Sports on Television (The Praeger Television Collection)

Citation preview

Sports on Television

Recent Titles in The Praeger Television Collection David Bianculli, Series Editor Spy Television Wesley Britton Science Fiction Television M. Keith Booker Christmas on Television Diane Werts Reality Television Richard M. Huff Drawn to Television: Prime-Time Animation from The Flintstones to Family Guy M. Keith Booker Crime Television Douglas Snauffer Big Pictures on the Small Screen: Made-for-TV Movies and Anthology Dramas Alvin H. Marill Truth and Rumors: The Reality Behind TV’s Most Famous Myths Bill Brioux

Sports on Television

A LVIN H. M ARILL

The Praeger Television Collection David Bianculli, Series Editor

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Marill, Alvin H. Sports on television / Alvin H. Marill. p. cm. — (The Praeger television collection, ISSN 1549–2257) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978–0–313–35105–1 (alk. paper) 1. Television broadcasting of sports—United States—History. 2. Sports films—History. I. Title. GV742.3.M37 2009 791.45'655—dc22 2008042615 British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data is available. Copyright © 2009 by Alvin H. Marill All rights reserved. No portion of this book may be reproduced, by any process or technique, without the express written consent of the publisher. Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 2008042615 ISBN: 978–0–313–35105–1 ISSN: 1549–2257 First published in 2009 Praeger Publishers, 88 Post Road West, Westport, CT 06881 An imprint of Greenwood Publishing Group, Inc. www.praeger.com Printed in the United States of America

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Contents

Acknowledgments

vii

Introduction

ix

1

The 1940s

1

2

The 1950s

9

3

The 1960s

29

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The 1970s

41

5

The 1980s

55

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The 1990s

73

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The 2000s

99

8

Scorecard Endnotes

137

Appendix: Sports-Themed Programs

143

Selected Bibliography

163

Index

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Acknowledgments

Many thanks to the following for aiding this non-sports authority on his path that wended its way through television history to chronicle the assorted athletic-themed events on the tube during the past nine decades: Olympics impresario Bud Greenspan and his Cappy Productions associate Nancy Beffa and documentarian George Roy, as well as Jane Klain, manager of research services at The Paley Center for Media, Steve Friedman of PBS, and television historian and author Vincent Terrace. Without you all, I would have either gone into double overtime or struck out.

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Introduction

Television, as initially envisioned by its founding fathers, David Sarnoff of NBC, William S. Paley of CBS, and Allen DuMont, of the somewhat short-lived network that bore his name in the early “commercial” days, was reported to be a fount of cultural, informational, instructional entertainments. In perusing the books about these insightful men, the word “sports” was hard to find. Nevertheless, sports, an afterthought, would emerge large in the televised scheme of things. Not only sporting events—and in more recent times, cable networks devoted fulltime to baseball, golf, tennis, auto racing, etc.—but also sports-related dramas, comedies, series, and television movies, would more or less dominate what would familiarly be termed “the tube.” Sports were to be not only spectator events airing from many of the great outdoor stadiums and indoor rinks and courts but, as in the case of drama, comedies, series and the like, metaphors for life lived by fictional and sometimes real-life heroes in whatever sports world TV writers positioned them. Virtually all sports dramas chronicled in this book took place off the field; it was too complicated to replicate an actual event, or even a tiny piece of one, except for stock footage on a flickering 10” TV screen in the background. This applied across the board, whether it be Paul Newman’s 80-Yard Run or Bang the Drum Slowly, both originals written for TV; or Brian’s Song or It’s Good to Be Alive, TV movie biographies; or any number of Rod Serling originals (pre-Twilight Zone). It was even the case for not so enthralling

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made-for-TV movies on Mike Tyson, Tiger Woods, Dennis Rodman, and Michael Jordan. Scientists had tinkered with the concept of television as far back as 1875, when George R. Carey of Boston proposed a television system in which every picture element is transmitted simultaneously, each over a separate circuit. This was four years before Thomas Edison invented the electric light bulb! It would be another 25 years before the term television was coined during the 1900 Paris Exhibition by Constantin Porskyi at the International Electricity Congress. Charles Francis Jenkins, in his Washington labs, spent the early part of the 1920s tinkering with the concept of “developing radio movies to be broadcast for entertainment in the home,” a number of years before Philo T. Farnsworth, long since considered the father of modern-day television, and whose somewhat fictionalized story is told in the later 2007 Broadway play. The Farnsworth Invention, demonstrated TV in San Francisco on September 7, 1927. (This was a year after Orrin Dunlap, radio editor of the New York Times, described television as “an inventor’s will-o’-thewisp.”) In any event, the first regular schedule of TV programming was begun by General Electric on May 11, 1928 in Schenectady, with programs transmitted Tuesday, Thursday, and Friday from 1:30 to 3:30 P.M. The first televised sports event was a tennis match on July 12, 1928. Other sports firsts would take place more than a decade later—heavyweight boxing, a major league baseball game, a college football game, a hockey game. Of course, sporting events long had been dominant on the big screen, in newsreels and as popular short subjects, and, especially in 1940s and 1950s sports-themed feature films. Except for, among others, Pat O’Brien and Gary Cooper’s memorable performances of Notre Dame football coach Knute Rockne in 1940 and Lou Gehrig in 1942’s The Pride of the Yankees, respectively, and early gridiron All Star and 1940 Heisman trophy winner Tom Harmon (the late dad of NCIS’s Mark Harmon of the modern era) in Harmon of Michigan, Errol Flynn portraying boxer Jim Corbett in Gentleman Jim, and relatively unknown Greg McClure as fighter John L. Sullivan in The Great John L. (produced by Bing Crosby), all of them were in direct competition with television in the latter’s infancy. There were biographical features dealing with Army football heroes, Doc Blanchard and Glenn Davis starring as themselves in The Spirit of West Point; William Bendix in The Babe Ruth Story; and James Stewart in The Stratton Story. (Monty Stratton was a major league pitcher and an All Star for the Chicago White Sox in the mid-to-late 1930s who lost a leg during a hunting accident but was determined to continue in baseball despite his wooden leg. He made a comeback of sorts in the minors in 1947.) These three films, and

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two of the very best boxing movies of the era, The Set-Up with Robert Ryan and Champion with Kirk Douglas, came during the immediate postwar years, along with Take Me Out to the Ballgame—with the MGM musical triumvirate of Frank Sinatra, Gene Kelly and Esther Williams—a turn-of-the-century comedy about America’s then-greatest sport. In the early to mid 1950s, baseball legend Jackie Robinson, L.A. Rams football pro Elroy “Crazylegs” Hirsch, and Olympic star Bob Mathias, all nonactors, played themselves in their own (rather low budget) screen biographies, and boxer Coley Wallace, another nonactor, was the star of The Joe Louis Story. Then there were Burt Lancaster, Glenn Ford, Ronald Reagan, Edward G. Robinson, and Anthony Perkins portraying, respectively, legendary Native-American athlete Jim Thorpe, golf champion Ben Hogan, early baseball star Grover Cleveland Alexander, New York Giants farm team manager John Lobert (in Robert Aldrich’s B-movie The Big Leaguer), and the Red Sox’s Jimmy Piersall (the last named coming directly from television). Dan Dailey and Richard Crenna (in his first film with billing) played baseball star brothers Dizzy and Daffy Dean in Pride of St. Louis. In later years there’d be, among others, Paul Newman, Robert De Niro, Tommy Lee Jones, Will Smith, John Goodman, Denzel Washington, and Russell Crowe as, respectively, Rocky Graziano, Jake LaMotta, Ty Cobb, Muhammad Ali, Babe Ruth, Hurricane Carter, and James J. Braddock. And the Harlem Globetrotters were the subject of not one but two pseudobiographies—one of which, in 1954, had cast as a court “ringer” a young Sidney Poitier. There were also a handful of baseball-themed comedies: It Happens Every Spring (actually 1949), with professor Ray Milland inventing a compound that, when rubbed on baseballs, causes them to avoid wooden bats, and Rhubarb, again with Milland, about a cat who inherits a baseball team, as well as Angels in the Outfield, that decades later would return as a Disney franchise on both the big screen and television. But this book deals specifically with television, and how sports (the real games and the dramatic or comedic themes revolving around them, sports documentaries, and, in the new millennium, the rush of reality shows, some dealing with sports) have become all pervasive on the small screen and the now giant plasma ones. Messrs. Sarnoff, Paley, and DuMont would hardly know ye. What would they have thought of the overarching excitement of, say, the memorable July 4, 2008 weekend when sports fans of many stripes—tennis enthusiasts and sportscasters alike—spent hours glued to their sets to thrill to what many already are calling the greatest one-oneone (doubled) athletic event—the women and men’s finals at Wimbledon. The sisters Serena and Venus Williams battled for the championship and

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then Rafael Nadal and Roger Federer, two of the foremost tennis players of their generation among the men, went at it on the court, through wind, rain, and descending darkness swapping spectacular shots in an epic fiveset confrontation. During its experimental stage in the days leading up to World War II, there were telecasts to the few in the New York City area who had sets, and one of the more significant ones was of the Max Baer–Lou Nova championship bout on June 1, 1939, from Yankee Stadium, carried on NBC. Reportedly about 300 people saw the telecast in the smoking room of the New Amsterdam Theatre on 42nd Street in New York, and about 20,000 saw it in stores and dealer display rooms. (Around the same time, the United Kingdom was experimenting with TV and the Henry Armstrong–Ernie Roderick fight was seen in London.) The first major league baseball game to be televised was played at Ebbets Field by the Brooklyn Dodgers on August 26, 1939 against the Cincinnati Reds. It was a double-header called by Red Barber. Three months prior to this, the first collegiate baseball game was televised—the 10-inning Columbia–Princeton contest played on May 17 at Baker Field in New York City. Bill Stern called the plays. The first televised college football game aired on September 30, 1939—a match-up between New York’s Fordham University and Waynesburg College in Pennsylvania at Randall’s Island in New York. A month later the second game was telecast between Kansas State and the University of Nebraska. What has been described as the “first commercially televised pro football game” (on NBC) took place on October 22, 1939, between the football Brooklyn Dodgers and the Philadelphia Eagles from Ebbets Field. Skip Walz called the game. A year later, on October 5, 1940, came another, when Philco sponsored the airing of the game between the University of Pennsylvania and the University of Maryland. Of course, this being live television—pre-coaxial cable—these games were all telecast locally. In February 1940, the first televised hockey game was between the New York Rangers and the Montreal Canadiens. It took place at Madison Square Garden, with the Rangers winning 2–1. Three nights later the first basketball games were televised, with the University of Pittsburgh defeating Fordham University 50–37 at Madison Square Garden. This was followed the same night by a game between Georgetown University and NYU. And in June 1940, NBC telecast racing from Belmont Park on Long Island, called by Clem McCarthy. These were the antediluvian days of the medium when rudimentary camera technology (most events were limited to just two cameras) was used simply to capture the event. In the decades to come, aside from the

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traditional sporting events, would be major television celebrations—and cultural events—like the World Series, the Super Bowl, March Madness, the Heidi Game, the Munich Olympics massacre, the Rumble in the Jungle and the Thrilla in Manila, Janet Jackson’s infamous “wardrobe malfunction” during the halftime show at Super Bowl XXXVIII, NASCAR racing, the Masters, the U.S. Open, the Stanley Cup playoffs, cable television, the faux bowling “contest” between Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton during their contentious 2008 run for their party’s presidential nomination, the launching of ESPN, the beginning of The Golf Channel, and regional niche channels. And there would be the steroid scandal in baseball in 2007 that occupied hours of discussion time on the sports networks and the network and cable news programs—and was compared in scope to the infamous Black Sox scandal of nine decades earlier. On August 29, 1940, Peter Goldmark of CBS announced his invention of a color TV system. It would be a decade later, however, before the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) approved CBS’s noncompatible color system, and the U.S. Supreme Court got into the act in 1951 by upholding the FCC approval. (The network estimated that 40,000 persons saw what CBS called the first sponsored color program in television history on its airing on June 25, 1951.) A few days later, RCA demonstrated its own electronic color system, which ultimately was to become the standard.

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CHAPTER 1

The 1940s

lthough it generally has been accepted that commercial television was launched in late 1946, a check of the radio page of the New York Times offers listings of (local) television programs on a regular basis as early as September 1, 1944. WNBT, which became the NBC outlet in New York, aired a limited lineup between 8:00 and 9:15 P.M. (At that point, there was practically nothing but a test pattern on the screen from mid-afternoon until what was to become primetime.) The following night, the station telecast boxing from Madison Square Garden from 8:30 to 11:00 P.M. Although no more than a couple of hundred people at the most might have been watching on their rabbit-eared boxes with their seven-inch round screens—less in their living rooms but in the windows of appliance store of local Main Streets or maybe in bars (radio with pictures is what it familiarly was called), these might well be among the earliest regularly scheduled sporting events on television, at least locally in the Big Apple—then as now the hub of the broadcast industry. Subsequently over the next couple of years, the listing schedule included wrestling from Jamaica or St. Nicholas Arena on DuMont; pro and college basketball on CBS, generally from Madison Square Garden; and boxing on NBC. Beginning in 1946, sportscaster Red Barber had a three-times-a-week, 15-minute Sports Roundup on CBS at 6:30 P.M. Sports programming of baseball, football, basketball, and hockey were initially local or regional events. (How many fans on the West Coast really were enamored of games played by the Washington Senators? Same thing

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goes with Bostonians, who had the Braves and the Red Sox to cheer for and couldn’t bring themselves to root for, say, the Pittsburgh Pirates or the St. Louis Browns.) The first Major League Baseball game on commercial television aired locally on WGN-TV in Chicago in 1940 (the Cubs vs. the White Sox on April 16). The 1940s established the basic sports broadcast techniques still used today, minus all the flashy graphics, slow motion, instant replays, and tricky camera angles. It wasn’t until the 1950s that TV added sports-themed dramas and comedies to its schedule of live events. NBC began broadcasting Major League Baseball on a regular schedule in 1947 and continued through 1959; it broadcast the World Series exclusively from 1948 through 1976. (The 1947 World Series with the Yankees pitted against the Dodgers aired on three networks, NBC, CBS, and DuMont, at least in New York.) NBC also televised National Football League (NFL) games as far back as 1939 on experimental television and then regularly from 1955 to 1963. (DuMont aired the National Football League championship two days before Christmas in 1951.) The first major sports program airing regularly on commercial television on a three-city network—New York, Philadelphia and Schenectady—was the Gillette Cavalcade of Sports, which premiered on NBC with the Willie PepChalky White Featherweight Championship bout, called by Don Dunphy from Madison Square Garden, on September 29, 1944. Initially Cavalcade of Sports was on twice weekly—on Monday from 9:00 to 11:00 P.M. and on Friday from 9:30 to 11:00 P.M.—and continued as a Friday night boxing staple until 1960. The sponsor’s jingle, “Look Sharp, Be Sharp” (aka “The Look Sharp March”) was about as familiar as another sponsor’s “Chiquita Banana” or “Be Happy, Go Lucky.” (The TV day at this time began late in the afternoon with a test pattern, and ended around midnight with a display of the American flag and then the playing of the Star Spangled Banner.) One of the first important boxing matches on Cavalcade of Sports was the Joe Louis–Billy Conn fight on June 19, 1946 at Yankee Stadium. It’s often referred to as the first commercially televised heavyweight title fight and was seen by 141,000 people, the largest TV audience to view a fight to that date. Gillette, the razor company out of Boston sponsored, and Bob Stanton called, the fight, and Ben Grauer added “color” to the match that aired over a three-city hookup. And in September, Gillette had the Joe Louis–Tami Mauriello match-up, and the next month, the Tony Zale–Rocky Graziano fight. In October 1946, CBS broadcast the Columbia–Rutgers football game from New York, with Mel Allen calling the plays; in November NBC aired the Army–Notre Dame game—the then-called Game of the Century that

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ended in a 0–0 tie. And NBC in October 1947 offered pro football: New York Giants versus Boston Yanks (the predecessor to the Patriots) from the Polo Grounds. Along with Jack Brickhouse, the original “voice” of DuMont in the sports arena, was Russ Hodges (Mel Allen reportedly got him the gig). Born in Dayton, Tennessee, Hodges began his career in 1929 and worked for the Chicago Cubs, Washington Senators, and Cincinnati Reds before landing in the Bronx with the New York Yankees. Between April 1948 and April 1949, he hosted the nightly Russ Hodges’ Scoreboard on DuMont before finding a home with the New York Giants. It was Hodges who was at the microphone for slugger Bobby Thomson’s famous “Shot Heard ’Round the World” late in the afternoon of October 3, 1951. All-around announcer and later familiar game show host Dennis James was the wrestling commentator for DuMont virtually from the beginning, and, in his unique, affable style, more or less proved that wrestling was more show biz than sport. James regularly added his own show biz touch to the proceedings as the man at ringside, showing up, it has been reported, equipped with dog biscuits, walnut shells, and pieces of wood, which he would crack into the mike whenever a wrestler would apply a bone-crushing hold. In the early days, DuMont, and to a lesser extent ABC, televised the bulk of sports events. Among the extremely popular wrestling shows were those that originated locally from Chicago. On Sunday nights on DuPont, Jack Brickhouse called the action from Marigold Garden for nearly six years. For ABC, it was Wayne Griffin announcing from Rainbow Arena. And Dennis James did the matches from arenas around the New York area: Sunnyside Gardens, and Jerome, Jamaica, and Columbia Park Arenas. Dennis James became defined by his enthusiastic “Okay, Mother” phrase when describing a particular fall or hold—a phrase made so popular by him that he used it later as the title for one of his numerous daytime game shows. Fictional sports-themed drama made what might well have been its TV debut on February 24, 1946, when NBC aired a 45-minute playlet, Knockout. Based on an unproduced play by veteran actor J. C. Nugent and his actor/writer/director son Elliott, it was the story of a young fighter (played by Michael Road) too proud to take money from his wealthy wife to further his career. The elder Nugent starred as the boxer’s father-in-law. Perhaps because this was the infancy of dramatic television, it was not well received (and probably seen by only a handful of viewers). Variety, for instance, wrote: “Show emerged as one of the most amateurish jobs yet televised by the NBC Stations, with acting, direction, script, and camerawork, all placing

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in the elementary class.” Until TV got its live-acting act together, few dramas dealing with sports were aired (at least on the East Coast) until 1950. A more or less full evening schedule on all four networks didn’t come about until 1948, with CBS broadcasting college basketball on Monday, Wednesday, and Saturday nights, and even pro hockey periodically from Madison Square Garden, when the Rangers played. NBC aired boxing from St. Nicholas Arena in New York on Mondays and wrestling on Tuesdays. Here, for instance, is the TV sports lineup in New York for the first 10 days of 1948 (ABC hadn’t yet come into the game): January 1, CBS: Basketball from Madison Square Garden (MSG) January 2, DuMont: Wrestling from Jamaica Arena in New York January 2, NBC: Sports Review of 1947, followed by boxing at MSG January 4, CBS: NHL Hockey from MSG—Rangers versus Chicago January 5, NBC: Boxing from St. Nicholas Arena January 5, DuMont: Boxing from Jamaica Arena January 6, DuMont: Sports to Remember, followed by boxing from Park Arena January 7, CBS: NBA basketball from MSG—Knicks versus Chicago January 8, CBS: College basketball doubleheader from MSG January 8, DuMont: Wrestling from Park Arena January 9, NBC: Boxing from MSG January 9, DuMont: Wrestling from Jamaica Arena January 10, CBS: College basketball from MSG

Even today, with a myriad of cable channels, that could still be called a full slate of nighttime sporting events. On the West Coast in 1948, sports-minded Gillette sponsored the airing on KTTV of television’s first Rose Bowl game on January 1. Four years later the Rose Bowl game became the first college football match to be broadcast nationally, on NBC, and in 1962, the first coast-to-coast telecast of a college football game, also on NBC. On the West Coast, in November 1948, there was a local sports show called Hail the Champ on KLAC-TV in Los Angeles. What might have been the earliest “reality” show on television, it was a kid participation program stressing athletic prowess. Greatest Fights of the Century was a 15-minute “filler” show on NBC that aired on Friday nights between October 1948 and July 1954 after the Gillette Cavalcade of Sports. Jim Stevenson narrated newsreel films of some of the century’s major boxing matches. (Another “filler” program on NBC in 1949 was Let’s Look at Sports with Tom Duggan as host, and CBS offered Top Views in Sports, in effect, the first TV sports newsreel, hosted by Jimmy Evans.)

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On March 4, 1949, CBS aired the Golden Gloves boxing championship, followed on May 14 by live coverage of the running of the Preakness at Pimlico. DuMont’s schedule included boxing (again with Dennis James from Jamaica Arena in New York on Mondays, from Park Arena on Tuesdays, from White Plains on Wednesdays, and from Sunnyside Gardens and Dexter Arena on Thursdays) with wrestling on Fridays. CBS and ABC countered on Wednesdays with wrestling and boxing, and NBC offered the alternative live drama programming: the Kraft Television Theatre. On Saturdays, while DuMont was “dark” (the only weekend programming on that network was the Original Amateur Hour on Sundays at 7:00 P.M.), the other three featured competing college basketball games. DuMont programming was heavy into sports—particularly from the New York area—because of its limited finances and inexpensive programming that has a ready audience. Fledgling ABC aired one of television’s first bowling shows, starting the day after Christmas 1948. The half-hour weekly series, Bowling Headliners, was hosted initially by Jimmy Powers. During its second season, it had moved over to DuMont (1949–1950), with Al Cirillo hosting. To put it succinctly there was an awful lot of wrestling and boxing in the infant years, and then bowling, primarily because all three were ideal for television, as each sport is limited to the square ring (or an alley), allowing for lots of close-ups and medium shots. In contrast, baseball, football, golf, and even basketball and hockey are played in wide-open spaces. Another early, and extremely popular, ABC show was Roller Derby, which ran from March 1949 to August 1951. During the 1950s a variation of this sport was ubiquitous in syndication, and said to be even more popular on TV than major league baseball. Then it more or less vanished from the tube. The first real sports star in television—in fact he became a superstar of both biblical and Berle (as in Milton) proportions—was blond-wigged and glitteringly robed Gorgeous George (aka George Wagner), who was to pro wrestling what Liberace would be to the piano. Physically unimposing, George began his wrestling career as a teenager in his hometown of Seward, Nebraska with little success. He changed his style as an entertainer in the 1940s. According to the Web site, WrestlingMuseum.com, he developed a gimmick that would forever change both him and the sport. Writer Steve Slagle, of The Ring Chronicle, noted: “He grew his hair out so it was long, could be curled and pinned back with gold-plated bobby pins, and dyed it blond. He wore elegant robes, dubbed himself ‘The Human Orchid,’ and was always escorted by one of his male ring valets . . . who would spray his corner of the ring, as well as George’s opponents, with disinfectant perfume. He was the originator of using entrance music [à la the later Elvis] and was

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always accompanied by “Pomp and Circumstance.” George’s ring entrances were legendary and often took nearly as long as his matches.” George not only put on an effeminate act but also played the hissable bad guy, with his theatrics cheating as often as possible and infuriating the fans. It was pure show business. According to writer Slagle, “In a very real sense, Gorgeous George singlehandedly established the unproven new technology of television as a viable, entertaining new medium that could reach literally millions of homes. Pro wrestling was TV’s first real ‘hit’ with the public.” Gorgeous George and Haystack Calhoun, Killer Kowalsky and Nature Boy Buddy Rogers were of another era. Modern generations know only Hulk Hogan, Rowdy Roddy Piper, The Rock, and Stone Cold Steve Austin. NBC, CBS, and DuMont aired television’s first World Series in 1947 (manager Bucky Harris’s New York Yankees lost to Burt Shotton’s Brooklyn Dodgers), which was seen in just four cities—New York, Washington, Schenectady, and Philadelphia. Since that time, broadcasting of the World Series has been alternated among the four networks (NBC, CBS, ABC, and in more contemporary times, Fox). These were in the years predating ESPN, television’s major sports network. Mel Allen called the first televised World Series and all the others through 1963. CBS first brought college (and later, professional) basketball to television— a court doubleheader from Madison Square Garden that was simulcast on New York radio’s WHN—in early January 1946. During the 1948–1949 season, NBC aired the games of the semipro New York Gothams, which were called on Sunday nights by Bob Stanton, at least in the New York area. In July 1949, Mel Allen called the first All-Star Game on television, from Ebbets Field. Subsequently, NBC had the game from 1950 through 1975. Mel Allen covered games for CBS beginning in 1950 on Monday nights, broadcast after Arthur Godfrey’s Talent Scouts, during the college tournament season. This was a forerunner, by many decades, of the network’s March Madness days. Auto racing on television goes back to 1949 and 1950, when the Indianapolis 500 aired live locally from station WFBM. There’d be another 15 years before it was seen nationally on TV when, in 1965, ABC began airing a combination of film and taped highlights of it on Wide World of Sports. After a few years it was televised with same-day coverage in tape delay. ABC has continued a television association with the Indianapolis 500 ever since. Starting in 1986, the race aired for the first time live with flag-to-flag coverage, and in 2007, it became an ESPN on ABC event.

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Also in those early television days, longtime radio sportscaster Red Barber began a long run with Red Barber’s Corner, a sports mainstay that aired first on CBS (1949–1955) and then on NBC (1955–1958). It was a 15-minute sports commentary show following the Dodgers games initially, where Barber called the play-by-play. Later, when he was doing the Yankees games (until he was fired in 1966), he hosted a local post-game show in New York.

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CHAPTER 2

The 1950s

n the early 1950s, an assortment of comics who had come out of films (and radio) plied their humor on the new medium, in some cases resurrecting or doing variations on routines they had perfected in earlier days. And invariably, boxing was the perfect fodder. Take Buster Keaton, for one. Having worn out his welcome on the screen years before and now reduced to a script supervisor and gag writer, he landed his own TV gig in 1950 in The Buster Keaton Studebaker Show, syndicated from the West Coast. On one episode, taken from one of his early silents, Keaton found himself having to climb into the ring to face a boxer with whose wife Keaton inadvertently had been seen out on the town. (This had nothing to do with one of reported fitness freak Keaton’s most famous films of the 1920s, Battling Butler.) And there were others, from Ed Wynn to Milton Berle, Red Skelton to Jackie Gleason, Jack Benny to the Three Stooges, even Lucille Ball. And of course, Bud Abbott and Lou Costello. Bud and Lou, on their own syndicated show in 1952, also managed to indulge in TV’s reigning sport of the time: wrestling. In “The Wrestling Match,” Lou is forced to get into the ring with a guy named Ivan the Terrible in a charity match when his (Lou’s) buddy Stinky ( Joe Besser) gets sick. All of these legends at one time or another did a skit or two dealing with boxing in the early TV days. The Ed Wynn Show, which premiered live from the West Coast (and kinescoped for New York) on October 6, 1949 on CBS immediately ran into a talent booking problem, as big-name movie

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performers wanted nothing to do with the new medium. Its star did some boxing spoofs (old pal Buster Keaton was one of the early stars and Lucy and Desi made their TV debuts on it). And on The Milton Berle Show, which preceded Wynn’s by16 months, Berle frequently donned baggy boxing shorts, usually pulled up to his armpits, subscribing to the old “no hitting below the belt” boxing adage, and oversized gloves. (On Berle’s Texaco Star Theatre, in April 1954, Uncle Miltie had to gear himself up for a match with heavyweight champion Ezzard Charles!) Red Skelton brought punch-drunk Cauliflower McPugg, one of his repertoire of distinctive characters, from radio when he premiered his 20-year-run television show at the start of the 1951–1952 season. Jack Benny himself climbed into the ring, as a boastful coward, of course, on one of this earlier TV shows, and later, in 1954, did a skit in which he daydreamed about being a fight manager for Kid Dynamite, in the guise of Dennis Day. In “The Next Champ,” a 1954 episode of The Honeymooners, Ralph Kramden comes up with his weekly hair-brained scheme—to become fight manager to a smalltime boxer named Dynamite Moran, who moves in with him and Alice. Alice, of course, wants to KO Ralph for this bright idea of taking on a green boxer with two bouts and two defeats. And in a 1956 episode of a show (one of the socalled 39 lost episodes) titled “The Bensonhurst Bomber,” Ralph is goaded by Norton into challenging a pool hall pal to a boxing match at Kelsey’s Gym. On I Love Lucy, Lucille Ball and Vivian Vance become “TV boxing widows” when Desi Arnaz and William Frawley go ga-ga over the sport in a 1953 episode called “Ricky and Fred Are TV Fans.” More to the subject, though, was an episode of the Westinghouse Desilu Playhouse in 1958 (Lucy sans Desi), called “K.O. Kitty.” Lucy plays a woman who inherits a boxer from her uncle and expects a cute pooch, only to discover she has actually gotten a real pugilist—a washed-up one—in the person of Aldo Ray. (The basic storyline was suspiciously like the one used years later in the Barbra Streisand/Ryan O’Neal movie The Main Event.) And even later, in 1967, on The Lucy Show, Lucy found herself once again as a prizefight manager—to Don Rickles—on the episode “Fight Manager.” On the Spring Byington show in 1955, December Bride, one-time fighter Art Aragon made a guest appearance when Lily Ruskin (Byington) invites him to a celebrity match. The title of the episode was “The Boxing Show.” On the March 1955 I Married Joan episode, titled “The Lady and the Prize Fighter,” Joan Davis, to the bemusement of “husband” Jim Backus, became involved innocently with the boxer named Mushy Callahan. Mushy, of course, was a real-life fighter who was World Middle-Welterweight (renamed junior welterweight) boxing champion and was inducted into the World Boxing Hall of Fame in 1989.

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The 1949 Emmys—awarded in the spring of 1950—for the first time had a category for TV sports: Best Sports Coverage. Since the Emmys in those days originated exclusively on the West Coast, the five nominees were local broadcasts: USC-UCLA Football (ABC); Wrestling, Amateur Boxing, and Ice Hockey (all local on KTLA); and College Basketball (CBS). To this day there remains confusion over the actual winner. (Microwave transmissions out of New York before the early 1950s could reach only as far west as St. Louis, and kinescope was the method by which syndicated shows could be seen nationally.) The next year the Emmys had a Best Sports Program category. The five nominees were based on West Coast broadcasts. NBC won for its coverage of Rams Football. The four other nominees were College Basketball Games and College Football Games (both on CBS) and Hollywood Baseball and Los Angeles Baseball (both local programs). There would not be another sports category until 1953. In the spring of 1950,Yankees’ slugger Joe DiMaggio—the first major sports figure outside his milieu on the new medium—had his own syndicated television show, broadcast from New York every Monday night at 7:30 on NBC. Jack Barry, later of game show fame, produced and hosted, and DiMaggio answered questions from a panel of youngsters about how to play sports properly and other sports trivia. The filmed show, sponsored by the Lionel Train Company, later moved to Saturday afternoons at 5:30. DiMaggio also hosted another sports quiz show, Joe DiMaggio’s Dugout, a 1951 syndicated TV series. Jackie Robinson’s Sports Classroom was a 15-minute show that aired on Thursday evenings locally in New York (on WPIX) beginning in December 1950. In the early days, many local TV stations had their own popular pregame and postgame shows. Among the more enduring and nostalgic ones was Happy Felton’s Knothole Gang, which preceded the Brooklyn Dodgers games in New York beginning in April 1950 and continued for seven years until “Dem Bums” left town. Felton, a former vaudeville, stage, and radio comic, hosted local kids who got a chance to toss the ball around at Ebbets Field with some of the players. (There’d be similar type of shows, generally locally late in the 1950s with Roy Campanella, after his devastating automobile accident, and Ralph Kiner, who chatted up many of their fellow players on the diamond.) On August 11, 1951, CBS aired the first baseball game on color television (not the same color system that later was developed by NBC and has become the standard). The CBS game(s) was between the Brooklyn Dodgers and the Boston Braves (a double-header) from Ebbets Field. Red Barber and Connie Desmond called the games. In 1951, NBC sewed up a deal to broadcast college football. (The agreement ran until 1987.) The match-up

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between Duke and the University of Pittsburgh, on September 22, was to be the first live coast-to-coast sporting event. And on October 3 came the first coast-to-coast telecast of a World Series game, sponsored by Gillette and airing on the three major networks. On June 5, 1952, the Joe Walcott–Ezzard Charles fight from Philadelphia became the first boxing event televised nationally. Boxing also was at the heart of a rivalry around this time between movie theaters and TV stations to see televised fights. Theater TV, as it was called, showed headline boxing matches live on the big screen, at the expense of television stations, and the International Boxing Commission got 40 cents for every theater seat sold. This arrangement soon wore out its novelty, and television alone became the fight game’s showcase—unless one preferred to be in the arena ringside. Along with sports programming that was now being telecast on a regular basis—baseball, college football, boxing, and wrestling—sports-themed dramas and comedies were beginning to become part of the network schedules. Because of their lesser esteem in the eyes of audiences through the years, wrestling and boxing, as dramas, frequently were on the seedy side. Boxing in particular generally portrayed their protagonists as washed-up, has-beens, and down-and-outers looking for another chance in the ring for a few more moments of glory. Actor and onetime pro boxer Canada Lee made his television debut in January 1950 as the star of writer Frank Alexander’s story, The Final Bell, airing on NBC’s Chevrolet Tele-Theatre. Lee, the first black actor to star in a television drama, played a onetime pug who refuses to throw a fight to a man he knows he can lick. (Beulah starring Ethel Waters didn’t begin airing for another 10 months, although it had been a hit on radio since 1944.) For the record, The Hazel Scott Show, on DuMont during the summer of 1950, was the first network variety series to be hosted by an African American woman. The Final Bell would be Lee’s only television acting. He was blacklisted and driven from the country. Shortly after making one final movie, he died in 1952 at the age of 45. In February 1950, on The Silver Theatre on CBS, there was a telecast of Howard Rodman’s original, “Never Hit a Pigeon.” It was a whimsical yarn about a young prizefighter ( James Lydon) who raised pigeons for a hobby, much as Marlon Brando’s boxing alter ego did later in On the Waterfront. Also from that period (April 1950) was a one-shot, half-hour NBC drama titled Come Out Fighting set in the world of prizefighting. The story revolved around two rival fight managers, Stick Keenan and Honest John McCorkindale (played by Lee Tracy and J. Edward Bloomberg). A young Marlon Brando, in just his second known TV acting gig, played Jimmy Brand, the green

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fighter of one of them. The program, which also featured Russ Hodges as the ring announcer, aired live locally in New York. Veteran actor J. Edward Bromberg did quite possibly his last work here before being blacklisted and moving to England where he died the next year. The comedy/drama “The Screwball” aired live in the spring of 1950 on CBS’s The Play’s the Thing with Jack Gilford and Lee Grant. Written by Mel Goldberg, it told of an average “shlub,” a garage mechanic, and his pursuit of his dream of being a major league pitcher. It later was restaged on Studio One on CBS in 1951 with Dick Foran and Cloris Leachman and again in 1954 with Jack Warden and Sally Gracie. On March 11, 1951, Bud Abbott and Lou Costello, in their second appearance on the Colgate Comedy Hour on NBC, performed their legendary “Who’s on First?” baseball classic for the first time on television. The comics had introduced the routine in their burlesque act in the 1930s and brought it to radio as recurring guests on the Kate Smith Show in 1939. “Who’s on First?,” which was “inducted” into the Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, was performed by Bud and Lou in two of their movies, as well as many times through the years on radio and television. In May 1951, ABC broadcast the first nighttime network baseball series (on Saturday nights) featuring all-women teams: the National Women’s Professional Baseball League Games. The first season, following the home games of the Queens of America, aired from Chicago, the second, New York (the games of the Arthur Murray Girls), with Don Dunphy doing the play-byplay and Bob Finnegan providing color commentary. Dunphy, who had been calling games for Gillette since the radio days, was to become the voice of boxing on television over the next decades. Twenty years later, NBC brought men’s major league baseball to primetime. Otherwise, Major League Baseball was generally all local or regional. For several months in 1951, CBS aired an audience participation boxing show called Kid Gloves. It was broadcast live from Philadelphia and featured kids ranging in age from 3 to 12 who were given the opportunity to test their prospective boxing skills in three-round matches. Sylvester Stallone’s new millennium Contender, anyone? Boxing was the theme, in late October 1951, of a filmed drama on the syndicated Bigelow Theatre. In the half-hour playlet by writer Ted Thomas (the father of classical pianist/symphony conductor Michael Tilson Thomas) called “T.K.O.,” a 19-year-old Martin Milner (a decade before he starred as footloose Tod Stiles on Route 66 and then Officer Pete Malloy on Adam 12) played a young boxer told to take a dive into a fixed match. One of his boxing buddies was played by virtual TV newcomer James Dean.

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September 4, 1951 marked America’s first regular coast-to-coast telecast. That doesn’t mean, though, that there was a real change yet in the world of televised sports. Boxing events—live in the East—were still on tape to the West Coast. Baseball and football games were still local or regional (which they would remain basically for the next 40 or 50 years). DuMont, in 1952, was still basically into sports, and the longest-running on the struggling network were Famous Fights From Madison Square Garden that year and then Boxing From Eastern Parkway in Brooklyn (between May 1954 and August 1956), with first Ted Husing as the announcer and then young Chris Schenkel. Ultimately the bouts moved to St Nicholas Arena, where they stayed until DuMont went out of the network business in 1956. It was the network’s last series when it ceased operations (as a network) on August 6. Hockey, often called by its nonenthusiasts, a “niche” sport, was always popular in Canada, where NHL games were televised nationally by the Canadian Broadcasting Company beginning in 1952. Five years later, CBS became the first U.S. television network to carry NHL games, although it covered hockey locally as far back as 1947. On January 5 of that year, for instance, CBS aired a game between the New York Rangers and Chicago Blackhawks at Madison Square Garden. By 1954, wrestling had just about vanished from the network schedules as a major TV sport, relegated more or less to local and regional programming. It would be two decades before it got its second act on the tube. At that time it became even more popular with the launching of the WWF (World Wrestling Federation) and WWE (World Wrestling Entertainment), as well as cult shows like Friday Night Smackdown. “A Man’s Game,” a 1952 baseball drama by writer David Shaw (a fireball pitching young woman proves she’s good enough for a men’s team), aired on NBC’s Philco Television Playhouse, with Patricia Benoit in the lead, along with Vinton Hayworth. David Susskind produced it and five years later had it reworked and expanded as a musical for Nanette Fabray on The Kaiser Aluminum Hour. Gene Nelson, Paul Ford, and Lew Parker also were in the cast. David Shaw’s “0 for 37” opened the 1953–1954 Philco season. It starred James Broderick (Matthew’s dad) as a ballplayer who comes to appreciate the value of home and family after a shaky start in professional baseball. Eva Marie Saint and Arthur O’Connell also starred. Shaw, who died in 2007, has been credited with being possibly the most prolific writer in the days of live television. In 1953, an early Rod Serling baseball tale (he was equally prolific), “Old MacDonald Had a Curve,” aired on the Kraft Television Theatre. It told of a sixty-something ex-major league pitcher (Cameron Prud’homme)

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who, after developing a freakish curve ball, attempts to get back into the game with his former team. “Baseball Blues,” written by Steven Gethers, was a baseball story that aired on The United States Steel Hour in 1954, with stalwart, square-jawed Frank Lovejoy playing a 40-year-old pitcher facing his retirement from the game. Lovejoy, incidentally, was baseball legend Rogers Hornsby to Ronald Reagan’s Grover Cleveland Alexander on the big screen a couple of years earlier. On the sports side, in the pilot episode (actually the second pilot) of his later private eye series, Meet McGraw, that aired on an anthology called Stage 7 in spring 1955, Lovejoy hired himself out as a bodyguard for a swaggering prizefighter named Pretty Boy Mandero (played by Biff Elliot). Two other Rod Serling baseball-themed dramas also aired in the mid1950s: “The Man Who Caught the Ball at Coogan’s Bluff” (on Studio One) with comedian Alan Young as a baseball fan who becomes a reluctant national celebrity after making a spectacular catch in the stands of a home run ball. The rather whimsical “O’Toole From Moscow” (on NBC Matinee Theatre) featured Chuck Connors, himself a onetime major leaguer, as a baseballloving Soviet citizen who defects to the United States to play for the Cincinnati Reds. (Leo Durocher also acted in this show) After World War II, before becoming an actor, Connors played center for basketball’s Boston Celtics briefly during the 1946–1947 season, then kicked around in baseball for awhile, playing in the minors, then for the Brooklyn Dodgers for a short time in 1949 and for the Chicago Cubs in 1951. Ultimately he abandoned sports for acting. In late 1956, one of his gigs on ABC’s primetime religious program Crossroads, starred him as Philadelphia A’s (and later Cleveland Indians) Lou Brissie, a player who came out of the war with a serious leg injury and overcame his handicap to pitch in the majors in the late 1940s and early 1950s. Variety pointed to Connors as “a young actor who should be around a long time, taking on bigger assignments.” The actual star of the drama was Don DeFore, playing Brissie’s spiritual adviser, Rev. C. E. “Stoney Jackson,” at the time baseball’s unofficial chaplain and director of the Christian Athletes’ Foundation of Tullahoma, Tennessee. In another baseball tale, for NBC’s Goodyear Television Theatre in 1955, novelist Eliot Asinov turned his baseball-themed book, Man on Spikes, about a thirty-something minor leaguer (Warren Stevens) and his struggle to become a big league player into an hour-long teleplay. Also in 1955, Buster Crabbe starred on Kraft Television Theatre in “Million-Dollar Rookie.” Another television drama by writer Mel Goldberg, it dealt with the father-son relationship in a broken home. The father had dropped out of baseball and left his family after throwing a beanball that killed a batter. The son (played by

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Richard York, later to be one of the two Darrin’s on Bewitched), a rookie just entering the majors, is driven by an overpowering desire to win and hits a player on the opposing team. Still another Kraft drama the next year was titled “The Life of Mickey Mantle” (Kevin Coughlin was The Mick as a kid and James Olson played the Yankees star to the age of 24). The original teleplay was by veteran Nicholas E. Baehr. Joe DiMaggio and other Bronx Bombers made guest appearances in the hour-long biodrama. The Mighty Casey, a short American opera by William Schulman (libretto by Jeremy Gury), adapted from Ernest L. Thayer’s famed baseball poem, Casey at the Bat, aired live in 1955 on CBS’s Omnibus. E. G. Marshall narrated and Danny Scholl starred as the stalwart player. And on Screen Director’s Playhouse, the legendary John Ford, in a rare foray into television, directed pal John Wayne as a cynical small town sports writer in Rookie of the Year, played by the Duke’s real-life son, Patrick Wayne. Vera Miles, Ward Bond, James Gleason, and other Ford regulars also appeared in this half-hour filmed drama. Adapted by Frank S. Nugent, who’d scripted a number of John Ford movie classics, from a story by W. R. Burnett, it tells how the journalist stumbles on a scoop: the father (Bond) of the Major League “Rookie of the Year” (the younger Wayne in his debut) happens to have been a disgraced player who was involved in a White Sox-like bribery scandal. And Duke, out of decency, chooses to kill the story. The premise was similar to that of another Ford TV film in the 1960s, Flashing Spikes, with James Stewart along with Pat Wayne and Ward Bond. Also in 1955, on the ABC anthology series TV’s Reader’s Digest, which dramatized true story articles from the magazine, Lee Marvin starred in the baseball-oriented drama, “How Charlie Faust Won a Pennant for the Giants.” Faust was the real-life pre-World War I pitcher for the New York Giants under John McGraw (played by Alan Reed). And on CBS’s Schlitz Playhouse of Stars, there was a baseball-themed drama that year. In “The Last Out,” veteran actor Thomas Mitchell was a once promising ball player who now finds himself groundskeeper for a team in the minors. Regis Toomey, as a big league scout who was one of his long ago protégés, and Touch (later Mike) Connors, as the club’s big hitter, also starred in this drama by Douglas Morrow, from a Frank O’Rourke story. On NBC’s popular weekly anthology series named after her, glamorous Loretta Young found herself playing a mom coaching her young son’s Little League team with her friend (Mabel Albertson) as the manager. The Loretta Young Show episode was called, naturally, “Little League.”

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“The Lou Gehrig Story,” basically focusing on the Yankees legend’s battle against the disease that took his life, was retold by writer Mel Goldberg in a live episode of the weekly hour-long show Climax! on baseball’s opening day in 1956. Wendell Corey and Jean Hagen portrayed Lou and Eleanor Gehrig. “Corey,” Variety’s critic found, “gave the Gehrig portrayal becoming dignity, pride and restraint; Jean Hagen was excellent as his loving, understanding wife.” Lou Gehrig’s Greatest Day: July 4, 1939 was reenacted on CBS’s You Are There in the year before the Climax! drama. Just two nights before the Gehrig show, the (condensed) story of Jackie Jensen, the golden boy of the Boston Red Sox during the 1950s, was dramatized on ABC’s DuPont Cavalcade of America in mid 1956, with Gary Gray as the teenage Jackie, whose sports goals were set by his junior high school coach, Ralph Kerchum (played by Ross Elliott), who saved him—according to the playlet—from becoming a juvenile delinquent. A half-hour drama titled “For the Record” was written by Lou Rusoff. At the end, Jackie Jensen turned up on the show as himself, and Variety noted: “The ballplayer himself registers warmly, despite an obvious lack of thespic polish.” He had the unique distinction of having played in both the Rose Bowl as a college star where he was an All-American halfback from the University of California, Berkeley, and in the major leagues, where he became the Most Valuable Player in 1958. He was also the only player ever to be the subject of a Norman Rockwell magazine cover. Bob Feller, the Cleveland Indians star pitcher, talked about his career on The Mike Wallace Interview series in 1957, discussing ballplayers’ salaries, the reserve clause, rich ball clubs, Pay TV, beer companies as sponsors, bean balls, gambling, and Joe DiMaggio versus Ted Williams. Wallace also interviewed other celebrities and world figures in the series, and at least one other sports personality, jockey Eddie Arcaro, during the show’s run on ABC during the 1957–1958 season. (The Ransom Center at the University of Texas at Austin has a complete collection of the interviews, which were donated by Mike Wallace, and the transcripts of the interviews can be read online at www.hrc.utexas.edu/collections.) On the Alcoa Hour in 1957, young Peter Lazer starred as Benjie Hauptmann, a precocious youngster with baseball in his eyes (despite his parents’ misgivings) in veteran writer Blanche Hanalis’s “The Littlest Little Leaguer,” which had the then-Brooklyn Dodgers’ Sal Maglie turning up as himself in a guest appearance. Baseball also was the theme of a popular episode of The Phil Silvers Show in October 1957, when Sergeant Bilko’s team from the motor pool got

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shellacked in a big game against Company B’s WAC team of typists in an episode called “The Hillbilly Whiz.” Dick Van Dyke, making what appears to have been his TV acting debut, turned up as Pvt. Harry Lumpkin, a Southern hillbilly with a great arm, whom scheming Bilko saw as a chance to make a fortune by selling him to the New York Yankees. Coming aboard in cameos were Yogi Berra, Phil Rizzuto, Whitey Ford, and Gil McDougald. On CBS’s Desilu Playhouse, in a 1959 episode titled “Comeback,” veteran actor Dan Duryea starred as a down-and-out ex-baseball star who, knocking around the country and with the help of an attractive young widow, regains his self-respect coaching a small Midwestern town’s Little League team. And on Lassie, of all shows, Roy Campanella turned up as himself in a 1959 episode called “The Mascot,” in which he visits Timmy’s ( Jon Provost) local Little League baseball team in his wheelchair. Big Apple newspaperman Damon Runyon became known in the late 1930s for his humorous New York-ese tales about the low-life who inhabited a rather unique Manhattan. These short stories, it has been pointed out, were written in a distinctive vernacular style: a mixture of formal speech and colorful slang, almost always in present tense, and his particular verbal patois became familiar as Runyonesque. His habitués were gamblers, gangsters, garrulous goons, and, to use the terminology of his own show that became a huge Broadway hit, guys and dolls. Although he died in 1946, a decade before the show bearing his name in the title aired, Runyon also pseudo-hosted his own weekly half-hour series, The Damon Runyon Theatre on CBS every Saturday night in the mid 1950s (although actor Donald Woods did the actual narration). On occasion, sports was the theme. Take for instance “The Pee Wees Take Over,” in which the son of a bookie finds himself tossed off a Little League baseball team for unsportsmanlike conduct. His button-busting dad then sponsors his own team for the kid to give him a chance. Steve Brodie played the father and Stuffy Singer was the rather shady kid. In 1956, there were several others out of the Runyon library dealing with the boxing game: “The Face of Johnny Dolliver” (Biff Elliott had the title role as a battered prizefighter who falls for a deb, gives up the ring, and has his face remodeled) and “The Big Umbrella” ( James Gleason as a fight promoter who discovers a promising boxer who happens to be the deposed and broke king of a mythical country). Still another Runyon tale was “Bred for Battle” on The Damon Runyon Theatre. The idea of an idealistic fight manager named Wilbur (Race Gentry, an actual “B” actor with a Runyonesque name) for building the perfect fighter is to breed one. Wilbur offers to loan an ex-boxer, Benny Toledo (Slapsie

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Maxie Rosenbloom), the cash needed to get married—on the condition that he gets to train the couple’s first boy as a boxer. Sheldon Leonard turned up as a sleazy manager/handler colorfully called Silky Mitts. Ernest Hemingway’s short story, “The Battler,” about a punch-drunk boxing mug, first aired on network television (Omnibus, 1953) with Jack Palance. It would be expanded and restaged in 1955 on Playwrights ’56 with Paul Newman, who later played the part in the movies. And on Climax!, in 1956, Ring Lardner’s short story “Champion,” which had made a top ranking star of Kirk Douglas in the 1949 theatrical feature, was restaged with Rory Calhoun in the lead as somewhat unscrupulous boxer Midge Kelly opposite Geraldine Brooks. Rod Serling wrote the TV adaptation; Allen Reisner directed. On the NBC anthology series Robert Montgomery Presents in late 1953, Gig Young starred in writer Thomas C. Parisi’s original boxing-themed drama, “The Sunday Punch,” as Tony Marino, a onetime big name fighter on his way down. Pressured to take a dive in a match with an up-and-comer, he becomes irate and nearly kills the younger guy in the ring. On CBS’s General Electric Theatre in early 1955, host Ronald Reagan introduced a tale called “The Return of Gentleman Jim,” with a cast that included George Montgomery (in the title role as Victorian era boxer Jim Corbett), Marilyn Erskine, Jesse White, and Joe Louis, whose character was merely “The Champ.” Based on the short story by Bob Foreman, the half-hour playlet had Corbett returning to the living in 1947 to engage in a prizefight with current champion, Joe Louis. Some months later, Reagan (now listed as “on-air program supervisor”) hosted “Winner by Decision,” an original Budd Schulberg boxing drama costarring Harry Belafonte, what might have been his TV acting debut, and veteran Ethel Waters. It was a short story (22 minutes or so) in which Belafonte was an ambitious young prizefighter on the cusp of fame and fortune in the ring (under somewhat unscrupulous Roy Glenn, who years later would play Sidney Poitier’s down-to-earth dad in Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner). Waters was Belafonte’s far-sighted mom who pulls him up short with her motherly advice. Ronald Reagan himself starred in the General Electric Theatre episode “Father and Son Night” in late 1957, playing an undefeated middleweight champ who retires from the ring and then disappoints his son when he turns his back on taunts from the new champion (Keith Larson) to defend his title. Between the two General Electric Theatre dramas, there was “The Big Payday,” on CBS’s Schlitz Playhouse of Stars. James Whitmore played an ex boxer, Tommy McDermott, who never made it to the big money and now is

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the crusty manager of a fighter in whom he sees, finally, the big payday. “A fight story without a fight,” Variety observed, “ ‘The Big Payday’ packs more punch than many a square-ringed saga. Richard English’s teleplay unravels a behind-the-scenes story, building up to a championship match and an attempt by gamblers to fix the fight.” Even NBC’s The Roy Rogers Show, set in contemporary times rather than the Old West (Roy rode around not only atop Trigger but also in a Jeep lovingly called Nellybelle), got into the sports game. In a late December 1952 episode called “The Knockout,” Roy rides to the aid of an old woman whose boxer grandson (young Charles Bronson in an early TV performance) has come under the thumb of crooks. Bronson also would play put-upon boxers in other television melodramas including “The Boxing Match” on the Brian Keith series The Crusader in late 1955, as a refugee from a communist country who gets mixed up with crooked fight promoter; a 1958 M Squad episode, “The Fight”; and One Step Beyond’s “The Last Round” in 1961, playing a down-and-out pugilist haunted by a ghost. In the series, West Point Story, airing on CBS in the late 1950s, Leonard Nimoy played a young Golden Gloves middleweight champion who follows in the footsteps of his successful boxer brother (played by onetime baseball star John Beradino) and enters West Point, only to have the latter try to get him expelled so that the young sibling can pursue a ring career. The episode was called “His Brother’s Fist.” Around the same time, on ABC’s primetime religion-oriented series Crossroads, on an episode titled “Ringside Padre,” Stephen McNally portrayed the real-life Major Harold Engle, director of New York City’s Catholic Youth Organization. He begins a crusade to make it illegal for a fighter to turn professional until the age of 16 after seeing one teenage boxer (a young Michael Landon) disfigured in the ring. In October 1959, John Cassavetes introduced his hipster TV series (his one and only), Johnny Staccato, in which Johnny investigated in “Viva, Paco!,” the disappearance of a Puerto Rican boxer named Paco Vidella on the eve of his fight for the featherweight championship. The episode was written by Gerald Orsini, with pro boxer (and character actor) Jimmy Murphy as Paco and Miriam Colon as his mom. The three most famous sports-themed dramas of the decade were, arguably, Rod Serling’s memorable “Requiem for a Heavyweight” on Playhouse 90 in 1956 with Jack Palance as the washed-up fighter hoping to rehabilitate himself but forced to make a clown of himself in the wrestling ring, and the baseball stories “Fear Strikes Out” and “Bang the Drum Slowly.” On Climax!, “Fear Strikes Out” (adapted from Red Sox star Jim Piersall’s autobiography) starred Tab Hunter and Anthony Perkins in the later film. “Bang the Drum

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Slowly” was adapted by Arnold Schulman for the United States Steel Hour from Mark Harris’s novel. Paul Newman, Albert Salmi, and George Peppard starred (when the theatrical version of it was made some years later, Robert De Niro had the Salmi role about a dying major leaguer). Moochie of the Little League (aka A Diamond Is a Boy’s Best Friend) aired in two parts on ABC’s Disneyland. Moochie Morgan (played by Kevin Corcoran) led a campaign to start a Little League team, the Bobcats, and be its catcher. Not long afterward, Disney had Moochie try football, in another kid’s sports two-parter, Moochie of Pop Warner Football. Ham Fisher’s popular comic strip about upstanding, if rather clueless, pugilist Joe Palooka came to TV in a short-lived, low-budget 1954 syndicated series The Joe Palooka Story (among the first “scripted” sports-oriented series in television). Square-jawed ex-golf champion (like his dad) Joe Kirkwood Jr. was the lead, as he had been in the “B” series of theatrical Palooka films of the late 1940s. During the 1920s and 1930s, Joe Sr. won the British, Australian, New Zealand, and Canadian Opens and was Dwight D. Eisenhower’s personal golfing instructor. In the 1954–1955 TV series “Slapsie” Maxie Rosenbloom was Palooka’s pal, Humphrey Pennyworth (played in films by Robert Coogan), and Luis Van Rooten was Knobby Walsh (popular character actors Leon Errol and later James Gleason had that role in the theatrical series). In one TV episode, a then barely known Paul Newman can be spotted as a fight spectator. Around the same time, NBC began airing what might be the earliest sports-oriented network weekly sitcom, The Duke (not to be confused with the similarly titled later detective series also on NBC and also dealing peripherally with sports). The July–September 1954 sitcom dealt with a streetwise professional boxer who, in his spare time, becomes an accomplished artist. Paul Gilbert and Phyllis Coates (Lois Lane of Superman fame) starred, and Sheldon Leonard, later to become a prolific television producer and director, played the Duke’s “dese-dems-dose” fight promoter, trying to entice him back to the ring. Former heavyweight champ Max Baer discombobulated Lou Costello in the 1953 episode “Killer’s Wife,” on the syndicated Abbott and Costello Show, as a jealous fighter who suspects that his sexy wife (Mary Beth Hughes) is carrying on with neighbor Lou. And on the short-lived NBC show So This Is Hollywood, about two aspiring actresses played by Virginia Gibson and Mitzi Green, the latter begins dating boxer Max Baer. Real-life lightweight contender Art Aragon and Johnny Indrisano, who also had a ring career, each guest starred in the 1955 episode (“He Done Her Wrong”) as well. Aragon also had an acting gig guest starring (as a boxer) on Spring Byington’s

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popular sitcom December Bride, in a 1955 episode titled “The Boxing Show.” Once labeled boxing’s “Golden Boy,” Aragon never won a world title but had a celebrity lifestyle that made him a top drawing card in the ring in the 1940s and 1950s before turning to acting gigs and many TV appearances, generally in the role of a fighter. Aragon was given an impressive obit in the New York Times and elsewhere when he died in the spring of 2008. NBC’s Philco Television Playhouse scored with “Shadow of the Champ” (1955), written by prolific TV drama scribe Robert Alan Aurthur and directed by veteran Robert Mulligan. On an ocean voyage, Lee Grant, playing the disenchanted sister of a sportswriter, is thrown together with Eli Wallach, the boyhood chum and much abused manager of the heavyweight champion of the world ( Jack Warden), and she slowly proceeds to draw him away from his lifelong shadow-like attachment to the champ. “Warden, was robust and ruthless,” Variety reported at the time, “yet reluctantly understanding, as the champ, giving a great performance.” “The Birth of Modern Boxing” was the title of a You Are There episode in June 1955, in which host Walter Cronkite and a crew of CBS reporters covered the 1892 John L. Sullivan/Jim Corbett fight. Two years later, on host/ narrator John Nesbitt’s Telephone Time on CBS, an incident in the life of Jewish ex-lightweight champ Benny Leonard, known as the “Ghetto Wizard,” was dramatized in “Fight for the Title.” Michael Landon played Leonard, whose boxing career was centered in the 1920s. Assorted 1950s dramas dealing with boxing included the 1953 Four Star Playhouse tale, “Knockout,” starring Broderick Crawford as a handler who sees to it that his fighter, a young heavyweight played by Ron Hargrave, refuses to take a dive in a fight that was fixed by his opponent’s crooked manager (Ted DeCorsia). It differs slightly from the typical fight drama in that, as Variety said in its review at the time, “he doesn’t do it for his mother or his girlfriend, but because it’s the right thing to do. Need it be added that in the rematch, he clobbers the champ loose from the title?” Blake Edwards directed and co-wrote it (one of his first TV gigs). There also was a 1954 Loretta Young Show, titled “Count of Ten,” in which Loretta is a critically ill wife of retired boxer Tiger Tipton (played by Eddie Albert) who climbs back into the ring to raise money for a life-saving operation for her. And on Jane Wyman Presents the Fireside Theatre, in the 1956 episode “Assignment Champ,” Donald Curtis was a misanthropic boxing champion who dislikes women. On ABC’s Naked City in June 1959, in a 30-minute episode by series writer Stirling Silliphant called “The Canvas Bullet,” Harry Guardino played an ex-boxer who needs money for his wife (Diane Ladd) to enter her prize

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roses in a flower show. He goes to his former manager who gets an alcoholic ex-doctor to ensure that the guy can fight again safely. Rocky Graziano had a prominent role as, what else, a boxer. Stuart Rosenberg directed. With a new title, it was remade for Naked City several years later as the hour-long “Five Cranks for Winter . . . Ten Cranks for Spring” with Robert Duvall and Shirley Knight. Events in the career of ex-boxer Joey Barnum, a welterweight boxer of the 1940s, were fictionalized in an episode of the Westinghouse Desilu Playhouse, “The Killer Instinct,” in mid-1959, written by Joseph Landon. Starring was a dubiously cast Rory Calhoun as Hispanic ring idol Juan O’Rourke who gives up his career at its peak to return to his hometown in Mexico and there takes up the management of a promising amateur named Angel (played by Michael Dante). Chicago-born Barnum’s real name was Guiseppi Rosselli Jr., but he fought as Gentleman Joey, the Lockheed Bomber. In later life he was a fight manager, then bail bondsman, and even, for a while, one of Marilyn Monroe’s reported bodyguards. In March 1950, CBS joined the weekly boxing fray with its Pabst Blue Ribbon bouts on Wednesday nights in competition with NBC’s Gillette Cavalcade of Sports (Ted Husing, then Russ Hodges, and later Jack Drees called the fights for Pabst). Meanwhile ABC offered Roller Derby three times a week beginning in 1950 and pro baseball on Saturday afternoon. Roller Derby was practically an unknown sport until TV discovered it. ABC also brought a weekly highlight film of a major college football contest, The Game of the Week, narrated by Bill Fisher. Several years later during the 1950s, ABC broadcast Notre Dame football highlights on Sunday nights, with Harry Wismer and Ford Bond doing the play-by-play. In the world of boxing, “The Brockton Blockbuster” Rocky Marciano, whose ring career coincided with the advent of commercial television, turned pro with a third-round knockout over Lee Epperson on March 17, 1947, north of Boston in Holyoke. In those days, television coverage was blacked out in the home turf of one or the other of the combatants if the match was being held within a radius of 50 miles of that fighter, so hometown fans would either have to travel to the fight or wait a few days to see a film of the fight in the local movie house. Most of Rocky’s early ring matches were held in Providence, Rhode Island. (On a personal note, I saw the fight on a movie theatre screen and cheering Rocky on was my choice, as a fellow Brocktonian who used to spot Rocky doing daily “road work”—today it’s probably called jogging—in front of my parents’ house as he literally ran around the city every morning.) Other pro fights during that time were telecast directly from movie houses on a special hookup, much like televised pay-per-view

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boxing events of a somewhat later era. Or else they could be watched through the storefront window of TV appliance dealers, where crowds would sometimes gather, or in bars. Marciano, who ultimately hung up his gloves with a perfect record— 49 fights, 49 wins—first made an impact on boxing in 1950 when he won a decision over Roland LaStarza, also an unbeaten heavyweight prospect. LaStarza is just one of three men to have gone the distance with The Rock. A year later, Rocky (reluctantly, he later said) knocked out former heavyweight champion and Marciano hero and mentor, Joe Louis, who was an old-forthe-ring 37. With the IRS hounding him, Louis was trying for a comeback. That bout led to a title fight in 1952 against 38-year-old champion Jersey Joe Walcott. Marciano overcame a first-round knockdown to win the title on a 13th-round knockout. The rematch lasted one round, as Marciano scored the 11th first-round KO of his career. The story of the Brockton Blockbuster, Rocco Francis Marchegiano, was told, somewhat fancifully, in not one but two made-for-TV movies several decades later. ABC’s weekly Greatest Sports Thrills, which aired between 1954 and 1956 (sometimes five times a week as a filler), featured filmed highlights of events that had taken place at Madison Square Garden through the years, particularly boxing. The sports were discussed on the series by Marty Glickman and Stan Lomax. And on the subject of pugilists and the square ring, Dr. Joyce Brothers, noted celebrity psychologist whose name became woven through television and all of show biz, gained fame initially in 1955 by winning The $64,000 Question, CBS’s hit big money TV game show of the day on which she appeared as an expert in the subject area of boxing. On the gridiron, two of the significant football-themed dramas of the decade were written by David Shaw. One from Philco Television Playhouse in late 1951 was “Education of a Fullback,” in which a philosophy teacher ( Joseph Buloff) has the whole university on his case when he flunks the school’s star football player (Logan Field). The other was “80-Yard Run,” in the late 1950s, with a teleplay by Shaw, based on a short story by his novelist brother Irwin Shaw. In this Playhouse 90 production, Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward costarred as a disillusioned onetime halfback living off a legendary 80-yard run he’d once made and the wealthy girl he marries but is frustrated by his inability to support her. Earlier in the decade, on CBS’s half-hour anthology series Schlitz Playhouse of Stars, Leif Erickson starred in “Homecoming,” as an ex-football star with a huge ego who returns for his college reunion and is forced to face his own aging. James Dunn, in “Nothing to Do Till Next Fall,” played a college

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football coach with a problem for the big homecoming game: his star player has a knee injury. And on ABC’s Pepsi Cola Playhouse, in the 1955 “The Boy and the Coach,” pro football stars Elroy Hirsch and Norm Van Brocklin turned up to help rehabilitate a high school gridiron player injured in a fire. Several fellow players from the Los Angeles Rams also were on the episode. Studio One’s fictional 1955 football-themed drama “Like Father, Like Son” (Ralph Bellamy is an ex-football hero turned-successful businessman who tries to mold his son in his own image) was called by the New York Times “thrilling full-hour drama of a man possessed by power and ambition and ready to destroy himself together with his family.” Football also was the theme of several episodes of the anthology series West Point (aka The West Point Story) on CBS in 1957, with Chuck Connors in a recurring role. One such drama was called “The Army-Navy Game,” dealing fictionally with the famed gridiron match-up that has been played annually for decades. Another, “His Highness and the Halfback,” had Connors in his occasional part as Major Neilsen, George Gaynes as His Highness, real-life football star of an earlier decade and West Pointer, Felix “Doc” Blanchard, and R. G. Armstrong as the coach. “The Red Sanders Story,” on NBC Matinee Theatre the day after Christmas 1955, dramatized the life of Henry Russell “Red” Sanders (played by veteran actor Richard Arlen), beloved football coach of the UCLA Trojans from 1949 to the mid-1950s (he was with Vanderbilt before that, after having been a playing star there). Red continued through 1957 and died suddenly just before the 1958 season. “Saturday Story,” on DuPont’s Cavalcade of America in May 1954, told the story of the real-life Mark Wilson, a high school football coach (played by Dabbs Greer) who taught the principles of living, as well as football fundamentals to his players. One of them was Otto Graham of the Cleveland Browns of the 1940s and 1950s. Graham and Wilson both turned up at the end of the drama. Paul Newman starred in the premiere episode of the Kaiser Aluminum Hour at the start of the 1956–1957 season, in Loring Mandel and Mayo Simon’s psychodrama “The Army Game.” Newman played a small-town football hero who gets a draft notice and turns out to be a malingerer. He indulges in the Army game of who can outfox whom as he tries to wriggle his way out of uniform by pretending to be unfit mentally. And on NBC’s Robert Montgomery Presents in 1954 there was “Homecoming.” It starred Don Taylor and Joanne Woodward as a college football star and the rich coed he falls for and could be his ticket to the pros. In “Fast Break,” on Schlitz Playhouse of Stars in early 1955, Jackie Cooper played a former basketball player, once jailed for throwing a game, now

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running from his past only to have the reverend of his church wanting to use his skills as the church’s athletic director. “Cooper scores most of the dramatic points with his strong portrayal of the young ex-athlete who’s been matured beyond his years by a life-shaping brush with notoriety,” Variety’s critic found. Another Schlitz playlet, “The Lady Was a Flop” (CBS 1957), dealt with horseracing. Mickey Rooney starred as, in Variety’s words, “an ex-jockey who hangs up his task after losing his saddlesmith nerves when injured in a fall.” Now an exercise boy at the tracks, he is taken by a newborn thoroughbred filly he thinks has what it takes to race at Santa Anita. The source of this drama was a Saturday Evening Post story by veteran writer Borden Chase. Beginning in 1956, NBC offered Jackpot Bowling on Friday nights after the Cavalcade of Sports. It initially was hosted by scrappy baseball manager Leo Durocher, who was succeeded by Mel Allen, Bud Palmer, and then Milton Berle (during the 1960–1961 and final season). Bowling was really a natural for television because of its single-camera coverage, and Don Carter, a bowler with an unorthodox style, dominated the game for years in the early days of television. On CBS’s Twentieth Century-Fox Hour, where Fox theatrical films of the past got “vest-pocket” 50-odd minute television adaptations, there was the auto-racing movie Men Against Speed in December 1956. In this cut-down version of the Kirk Douglas mid-1950s film The Racers, Farley Granger costarred with Mona Freeman and Rick Jason. One sport that was not a huge factor in commercial television during its first decade was golf. Perhaps it was too leisurely a game spread over too much ground, or perhaps it was not a blue-collar sport. In any event, golf found its TV groove and went national when CBS began televising the Masters golf tournament from Augusta, Georgia, in 1956, something the network has continued to do ever since. ( Jack Burke Jr. won it that first telecast year.) Honoring the tradition 50 years later, in April 2007, CBS aired Jim Nantz Remembers Augusta: The 1960 Masters, a colorized version of the event that Arnold Palmer won for the second of four times. ABC, in 1957, began airing All-Star Golf in the network’s block of weekend sports events. Sportscaster Jim Britt (1957), Dick Danehe, (1958), and former champ Jimmy Demaret (1959–1960) hosted. The show featured 18hole matches between some of the top American players of the era. Initially, the matches were filmed in the Chicago area, but soon other courses around the country became involved. Golf coverage switched over to NBC in 1961 for two seasons. NBC aired World Championship Golf in 1959–1960. Sam Snead, Arnold Palmer, Gene Littler, and Byron Nelson were the stars of the game at the time. Beginning in 1963, Shell’s Wonderful World of Golf, hosted

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initially by Gene Sarazan and George Rogers, and later Jack Whitaker, aired as a taped Sunday afternoon series that more or less continues today first on the networks and then on ESPN and, in the mid-2000s, on The Golf Channel. One of the truly memorable matches featured Ben Hogan and Sam Snead. It aired in 1964 and is available on DVD, as are many other head-to-head contests. One of TV’s first tennis-themed dramas was a 1958 episode of Alfred Hitchcock Presents (Hitch earlier had used tennis as an important plot line in Strangers on a Train). In “Disappearing Trick,” Robert Horton starred as Walter Richmond, a gullible tennis player with a nose for snooping, but found himself scammed by a gorgeous woman he has met (Betsy Von Furstenberg), his “widowed” tennis partner, and her supposedly dead hubby (Raymond Bailey). Arthur Hiller directed this episode, which was adapted from a short story by prolific novelist Victor Canning. In 1952, radio sportscaster turned writer and then filmmaker Bud Greenspan made the first of his extensive output of sports-oriented films, a 15minute documentary, titled The Strongest Man in the World, about a black weightlifting champion who also was studying to be an opera singer. One press release of the time from the U.S. Olympic Committee maintained: “One of the greatest and most obscure champions in Olympic history, John Davis (USA) won his first world championship in weightlifting in 1938 at the age of 17 and was undefeated in 15 years of international competition. He won gold medals at the 1948 (London) and 1952 (Helinski) Olympic Games, and had the 1940 and 1944 Games not been canceled, John would have easily won two more gold medals. He was the most dominating competitor in his sport, and renowned as the strongest man in the world.” Before this documentary, Greenspan had, at the age of 21, been sports director of radio station WMGM in New York, broadcasting such programs as “Warm-Up Time” and “Sports Extra,” the pregame and postgame coverage of the Brooklyn Dodgers. The story goes that ultimately he left WMGM and turned to magazine writing (fiction and nonfiction). At some point he asked his dad to loan him $25,000 to make the Davis film. Initially he was unable to sell it. “I didn’t know what I was doing,” Greenspan said years later, “and Pop was getting a little upset because the money was supposed to be returned. I finally heard that the State Department was looking for a vehicle to offset Korean War propaganda from the Soviet Union that said blacks had no opportunities in the United States.” The State Department paid him $50,000 for his short film. “I said to myself, ‘This is a good business.’ ” Through the next five decades Bud Greenspan would become the premiere documentarian, through his Cappy Productions, of Olympic-oriented TV

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films. Only David L. Wolper would rival him in output as a TV documentarian, although Wolper became involved in other TV areas, producing Roots. The story of Bob Richards, known as the “Vaulting Vicar,” was dramatized on the DuPont Cavalcade of America in “Leap of Faith” in 1957. In the late 1940s, Richards was a young football halfback who became an Olympic pole-vault champion, winning the bronze in the 1948 games and the gold in 1952 and 1956. Richards later moved into the ministry and even ran for president of the United States in 1964 on the Populist Party. Richards was played as a child by Hal Stalmaster and as a teen by Richard Tyler. He played himself toward the end of the drama. Sports Focus, an ABC show that aired live from New York nightly from 7:00 to 7:15 in 1957–1958, brought to the medium distinctive sportscaster, commentator, and unabashed know-it-all Howard Cosell, the erstwhile Howard Cohen of Winston-Salem, North Carolina. Through the years he’d be an integral part of television, particularly in sports, on ABC’s Monday Night Football from 1970 to 1983, Saturday Night Live With Howard Cosell (ABC 1975–1976), and Monday Night Baseball (ABC 1977–1985). Cosell also narrated cult director George A. Romero’s 1974 documentary, O. J. Simpson: Juice on the Loose (about O. J.’s storied football career). In addition, Cosell took part in his own 1991 tribute on ESPN: Outside the Lines, The Life and Times of Howard Cosell.

CHAPTER 3

The 1960s

uring the 1960s, network television offered several short-lived series dealing with sports—but not baseball, football, basketball or hockey. Instead it was horseracing, auto racing, and the rodeo circuit. National Velvet, airing on NBC for two seasons beginning in September 1960, starred Lori Martin as Velvet Brown, a young girl with dreams of running her horse, a beautiful chestnut thoroughbred named King, in a championship race. This, of course, was the television version of the 1944 movie that made a star of 12-year-old Elizabeth Taylor, reset from rural England to a dairy farm in America’s Midwest. James McCallion had the part of Velvet Brown’s trainer, Mi Taylor, an ex-jockey, played originally by Mickey Rooney. Straightaway was an adventure series on ABC during the 1961–1962 season. Brian Kelly and John Ashley played partners in a garage where they designed, built, and serviced racing cars. The show’s premise unexpectedly ran afoul of its sponsor, however, when the Ford Motor Company just happened to buy out the initial corporate backer, Autolite, the battery maker, prior to the series premiere. Many of the racing sequences were deleted by Ford, and that angle of the show’s premise was deemphasized. The series is best remembered today for the music score by jazz great Maynard Ferguson. The Wide Country (NBC) and Stoney Burke (ABC) vied during the 1962– 1963 season for the same audience, both being about professional rodeo riders Earl Holliman and Andrew Prine, who played brothers in the former

D

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series as “rodeo bums.” Jack Lord (in the years before Hawaii Five-O) starred as the titular rodeo performer in the latter, along with up-and-comers Bruce Dern and Warren Oates. Aside from these programs, there were several interesting sports-themed dramas for The Twilight Zone, written by either Rod Serling or Richard Matheson. One that aired in spring 1960, dealing with boxing, was titled “The Big, Tall Wish.” It starred Ivan Dixon (boxer Archie Moore initially had been approached to star) as Bolie Jackson, an aging ex-fighter who gets another chance in the ring with the encouragement of his neighbor’s young son. Another drama in the series, several months later, had Jack Warden in “The Mighty Casey” as Mouth McGarry, the coach of the hapless (and fictional) Hoboken Zephyrs where a human-looking android has been signed up as the team’s star pitcher. The team is on its way until the stalwart southpaw robot, Casey, is beaned by a ball and it is discovered that he has no heart. Nine men make up a team, the rules say, and without a heart, Casey is not a man. He secretly is given a heart but becomes too compassionate to strike out other players and finds himself washed up in baseball. But not McGarry, who finds the blueprint for Casey and soon is fielding an all-robot team to victory after victory, we learn in Serling’s ironic epilogue. Another memorable sports-themed Twilight Zone episode, “A Game of Pool,” pitted a confident pool hustler, Jesse Cardiff (Jack Klugman), against a long-dead master pool shark, Fats Brown ( Jonathan Winters, in a rare serious role). The story was written not by Serling but by longtime Twilight Zone contributor George Clayton Johnson and was directed by Buzz Kulik. Later it was remade for the New Twilight Zone series of the late 1980s and cast this time with slick Esai Morales and rotund Maury Chaykin. The new version, in fact, included the original ending that was scrapped initially. Pool was played by Flip Wilson, as a hustler named Big Red, on the premiere episode of ABC’s Love American Style (titled “Love and the Hustler”) in September 1969. In the company of Eddie “Rochester” Anderson and Mantan Moreland, Flip tried to instruct a fine young lady (Gail Fisher) in the finer points of the game. In 1963, Rod Serling’s famous “The Last Night of a Jockey” starred Mickey Rooney in a Twilight Zone tour-de-force performance as a jockey who finds his life at a crossroads and prays desperately to become taller. His wish is granted one night, and he soon finds himself much too big to be a jockey, and out goes the one job for which he was qualified. In “Steel,” on Twilight Zone, writer Richard Matheson tells of an android pugilist called Battling Maxo, a heavyweight, who arrives in town with his manager and handler, retired boxer Steel Kelly (played by Lee Marvin), for a

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scheduled six-round bout. As Rod Serling reveals in his introduction to the short tale, “Only these automatons have been permitted in the ring since prizefighting was legally abolished in 1968.” Just before the bout, however, Maxo breaks down and Steel, desperate for the money to repair him, disguises himself as a robot and gets into the ring with Maynard Flash, an android challenger. Steel takes a punishing beating, but his share of the purse he figures will be enough to repair Maxo. Matheson adapted this drama from his own short story. Between 1960 and 1964, Route 66 was a hugely popular on-the-road weekly CBS series in which Martin Milner, as Tod Stiles, and, first George Chakiris, as Buz Murdock, and later Glenn Corbett, as Linc Case, toured America in a spiffy Corvette in search of adventure (stopping not so coincidentally in cities that had CBS television affiliates to give local Screen Actors Guild talent supporting acting gigs). Some of the dramas in this anthology were sports themed, like “The Opponent” (airdate June 2, 1961), written by veteran Stirling Silliphant. Guest star Darren McGavin played Johnny Copa, onetime boxing great, who was Buz’s boyhood idol. Now, years later, Buz and Tod encounter Copa in a small Ohio town making a living by throwing fights. Lois Nettleton played Copa’s girlfriend and Edward Asner his manager. Charles Bronson won an Emmy nomination for his 1961 performance as boxer Soldier Conlon in the General Electric Theatre episode, “Memory in White,” adapted by Budd Schulberg from a story he wrote for Collier’s Magazine two decades earlier. Sammy Davis Jr. (who actually had the lead) played his trainer, an ex-boxer named Pancho Villa III, who is now a handyman at a local gym with dreams of becoming a ring announcer, but he feels he needs a white suit for the job (according to the TV Guide write-up of the show at the time). Fighter-turned-actor Art Aragon was Bronson’s sparring partner. Bronson also put on the gloves to play one Yank Dawson—also in 1961— in an episode of Alcoa Presents One Step Beyond titled “The Last Round.” He’s an American fighter boxing in World War II England after being banned in the States because of an accident in the ring and now finds himself in an arena haunted by a ghost. A boxing drama, “Ten O’Clock Tiger,” an original by prolific writer William Fay, was offered up on Alfred Hitchcock Presents in early 1962, with Robert Keith as a crooked manager who dopes up his hasbeen fighter (Karl Lucas) by turning to a racetrack habitué (Frankie Darro) for some illegal drugs. “The Meal Ticket,” adapted from a Budd Schulberg story for the Bob Hope Chrysler Theater (airing on NBC in February 1964), starred Cliff Robertson as an up-and-coming boxer, Broderick Crawford as his ambitious dad who

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wants him to go for the big time, and Chris Robinson as the black sheep other son, a broken down ex-fighter. In an early episode of The Fugitive on ABC in 1963, “Decision in the Ring,” David Janssen as on-the-run Richard Kimble becomes the anonymous Ray Miller, cut man for troubled boxer Joe Smith ( James Edwards). Ruby Dee guest starred as Joe’s wife and James Dunn was his possibly crooked manager. Robert Duvall and Shirley Knight costarred in “Five Cranks for Winter . . . Ten Cranks for Summer,” in late 1962, a reworking on Naked City of the 1959 episode “The Canvas Bullet” (about a has-been fighter who wants to earn money in the ring so that his wife can enter his prize roses in a flower show). Boxing even played a pivotal role in a 1965 episode of The Dick Van Dyke Show, titled “Body and Sol.” In flashback, Rob recalls how, during his army days, he had a short-lived career as “Pitter Patter” Petrie, middleweight champ of Company A. Writer Garry Marshall had a humorous cameo as a boxing referee. And on Car 54, Where Are You?, in spring 1963, Toody and Muldoon ( Joe E. Ross and Fred Gwynne) meet an aspiring boxer in the episode “Puncher and Judy.” Guest stars included ex-fighters Rocky Graziano and Sugar Ray Robinson. Also boxing played for laughs was a bit on the 1969 Laugh-In (the skit was titled “Drop Your Socks and Grab Your Pencils”) in which diminutive Sammy Davis Jr. has a world championship match against basketball legend Wilt Chamberlain and decks him with an uppercut to the knees. In The Munsters, in “Herman the Rookie,” Leo Durocher turned up to investigate Herman Munster’s prowess as an incredible batter after being beaned by a ball Herman hit eight blocks away. The Monkees also got into the fight game in the January 1967 episode “Monkees in the Ring,” when a crooked fight manager tells Davy he could be a featherweight champ and starts fixing fights so that “Dynamite” Davy Jones quickly makes a career. D’Urville Martin guest starred as The Champ who shared the ring with “Dynamite.” Three on an Island was a 1965 CBS sitcom pilot dealing with three beautiful girls ( Julie Newmar and Pamela Tiffin among them) who acquire a glass-jawed boxer named Julius “Bulldog” Sweetley (played by Jody McCrea). Veteran sitcom creator Hal Kanter wrote it and veteran film director Vincent Sherman was behind the camera. The aforementioned Flashing Spikes, directed by John Ford for Alcoa Premiere in 1962, starred James Stewart as a notorious, now-banned veteran baseball star once at the center of a Major League bribery scandal, and whose story is about to be revealed by a sports reporter. The film, based on

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a novel by Frank O’Rourke, also had in its cast Jack Warden (ubiquitous, it seems, in sports dramas) and Patrick Wayne. Martin Milner—post Route 66; pre Adam 12—had the lead in the syndicated 1965 pilot Starr, First Baseman (aka Starr of the Yankees), playing a New York Yankees rookie, Joe Starr, who has problems after being hit by a baseball. Stuart Whitman played his coach; Freddy Gordon, and Arthur Hiller directed. This pilot was made in late 1957 and sat unsold on the shelf for the next seven years. The famed Broadway baseball musical, Damn Yankees, was restaged for television as an NBC Color Special in 1967. Lee Remick, as the seductive Lola; Jerry Lanning, as the innocent Shoeless Joe from Hannibal, Mo.; and Phil Silvers, as the devilish Mr. Applegate, starred in this two-hour version of the 1955 George Abbott and Douglas Wallop musical comedy, based on Wallop’s novel, The Year the Yankees Lost the Pennant, with music and lyrics by Richard Adler and Jerry Ross. The Yankees’ Joe Garagiola had a cameo. Lee Mendelson, later the longtime producer with Bill Melendez of Charles Schulz’s beloved Peanuts series on television, formed his own production company in the spring of 1963, and his first project followed Willie Mays through that season’s baseball campaign. That hour-long documentary, A Man Named Mays, aired on NBC on October 6. Mendelson became fond of recalling that “I had done a Willie Mays documentary in 1963, which had done really well. Then I was reading a Charlie Brown baseball strip, and the idea came to me: I’ve just done the world’s greatest baseball player; now I’ll do the world’s worst.” Good old Charlie Brown and the Peanuts gang made their TV debut at the end of 1965, and many of their sandlot adventures through the decades have revolved around sports beginning with the second entry, Charlie Brown’s All-Stars, in June 1966. In this one, Charlie Brown finds himself alone on the pitcher’s mound when the entire team quits to pursue skateboarding, surfing, and other sports. He scouts around for uniforms from local merchants, but the new league won’t allow dogs or girls—no Snoopy or Lucy or Peppermint Patty—and he forgoes this opportunity. Producer Bill Melendez mused in the twentieth anniversary Charlie Brown booklet for New York’s Museum of Broadcasting (now the Paley Center for Media): “There’s a scene in Charlie Brown’s All-Stars where Snoopy takes his supper dish in his teeth, walks over to Charlie Brown on the pitcher’s mound, and spits out the dish as a gesture of disgust at the way the game is going. Now what is the sound of a dog spitting out a dish at a pitcher” Melendez concluded: “After all, who’s to complain except maybe another beagle.”

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Another baseball-themed animated show was Hanna-Barbera’s The Flintstones, on ABC. In 1962, one episode, “Take Me Out to the Ball Game,” had Fred becoming umpire for pal Barney Rubble’s Little League team, and finding, on the day of the big game between the Bedrock Giants and the Grittsburg Pirates, that the parents of the players take things way too seriously. The next season, in an episode dealing with bowling called “Bowling Ballet,” Fred blows the big championship game pitting his Water Buffalo team against the Rockland Rockets because of his lack of coordination, and finds he might be better off taking a little ballet at Bedrock’s Dance School! Biography of a Rookie: The Willie Davis Story was a David L. Wolper production that aired four days on CBS before the JFK assassination. Co-directed and photographed by the estimable James Wong Howe and narrated by Mike Wallace, it followed teenage Willie Davis, a track athlete trying to cross over to baseball, who went to the Los Angeles Dodgers’ rookie camp. He played with the Dodgers from 1960 to 1973, was a member of the National League All-Star Team in 1971 and 1973, and won the Golden Gloves for three consecutive years (1971–1973). Later after his playing career, he got into trouble with the law on gun charges. Another Wolper baseball documentary, airing in 1965 on ABC, was October Madness: The World Series, narrated by Gene Kelly. Wolper followed this program a month later with a football documentary, Pro Football: Mayhem on a Sunday Afternoon. Veteran actor Van Heflin told of the anatomy of football in America—its origin and growth, plus a look at the sport on the contemporary scene of the mid 1960s. In 1965, Howard Cosell hosted, locally in New York on WABC, Mickey Mantle: A Self-Portrait, in which The Mick sat down for 30 minutes with Cosell and, as Variety put it, “came off as a likeable, winning guy . . . To Cosell’s credit, he was able to elicit a word picture of a baseball hero’s life, his background, his tribulations, hopes, and glories.” In Boston, coincidentally on the next night, there was a half-hour program about the athletic achievements of “The Golden Greek,” Harry Agganis, who, in the 1940s and early 1950s, was the much sought after local baseball and football phenomenon out of Boston University. Agganis the Man recounted the brief life of the sports star and local guy made good who went from being an All-American quarterback in college to a baseball star with the Red Sox (at a bonus of bigmoney-at-the-time $40,000). In his sophomore year with the club (1955), tragedy struck him out. At 26, he died suddenly of a massive blood clot in his lungs. The Group W documentary on Agganis later was released on DVD together with the 1957 TV drama of fellow Sox star Jackie Jensen that played out on DuPont Cavalcade of America.

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And in the realm of baseball there was, in 1963, the humorous “Leo Durocher Meets Mister Ed,” with TV’s most famous talking horse parrying with The Lip, who brought along such cohorts as play-by-play guy Vin Scully, Willie Davis, Sandy Koufax, Moose Skowran, and Dodgers catcher Johnny Roseborough. In January 1966, the San Francisco Giants’ Willie Mays had a guest-starring role on The Donna Reed Show with his longtime rival, pitcher Don Drysdale of the Los Angeles Dodgers. Each played himself in the episode “Calling Willie Mays.” The plot concerned the players’ competition to sign hot prospect Jeff Stone, Reed’s son (played by Paul Peterson) on the show, to one of their clubs. In keeping with the feel-good endings of 1960s sitcoms, Jeff elected to continue his education rather than seek a pro career. Hall of Famer Don Drysdale also made guest appearances as himself in Leave It to Beaver (“Long Distance Call” episode) in 1962, two other Donna Reed episodes (“Play Ball” and “My Son the Catcher”) in 1964, The Flying Nun (“The Big Game” in which Sally Field as Sister Bertrille takes over as coach of her convent’s baseball team, and Drysdale turns up as the team manager) in 1969, and The Brady Bunch (“The Dropout,” where Greg Brady is thinking of ditching school to become a professional ballplayer) in 1970. “Shadow of a Hero” was an early high school basketball-themed drama airing on the General Electric Theater in 1962, with series host Ronald Reagan playing the father of a hoop star. The coach (David Janssen) becomes concerned about the boy because his best player has been skipping practice to study for an exam. Wrestling was back in the 1960s. Since sort of fading from national view in the early days of television, wrestling maintained a local TV niche in various parts of the country. In the 1980s, thanks to the American Wrestling Association (AWA), it began reemerging as a popular (if generally syndicated) TV sport. None of the networks seemed much interested in it. But AWA-Star Wrestling, which really came into being on television in 1960 and lasted until 1990 kept adding to its fan base, with stars like André the Giant, Bret Hart, Jesse Ventura, and the sport’s biggest booster, Hulk Hogan. The AWA subsequently merged with the WWF (World Wrestling Federation). “A Feat of Strength” (May 18, 1962) was another Route 66 episode, where, in Los Angeles, Tod Stiles (Milner) takes a job as assistant to a wheelchairbound wrestling promoter named Steiner ( Joe DeSantis). His first assignment is to drive Steiner to the bus station to meet the promoter’s newest attraction, Hungarian refuge Sandor Biro ( Jack Warden). Onetime welterweight champion Mushy Callahan turned up as the referee. Howard Rodman wrote this episode, which appears to have been the first serious TV drama about the sport.

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Best known as the man who brought the horror genre to television, Dan Curtis, who died in 2006, was in his early career an estimable sports producer. He has left a mark on medium and popular culture that is impossible to ignore. After starting as a salesman for NBC in the early 1960s, Curtis formed his own production company to produce such fare as the CBS Golf Classic, but it was his venture into daytime television that earned him a place in television history, with Dark Shadows, and later late night versions of Frankenstein, Dracula, and The Turn of the Screw, as well as The Night Stalker and the granddaddies of the miniseries genre, The Winds of War and War and Remembrance. The sitcom world had golf as a comedy topic in the 1960 episode “The Golf Champion” of Hanna-Barbera’s animated ABC series The Flintstones. (Fred wins a golf championship sponsored by the Loyal Order of the Dinosaurs and is stripped of his trophy by pal Barney Rubble, the Lodge’s president, because he hasn’t paid his membership dues.) And then there was “Country Club Munsters” (1964), an episode of the CBS series, The Munsters. (Herman has the opportunity to practice his golfing skills, but much to the dismay of many members of the local country club, others felt that this could increase its popularity of the club by inviting him along with wife Lily, and Grandpa. On the carefully kept greens, though, despite all his efforts, Herman practically destroys the course with his strong swings, leaving his giant footprints around the links.) This episode is reminiscent of Jackie Gleason (as Ralph Kramden) who managed to deconstruct the game of golf, without ever leaving his kitchen, on a 1950s episode of The Honeymooners called “The Golfer.” Colleague-in-arms Ed Norton (Art Carney) offered the finer point of the swing, instructing Ralph in how to address the ball. NBC offered the weekly 1960 series Celebrity Golf, pitting champion Sam Snead against a parade of Hollywood stars (Bob Hope, Dean Martin, Danny Thomas, Fred MacMurray, Harpo Marx, Jerry Lewis, Perry Como, and others) in a nine-hole match for charity. Harry von Zell was host and commentator. Decades later, The Golf Channel, which was launched in January 1995, rebroadcast the series beginning in 2003. In racing, CBS Sports, in 1960, televised two hours of the 25-mile polequalifying events for the Daytona 500. Of the 500 that now is the crown jewel of NASCAR, The Hollywood Reporter’s review said: “It went over about as well as an oil leak.” Chris Economaki, now editor emeritus of National Speed Sports News and a former longtime race commentator for ABC and CBS who at the time was Daytona’s track announcer, had said: “You can’t believe how bad the reviews were.” Lee Petty, patriarch of a famous racing family whose most renowned member was his son, Richard, won the first Daytona 500 on February 22, 1959. The Daytona 500 was the first 500-mile auto race to be

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televised live flag-to-flag on network television when CBS aired it in 1979. CBS continued telecasting the Daytona 500 until 2000. From 2001 to 2006, the race alternated between Fox Sports and NBC under a $2.48 billion NASCAR television contract. Starting in 2007, Fox became the exclusive home of the Daytona 500 under the terms of NASCAR’s new television package. The Olympic Games first were televised in Berlin in 1936. According to the Web site www.tvhistory.tv, “This marked the first live television coverage of a sports event in world history. They were televised by two German firms, Telefunken and Ferbseh, using RCA and Farnsworth equipment, respectively. Four different areas were telecast using three cameras, and 72 hours of live transmission went over the airwaves to special viewing booths (called Public Television Offices) in Berlin and Potsdam.” It was estimated that more than 150,000 Germans followed the Olympic games via television at 21 television centers. The first Olympics televised worldwide were in 1960. The Squaw Valley games that year cost CBS only $50,000 in rights fees. Walter Cronkite anchored the games, along with commentators Jim McKay, Harry Reasoner, and Dick Button. CBS also aired the summer games from Rome. The Olympics first attracted a significant television audience during the 1968 summer games when Roone Arledge was at the helm of ABC Sports. The combination of his in-depth, personalized approach to sports broadcasting (embodied by ABC Wide World of Sports) and the technological advances in the field, such as satellite feeds and videotape, set the standard for Olympic telecasts. Producer David L. Wolper’s The Rafer Johnson Story was an hour-long documentary, airing on CBS in 1961. Narrated by Mike Wallace, it told the story of the decathlon winner at the 1960 games in Rome, and captain of the U.S. team. More than two decades later, in poor health, Johnson was chosen to light the torch at the opening of the 1984 Olympic Games in Los Angeles. Several years later, Bud Greenspan and wife Cappy Patrash produced their first film together, a one-hour documentary film based on the Olympic career of Jesse Owens. As Bud related in the 2008 ESPN documentary about himself, he met Jesse after reading a piece about him in 1951 in the New York Times after Jesse had returned to the site of his most famous sports moment and was greeted by the mayor of West Berlin at an event at the Olympic stadium that had survived the war. The mayor told him, from the very box where Adolf Hitler had viewed the 1936 games, how sorry the German people were about Jesse’s slight at those games and he extended both hands to Jesse to apologize for Hitler’s refusing even to extend one. “The story stayed with me,” Bud remembered,” and I found Jesse in the mid-1960s and got him to go back with me after nearly three decades for Jesse Owens Returns to Berlin.” Jesse himself narrated the 1964 film, which became part of Bud’s landmark series The Olympiad. “Jesse and I became the best of friends.”

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The 1972 Summer Olympics in Munich, West Germany, showed further growth in costs and coverage. The drama of the games was overshadowed, however, by the grisly murders of 11 Israeli athletes at the hands of Palestinian terrorists—the single worst tragedy in the history of sports broadcasting. Viewers watched in horror as the events of the September 5 and 6 massacre unfolded, and television turned into an international forum for the extremist politics of the Black September Organization. “The thrill of victory, the agony of defeat” became the familiar catchphrase popularized to promote ABC Wide World of Sports, which debuted April 29, 1961. A creation of Edgar J. Scherick, later a top TV producer of Made for Television movies, the show featured in its premiere broadcast the Drake Relays from Des Moines’s Drake University. After later selling his production company to ABC, Scherick hired a young Roone Arledge to produce the show. Intended as a “fill-in” show for a single summer season, until the start of fall sports seasons, Wide World of Sports, which ran on Saturday afternoons for 90 minutes, became unexpectedly popular. Its goal was to showcase two or three separate sports events each week from around the globe. These included many types not normally featured on national television, such as surfing, rodeo, log rolling, hurling, curling, jai-alai, firefighters’ competitions, demolition derby, even badminton. Traditional Olympic sports such as track and field, gymnastics, figure skating, and skiing competitions were also regular features of the show. The broadcast, which also began featuring events like the Daytona 500, was hosted for most of its history by Jim McKay. Wide World of Sports continued through the late 1990s. (The Daytona 500 would be exclusive to CBS from 1975 to 2000.) Arledge eventually would become the executive producer, then president of ABC Sports (as well as president of ABC News). In addition, he created American Sportsman in 1965, with host Curt Gowdy (dealing primarily with fishing and hunting) and NFL Monday Night Football in 1970. Arledge also was responsible for Saturday Night Live With Howard Cosell (1975), 20/20 (1978), Nightline with Ted Koppel (1980), even Frank Sinatra: The Main Event in 1974. Roone Arledge might be said to have been the most significant force behind sports in television until his death in 2002. Running on ABC from 1965 to 1985, American Sportsman had as its host veteran sportscaster Curt Gowdy, who, on the show, hunted or fished with the likes of Bing Crosby, Phil Harris, Peter O’Toole, Robert Stack, President Jimmy Carter and his wife Rosalynn, and former Red Sox slugger Ted Williams, one of his closest friends. In his extraordinary broadcasting career

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that spanned more than 40 years, Gowdy, in the precable television era, covered baseball for the Boston Red Sox for 15 years, including the defining moment in 1960 when Ted Williams hit a home run in Fenway Park for his last at bat in the major leagues. He left the Red Sox in 1966 for a 10-year stint with NBC’s baseball Game of the Week. Gowdy was to call Super Bowl I (and eight others), the AFL’s infamous “Heidi” game of 1968, Pittsburgh Steelers Frank Harris’s “Immaculate Reception” against the Oakland Raiders in 1972, Hank Aaron’s 715th home run in 1974, and Super Bowl III, when the upstart New York Jets under Joe Namath upset the favored Baltimore Colts. The storied sportscaster, in addition to 9 Super Bowls, was involved in the broadcast of 13 World Series, 11 All-Star Games, 14 Rose Bowls, 8 Olympic Games, and 24 NCAA Final Fours. Gowdy was the first sportscaster to receive broadcasting’s George Foster Peabody Award (in 1969) and was inducted into baseball’s Hall of Fame in 1984. In April 1966, NBC aired its first Stanley Cup Playoffs, effectively bringing professional hockey back to the American TV screen—and in color, for the first time. On January 15, 1967, both CBS and NBC aired the first Super Bowl Game in which Vince Lombardi’s Green Bay Packers beat the Kansas City Chiefs in Memorial Coliseum in Los Angeles. Jack Whitaker, Ray Scott, Frank Gifford, and Pat Summerall called the game. Through the years, the Super Bowl became more than simply a season-ending championship game between the two leading NFL teams. It is a true cultural event, probably the single most watched television spectacular of the year, sports or otherwise. In 1967, one of the football greats was profiled by sportscaster Chris Schenkel in an hour-long ABC primetime special called Coach Bryant: Alabama’s Bear. (Legendary Paul “Bear” Bryant, who was to die in 1983, several decades later, would be the catalyst in a TV movie called The Junction Boys, from a book by Jim Dent.) Two years later, another football great, Joe Namath, found himself with a short-lived syndicated television sports talk show called, what else?, The Joe Namath Show, co-hosting with Dick Schaap, the sportswriter. Among Broadway Joe’s guests over the weeks were baseball’s Mickey Mantle and Willie Mays, football’s Willie Richardson, basketball’s Dave DeBusschere, Joe’s Jets coach Weeb Eubanks, and boxing’s Rocky Graziano (the latter on the same show with Truman Capote!). The infamous Heidi Game (also sometimes called the Heidi Bowl) refers to the 1968 AFL game between the New York Jets and the Oakland Raiders, played on November 17 in Oakland, California. With the Jets leading 32–29 with only 65 seconds left in the game, the Raiders quickly scored 14 points

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to win, 43–32. Meanwhile, millions of American television viewers were unable to see Oakland’s comeback. NBC cut off the live broadcast in favor of a prescheduled airing of Heidi, a new made-for-TV version of the classic children’s story. In mid-1962, Aldo Ray guest starred with Sandy Dennis in “Idylls of a Running Back,” a Naked City episode on ABC written by Ernest Kinoy. Ray played a football star, shot by a woman who was accused of putting the make on her, and who initially was accused of having been a naive girl led astray. (In 1961, Ray starred in a never-aired CBS pilot, The Rock, playing a pro athlete who moonlighted as a writer of articles for a sports magazine.) On the Hallmark Hall of Fame in November 1968, Hugh O’Brian starred as Indian John Aragon, a big-league football quarterback, sitting out a season feeling sorry for himself after a head-shattering injury, in “A Punt, a Pass, and a Prayer,” an original sports drama by David Mark. Betsy Palmer played Indian John’s wife and Ralph Meeker, a teammate and rival. “Mark,” critic Jack Gould wrote in the New York Times, “dug out the old chestnut of the professional athlete who does not know he is through because of age and injuries. Hugh O’Brian manfully ran through the accepted clichés of the familiar situation, and Tom Donovan, the director, scrupulously required the supporting company not to break the mold of gridiron corn.” “The Long Walk Home,” an hour-long drama on Alcoa Premiere on ABC in late 1962, hosted by Fred Astaire, was about a high school football coach (Lin McCarthy) who is blackmailed into throwing his team’s big championship game. It was written by Everett Freeman. Toward the end of the 1960s, there was a two-season Saturday morning cartoon series from Hanna-Barbera on CBS with a sports theme: Wacky Races—about a transcontinental automobile race, à la the big screen’s The Great Race with Tony Curtis and Peter Falk. Dave Willock was the zany host, and Janet Waldo voiced the character of Penelope Pitstop from another Hanna-Barbera series. Some consider this one of the best cartoon series of the 1960s. Another would-be series dealing with stock car racing—this a live-action one—was a busted pilot in 1962 for ABC called Tack Reynolds. It starred Michael Parks as a hot-dogging driver. The first movie made for television dealing in its own way with sports, The Challengers, was filmed in 1968, but it didn’t air until 1970. Darren McGavin starred as a driver preparing for the Grand Prix. Although the new genre of movies made for television kicked off during mid decade, it wasn’t until the 1970s that sports-themed films and biographies of major athletes began proliferating.

CHAPTER 4

The 1970s

rian’s Song, in 1971, was to be the first great sports-themed television movie, and it resonates to this day as a classic of the genre. It tells the story of Gale Sayers and Brian Piccolo, two friends (and rivals) who were teammates on football’s Chicago Bears in the 1960s. Billy Dee Williams is Sayers, on whose 1970 book I Am Third this movie was based; James Caan is Piccolo, who died of cancer at the height of his career. This was one of the landmark made-for-TV films, a multi-Emmy Award winner and a four-handkerchief tearjerker. Jack Warden played Bears coach George Halas. The film was remade in 2001. The memorable theme of the original by Michel Legrand was interpolated into this new version that starred Mekhi Phifer as Sayers and Sean Maher as Piccolo. Veteran actor Ben Gazzara took the role of George Halas. Shortly after Brian’s Song was another (fictional) football movie, Footsteps (1972), with Richard Crenna as a win-or-else coach, hired to whip a small college football team into shape. He soon finds himself in trouble with heavy gamblers on the squad’s success, who plan to set the odds. The film was based on the novel Paddy by Hamilton Maule. A primetime animated sitcom on CBS on Wednesday nights at 7:30 P.M. during the 1970–1971 season, Where’s Huddles? followed the luck of a hapless football team, the Rhinos. Ed Huddles is the quarterback (voiced by Cliff Norton), and Bubba McCoy (Mel Blanc), his neighbor and best friend, is the team’s center. There were just 10 episodes. Later Hanna-Barbera’s

B

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iconic cartoon series of the 1960s returned in the form of an animated special or two, one of which (in 1978) was The Flintstones: Little Big League, in which Fred finds himself coaching a hopeless team of Little Leaguers, the Bedrock Broncos, and blindly refuses to recognize the talents of his daughter Pebbles. To make matters worse, he’s having a tiff with the coach of the opposing team, the Sandstone Sluggers—pal Barney Rubble. On one of ABC’s quality Afterschool Specials in the late 1970s, a version— in black-and-white—of Barbara Cohen’s 1974 novel for young people, Thank You, Jackie Robinson, was produced (under the title A Home Run for Love). It dealt with a fatherless young 12-year-old white boy (Ronnie Scribner), an avid Brooklyn Dodgers fan who has never been to Ebbets Field. His mother and older sister (played by early Felicity Huffman—at the time, she was Flicka Huffman in what might have been her very first TV work at age 16) run the family hotel, where the new cook, a sixty-something black man named Davey (Charles Lampkin), and the youngster form a warm friendship and bond over their love of the Dodgers and of newly acquired Jackie Robinson. Soon they are going to Ebbets Field regularly with Davey’s daughter and son-in-law. But Davey, it turns out, has a heart condition, threatening to leave the boy once more without a father figure. Among the other Afterschool Specials in the 1970s dealing with young people and sports were Rookie of the Year, with preteen Jodie Foster as an 11-year-old who wants to join her brother’s all-male Little League Baseball team (sounds like her earlier TV pilot, My Sister Hank); It’s a Mile From Here to Glory (an adaptation of Robert C. Lee’s 1972 young adult novel about a high school track star who becomes involved in a debilitating accident and now must learn to depend on others for his day-to-day living); The Skating Rink (a teenager overcomes his stuttering by becoming a championship figure skater); Mighty Moose and the Quarterback Kid (a high school football coach, played by Alex Karras, finds himself mediating a conflict between his star quarterback and the latter’s dad); A Special Gift (a teen basketball player’s decision to pursue ballet dancing troubles his family and friend in this adaptation of the novel by Marcia L. Simon); The Rag Tag Champs (a 14-year-old basketball star and his “winning is everything” uncle, the team manager, find themselves at odds); The Gymnast (a high school coed is determined to become a world-class athlete); The Hero Who Couldn’t Read (a teacher, played by Clarence Williams III, discovers that the star basketball player is illiterate and makes it his mission to teach him how to read); and a number of others through the life of the ABC series that aired periodically between 1972 and 1995, generally in 45- to 50-minute segments. The occasional 1974–1978 PBS sports series, The Way It Was, hosted primarily by Curt Gowdy (who also produced along with Dick Enberg)

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served as a nostalgic showcase for a variety of sports events from the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s, with its appeal mainly on the game footage, usually grainy black and white film, from assorted sports. Shows were devoted to the 1950, 1953, the 1958 NFL championship games; the 1946 and 1947 World Series; the 1946 Army-Navy game; the 1951 Giants-Dodgers playoff game; the 1962 NBA finals; the 1960 Summer Olympics; the 1963 Rose Bowl Game; the 1968 Harvard-Yale football match-up; the 1946 Rocky GrazianoTony Zale fight; and a look at the Negro Leagues in baseball. Former Yankees player Joe Garagiola became a familiar face on television in the 1970s, both as a sportscaster and a member of The Today Show team. He also hosted Joe Garagiola’s Memory Game, a daytime game show on NBC in 1971, and then The Baseball World of Joe Garagiola on the network from 1972 to 1975, preceding Monday night major league baseball on the network. The Yankees’ 1977 championship season was the focus of a documentary that year called A Winning Tradition. Produced by Major League Baseball Productions, it was narrated by Yankees broadcaster and former star Phil Rizzuto. The first made-for-television movie dealing with baseball was It’s Good to Be Alive, a 1974 docudrama about the Brooklyn Dodgers’ Hall of Famer, Roy Campanella, and the auto accident in 1958 that paralyzed him and put him in a wheelchair. Based on Campanella’s best-selling autobiography, it was played movingly by Paul Winfield and Ruby Dee. Michael Landon directed. One in a Million told, with dramatic license, the true story of baseball star Ron LeFlore (based on his autobiography, Breakout, written with Jim Hawkins) from his days as a street-corner punk with no future to his time behind bars on a petty robbery conviction and his ultimate once-in-alifetime chance with the Detroit Tigers, where he became an outstanding player. He played six seasons with the Tigers beginning in 1974 before being traded to the Montreal Expos and finally retiring from the Chicago White Sox in 1982. He stole 455 bases in his career and was an American League All-Star selection in 1976. After his playing days, he became a coach and manager in the minors. LeVar Burton (Kunta Kinte in Roots) starred as LeFlore. Scrappy Billy Martin turned up playing himself. A Love Affair: Eleanor and Lou Gehrig was a sentimental retelling of the love story of the New York Yankees baseball immortal and his wife (played by Edward Herrmann and Blythe Danner). The story was told from Eleanor’s point of view. Originally this drama was to have premiered in October 1977, but ironically it was preempted by the World Series. Instead it had its initial airing opposite the Super Bowl Game in early 1978. It was an adaptation of Eleanor Gehrig’s 1976 book, My Luke and I, written with sportswriter Joseph Durso. Among the other baseball figures from Gehrig’s life were Babe Ruth

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(played by Ramon Bieri), manager Joe McCarthy (Gerald S. O’Louglin), Lefty Gomez ( Joe E. Tata), Tony Lazzeri ( James Luisi), and Bill Dickey (William Wellman Jr.). Jean Stapleton played the real-life Mary Dobkin in Aunt Mary, a 1979 Hallmark Hall of Fame drama about a physically handicapped Baltimore woman living on welfare who organized a sandlot baseball team, the Dobkin Dynamiters, in the 1940s. The team was composed of disadvantaged and minority kids. Over the next four decades, she ended up coaching more than 50,000 boys and girls. Two baseball-themed fictional dramas that aired during the 1970s were Murder at the World Series and The Kid From Left Field, a remake of the 1953 theatrical film refashioned for young Gary Coleman for his own production company. In the former, an original written by veteran Cy Chermak, with a cast of familiar TV names of the day, a disturbed young man, who had tried out for the Houston Astros baseball team and been rejected, plots to take his revenge by a number of kidnappings during the World Series. In the latter, a batboy guides the San Diego Padres to the World Series with the secret help of his dad, a baseball has-been who’s now reduced to hawking refreshments in the stands. The former movie was directed by Andrew McLaglen, a protégé of John Wayne and son of veteran actor Victor McLaglen, a longtime Wayne acting and drinking pal; the second movie was directed by Adell Aldrich, daughter of veteran director Robert Aldrich, another Wayne pal (and one of her very few directing credits). Bleacher Bums was a 1979 PBS adaptation of a play familiar in Chicago but little known elsewhere. It takes place in the bleachers, the cheap seats set at the back of a baseball stadium, where tickets were about a buck, but the viewer needed binoculars. The characters are a bunch of Chicago Cubs fans. Bleacher Bums was restaged as a movie made for television three decades later. Two sitcoms during the 1970s dealt with baseball. First, in 1976, there was Ball Four, developed by 1960s’ star pitcher for the New York Yankees and later New York sportscaster, Jim Bouton (from his book of the same title that provided an inside view of pro baseball). He also starred as the pitcher for the hapless Washington Americans, although most of the action took place in the locker room. The CBS series fouled out and was gone after five episodes. Next came The Bad News Bears on CBS in 1979 and 1980. It was based on the hit movie that starred Walter Matthau. Jack Warden took on Matthau’s role as grumpy (if less foul-mouthed than in the theatrical version) Morris Buttermaker, a swimming pool cleaner, who, as an alternative to a prospective jail term, agrees to coach baseball at a school for problem

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youngsters. There also was an unsold CBS pilot that aired early in 1979 called Flatbush. It dealt with five former members of a neighborhood kids’ baseball team in Brooklyn, the Flatbush Fungos, who band together to help the team’s new coach and then discover its playing field is about to become a parking lot. New York and San Francisco Giants slugger—and subsequent Hall of Famer—Willie Mays (or rather his voice) made his “acting” debut in an hourlong animated Rankin-Bass cartoon called “Willie Mays and the Say-Hey Kid” on ABC’s Saturday Superstar Movie in mid October 1972. On another series, Carl Reiner, as a witty angel in a business suit in Good Heavens, a short-lived 1976 ABC sitcom, granted a wish to a sporting goods salesman to try out in the big leagues in the episode, “Take Me Out to the Ball Game.” The hopeful was son Rob Reiner whose girlfriend in the episode was real-life then-wife Penny Marshall. Documentarian Bud Greenspan made a film in 1977 of Lawrence Ritter’s 1966 book The Glory of Their Times: The Story of Baseball as Told by the Men Who Played It. Tracing the development of the sport from the end of the nineteenth century through the first decade and a half of the twentieth, The Glory of Their Times aired on PBS in spring 1977, using still photographs, vintage film footage, and interviews with some of baseball’s early stars. The hour-long documentary was narrated by Alexander Scourby. On the football scene, there were a couple of unsold CBS pilots in 1972 and 1973, respectively. In The Living End, Lou Gossett (later Fiddler of Roots) was an aging running back for the Chicago Cherokees, a pro-football team, who had domestic problems at home. It was retooled the next year as Two’s Company in which onetime football star John Amos (also of Roots as the adult Kunta Kinte and the series Good Times, among many others) was a star trying to balance his playing career with the needs of his wife. Diana Sands played the wife in both incarnations. Real-life football star Joe Namath turned up on a 1973 episode of The Brady Bunch titled “Mail Order Hero.” (Broadway Joe pays a visit to Bobby Brady, who’s faking a fatal illness and wants to meet the Hall of Famer as a dying wish.) And toward the end of the decade, there was a short-lived 1979 CBS sitcom called Hangin’ In, set on the campus of Braddock University, a Southern college, where Bill Macy (late of Maude) was the new president after his days as a pro football star. (This was after producer Norman Lear created several pilots, none of which made it, first with John Amos, then with Cleavon Little.) The show lasted just four episodes. In Profile: Legend in Granite, an hour-long 1970s film on ABC, Ernest Borgnine starred as one of football’s greatest coaches, Vince Lombardi, along

