You Can't Keep Him Down On The Farm

Whatever the slippage, it's probably attributable to age and jet lag. Every announcer makes what are known in the business as "foomphs"—picayune stumbles in which what he wants to say just doesn't come out. In golf you whiff; in TV you foomph. McKay has had his share of them the last few years, especially at Lake Placid, where ABC officials now say they worked him too hard. "The only time somebody could say he slipped was when he hadn't had the rest he needed," Howard says. "It's like a starting pitcher or a racehorse. You can't send him out day after day." To guard against overworking, McKay has cut back on his total of weekend assignments from 48 a few years ago to 35 in 1984. In Los Angeles he'll cede daytime and late-night duties to the likes of Jim Lampley, Al Michaels, Frank Gifford and Kathleen Sullivan. As for his beauty rest, these games will be broadcast live, McKay says, so "this should be a lay up."

For all of McKay's credits—besides doing Wide World, he has been ABC's premier golf announcer almost since. the four-wood was invented and its horse racing host since Eddie Arcaro retired in 1962—the Games alone will be his legacy. Mr. Olympics. He worked his first Games in 1960, from a CBS studio in New York, voicing over videotapes that had been flown from Rome on the new jet planes. "I'm the storyteller of the Olympics," he says. "Here are all these disjointed events. My job is to link them together and see which story is beginning to tell itself."

In a sense, McKay learned to tell stories by attending Athletics games. McKay, whose father owned his own real-estate firm and was later an appraiser and loan officer, lived in Philadelphia until the family moved to Baltimore in 1934. In the early '30s, he spent long afternoons at Shibe Park watching the last-place A's. The next morning he would look for an account of the game in the Philadelphia Record, but the paper's sports columnist would more often write a story about one player or another. The writer's name was Red Smith. From him McKay first learned that a well-told story is more interesting than a well-worn fact.

It's the telling of such stories that accounts for McKay's reputation for warmth and makes him seem avuncular. His penchant for describing sports in human terms dovetailed with Arledge's desire to "personalize" athletes with things such as the "up-close-and-personal" interviews. While announcing the '68 Winter Games, for example, McKay told viewers that Jean Claude Killy is indeed French, but that he happens to be a descendant of an Irish mercenary who fought in Napoleon's army. This was the small jewel of information no one else had.

"If I were on the Titanic and I could have any two people there with me to put things in perspective," Lewin says, "I'd have Jim and Howard [Cosell]. Jim would have a way of relating the disaster to the rest of the world and in some way humanizing things, telling what it means for the 420 crew members on board, the 68 Czechs on board, the 2,000 passengers on board. Howard would give you a detailed description of why the problems exist, how they can be rectified and where the help is going to come from."

Another of McKay's saving graces is his boundless, almost sprightly optimism. Yes, he can be terribly effusive. Yes, an American gold medal performance can leave him breathless. As even Arledge admits, "He's given sometimes to getting carried away and overstating things, because that's the way he really feels." But the point is, McKay established his journalistic credentials at Munich, so he has earned the right to his occasional gee whizzes. More important, he remains in perfect lockstep with his audience. When Dwight Stones came to the studio at Montreal in '76 wearing a Mickey Mouse T shirt, it was McKay who sang the famous chorus with him—"M-I-C...K-E-Y...." In other words, he's one of us. Not intelligent to the point of being intimidating. Unpretentious. And always there, every four years, speaking to our hearts as well as our heads.

"You're going to hear stories about politics, drugs and all those things," McKay says. "But that's not the point of the Games. The point of the Games is a search for excellence. And we will find it. That's not to say we don't report the drug busts, but we have to go in looking for excellence, people taking a skill and honing it to the sharpest edge.

"Take the sports pages nowadays. You pick up the sports page and four-fifths of the front page is about a guy being arrested for cocaine or about a guy getting a million-dollar contract or some legal hassle. There's something wrong with that. Maybe the drug busts ought to be on a page with all the other drug busts, the legal stuff should be with all the other legal stuff, and the sports should be on the sports page. Sports is a little different from news in that there's no basic importance to sports. It's games. That's all it is. But it can be a source of inspiration, to kids particularly."

Not long ago, relaxing at his Maryland horse farm, McKay ruminated about the athletes who squander their talents. "How pertinent that Housman poem I read at Munich sometimes seems today," he said. Indeed, two of the stanzas in particular cry out to be heard.

Eyes the shady night has shut
Cannot see the record cut,
And silence sounds no worse than cheers,
After earth has stopped the ears: