boy...."

The fact is that McKay has never been Henry Higgins when it comes to smoothness of discourse. He still tends to talk too fast, although he has slowed down considerably, and he has a curious tendency to garble words at the end of sentences. In the last few years there have been moments when he has seemed momentarily befuddled. The oppressive number of Olympic hours ABC now airs and all those split-second switches may account for that.