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with Colleen Dewhurst as his wife, Marie; John Calvin and Alex Rocco as Green Bay Packers stars Paul Hornung and Tony Canadeo; and others. It traced Lombardi’s football career, from one of the legendary “Seven Blocks of Granite” at Fordham University to coaching great with the Green Bay Packers (1959–1967) and, for a season, the Washington Redskins (1969). Something for Joey (1977), written by Jerry McNeely, was a made-for-TV movie dramatization focusing on the relationship between 1973 Heisman Trophy-winning Penn State football star John Cappelletti (Marc Singer) and his brother, Joey, stricken with leukemia. Producer David L. Wolper followed eclectic writer George Plimpton through various endeavors for ABC in 1971, Plimpton: The Great Quarterback Sneak. Plimpton joined the NFL’s Baltimore Colts for a month of preseason training and then guided the team as quarterback for four plays during halftime against the Detroit Lions. And in 1974, ABC aired cult director George A. Romero’s hour-long documentary O. J. Simpson: Juice on the Loose, covering the football superstar’s glory days long before the infamous events leading to the “trial of the century.” Among those partaking in the documentary were Howard Cosell, Houston Oilers’ star Al Cowlings, L.A. Times reporter Dwight Chaplin, O. J.’s mother Eunice Simpson, and his brother, his sister, and his wife at the time. Then there was Superdome in early 1978, a rip-off of the big screen TwoMinute Warning. A silent killer stalks New Orleans and threatens the Super Bowl football game, putting a roster full of familiar TV faces in jeopardy, and it’s up to David Janssen to track him down. Dallas Cowboys Cheerleaders, in 1979, was a lighthearted pseudo-drama about the Dallas Cowboys cheerleaders, and there even was a sequel the next year. In early 1970, one of the unique fight films in the history of the sport— the famed Ali-Marciano Computer Super Fight, pitting two of the greatest heavyweight champions of all time against one another based on computerized records from the high points of their individual careers—was secretly assembled and, on January 20, was shown only one time in about 1,500 movie houses around the world. Immediately afterward, all of the 35mm prints reportedly were destroyed except for the one sent to the Library of Congress for copyright purposes. The fighters had duked it out (fictionally) for more than 100 rounds in the ring, where they had never been together. Marciano, who died in a plane crash less than four months before the release of the film, never learned that he had won the computer fight after all of their records, styles, and techniques were minutely analyzed. Months after the “event,” the fight aired only once on television, on ABC’s Wide

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World of Sports. More than 25 years later, the fight became available on DVD—complete with tinkering, tweaking, and alternate endings. Before and after hanging up the gloves, Ali, of course, never shied away from good-sportedly mixing it up with assorted TV stars on varied sitcoms and the like. In a January 1971 episode of The Flip Wilson Show, he found himself being vamped by Flip’s icon character, sassy Geraldine Jones. Ali guest-starred on Diff’rent Strokes in late 1979 in an episode called “Arnold’s Hero,” which was inspired by the Sammy Davis–Wilt Chamberlain skit on Laugh-In a decade earlier. A pint-sized Gary Coleman finds himself faceto-knee with Muhammad Ali. He guest starred (always as himself ) on The Sonny and Cher Show and The Captain and Tennille Show in 1977, as well as Vega$ (the 1979 episode, “The Eleventh Event”), among others. As one of the best known sports figures of the twentieth century, he even had his own animated show on Saturday mornings (1977–1978), NBC’s I Am the Greatest: The Adventures of Muhammad Ali, for which he provided the voice of the lead character, whether fighting bad guys or wrestling crocodiles. Ali starred in one dramatic TV movie, an adaptation of Howard Fast’s Freedom Road, although not as a sports figure, but an ex-slave who became a U.S. Senator during Reconstruction. Ali’s most recent TV guest-starring (acting) role, before his growing incapacitation, was on “Fighting the Good Fight,” an episode of CBS’s Touched by an Angel in 1999. One of Ali’s more controversial opponents, Sonny Liston, did an unlikely bit in comedy in “Love and the Champ,” an episode of ABC’s Love American Style that aired a month before Liston’s mysterious and still unexplained death. Godfrey Cambridge and Ketty Lester starred with him in the episode. HBO premiered the leading show of the boxing world, HBO World Championship Boxing in January 1973, and it continues to this day. The first event was the heavyweight championship bout in Kingston, Jamaica, in which George Foreman defeated Joe Frazier in the second round for the title. Two of the memorable fights in modern-day boxing also were on World Championship Boxing—the famed Rumble in the Jungle on October 10, 1974, with Ali decking Foreman, and the equally famous Thrilla in Manila the next year between Ali and Frazier. Biopics of two of the boxing world’s greatest champions, Joe Louis and Rocky Marciano, were produced within months of each other in the late 1970s. Ring of Passion was a drama about the two Louis–Schmeling heavyweight fights and the way both boxers unwittingly became symbols of political ideologies on the eve of World War II. Bernie Casey and Stephen Macht played the two battling adversaries. Marciano, starring the ideally

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cast Tony Lo Bianco, was a somewhat romanticized drama about the last great white champion of the ring, the only heavyweight to retire with a perfect record (49 fights, 49 wins, including one against the aging Joe Louis). In a second Marciano movie (Canadian-made) two decades later, Lo Bianco appeared again in another role. Tom Berenger had his first important television role as Bobby Fallon, a young street-tough-turned boxer in a two-part, four-hour drama, Flesh and Blood, based on Pete Hamill’s 1977 novel about a fighter struggling to reach the top. Meanwhile, his romance with an attractive TV reporter is complicated by an incestuous relationship with his mother (played by Suzanne Pleshette, who is just 12 years older than her “son”). John Cassavetes received an Emmy nomination as Gus Caputo, his dedicated fight manager. Also in the cast was twenty-something Denzel Washington. Two fictional boxing dramas were The Duke, a short-lived NBC series in 1979 starring Robert Conrad as an aging fighter turned Chicago private eye, and a lighthearted O. J. Simpson TV movie called Goldie and the Boxer (he’s a struggling fighter with a 10-year-old girl who talks him into letting her become his manager). A sequel the next year was titled Goldie and the Boxer Go to Hollywood. Rod Serling’s Night Gallery (he didn’t write this one) offered a boxingthemed playlet in 1972 called “The Ring With the Velvet Ropes.” Gary Lockwood portrayed a newly crowned boxing champ who discovers that he still has one more bout—unscheduled—before grabbing the title. His opponent is Big Dan Anger (played by menacing Ji-Tu Cumbaka). Boxing also was in the plot of an episode, “The Meal Ticket,” of Burt Reynolds’s Dan August series in 1971 on ABC (tough guy Burt investigates the death of a boxer and finds that two of the guy’s brothers, played by Dane Clark and Don Stroud, are involved along with a fighter named Tiger, played by Art Aragon), and then of an NBC Ellery Queen mystery in 1976’s “The Adventures of the Sunday Punch.” Queen (played by Jim Hutton) is dubious when, after a boxer is killed while training for a championship bout, the finger points to his sparring partner (portrayed by guest star Otis Young). Then he discovers that the boxer had a number of enemies, including such veteran actors as Robert Alda, Dane Clark, and Lloyd Nolan. In cameos in this episode were the former boxers Jerry Quarry and Art Aragon. Jerry Quarry also got himself involved with perennial teenage sleuth Nancy Drew (Pamela Sue Martin), playing a former boxer named Big Jerry who joins her in tracking down the potential assassin of a visiting British prime minister to New York City in a 1978 episode called “The Lady on Thursday at Ten” on ABC’s Nancy Drew Mysteries. And in the initial episode of CBS’s

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The Incredible Hulk, in March 1978, “The Final Round,” David Banner (aka The Hulk) is saved from a pair of muggers by a boxer named Rocky Welsh (played by Martin Kove) and takes a job as his corner man in the fighter’s gym, only to learn that the gym’s owner is a drug dealer. One of the most significant basketball games historically in all of NCAA Championships was the match-up between Michigan State University and Indiana State University—always known to fans as the duel of two future Hall of Famers, Magic and Bird (the Michigan Spartans’ Earvin “Magic” Johnson—in the days before he tore up the league with the Lakers—and the Indiana Sycamores’s Larry Bird—before he went to the Boston Celtics). The game, broadcast live on NBC on March 26, 1979, played at the University of Utah in Salt Lake City, was called by Bryant Gumbel, Al McGuire, Billy Packer, and Dick Enberg. Magic and Bird were credited with lifting the game to new heights of popularity. Twenty-five years later, the classic game (won by MSU 75–64) was released on tape nationally to network affiliates as The Birth of Legends, including a rare interview with Bird, in April 2004. The championship game also became available on DVD, sans commercials. On disc, it is immortalized as Magic vs. Bird: The 1979 NCAA Championship Game. Basketball also was the game, of course, of the legendary Harlem Globetrotters, and the boys dribbled their unique way up and down the court— shooting and invariably scoring—in two Saturday morning series during the 1970s. The Harlem Globetrotters (1970–1972 on CBS, 1978 on NBC) played on Saturday morning television in a Hanna-Barbera cartoon series, with Scatman Crothers providing the voice for the team’s famed star, Meadowlark Lemon. The boys also were on TV in the live-action The Harlem Globetrotters Popcorn Machine on CBS weekly between 1974 and 1976, with Lemon and a number of his teammates featured along with young Rodney Allen Rippy and character actor/writer Avery Schreiber. Two 1970s series dealing with high school basketball were The Waverly Wonders, a half-hour sitcom on NBC, with ex-football great Joe Namath as a basketball coach saddled with a hapless team (the series lasted four episodes) and The White Shadow, a well-received, hour-long drama on CBS, starring Ken Howard as a former basketball pro turned beloved, inspirational high school coach. Both aired in 1978, but the latter ran for three seasons. Bruce Paltrow (Gwyneth’s dad) was the executive producer. Another 1970s made-for-TV movie on CBS dealing with basketball was Shirts/Skins, in which six businessmen/pals get together each week to play hoops. This sardonic comedy, too, was written and produced by Bruce Paltrow.

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In the summer of 1972, chess—a new-to-television sport (or is it just a game?)—riveted audiences almost daily for three months on PBS. This would be what the Brits are fond of calling a “one-off”— a one-time only television event, for never again would chess attract huge audiences on television. American child chess prodigy turned grandmaster, the legendary Bobby Fischer, as an adult faced off across the chessboard internationally with Russian grandmaster Boris Spassky in Reykjavik, Iceland, in what came to be known as the Cold War Chess Championship. Fischer won, as a matter of deep pride in the United States. He later was stripped of his title when he refused a rematch, and then through the years he went into a strange new place. He denounced his country, went into exile in Japan, was hounded by the State Department and the tax people who wanted him extradited to America, and fought lengthy court battles as a virtual recluse. He eventually returned to Iceland and became a citizen there. He died there in 2008. In an “appreciation” just after his death, the New York Daily News wrote: “Long before he was a white-bearded, paranoid recluse, Bobby Fischer was one of the most prolific sports celebrities ever produced by our nation, and by New York City. He was the greatest young chess champion in history, and anybody who doesn’t think that chess is a sport should try hanging in there physically and mentally during a draining, top-level, four-hour contest that demands withering concentration.” One reason, however, that chess never became a TV sport beloved by more than the dedicated aficionados is the slowness of the game—slow even when compared to golf, and, dare it be said, baseball? As to the aforementioned golf, there was the half-hour documentary by Bud Greenspan, A Couple of Days in the Life of Charlie Boswell, in 1970 (Boswell was the noted blind golfer who in his career won a number of professional tournaments), and by 1975’s Babe, the story of Babe Didrickson, America’s foremost woman athlete who won two Olympic track-and-field gold medals in 1932 and went on to become a world champion golfer. The film traced her development as an athlete, her battles to be accepted in sports, and her marriage to wrestler-turned-sports promoter George Zaharias. For her performance in the title role, Susan Clark won an Outstanding Actress Emmy. Tennis was represented by Little Mo (1978), a biopic about Maureen Connelly, the court great who, as a teenager, was the first woman to win the Grand Slam of Tennis, became world-renowned as “Little Mo,” and died of cancer in 1969 at the age of 34. Glynnis O’Connor starred in the title role, with Anne Baxter (initially it was to have been Lana Turner) as her mother. Jack Webb’s production company Mark VII Ltd. produced this one, and Webb was billed as executive producer.

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Among the lesser-explored, sports-themed dramas to this time had been hockey. The Deadliest Season (1977), written by veteran TV dramatist Ernest Kinoy, was one of the more serious looks at the sport. Michael Moriarty played professional hockey player compelled by his drive to succeed and by financial pressures to adopt a more aggressive playing style. He takes a more violent stance on the ice, resulting in the death of a player and a manslaughter charge against him. As his concerned wife, a young Meryl Streep gave one of her earliest film performances. (They were teamed again in the landmark TV film, Holocaust, the next year.) Hockey also happened to be the game du jour as the first sports telecast by HBO, on November 6, 1972, as its initial show on its launch as pay channel Home Box Office. The match-up at Madison Square Garden between the New York Rangers and the Vancouver Canucks was called by Marty Glickman and reportedly reached HBO’s 365 subscribers in Wilkes Barre, Pennsylvania. Approximately three years later (December 13, 1975), HBO became the first network to broadcast its signal via satellite when it showed the famous “Thrilla in Manila” heavyweight championship bout between Muhammad Ali and Joe Frazier. Michael Landon wrote, produced, and directed the autobiographical The Loneliest Runner (NBC 1976), about how during his teenage days he became a competitive runner. He was inadvertently forced into this training because he was a teenage bed wetter and had to run home from school every day to retrieve the wet sheets his mother hanged from the bedroom window to punish him. Before making his name as an actor, Landon, born Eugene Orowitz, was a javelin thrower and won the New Jersey State Championship for his high school in 1954. Wilma (1977) was an NBC docudrama, written, produced, and directed by Bud Greenspan for his Cappy Productions. It told of the childhood years of Wilma Rudolph, a Tennessee girl who overcame physical handicaps with her parents’ encouragement and became a champion track sprinter, winning three gold medals in the 1960 Rome Olympics. Shirley Jo Finney had the title role and Cicely Tyson played her mother. In the part of a teenage athlete was Denzel Washington (then 23) in his film debut. In a fictional story about running, See How She Runs (1978), Joanne Woodward won an Emmy Award for her performance as a middle-age housewife and mother (one of her fictional daughters was played by real-life daughter Lissy Newman) who, after spending a lifetime giving to others, decides to claim a piece for herself and enters the grueling 26-mile Boston marathon as an obsessive means of self-expression. In 1979, the CBS TV movie, A Shining Season, dramatized the true story of John Baker, a top-ranked distance runner who is suddenly struck with

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cancer and spends his remaining time coaching a girls track team, the Duke City Dashers, leading them to a national championship. Timothy Bottoms had the starring role and Ed Begley Jr. played his best friend. It was adapted from the Baker biography by William Buchanan And in filmmaker Michael Mann’s CBS TV movie in 1979, The Jericho Mile, Peter Strauss won an Emmy as Best Actor for his performance as Rain Murphy, a man serving a life term in prison who, to occupy his time, runs the recreational track in near isolation and soon becomes Olympics material. With a change of gender, and reset in a women’s prison, the 2008 Lifetime TV movie Racing for Time appeared to be a revision of Mann’s earlier film. It was directed by actor Charles S. Dutton (who also plays a male prison guard encouraging the girls in an unconventional track program). A 1977 Canadian-made film, Goldenrod, adapted by Lionel Chetwynd from Herbert Harker’s 1972 novel, was about a once-successful champion of the Western Canadian rodeo circuit (Tony Lo Bianco) in the 1950s who is crippled in the ring, ending his winning streak and breaking up his marriage. The 1979 drama Champions: A Love Story portrayed two adolescents hoping to reach their goal—the national figure skating championships. The drama was written by John Sacret Young. (Tony Lo Bianco was in this one, too, as their coach.) Football Hall of Famer Alex Karras (he was with the Iowa Hawkeyes and played in the 1956 Rose Bowl, and then was with the Detroit Lions from the late 1950s to the early 1970s) starred in the 1977 wrestling drama Mad Bull. Karras also acted in the previous year’s ABC Afterschool Special, “Mighty Moose and the Quarterback Kid,” playing a high school football coach, as well as Babe Didrickson’s onetime wrestler husband, George Zaharias, in Babe. And in 1973, Karras played an empty-headed hillbilly turned weightlifting champion at the Olympics in the made-for-TV movie comedy, The 500-Pound Jerk, but goes all soft for a comely Russian gymnast. Another Hall of Famer, Rosey Grier, ex-lineman for the Los Angeles Rams, played a former football star and widower who becomes a cooking show host, in Big Daddy, a CBS pilot. The real-life account of a deaf girl who overcame her handicap to become one of Hollywood’s top stuntwomen and holder of the women’s world land-speed record in a rocket-powered racing car, was told in 1979’s Silent Victory: The Kitty O’Neil Story, with Stockard Channing starring and Brian Dennehy (who is a mere six years older than she) as her encouraging dad. In 1972, a 10-year-old Jodie Foster starred in a CBS pilot called My Sister Hank, playing a rambunctious tomboy, Henrietta “Hank” Bennett, who wants to play baseball with the local guys. Edgar Bergen had the role of her grandfather.

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Evel Knievel, a 1974 CBS pilot, starred Sam Elliott as the famed reallife motorcycle daredevil (played in the earlier film of the same name by George Hamilton). Three decades later, Evel’s career was dramatized in a made-for-television movie. Sheldon Leonard directed and co-produced the 1974 CBS buddy pilot Aces Up, with José Perez as a would-be race car driver and Raul Julia as his auto designer friend, both building the dream car they hope someday to race in professional competition. And an unsold NBC pilot in 1972 titled Movin’ On, written and created by the estimable Stirling Silliphant, followed the adventures of Patrick Wayne and Geoffrey Deuel as a couple of stock car racing buddies. Little Vic (six-part, 30-minute 1978 syndicated series) was, according to the show’s producer, Linda Marmelstein, about a horse named Little Vic and an orphaned black teenager, Gilly Walker, who trained and raced him. In the 1978 Special Olympics, a widowed father (Charles Durning) struggles to hold together his family of three teenagers, one of whom is mentally retarded and enrolled in a state school for “special” children where he finds self-fulfillment in his love of sports, emulating his older, athletic brother. Roller skating was also the subject of TV fare in the 1970s. In Bailey’s Comets (CBS 1973–1975), an animated children’s show, a teenage roller skating team competes in a global roller derby. It was produced by the cartoon team of David DePatie and Friz Freleng. Roller Derby, so popular in the early days of television, made a brief comeback (four episodes before being canceled) in the 1978 NBC sitcom The Roller Girls, dealing with a sexy if rather inept all-girl team, the Pittsburgh Pitts, and their hustling chauvinist manager. Several sports-oriented programs that aired during the 1970s were in categories of their own. A dramatization of the events surrounding the 1972 Olympics massacre when eight Arab terrorists killed 11 Israeli athletes, turned up in 21 Hours in Munich. A well-made, thoughtful 1976 film (adapted from Serge Groussard’s book, The Blood of Israel) that had the dubious distinction of premiering opposite the initial TV showing of Gone With the Wind, it focused on sports only tangentially—off the field. A later cable docudrama, Sword of Gideon, dealt with Israel’s Mossad and its relentless worldwide hunt to track down the Munich terrorists. The source book for this movie also was used more than three decades later by Steven Spielberg for his theatrical film, Munich. World Wide Wrestling was a long-running syndicated series that began in 1975, when wrestling wasn’t a popular sport outside of the hinterlands,

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after its initial splash in commercial TV’s infancy. The program ended in 2001 when it was well on its way to becoming huge all over again. Way Out Games (CBS weekends 1976–1977), hosted by Sonny Fox, was a game show in which young teams from all over the country competed in athletic feats.

CHAPTER 5

The 1980s

uring the 1980s, a number of made-for-TV movies were produced dealing with the Olympics. The first was novelist Irwin Shaw’s only original written exclusively for television. The two-part, four-hour Top of the Hill centered on a rising company executive (Wayne Rogers) who chucks his career and his marriage to fulfill a fantasy—to be a member of the Olympic bobsled team (to tie in with the 1980 Winter Olympics at Lake Placid). The film starred among others Sonny Bono, who later was involved in a fatal skiing accident. The second, The Golden Moment—An Olympic Love Story, had a rather interesting back story. The producers decided to make this film as a tie-in with the actual 1980 Summer Olympics: a fictional two-part, four-hour tale about an American athlete (played by David Keith) whose dreams of winning the decathlon are threatened by his romance with a pretty Russian gymnast (Stephanie Zimbalist). Before it could be shown, however, President Jimmy Carter withdrew the United States from the summer games in Moscow for political reasons, making the film rather redundant. Miracle on Ice (1981) was a TV movie about the 1980 United States Olympic hockey players, a group of amateurs from around the country who were whipped into a cohesive unit by controversial coach Herb Brooks (played by Karl Malden) to win a gold medal at Lake Placid during the winter games. There the squad defeated the seemingly invincible Soviet team. The 2004 theatrical film, Miracle, covering the same subject, starred Kurt Russell as Brooks.

D

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The First Olympics—Athens 1896 (1984) dramatized the first modern Olympic Games, which were revived at the end of the nineteenth century by a French aristocrat (Louis Jourdan) with the help of a Princeton professor (David Ogden Stiers). The film followed the fortunes of a ragtag team of amateur American athletes whose Olympic triumphs stunned the sports world. The Jesse Owens Story (1984) starred Dorian Harewood. The legendary black track gold medalist of the 1936 Berlin Olympics was the subject of this twopart, four-hour docudrama. The film dealt with 40 years of his life from his Alabama roots to his tax battles with the government and his final vindication. It aired in syndication to coincide with the 1984 Olympics in Los Angeles. Nadia (1984) dramatized the story of Rumanian gymnast Nadia Comaneci, the remarkable, petite teenager who amazed the sports world with her athletic abilities in the 1976 Olympics. Nadia was a British-Yugoslavian coproduction, King of the Olympics: The Lives and Loves of Avery Brundage (1988), a two-part, four-hour syndicated biographical (although superficial) drama, chronicled, with a certain amount of artistic license, the public life and private love affairs of the authoritarian, iron-fisted Olympics leader who for 50 years championed the cause of amateur athletics as president of both the U.S. and International Olympic Committees. Bud Greenspan’s uplifting America at the Olympics, airing on CBS on July 4, 1984, focused on 10 American athletes who competed in various Olympics and told of their personal accounts when returning to the scenes of their victories. (Nine were still alive at the time the two-hour documentary was made.) “If you don’t get a little teary at this,” the New York Times reported, you have no business watching America at the Olympics. It is a winning film.” An earlier in-the-decade Greenspan documentary was the 1980 PBS valentine Sports in America, adapted from James A. Michener’s book. Told in three parts over as many months, it focused individually on “The Black Athlete” (interviews with Muhammad Ali, O. J. Simpson, Arthur Ashe, and others), “Women in Sports” (tennis pro Chris Evert Lloyd, golfer Nancy Lopez, auto racer Janet Guthrie), and “Children and Sports.” And Greenspan’s 13-part Numero Uno, on PBS, documented the individual feats of runner Roger Bannister, skier Jean-Claude Killy, sprinter Irena Szewinska, New Zealand gold-medalist Peter Snell, and others between April and July 1982. Another Greenspan production included the 1988 HBO documentary The Golden Age of Sport, featuring legendary hero athletes from the 1920s including Babe Ruth, Bill Tilden, Bobby Jones, Jack Dempsey, and Red Grange. The program won a Cable ACE award as the Outstanding Sports Documentary of the Year.

