Award Recipients

ABC's Jim McKay 2001 Paul White Award Recipient

SPORTS AUTHORITY

Jim McKay has made his mark covering sports and news. The longtime face and voice of the Olympics and ABC Sports is the winner of the 2001 Paul White Award.

By Robert Garcia for July/August 2001 Communicator

Is sports news? Jim McKay's career makes a good case that it is. Just look at the stats: more than 50 years in journalism, winner of 13 Emmys--not just for sports, but for news and writing--and winner of the Peabody and George Polk awards. Bona fides that would make any reporter proud.

In the news community, McKay is perhaps best known for the seamless transition he made between covering the Olympics and chronicling the terrorist attack on Israeli athletes during the 1972 Games in Munich. McKay's coverage won accolades from many, including Walter Cronkite.

You won't see McKay, now 80, as much as you did during his more than 30 years as host of ABC's Wide World of Sports and anchor of some of the greatest events in athletic history. Over that time, he logged 4.5 million miles of travel. McKay's itinerary isn't nearly as full these days, but the moniker "retiree" wouldn't fit him well.

He's under contract for life with ABC, and still covering golf and horse racing. In addition, ABC is loaning this veteran of 11 Olympic Games to NBC to work alongside Bob Costas for the 2002 Winter Games in Salt Lake City. McKay and his wife, Margaret, are also minority owners of the Baltimore Orioles.

Decades of Change
Much has changed in the world of sports during McKay's career, most notably the Olympics. Starting with the 1960 Games in Rome, much of McKay's sports reporting occurred under the specter of the Cold War, framing international sports as an East vs. West showdown. Sounds ominous, but McKay says that might have been good for the planet. "I think that relationship may have had something to do with holding off World War III, just because people were exposed to each other."

One of those people Americans were exposed to, McKay recalls, was Valery Brumel, the Soviet athlete who in the early '60s was named Wide World of Sports Athlete of the Year for setting world records in the long jump three years in a row. "I think it was the first time that Americans got interested favorably in a foreign athlete, and of all things, a big 'enemy,' " McKay says.

Gymnast Olga Korbut was another "enemy," one who captured hearts around the world. She had been a substitute on the Soviet national team. "And then in warm-ups," recalls McKay, "she did this thing on the uneven parallel bars and our expert, Gordon Maddox, said, 'Oh my, wow!' And then later, when we did the commentary on the [main event], she did this amazing maneuver, and I asked, 'Has a girl ever done that before?' and [Maddox] said, 'No human has ever done that before.' "

For American fans, the thrill of victory was perhaps no sweeter than in 1980, when a group of American college kids knocked off the greatest collection of hockey players on Earth, the Soviet national team. For McKay it was the most inspiring victory in the history of sports. "The hostages were still being held in Iran; the economy was down; it was a downward time. It really did lift up the country." ABC was still on the air around midnight and snow was falling over the Olympic village in Lake Placid, NY. "Walking down the street were about a hundred young Americans and one of them was carrying a flag and they were all singing 'God Bless America,' " McKay recalls. "It was a very important thing that happened there."

But Brumel, Korbut and the U.S.-Soviet hockey showdown represent the Games of a different era. Olympic broadcast rights now sell for billions of dollars. Professional athletes are allowed to compete. And while McKay admits the Olympics of yesteryear had their share of "shamateurism," he suggests the pendulum has swung too far in the direction of professionalism and commercialism. "I've never been a fan of the Dream Team. What is the appeal of the greatest players in the world beating Ethiopia by 60 points?" he says. "There'll never be a U.S.-Soviet hockey game again. Not like that one."

Rising to the Occasion
Hopefully, there will never be another Munich either. During the 1972 Olympic Games, 11 Israeli athletes died after being seized by the Black September terrorist group. It was one of the darkest Olympic moments, stunning the hundreds of millions watching on television. McKay transformed instantly from sports commentator to hard-news anchor, saying at the time that the event marked "the end of an age of innocence for sports."

"It was a terrible, horrible day," McKay recalls. "I've always thought that, basically, reporting is reporting," he says. "The skills required are to be a good reporter and to read all the sections of the newspaper. Roone [Arledge, former head of ABC Sports and ABC News] always said he never thought of me as just a sports guy, but as a reporter." Walter Cronkite also recognized the hard-core journalist in McKay, sending him a note soon after the Munich massacre that commended McKay for representing journalism in an exemplary manner. The West German government took note of his reporting too, awarding McKay the Officer's Cross of the Legion of Merit.

