Wide World of Sports (American TV program)

History

Wide World of Sports began with Edgar Scherick, who founded Sports Programs, Inc. and later sold it to ABC. He then brought in a young Roone Arledge to produce the show. The program first aired on April 29, 1961, covering the Penn Relays and the Drake Relays. Jim McKay, who would become the longtime host, worked alongside Jesse Abramson, a track and field writer for the New York Herald Tribune, broadcasting from Franklin Field with Bob Richards as the field reporter.

Meanwhile, Jim Simpson called the action at Drake Stadium, with Bill Flemming handling field reporting there. That first season, airing spring and summer of 1961, the show ran Saturdays from 5:00 to 7:00 P.M. Eastern Time. By 1962, it shifted to 5:00 to 6:30 P.M., and later to 4:30 to 6:00 P.M., so ABC affiliates in the Eastern and Central time zones could fit in local evening newscasts. In 1961, the program featured a bowling event, the PBA National Invitational, where Roy Lown defeated Pat Patterson.

That broadcast proved so popular that ABC Sports started covering the Professional Bowlers Tour the next year. In 1964, Wide World of Sports aired the Oklahoma Rattlesnake Hunt championships; the following year, ABC launched The American Sportsman, an outdoor series that stayed on the network for nearly two decades. In 1973, the Superstars first appeared as a segment on Wide World of Sports, and it became a weekly winter series in 1974, running for ten years.

ABC Sports producers began naming an Athlete of the Year in 1963, with the first winner being track star Jim Beatty, who became the first person to run a sub-four-minute mile indoors. Over the years, the award went to legendary figures like Muhammad Ali, Jim Ryun, Lance Armstrong, Mario Andretti, Dennis Conner, Wayne Gretzky, Carl Lewis, and Tiger Woods, before being discontinued in 2001. As cable television expanded, offering more sports programming outlets, Wide World of Sports lost many of its longtime staple events, with many—though not all—moving to ESPN, which was a sister network to ABC for most of the show’s existence.

The original anthology series ended on June 21, 1997, after 37 years. However, the Wide World of Sports name continued as an umbrella title for ABC’s weekend sports programming, starting January 3, 1998.

Format

Wide World of Sports began as a temporary summer replacement, meant to fill airtime until autumn sports kicked off, but its unexpected popularity turned it into a long-running fixture. The show aimed to bring American viewers sports from around the world that rarely, if ever, appeared on U.S. television. It originally aired for two hours on Saturday afternoons, later trimmed to 90 minutes. Each episode typically featured two or three events, introducing audiences to a wide range of competitions previously unseen on American TV, including drag racing, hurling, rodeo, curling, jai-alai, firefighter competitions, wrist wrestling, powerlifting, surfing, logger sports, demolition derby, slow pitch softball, barrel jumping, and badminton.

Auto racing was a core part of the program from the start. Wide World provided the first national television coverage of NASCAR Grand National stock cars and NHRA drag racing. An edited broadcast of the Indianapolis 500 debuted in 1965—before that, only the time trials had been televised. ABC cameras also regularly traveled overseas for major Formula One Grands Prix and the 24 Hours of Le Mans.

Traditional Olympic sports like figure skating, skiing, gymnastics, and track and field were regular features; for much of the show’s run, ABC held the U.S. television rights to the Olympics, and stars such as Jean-Claude Killy, Olga Korbut, and Dorothy Hamill became popular draws. Wide World was also the primary home for major boxing bouts until pay-per-view took over in the 1980s. Nearly all of Muhammad Ali’s fights aired on ABC, and he appeared in regular interview segments alongside lead boxing commentator Howard Cosell.

Another memorable regular segment in the 1960s and 1970s featured Mexican cliff diving. The only national television broadcast of the Continental Football League was Wide World’s coverage of the 1966 championship game, for which ABC paid a rights fee of just $500, a tiny sum by professional football standards.

International versions

The Canadian version of the program aired on the CTV Television Network from September 19, 1964, until December 28, 1991. Licensed by ABC, this broadcast combined material from the American show with original segments created by CTV and its affiliates. The series concluded in 1991 when the network introduced CTV Sports Presents. In Australia, the Nine Network ran its own adaptation, Nine's Wide World of Sports, from 1981 to 1999 and again from 2008 to 2016.

This version began as a sports anthology series but later included professional competitions. It eventually became the overarching brand for all of Nine's sports coverage. The show, along with Nine's cricket broadcasts, inspired a series of parody audio albums by Billy Birmingham, who performed under the name The Twelfth Man. A Mexican program partly inspired by the American original, DeporTV, El Ancho Mundo del Deporte, first aired on January 6, 1974, on Canal 13, which was then the Mexican government's public television channel and later became Imevisión.

The show continues to air on Imevisión's successor, TV Azteca, making it one of the country's longest-running programs. Its original host, José Ramón Fernández, presented it from its debut until 2006. Current hosts are Antonio Rosique, Luis García Postigo, and Christian Martinolli. A separate version of El Ancho Mundo del Deporte aired in Monterrey, Mexico, on the state-owned Canal 28 from 1985 to 1991.

This broadcast was made possible through an exchange with Imevisión, as the NFL national broadcast in Mexico for that network originated in Monterrey, featuring Fernando Von Rossum Garza and Jose "Pepe" Espinoza. The Monterrey version was hosted by Javier Hector Gutierrez, Rubén Pizarro, Alejandro Campos, Martha Vigil, and Carlos Gutierrez.