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Numerous baseball (and softball)-themed dramas aired on television during the decade. The Comeback Kid—far from the story of Bill Clinton—was a 1980 made-for-TV movie, in which a down-on-his-luck baseball pitcher ( John Ritter) finds a new set of rewards coaching a gang of underprivileged youngsters and romancing a career-oriented playground supervisor (Susan Dey). Dribble was an unsold NBC comedy pilot airing in the summer of 1980. It dealt with a fictitious pro baseball team in New York City. Dee Wallace played a local sportswriter and Dan Frazier played the team’s coach. Don’t Look Back (1981) dramatized the story of Leroy “Satchel” Paige, the legendary pitcher, from his barnstorming days in the 1920s, when he hoped to break into organized Negro baseball, to his emergence at age 43 in the major leagues with the Cleveland Indians the year after Jackie Robinson and then Larry Doby broke baseball’s color barrier. Lou Gossett had the lead role. The film was based on the 1967 autobiography Paige wrote with David Lipman. Paige, who died in 1982, appeared briefly as himself in the film’s epilogue. Charles Durning starred in a one-man show, Casey Stengel, which aired on PBS in 1981 as a Hallmark Hall of Fame production. Nick Havinga directed. It was written by Sidney and David Carroll. A few years later, The Babe, actor Max Gail’s 1984 one-man play about Babe Ruth that had a brief run on Broadway, was restaged as a 90-minute dramatization on ESPN. Another look at the Bambino was in “The Babe: The Babe Ruth Story,” one of the subjects of the popular, long-running Biography series in the mid-1980s, in the days when Peter Graves was hosting it on A&E. Rob Reiner co-produced and co-wrote Million Dollar Infield (CBS 1982), an affectionate, semiautobiographical comedy, and starred as third baseman Monte Miller, an affluent Long Island suburbanite whose life and those of three buddies (played by Christopher Guest, Bruno Kirby, and Robert Costanzo) revolved around their softball team at the expense of their crumbling marriages. Mel Allen put in an appearance as himself. Baseball and other sports made up the plotlines of a number of episodes of the quirky cult series Quantum Leap that ran on NBC from 1989 through 1993, in which the lead character, Sam, Beckett (Scott Bakula) was a physicist who was sent bouncing around in time and space as the result of a flawed experiment. In his role he leapt into the bodies of others, male or female, black or white, Latino or Native American, Elvis Presley or Lee Harvey Oswald. With the help of a bemused, white-suited angel named Al (Dean Stockwell) who became visible only to him, Sam was the ultimate dogooder. Sam’s first leap (in the premiere episode, “Genesis”) was into the

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body of an X-2 test pilot and baseball minor leaguer. Playing in a park in Waco, Texas, Sam manages to strike out the first time at bat, but the catcher misses the last ball, allowing him to reach first base. The guy who pitched to him, he learned, was a young Tom Seaver. In another baseball-themed “leap,” Sam was Doc Fuller, pitcher in “Play Ball” for the minor-league Galveston Mustangs who, while in the majors, once accidentally killed a player with a fastball. A number of “leaps” later, in the episode “Heart of a Champion,” Sam finds himself in the world of professional wrestling, as part of a pseudoRussian tag team. In “The Right Hand of God,” he was in the boxing ring, fighting in what he finds to be a fixed bout on behalf of a group of nuns trying to get a chapel built (shades of Sidney Poitier in Lilies of the Field). Sam would be the Hispanic high school quarterback for the Jaguars at El Camino High in southern California in the early 1990s football-themed episode “All Americans.” In “Pool Hall Blues,” he was Charlie “Black Magic” Waters, a famed black pool hustler, while in “Running for Honor,” in 1992, he was a sprinter at a military academy whose track meet buddy is the victim of gay-bashing cadets. Returning to America’s passtime sport, a syndicated, 30-minute, Saturday morning show that ran weekly from March 21, 1982, until January 1, 1985, was The Baseball Bunch. It was hosted by Hall of Famer Johnny Bench and (initially) featured children chosen from the Tucson, Arizona, Little League. Each show was divided into two halves. The first spotlighted a current or former major league player demonstrating a fundamental of the sport to the kids, as well as their humorous attempts to imitate Bench. In the second half was a skit called “The Dugout Wizard” (played by Tommy Lasorda) who taught a second baseball fundamental (for example, use two hands to catch a fly ball). A music video (then a genre in its embryonic stage) was used as accompaniment to the players, either performing the on-field task or failing at it. Another star of the show was the San Diego Chicken, and among those making appearances were Ted Williams, Bucky Dent, Tug McGraw, Frank Robinson, Pete Rose (who was a guest twice), and Graig Nettles. In 2006, the basic premise for the show (which didn’t run very long this time around) was revived with pitcher Roger Clemens and the Phillie Phanatic (played by Tom Burgoyne) as new hosts. Like the earlier version, it was a kids-oriented show with stars from not only Major League Baseball but also film, television, and music such as Bob Goldthwait, Jimmy Kimmel, and Fernando Valenzuela. Another syndicated show dealing with baseball was Greats of the Game (1985–1986), produced by Major League baseball and hosted by

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sportscaster Tim Carver. The greats included through the weeks many of the superstar players of the time from Hank Aaron to Maury Wills. The Disney Channel presented its first original film, Tiger Town, in 1983. It followed the exploits of a 12-year-old diehard Detroit Tigers fan ( Justin Henry), and a veteran ballplayer, Billy Young (Roy Scheider), the Tigers’s Big Number 6—patterned after Al Kaline or perhaps Ernie Banks—who led his team to a pennant after a midseason slump. Tigers skipper Sparky Anderson does an onscreen bit as himself, along with Ernie Harwell, Al Ackerman, and Ray Lane. Tigers enthusiast Alan Shapiro wrote and directed the film. In the 1985 Amos, from the 1983 novel by Stanley Gordon West, Kirk Douglas was Amos Lasher, a 70-year-old former major league baseball coach now confined to a nursing home and constantly clashing with a sharp-tongued Nurse Ratched-type played by Elizabeth Montgomery. Actor Kirk’s son, Peter, was the film’s executive producer. Another baseballthemed 1985 drama, this one from Canada and shown as part of HBO’s “Family Playhouse” series, was the hour-long Workin’ for Peanuts, adapted from Todd Strasser’s book for young people. The publicity from HBO described it this way: “A teenage peanut vendor at a baseball stadium goes nuts over a pretty girl he spots there—until he learns that she’s the daughter of the stadium’s stingy owner.” A Winner Never Quits was a sentimental dramatization in 1986 of Pete Gray’s story. Keith Carradine (with one arm tied behind his back) portrayed the one-armed baseball player of the 1940s who not only realized his dream of playing in the major leagues (he was with the St. Louis Browns briefly) but also inspired a handicapped youngster, enacted by Huckleberry Fox. “Magic Saturday,” a 1986 episode of Steven Spielberg’s Amazing Stories, told of a youngster named Marky (played by Taliesen Jaffe) and his best friend, his adoring, long-ago baseball star grandpa, once known as “Stormin’ Norman” (M. Emmett Walsh), who share everything. When the old man becomes ill, the boy invokes a magic spell and he and grandpa switch bodies. The spell allows Stormin’ Norman to play one last magical ball game. This one was written by Richard Christian Mathieson, son of the noted sci-fi writer. The comedic Long Gone was a 1987 HBO baseball film publicized as the story of a lowly minor league team, the Tampico Stogies, with major league dreams. It starred William L. Petersen as a brash player-manager, Stud Cantrell, who was reduced to coaching a third-rate mid-1950s team. Co-starring was Virginia Madsen as a sassy blonde beauty queen, Dixie Lee Boxx, intent on turning a one-night stand with Cantrell (and possibly every other one of his players) into a lifelong commitment.

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Bay City Blues (NBC 1983) was an hour-long dramatic series following the fortunes of a minor-league baseball team, the Bay City (California) Bluebirds of the AA Western League. Michael Nouri was the manager, Dennis Franz the coach, and Pat Corley the slippery owner. Like just about every other baseball-oriented series on TV through the years, this one fouled out after just four episodes. Casey at the Bat (1986), adapted from Ernest Thayer’s classic baseball poem, starred Elliott Gould as the famous player of lore and Carol Kane as his sweetie in this episode of Shelley Duvall’s cable series Tall Stories and Legends. Howard Cosell narrated this tale of the hapless Mudville Hogs player who saved baseball in 1888. Bob Uecker was Cosell’s “color man,” and Bill Macy (of Maude, not William H. Macy) was Casey’s mentor. In a November 1981 episode of The Greatest American Hero, an early 1980s ABC comedy/action series, baseball was the theme on “The Two-HundredMile-an-Hour Fast Ball,” in which reluctantly superhuman but rather klutzy Ralph Hanley (William Katt) joins the underdogs on a diamond team and lends his fantastic arm as a pitcher to thwart a bunch of crooked gamblers. Several months later, on CBS’s sitcom Archie Bunker’s Place, Yankees star Reggie Jackson turned up. Although the episode “Reggie-3, Archie-0” was not really about baseball, it’s included here simply because a sports star was the lead guest star playing himself. In this story Archie’s truck accidentally backed into Reggie’s spiffy sports car. Although Reggie turned up at Archie Bunker’s tavern to say “no problem,” Archie made a racial remark, and the whole thing ended up in court. And on the New Twilight Zone series on CBS in 1988, Marc Singer starred in an episode called “Extra Innings” as Ed Hamler, a washed-up, injured pro baseball player who finds a 1909 baseball card of one Monte Hanks, who looks just like him. In fact, that card transports him back into the game. It was written by Tom Palmer and directed by Doug Jackson. During the 1980s, Charlie Brown and the Peanuts Gang were doing their well-loved thing on The Charlie Brown and Snoopy Show on CBS, whether it be playing sports, particularly baseball (Snoopy: Team Manager; The Lost Ballpark; It’s the Team Spirit, Charlie Brown) and sometimes football (Snoopy’s Football Career; Linus and Lucy) or indulging in more mundane things like everyday living—and puppy-loving. Another animated show dealing with baseball was a 30-minute Canadian cartoon called Take Me Up to the Ball Game (1980). It is mentioned here solely because comedian Phil Silvers was the star (or at least his voice was). He played Irwin, the coach of a team of farm animals from Earth who compete in a baseball game in outer space with a bunch of alien all-stars.

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In the mid-1980s, PBS Sports broadcast a number of documentaries dealing with baseball, including these: Pinstripe Power: The Story of the 1961 New York Yankees (1986), narrated by E. G. Marshall 1986 Mets: A Year to Remember (1986), produced and written by Steven Stern for Major League Baseball A Silver Odyssey: 25 Years of Astros Baseball (1987), also written and produced by Stern A League of Their Own (1987), produced for PBS by Kelly Candaele in tribute to her mother and the other women baseball players and their fabled team of World War II. The title of the show was appropriated by director Penny Marshall for her later feature movie on the same subject. “Forever Baseball” (1989), produced and written by filmmaker Irv Drasnin, aired as part of PBS’s American Experience series. Publicity for the show described it, in part, this way: “It reflects both the ideals and contradictions in American life. Though black professional players were forced to play in their own leagues up until 1946, baseball has traditionally represented a way into the American mainstream, especially for immigrants. Baseball was a melting pot producing heroes nicknamed The Babe, Dizzy, Peewee, Joltin’ Joe, Hammering Hank, The Duke, and Dr. K.”

All the while on the TV gridiron, there were these programs in the 1980s. ABC’s Semi-Tough (1980) which lasted only four episodes, was based on the Dan Jenkins’s novel and the 1977 film, with Bruce McGill and David Hasselhoff as the fictional New York Bulls pro football team stars Billy Clyde Puckett and Shake Tiller. These roles were played on the big screen by Burt Reynolds and Kris Kristofferson. Coach of the Year (1980) had Robert Conrad as Jim Brandon, a former football pro with the Chicago Bears, who comes back from the Vietnam War in a wheelchair and tries to put his life back together by coaching youngsters in a correctional facility. (This was not the same Jim Brandon of the Bears who in 1988–1989 was named Coach of he Year.) In 1988, Conrad returned as both director and star of CBS’s football drama Glory Days, about a middle-age man who fulfills his desire to be a football star. He returns to college after retiring and becomes a grid hero. As with most of the latter day Conrad vehicles, this was a family affair. Real-life son Shane, for whom his production company was named, played his screen son; real-life daughter Joan was executive producer; another daughter Nancy had a small role as a coed; close pal Roger Bacon was co-producer. Fighting Back (1980) was a dramatization of the story of Pittsburgh Steelers football star, Rocky Bleier (played by Robert Urich) and his comeback

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from serious injuries during the Vietnam War, thanks to Art Rooney, the team’s benevolent owner (portrayed by Art Carney). This was based on Bleier’s 1975 autobiography written with Terry O’Neill. Grambling’s White Tiger, a 1981 NBC television biopic, romanticized the story of James Gregory, an outstanding high school quarterback from California who, hoping to get into pro football, becomes the lone white student at Grambling College in Louisiana. This was an adaptation of Bruce Bahrenburg’s early 1970s book My Little Brother Is Coming Tomorrow. Sports star-turned-actor Bruce Jenner, Olympic decathlon gold medalist in 1978, starred, and Harry Belafonte made his television movie debut as the famed Grambling coach Eddie Robinson (who died in 2007 at age 88). The 1981 TV movie that was part Norma Rae and part The Longest Yard was ABC’s light-hearted The Oklahoma City Dolls, written by Ann Beckett. Susan Blakley starred as a factory worker who leads a rebellion for equal rights by forming a company football team for women and hiring down-onhis luck coach Eddie Albert to turn them into winners. Football, although not the primary part of the plot, ran through the topnotch 1981 two-part movie called The Sophisticated Gents, adapted from John Alfred Williams’s 1976 book, The Junior Bachelor Club, which brings together nine members of a black athletic/social club for the first time in 25 years to honor their old college coach. The reunion is marred by a murder investigation involving one of the gents (Melvin Van Peebles, who had written the teleplay as well as one of the songs). Sonny Jim Gaines played the coach and Paul Winfield was the nominal lead, a onetime star player named Richard “Bubbles” Wiggins. This basically all-black film, made in 1979, sat on the network shelf for nearly two years, and has hardly been seen since its NBC premiere. Quarterback Princess, a 1983 TV movie, told the story of the real-life Tami Maida, a teenage girl from Canada who, in 1981, became a quarterback for the boys’ junior varsity football team while living briefly in Oregon. She not only led the squad to a winning season but also was crowned homecoming princess, and it gave young TV veteran Helen Hunt her first starring role. An offbeat, football-themed TV movie, Pigs vs. Freaks (aka Off-Sides), followed the antics of an antiestablishment group of hippies, coached by Tony Randall as Rambaba Organimus, who take on their mainstream small-town sheriff and son’s gridiron team of Vietnam war vets (it was set in the late 1960s). Filmed in 1980, this sat on the shelf for nearly four years before its NBC premiere. In the cast were Grant Goodeve, Adam Baldwin, Brian Dennehy, Gloria De Haven, Patrick Swayze, Elisha Cook, and Eugene Roche as the head cop, plus sports legend and Heisman Trophy winner of decades earlier, Tom Harmon, as the game announcer. Football giant Harmon had

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been Emmy-nominated back in 1949 in a category called “Most Outstanding Live Personality” along with early talk- and game-show host Mike Stokey and comedian Ed Wynn (who won). Macho Robert Conrad did his thing once again in a 1988 football movie, as director and star, playing a middle-age man with two kids in college (one real-life son Shane). Because he didn’t finish his own education, he enrolls with them, tries out for and makes the football team, and of course becomes a phenomenon. His wife wants him to quit, but he stays with it. Equally macho Robert Urich also did a CBS movie around the same time, The Comeback, based (at least on the screen credits) on Seymour Epstein’s “Eye of the Beholder.” Urich portrayed an ex-NFL football jock whose career was cut short by injuries and has been traveling the world carefree for the past two decades. He decides to return to Minneapolis to settle down and pay a visit to his ex-wife and now grown son, making a comeback in life, and inadvertently becoming enamored with his son’s girlfriend. Quiet Victory: The Charlie Wedemeyer Story (1988) was a CBS docudrama about an outstanding high school athlete who became quarterback of the Punahou School football team in his home state of Hawaii and was named Hawaii Prep Athlete of the ’60s. After his graduation from Punahou in 1965, he attended Michigan State University where he played for famed coach Duffy Daugherty. Later, following his graduation from Michigan State in 1969, he obtained a master’s degree from Central Michigan University. In 1978, while he was the head football coach at Los Gatos High School, he was diagnosed with Lou Gehrig’s disease at age 31, but continued to coach from a wheelchair and almost wordlessly for another 15 years. Michael Nouri starred as Wedemeyer. Directing this sports drama was Roy Campanella II, whose own dad was the legendary Brooklyn Dodgers catcher who was left paralyzed after an auto accident. 1st and 10 was a six-season HBO sports sitcom (the cable network’s first regular series) beginning in 1984. Delta Burke starred as Diane Barrow, team owner who inherited it (the fictional California Bulls) as part of a divorce settlement after her hubby ran off with a lineman. O. J. Simpson played T. D. Parker, general manager, beginning with the second season. The Diane Barrow character reportedly was based on real-life Georgia Frontiere, owner of the NFL’s St. Louis Rams. Assorted pro football players, past and present, made appearances throughout the TV seasons, each of which (beginning with the second) had a new subtitle: Training Camp: The Bulls Are Back The Championship Going for Broke

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Television aired many boxing-related stories during the 1980s. In CBS’s three-hour docudrama Dempsey in 1983, Treat Williams made his dramatic television debut as boxing great Jack Dempsey in the film covering the career of the fighter known as The Manassa (Colorado) Mauler. The drama described his first two marriages, his trial for draft evasion in World War I, his lifelong friendship with Damon Runyon and other celebrities, and his achievements in the ring. Sally Kellerman played Maxine Cates, his first wife, a jaded saloon singer 10 years his senior; Victoria Tennant was silent screen actress Estelle Taylor, who became the second Mrs. Dempsey; and Sam Waterston portrayed Doc Kearns, who discovered the young Dempsey and managed his career to the heavyweight championship. As the official Jack Dempsey Web site puts it: “Dempsey proved his phenomenal ability in a battle of ‘David and Goliath’ match of fists. His iron strength and killer left hooks allowed Dempsey to beat Jess Willard in 1919, leaving the giant bewildered and shattered.” He went on to become one of the boxing greats of the 1920s. On September 23, 1926, he was defeated by Gene Tunney and lost his heavyweight title. Ironically, this match yielded the largest paid attendance in boxing history. Tunney and Dempsey went fist to fist again in 1927 in hopes that Dempsey would reclaim his title. He lost this rematch, which was coined “The Battle of the Long Count” because the referee claimed that Dempsey did not return to a neutral corner after Tunney fell. Tunney won the match three rounds later. Dempsey continued boxing in exhibitions after his defeat but retired from professional boxing in 1940 and went on to be a successful restaurateur in New York. He left the ring with a record of 60–7–8. Fifty of these wins were knockouts. The film was based on Dempsey’s 1977 autobiography, written with his third wife, Barbara Piatelli Dempsey. CBS next took on the career of Ray “Boom Boom” Mancini in 1985 in Heart of a Champion: The Ray Mancini Story. Doug McKeon played the boxer, who became a darling of TV boxing matches during the 1980s, with Robert Blake as his father, Lennie. This was the story of the onetime World Boxing Association (WBA) Lightweight Champion who claimed he fought to keep alive the dream of his dad, a lightweight contender whose chance at the title was dashed by wounds he suffered during World War II. On November 13, 1982, a 21-year-old Mancini met 23-year-old South Korean challenger Duk Koo Kim. In the 14-rounder at Caesars Palace in Las

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Vegas, Mancini battered away at Kim who sustained brain injuries and died in the ring (actually five days later). This changed the face of lightweight boxing. Mancini retired officially in 1993, leaving a record of 29–5, with 23 knockouts. He gained new fans later as a fight analyst for the Fox reality series, Celebrity Boxing. In the realm of popular culture, Ray is remembered by music fans through writer/performer Warren Zevon, who once wrote a song that tracked Mancini’s career, up until Ray’s January 1984 fight with Mexican Bobby Chacon, which was televised on HBO. Sylvester Stallone, one of the screen’s most famous fictional boxers, not only was executive producer of the Mancini film but also choreographed the fight sequences as he had done for his Rocky movies. Before acquiring its final title, this superficial TV movie biography was called, variously, “Dreams Don’t Die—The Ray Mancini Story,” “A Champion’s Edge,” and “I Walk in Your Shadow.” For the TV-movie Terrible Joe Moran, on CBS in 1984, James Cagney was enticed out of retirement for one final role. He did his first television acting in 25 years, playing a wheelchair-bound former boxing champion whose long estranged granddaughter, an aspiring writer, pops back into his life, at first searching for money to help her ne’er-do-well boyfriend get off the hook with the syndicate and later redeveloping a warm, familial bond with the old man. Art Carney won an Emmy as Outstanding Supporting Actor for his performance as Cagney’s longtime pal. The drama was filmed entirely on location in Manhattan, whose flamboyant mayor, Edward Koch, put in a cameo as a seedy fight promoter. Memorable middleweight boxing champ Marvelous Marvin Hagler (like fellow boxer from an earlier era, Rocky Marciano, from Brockton, Massachusetts) was sought out by popular NBC TV star Punky Brewster (perky Soleil Moon Frye) for fighting tips in “The K.O. Kid” when she finds herself bullied by a schoolmate in a 1985 episode. On an earlier sports-themed episode in 1984, the young lady, a die-hard Cubbie, finds herself the proud possessor of a pair of Chicago Cubs baseball tickets, scored for her by her curmudgeonly costar Henry Warnimont (George Gaynes). In an episode of the Lee Majors series, The Fall Guy, on NBC in 1986, Colt (Majors) tries to protect a fight manager from the mob. Turning up as themselves were Sugar Ray Robinson, Archie Moore, Larry Holmes, and Bobby Chacon. And the same season (same network), the Knight Rider episode “Redemption of a Champion” featured Ken Norton as a former boxing champ determined to step back into the ring even if it kills him. Don King, Jerry Quarry, Carlos Palomino, Danny Lopez, and Monte Masters all had cameos. Sammy Davis Jr. made one of his last acting appearances in Ring of Honor,

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an episode of NBC’s series Hunter in the spring of 1989. He played an aging boxing trainer named Benny Shaffer, who gets involved when no-nonsense L.A. cop Rick Hunter (played by former Los Angeles Rams football star Fred Dryer) pursues the murder of a promising fighter’s manager and his doctor. Hip cops Sonny Crockett and Ricardo Tubbs (Don Johnson and Philip Michael Thomas), on a two-part Miami Vice in early 1987, set themselves up as cable TV promoters in an episode called “Down for the Count” to get the goods on a mobster trying to fix a fight. Two-time welterweight champ and 1984 Olympics gold medalist Mark Breland guest starred as the boxer. A few seasons earlier, an episode of NBC’s popular series The A-Team, titled “Pros and Cons,” had Mr. T as “B. A.” going to bat for his friend Jackhammer Jackson (heavyweight champ Ken Norton), who’s now in prison and participating in fight-to-the-death boxing matches set up for the warden’s amusement. In another episode, titled “The Trouble With Harry,” George Peppard leads The A-Team in 1986 in a search for fighter Harry ‘The Hammer’ Sullivan (Paul Gleason) who accidentally killed a man in the boxing ring in 1959 and has been on the run ever since. Now a drunk, Harry finds that both a loan shark and a mob hit man are closing in on him and his son. Joining the team in the search are guest stars Hulk Hogan and fellow wrestling star William “Refrigerator” Perry (who had earlier been an NFL lineman for the Chicago Bears and Philadelphia Eagles). Boxing was part of the plot of an episode in February 1989 of the NBC sitcom Amen, when Deacon Frye (star Sherman Hemsley) recruited one of his parishioners, a punch-drunk fighter named Windmill Pearson to get into the ring on behalf of the church. Windmill was played by onetime boxer-turned-actor Vinnie Curto (he’d fought as a super middleweight in the 1970s and 1980s) in the episode titled “The Boxer.” Curto’s story was scheduled to be dramatized in the 2009 Robert De Niro movie Out on My Feet with Curto playing his own dad. During the 1980s, a few basketball dramas and comedies were aired. A Mother’s Courage: The Mary Thomas Story (1989) was an inspirational Emmywinning (Outstanding Children’s Drama) Disney production recounting the early life of Detroit Pistons basketball great Isaiah Thomas (who’d go on to be the controversial, now former, head coach of the New York Knicks) and the loving upbringing in the Chicago projects by his mother Mary, played by Alfre Woodard. The Harlem Globetrotters on Gilligan’s Island aired in 1981, the title of which tells the plot of this third pilot to a prospective new Gilligan’s Island series. The legendary team’s chartered plane crash lands on the atoll inhabited by the happily marooned Gilligan and fellow castaways, and the Globetrotters and Gilligan’s gang play basketball against a specially programmed squad of robots controlled by mad scientist Martin Landau.

