In ABC's final year of their initial go around with the National Football League, they added Los Angeles Rams and San Francisco 49ers games (for the Pacific Time Zone affiliates) to go along with their coverage of the Bears and Cardinals.
In the rest of the United States, 3 in 4 TV sets in use watched Dizzy Dean[12] and Buddy Blattner[13] (or backup announcers Bill McColgan and Bob Finnegan) call the games for ABC.
Despite the production values he brought to NCAA college football, Scherick wanted low-budget (as in inexpensive broadcasting rights) sports programming that could attract and retain an audience.
On December 15, 1973, ABC aired what is considered to be the first[37] telecast of a regular season college basketball game by a major broadcast network (between UCLA and North Carolina State in St. Louis).
The game, called by Jim Lampley and Bill Russell, marked the first time Duke University's Blue Devils basketball team played on national television.
Prior to the debut of the PBA on ABC television in 1962, most tournaments were organized where, once the cut was established after qualifying rounds, a set number of match-play games were bowled, and bonus pins were given to the winner of each match.
The segment appeared on Wide World of Sports and immediately was spun off into its own series airing at 3 PM EST on Sundays January through March on ABC.
[47] ABC would present filmed highlights involving the program's hosts and celebrities participating in hunting and/or fishing trips along with outdoor recreational activities such as whitewater kayaking, hang gliding and free climbing.
An early bid by the league in 1964 to play on Friday nights was soundly defeated, with critics charging that such telecasts would damage the attendance at high school football games.
During subsequent negotiations on a new television contract that would begin in 1970 (coinciding with a merger between the NFL and AFL), Rozelle concentrated on signing a weekly Monday night deal with one of the three major networks.
Arledge also ordered twice the usual number of cameras to cover the game, expanded the regular two-man broadcasting booth to three, and used extensive graphic design within the show as well as instant replay.
Looking for a lightning rod to garner attention, Arledge hired controversial New York City sportscaster Howard Cosell as a commentator, along with veteran football play-by-play announcer Keith Jackson.
Arledge had tried to draw in Curt Gowdy and then Vin Scully to ABC for the MNF play-by-play role, but settled for Jackson after they proved unable to break their respective existing contracts with NBC Sports and the Los Angeles Dodgers.
In 1971, Frank Gifford became available after his contract with CBS Sports concluded; Arledge brought him to ABC to serve as play-by-play announcer, replacing Jackson (who returned to broadcasting college football for the network, which he continued to do for the next 35 seasons).
Although Chris Schenkel was the actual host of the Games that year, Arledge assigned the story to McKay largely because he was a local news anchor in Baltimore, Maryland prior to joining CBS (and later ABC).
YES!During the broadcast wrap-up after the game, ABC Olympic sports anchor Jim McKay compared the American victory over the Soviet professionals to a group of Canadian college football players defeating the Pittsburgh Steelers (the recent Super Bowl champions and at the height of their dynasty).
He brought in Michael Marley, then a sportswriter for The Washington Post, Lawrie Mifflin, a writer for The New York Times, and a 20-year old researcher who quickly rose to an associate producer, Alexis Denny.
As a sophomore at Yale University, Ms. Denny had been a student in a seminar that Cosell taught on the "Business of Big-Time Sports in America", and was selected by the Director of Monday Night Football to join their production crew.
She took her junior year off to join Cosell's staff at ABC Headquarters in New York City, and produced many segments, including in 1983 a half-hour special report previewing the 1984 Olympic Games in Los Angeles.
The coverage was nonetheless quite low for a Big Three television network, with a June 17 prime-time regular season game between Chicago and Birmingham finishing as the lowest-rated prime time broadcast of the week, with a 4.8 rating.
Cosell continued to draw criticism during Monday Night Football with one of his offhand comments during the September 5, 1983 game, igniting a controversy and laying the groundwork for his departure at the end of that season.
Frank Gifford was the play-by-play announcer, while then-ABC Sports analyst Don Meredith and then-Washington Redskins quarterback Joe Theismann served as color commentators.
Premier events, including ice hockey and figure skating, were scheduled for prime time and the Games were lengthened to 16 days from the previous 12 to ensure three weekends of coverage.
[113] The network, at the insistence of new owner Capital Cities Communications (much to the chagrin of Roone Arledge's successor at ABC Sports, Dennis Swanson), opted not to bid for the rights to show any future Games.
After braving the traumatic Loma Prieta earthquake[121] and an all-time low 16.4 rating for the 1989 World Series,[122] Al Michaels took ABC's loss of baseball to CBS[123][124] as "tough to accept."
Although the Professional Bowlers Tour maintained high ratings throughout most of its years, ABC (which was transitioning to new management after being purchased by The Walt Disney Company in 1996) opted against renewing its contract with the PBA primarily due to the overall decline of the sport in the late 1980s and 1990s.
Beginning in 1999, Monday Night Football telecasts used a computer-generated yellow line to mark where a team needs to get a first down, a method first used by ABC sister cable channel ESPN.
[212] Prior to the advent of Wide World of Sports, many major heavyweight boxing title matches were televised via “closed-circuit” (this generally meant that you had go to a movie theater to see it, pay a decent-sized amount of money to get it, and then watch it on a giant screen).
ABC's final boxing card occurred on June 17, 2000[213][214] with José Luis Castillo upsetting Stevie Johnston in the lightweight championship bout in Bell Gardens, California.
Miller demonstrated a knowledge of the game and its personalities, although at times he tended to lapse into sometimes obscure analogy-riddled streams of consciousness similar to the "rants" of his standup comedy act.