In fact, McKay hadn't strayed far from his roots. He began his career working for the Baltimore Sun, where he met his wife. McKay did crime stories and assorted general assignment tasks, and was later named aviation editor in lieu of a raise. (He wasn't making much at the time.) It wasn't until his first network job in the late 1950s that CBS turned to him for sports coverage.

With the Munich attack, McKay says he had to confront his own delicate emotional balance. As you watch tragedy unfold, says McKay, you are first a reporter, but also a human being. His philosophy is this: "If you can do it, let a professional amount of what you feel leak through. That's what I tried to do."

McKay was also acutely aware of the personal dimensions of the story: Those Israeli athletes had families. "One thing I remember thinking all through that day was about a young man in there named David Berger from Shaker Heights, OH, and I'm going to be the person who tells [that family] if their son is alive or dead. And I always wondered since then, did I treat that sensitively enough?" Two years ago, McKay received a letter from Berger's mother shortly after she'd read McKay's book, "The Real McKay," whose first chapter is dedicated to the Munich Games. She wrote McKay saying he had, indeed, handled the reporting of her son's death sensitively and appropriately. "It took a little bit of a load off my mind after 25 years," he says with no small amount of relief.

It's Just a Game
McKay, who has covered 100 sports over four decades, knows a lot more than just the Olympics. As a minority owner of the Baltimore Orioles, he is fond of baseball. To those who regularly predict the demise of the game, he'll remind you how far baseball has come. One year in the 1930s, he points out, the St. Louis Browns drew 75,000 people over an entire season. That's what the Orioles draw in just two home games nowadays.

But McKay does have concerns. He bemoans the extremes of free agency and the mammoth player salaries. McKay thinks Cal Ripken is probably going to be the last Hall-of-Famer (presuming the inevitable) to spend an entire career with a single team. He thinks the owners have to get some kind of salary cap and says that's one secret of the NFL's success. "It'll be a big fight, but I sure hope there's not another strike or a lockout," says McKay, looking ahead to the upcoming negotiations over a new collective bargaining agreement.

McKay also wouldn't mind eliminating a few franchises, which the commissioner's office now concedes is a real possibility. "Tampa Bay is a total disaster," McKay says. "Watching it on television, it's so depressing looking at that place (Tropicana Field, the Devil Rays' home park). It's like an old warehouse and nobody's there."

As far as today's sports journalism, McKay isn't thrilled with the "gotcha" mentality of some sports reporters. Be it Mickey Mantle's alcoholism or the saga of Darryl Strawberry, McKay thinks we know too much about today's athletes. "I like the image of Babe Ruth that's come down to us," he says. "He's The Babe and what's so wrong with that? I don't want to hear about his womanizing. I like to hear he ate 12 hotdogs in a single day. But not that other stuff."

McKay traces this appetite for dirt back to the Watergate era. "There's a new breed of reporters that doesn't think it has a story unless it's a bad story and that's not necessarily true." So to those who consider it a great journalistic feat to report in detail about the underbelly of every athlete's life, McKay offers this perspective: "Sports is not that important in and of itself. What really counts to us is sports as inspiration. To kids and, sometimes, to adults."

The Home Stretch
Horse racing remains McKay's favorite sport, and his coverage of the Triple Crown is etched in the minds of those who have watched his work. The love affair with the sport of kings began with the first horse race McKay saw as a kid. He wagered and won on a long shot. (We're presuming his dad placed the bet.)

McKay's relationship with the sport continued with his first invitation to the Kentucky Derby, where he recalls being overcome with emotion at the beauty and fragility of the horses, the courage and colors of the jockeys, and the tear-inducing strains of "My Old Kentucky Home." Racing grew on him more as he delved into it himself, owning John the Bold, a thoroughbred good enough that there was talk of a Derby appearance, hopes that were later dashed.

Another horse close to McKay's heart was Sean's Pride, who in the second year of the Maryland Million--a race McKay founded--won at 17-1 odds against a prohibitive favorite. He remembers telling the owner, his wife, "If that horse never wins another race again, he owes us nothing." And, McKay concedes with humility, "He took me at my word and never won another race again."

His horse ownership days are over now, but McKay's broadcast days are not. Through him, over four decades, we have witnessed Olympic drama and tragedy, the pageantry of horse racing, the adrenaline of auto racing and the thrills and agonies from a panoply of other sports. He'll cover his 12th Olympics next year on NBC, ABC's gift not just to its rival network, but to all who enjoy McKay's skills as a sports reporter and, more accurately, as a reporter's reporter.

--Robert Garcia is vice president of CNNRadio and past chairman of RTNDA.