Programming: A Locker in the Living Room

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Lou Brock races for the foul line, straight-arms a caddie, and plows over for the touchdown. Joe Namath fakes to a Ferrari and hook-slides into the 14th green. And here comes Billie Jean King, riding home another long shot at the big A.

So it might have seemed to any dial-twirling fan who tried to keep up with the dizzying array of TV sports shows last week. The enthusiasm is understandable, for sport is the most consistently exciting spectacle on TV. The cameras follow the bouncing ball with such telescopic expertise that they have turned the living room into a locker room and Daddy into a sports nut. This season the three networks will telecast 796 hours of sports—more than twice as much as ten years ago.

Last week's coverage of the World Series by NBC was typical of the new dimensions that TV has added to the game. When Boston's Carl Yastrzemski was hit by a fast ball, Pitcher-Turned-Commentator Sandy Koufax told how and why he himself had deliberately thrown at batters, explaining that "it's dangerous but it's part of the game." In the last game, a split-screen showed Cardinal Lou Brock take a daring lead off first base, then dash for second—and a new series record for stolen bases. And when Julian Javier was called out on a close play at first, NBC's instant replay clearly showed that it is not only ballplayers who make errors.

Snaking Putts. The man who popularized many of the innovations in TV sports coverage is a 36-year-old ex-college wrestler with the unlikely name of Roone Pinckney Arledge. When he and his ABC production team cover a sports event, seeing it is often better than being there, particularly in the case of golf. At this year's U.S. Open, he mounted 19 color cameras atop a 250-ft. crane, in trees, behind bunkers and in a blimp, which allowed panoramic shots of the entire course, as well as close-ups of snaking putts that seemed to drop right into the viewer's martini. At one point, when Billy Casper and Arnold Palmer were tied for the lead, Arledge split the screen and showed them putting simultaneously on different holes—a touch of drama that neither the golfers nor the gallery could savor. Significantly, many golf writers no longer cover a tournament by tromping around the course; they sit in the press tent and watch it on TV.

Since joining ABC in 1960, Arledge has increased the network's yearly coverage of sports from 140 to 325 hours and its sports-programming revenues from $2.5 million to $65 million. As executive producer of the Wide World of Sports, which has telecast 90 different sports events in 31 countries, he goes to uncommon lengths "to capture the spirit of the place, the people and the event." In 1965, when a team of mountain climbers scaled the Matterhorn to celebrate the 100th anniversary of the first ascent, they were greeted on top by an ABC camera team that had climbed up the day before to film the event.