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Hockey was also the subject of several TV shows of the 1980s. In The Boy Who Drank Too Much (1980), Scott Baio is a high school athlete, Buff Saunders, who is well on the road to becoming an alcoholic like his ex-hockey pro father, Don Murray, until his teammate and best friend, Lance Kerwin, commits himself to saving Buff from his self-destructive habit. The CBS film was based on the 1979 novel by Shep Greene. PBS’s WonderWorks series of programs aimed at younger viewers aired the Canadian-made Hockey Night in 1984. It starred Megan Follows (in her Anne of Green Gables days) as a teenager in a small Canadian town looking to become a goalie on the boys’ high school hockey team and bowling over the team’s coach, played by Rick Moranis, who thinks that heaven has fallen into his lap (or on his patch of ice). In 1984, on a CBS Schoolbreak Special (a series of periodic late afternoon dramas that competed with ABC’s Afterschool Specials but aimed at a slightly older audience), the story of the real-life high school hockey coach Bob Anastas (played by Stephen Macht) was dramatized in “Contract for Life: The S.A.D.D. Story.” Anastas, after losing two of his all-star players, gets his students to prevent more tragedies by forming Students Against Drunk Driving in 1981. Other sports-themed dramas in the 1980s and 1990s CBS Schoolbreak Special series that were aimed at young adults included “What If I’m Gay?” (the macho captain of the high-school soccer team is forced to confront his homosexuality after his buddies discover a gay magazine in his locker) and “If I Die Before I Wake” (high schoolers are left to pick up the pieces, in this original by Susan Rohrer, who also directed, when the entire track team is killed in an airplane crash). Director Bob McKeown’s Canadian-made 1987 documentary The Boys on the Bus followed hockey stars Wayne Gretzky, Mark Messier, Charlie Huddy, and teammates of the Edmonton Oilers through the 1986–1987 season as they battle for the team’s third Stanley Cup. Gretzky and Messier were the superstar heart and soul of the Oilers during the 1980s. Figure skating made it into the TV drama spotlight in a 1980 ABC Afterschool Special titled “The Heartbreak Winner,” adapted from Michael Bonadies’s novel for young people, The Gold Test. It followed the fortunes of a teenage figure skater who, while aspiring to “go for the gold” and achieve her Olympic dreams, comes down with rheumatoid arthritis and subsequently learns the true value of winning when she meets a young African American paraplegic. At least one golf-related story bears mentioning. Dead Solid Perfect, based on the 1974 book by Dan Jenkins, was an HBO comedy/drama in 1988 that starred Randy Quaid as a pro golfer on the PGA tour. The title,

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as golf enthusiasts know, is the term given when the golfer’s ball is hit at a perfect angle. In this sometime salty adaptation by Jenkins and the film’s director, Bobby Roth, Kathryn Harrold played Quaid’s independent-minded “golf widow” wife, and Jack Warden his colorful sponsor, a bigoted Texas loudmouth. Several programs in the 1980s portrayed stories about runners. Bob Newhart played a jogger who had everything he could want in the comedy/ romance Marathon, a 1980 TV movie on CBS—a loving wife, a happy teenage daughter, a couple of best buddies. Then he meets a beautiful female runner in a local marathon and found that he had to be kept on his toes to keep himself and his life running smoothly before his mid-life crisis overtook him. Veteran actor Jackie Cooper directed this lively script by Ron Friedman. The Miracle of Kathy Miller was a dramatized account on CBS in 1981 of runner Kathy Miller (Helen Hunt), a sports-minded Arizona teenage girl who was struck down by a speeding auto in 1977, spent 10 weeks in a coma with massive brain damage, and eventually recovered miraculously to be named the world’s most courageous athlete. The script was by Mel and Ethel Bretz. The Terry Fox Story (1983) dramatized young Canadian athlete Terry Fox’s cross-country Marathon of Hope after he lost a leg to cancer. This movie was heralded as the first made exclusively for HBO. Filmed in Canada with a basically local cast and crew (and Eric Fryer making his acting debut in the lead; to date he’s never made another film), it had two actors from the United States, one of whom was Robert Duvall as the opportunistic PR man who helps turn Fox into a national hero. TNT’s cable movie Finish Line (1988) was a sports-related drama about a father-son relationship with a real-life father-son team playing the fictional roles. The passionate involvement of the ambitious, dedicated-to-winning older man ( James Brolin), a former track star, in the athletic career of the younger one ( Josh Brolin, then just 20) drives the latter to steroid abuse and tragedy. It was an original story by Norman McLeod Morrill. Three tennis-related dramas of the 1980s should be mentioned. Second Serve (1986) was a compelling telling of the story of Dr. Renée Richards, the tennis star who had undergone a sex change operation after having lived the first part of her life as a man, Richard Raskind (here called Richard Radley), a loving father, and a transvestite. Vanessa Redgrave received an Outstanding Actress Emmy nomination playing both Renée and Richard. Tennis played a secondary role in two Alfred Hitchcock classics of the past, both of which were remade for television. First came the 1981 TV version of Hitch’s 1954 Dial M for Murder (this time starring Christopher Plummer—as

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a noted British tennis pro, Angie Dickinson, and Michael Parks). This new version, based on the Frederick Knott mystery, was adapted to television by prolific John Gay. (It later was made again theatrically as A Perfect Murder, with Michael Douglas, Gwyneth Paltrow, and Viggo Mortensen). Another tennis-tinged Hitchcock movie, 1951’s Strangers on a Train, based on Patricia Highsmith’s novel, was remade for TV in Great Britain in 1967 with Laurence Harvey, Diane Cilento, and American Hugh O’Brian, and again in 1996 in the United States, as Once You Meet a Stranger with a change of gender—Jacqueline Bissett and Theresa Russell, plus Anthony Quayle as the police inspector. It was written and directed by Tommy Lee Wallace, who adapted (among others) Raymond Chandler’s original 1951 screenplay. Even the rodeo was the subject of a 1980s TV drama. In Rodeo Girl the wife (Katharine Ross) of a champion rodeo performer who is tired of her subsidiary role at home, becomes an aspiring rodeo rider herself, encouraged by her onetime performer mother and despite her husband’s disapproval. The movie was based on the true story of rodeo champion Sue Pirtle, who was inducted into the Cowgirl Hall of Fame in 1981. Aside from an increasing plethora of wrestling matches on TV—the nationally syndicated pro series World Wide Wrestling (first out of Raleigh, North Carolina, and then Charlotte, and by 1993 taped on the road), launched by producer Lawrence Crockett Jr. in 1975 and which continued through the 1980s and 1990, was a syndicated series WWW Superstars of Wrestling (1984–96). There also were good-humored, almost spooflike hourlong wrestling /talk shows, including, Tuesday Night Titans (or TNT, as it was called), airing in 1984 on the USA Network, in which wrestlers, rather than actors and book authors, were interviewed by Vince McMahon and cohost Lord Alfred Hayes; an NBC wrestling series Saturday Night’s Main Event, airing occasionally between 1985 and 1992; and CBS airing a part animated/ part live action series, Hulk Hogan’s Rock ‘n’ Wrestling on Saturday mornings in 1985. Hogan played himself in live-action segments and Brad Garrett did Hulk’s voice in the animated parts. WWF Prime-Time Wrestling aired from 1986 through 1993 on the USA Network. This program was the predecessor of Monday Night RAW and RAW Is War. Also, beginning in 1989 and continuing annually through 2000, with Hulk Hogan, Roddy Piper, Curt Hennig, and Eddie Guerrero, was a pay-perview series called Halloween Havoc, telecast live initially from the Philadelphia Civic Center. Produced by World Championship Wrestling (WCW), it mixed wrestling with steel-cage matches, G.L.O.W (Gorgeous Ladies of Wrestling ) (1986–1990 in syndication, taped in Las Vegas at the Riviera Hotel ) was an hour-long weekly offering that was

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extremely popular in urban areas. Outlandish women wrestlers would go at it in the same fashion as those trashy mud wrestlers from the Hollywood strip clubs. In fact, many of the “ladies” in the ring were current or former LA strippers and mud wrestlers. Women’s wrestling has never gone mainstream on television except for the infamously bizarre intergender match in the 1980s that was staged by way-out comic Andy Kaufman, a devoted wrestling buff who was the self-proclaimed king of the offbeat genre. Learning the Ropes (1988–1989 syndicated ) with real-life football star Lyle Alzado (defensive lineman for the Denver Broncos, Cleveland Browns, and Los Angeles Raiders during the 1970s and early 1980s) starred as a history teacher and prep school principal by day and a pro wrestler, The Masked Maniac, at night. Alzado was one of the first professional athletes to be accused of using steroids. He later died of brain cancer in 1992 (at age 42). Skiing was the subject of ABC’s Swan Song in which Sun Valley provided the backdrop to this fictional 1980 story (by Jeffrey Bloom, Michael Mann, and Ron Koslow) of a downhill ski racer, Jesse Swan (played by David Soul). Swan seeks to make a comeback after being branded a loser, and a ski bunny helps him regain his self-respect. Going for the Gold: The Bill Johnson Story (1985), with Anthony Edwards in the lead, follows the fortunes of a tough, street-smart skier from Oregon who put his scrapes with the law behind him and emerged a gold medalist at the 1984 Winter Olympics at Sarajevo, Yugoslavia. Several TV shows dealt with auto racing in 1980s. The Dukes, a 1983 cartoon series from Hanna-Barbera, was a Saturday morning CBS spin-off from The Dukes of Hazzard, with many of the actors, including John Schneider and Tom Wopat, providing the voices. Elke Sommer’s World of Speed and Beauty (1984) was a syndicated series hosted by 1960s’ beauty, painter, sculptor, and, according to Sports Illustrated, one of the top-ranked celebrity tennis players and golfers. The series later was revived on TNN in 1989. And in 1981, shortly after the Burt Reynolds theatrical film Cannonball Run became a huge success, country singer Mel Tillis and ex-Pittsburgh Steelers quarterback Terry Bradshaw (later to become a Hall of Famer and still later as sportscaster on CBS) reprised their big screen roles in an NBC pilot called The Stockers, playing a pair of struggling stock car racers named Mel and Terry. Motorcycling was the topic of Stormin’ Home (1985) in which an aging motocross racer (Gil Gerard) vows to make one last go of it on his bike in the race of his career. He has already lost his wife and daughter to his footloose lifestyle and is about to have his semi-tractor cab repossessed.

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Billiards had a rare bank shot in the late 1980s in Kiss Shot. Whoopi Goldberg made her TV-movie debut in this 1989 romantic comedy as a pool hustler, a self-made single mother who turns her skills into fast money to meet her mortgage payments. Dennis Franz played her promoter and Dorian Harewood was a part-time player and full-time playboy. The triathlon is the subject of Challenge of a Lifetime (1985). It starred Penny Marshall as a lovable eccentric who becomes obsessed with competing in Hawaii’s Ironman Triathlon, a grueling daylong sports contest that consists of a 2.4-mile swim, a 112-mile bike ride, and a 26.2-mile running race. Her teenage son (played by Jonathan Silverman) encourages her to “go for it!” Gymnast turned actress Cathy Rigby starred as one of her friends. The script was by Peachy Markowitz, the alter ego for TV writer/producer Sally Robinson.

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CHAPTER 6

The 1990s

y the last decade of the twentieth century, the landscape of television began expanding quite rapidly, with the launching of more and more pay and basic cable stations, many specializing in sports programming. By the end of the 1990s, reality programming (sports and sports themed) became increasingly popular. On American Gladiators, a weekly syndicated sports/audience participation series (it actually began in October 1989 and ran until mid-1997), contestants (male and female, given colorful, exotic names) competed in assorted physical endeavors, not against one another but against various members of the in-house staff of challengers. In what today would be categorized as a reality series, the hour-long show was hosted by Mike Adamie along with, at various times, Joe Thiesmann and Larry Csonka, among others from the sports arena. It might be thought of as a precursor to the current Dancing With the Stars or Deal or No Deal. Executive produced by Ron Ziskin, there were 208 episodes. A children’s version of the series, also syndicated, was Gladiators 2000, which aired for a single season in 1994. American Gladiators was revived on NBC at the start of 2008, with flamboyant wrestling star Hulk Hogan and Laila Ali, Muhammad Ali’s champion boxer daughter, as cohosts. The new millennium version featured 24 fearless contenders—12 men and 12 women—facing off against the show’s Gladiators (see later). Baseball was often featured in dramas, comedies, and documentaries in the 1990s. The Court-Martial of Jackie Robinson was a dramatization of events in the life of Jackie Robinson while he was an officer in the U.S. Army during

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World War II. He was court-martialed for his refusal to sit in the back of an army bus while at Fort Hood, Texas. André Braugher played the future big leaguer in this 1990 film and Ruby Dee, who portrayed Robinson’s wife in the early 1950s film biography of the Dodgers great, was his mother here. Along the way in this film, Jackie Robinson crossed paths with Joe Louis and Satchel Paige, played, respectively, by Stan Shaw and Steven Williams. The 1991 NBC biopic Babe Ruth offered a heavily made-up Stephen Lang as the Bambino, portraying the slugger on and off the field. Contemporary superstar of the game Pete Rose played a small role as Ty Cobb. The film was based on two 1974 books: Babe Ruth: His Life and Legend by Kal Wagenheim and Babe: The Legend Comes to Life by Robert W. Creamer. Comrades of Summer, a 1992 cable baseball comedy by Robert Rodat, starred Joe Mantegna as Sparky Smith, Seattle Mariners (fictional) manager who was given the boot by the owner but takes on the task of training a Russian baseball team for the summer Olympics. The premise, as Rob Edelman observed in Great Baseball Films (Citadel Press, 1994), was similar to the one on the big screen the same year, Mr. Baseball with Tom Selleck, with the locale and circumstances changed. (Selleck ended up managing a Japanese team outside of Tokyo.) The Man From Left Field—not to be confused with The Kid From Left Field—was a 1993 CBS movie starring Burt Reynolds (who also produced and directed) and Reba McEntire. In it Reynolds plays a homeless man who, after being “adopted” by a Little League team as its coach, inspires the kids to reach for it all, and they inspire him to reclaim his life. In 1993’s Cooperstown, an original TNT drama by Lee Blessing, Alan Arkin starred as a retired, somewhat embittered pitching great waiting to be selected to the National Baseball Hall of Fame. His friend and baseball rival, a Native American (Graham Greene), whom he hasn’t talked to in many years because of a grudge, is selected to the Hall the night before he (the rival) dies. His ghost, however, helps rectify the Hall of Fame selection committee’s oversight. A sentimental tale derived from Christopher Bohjalian’s 1992 novel, Past the Bleachers (1995), dealt with a Little League baseball coach (Richard Dean Anderson), grieving for the loss of his young son, who is helped to cope by a mysterious mute boy seemingly to have come from nowhere, with no parents and no history. Soul of the Game was an engaging, speculative story, written by David Himmelstein and airing on HBO in 1996, of legendary players Satchel Paige (Delroy Lindo) and Josh Gibson (Mykalti Williamson). They meet on a playing field in Kansas City in 1945 on the eve of the breaking of racial

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barriers in the majors to figure out which one will be chosen the first black to play in the big leagues. Instead, the outspoken, young Jackie Robinson (Blair Underwood) gets the nod from Dodgers G. M. Branch Rickey (Edward Herrmann), not the veteran players. Jerry Hardin played baseball commissioner Happy Chandler. Joe Torre: Curveballs Along the Way was a 1997 film, adapted by Philip Rosenberg from the New York Yankees manager’s autobiography (Paul Sorvino played Joe), that focused on Torre’s 1996 ordeal of living through his brother Frank’s (Robert Loggia) heart transplant while leading the Yankees through the World Series. The ringer in this one was having prolific Canadian actor Kenneth Welsh, who earlier had portrayed Harry Truman and Thomas Dewey, play blustering George Steinbrenner. A 1999 cable film on Showtime, a thriller called Mean Street, tangentially dealt with baseball. A racist white NYC cop (Scott Bakula) finds himself teamed with a straight-arrow black FBI agent (Leon) to track down a vicious serial killer who has been sending gruesome threats to a star baseball player who is about to break Joe DiMaggio’s hitting streak. In It’s Spring Training, Charlie Brown (1992), directed by Bill Melendez and written by Charles Schultz, as springtime rolls around, Charlie Brown’s team performs the usual hopeless task of getting in shape for the new season. To improve the team’s morale, he manages to find a potential sponsor who agrees to provide uniforms if the team wins the first game of the season. Considering its usual incompetence, including new members like Leland who is too young to even tie his shoes, the challenge seems impossible. Based on the hit movie with Tom Hanks, Madonna, and others, A League of Their Own (a short-lived CBS series of 1993) was a World War II comedy about the real-life Rockford Peaches, one of the teams in the women’s professional league formed while the male players were serving overseas. It was pulled after three episodes (although two more were aired months later). Sam McMurray had the Hanks role as the washed-up big leaguer who was recruited as the team’s manager. Hardball (1994) was a limp, short-lived baseball sitcom that aired on FOX. It dealt with the Pioneers, an inept American League baseball team that was more interested in finding the right mascot (the titular name) and the locker room antics than actually playing. Bruce Greenwood, Dann Florek, and Rose-Marie starred, respectively, as wisecracking team leader and veteran pitcher, Dave Logan; Pioneers’ manager Ernest “Happy” Talbot, brought aboard to shape up the clubhouse; and the tough-talking, Marge Shott-type team owner, Mitzi Balzer. The show fouled out after just six (of eight) episodes.

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Another equally short-lived sports-oriented sitcom of the time—coinciding more or less with the infamous 232-day major league baseball strike—was ABC’s A Whole New Ballgame, which premiered in early 1995. Corbin Bernsen starred as Brett Sooner, a full-of-himself major leaguer who took a job at a Milwaukee TV station as a sports announcer during a baseball strike. At least 11 episodes of the series were filmed but only seven aired before the network called the game. On the documentary side of baseball, Black Canyon Productions in association with HBO Sports offered the lyrical documentary When It Was a Game in 1991, produced by George Roy and written by Steven Hilliard Stern. The show consisted of 8mm and 16mm film taken by players and fans from 1934 to 1957, all but a few minutes in color. Winner of a George Foster Peabody Award, it spawned a sequel, When It Was a Game II the next year. When it came time for When It Was a Game III in 2000, the concept was changed to include views from assorted sports celebrities, a narration by Liev Schreiber, and fellow narrators André Braugher, Kevin Costner, and Rita Moreno. Generally each of the shows premiered on the eve of the All-Star Game. Ruminating to this author in 2008 about the many sports documentaries that he produced through the years, George Roy said: The first one, and probably in its way I guess vanguard, was When It Was a Game. It really was the first of its kind in many respects. There were two in a row, and then there was a big gap. My partner and I at the time had just come from Major League Baseball productions, and we’d come across a gentleman by the name of Meyer Robinson, who owned the Manischewitz wine company [philanthropist and cofounder]. He was a home movie buff, and had taken home movies of the Dodgers in color. Somehow our paths crossed, and he showed us these movies that he’d shot in Ebbets Field. It was the first time I had ever seen Jackie Robinson and Pee Wee Reese and Cookie Lavagetto in color, I thought that baseball in the fifties was black and white. So I immediately saw that there was something unique and special there, and we spent a year contacting—and this was before Switchboard and Google, before the Internet—as many former baseball players as we could, and asked a simple question: did you ever have a movie camera, did you ever take home movies when you were playing? “As it turned out, a decent amount of them had, with old Bell & Howells given to them as premium gifts, and had been bought by their families. The short story basically is that we ended up accumulating home movies from about 150 players from the thirties all the way through the early sixties, and amassed an incredible collection of America’s pastime—probably the most unique collection that exists in the world today, surpassing anything that

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Major League Baseball would have or Cooperstown would have. And we just chose to do sort of a meat and potatoes, pragmatic presentation, sort of a movie scrapbook showing what baseball was like in a more innocent time, what it was like for the players to wear the baggy uniforms. For them to travel, to measure the value of winning the World Series, in terms of what that paycheck meant, the elements of what baseball meant in that time period, combined with visuals of what people today were seeing for the first time. “It was a stunning documentary. There was no America’s Funniest Home Videos, no My Space, no YouTube, no social aspect of sharing images that were for the most part in people’s basements and attics that remained under wraps for years and years. Even the Bob Fellers of the world and Enos Slaughters of the world and Gil Hodges of the world, they hadn’t seen them in 25 years, and they were thrilled just to have them transferred to VHS from 8 and 16mm, sitting in little yellow boxes. And you end up with 80 hours of the stuff, it becomes unique, and so we edited it down and did that first show and it won a Peabody Award and other critical acclaim. And then HBO wanted us to do a follow-up, and that was received basically the same way. It was very poetic. We had the actors doing voiceovers, Kevin Costner and Jason Robards and James Earl Jones, a few female voices, Glenn Close. We did the third one in 1996 because people just kept asking for the next one. And we went back and revisited some of the players, and brought it from the mid-sixties and introduced free agency and we saw players of my generation that people had grown up to know—the Kofax’s and the Drysdales, the Alivas and the Yasztremskis, who played in the sixties, and we ended it there. “Black Canyon Productions does not exist anymore. We were bought out by Clear Channel Entertainment about six years ago. . . . We now have our own company called Camero Films. For better or worse, I’ve been involved in the sports documentary field since the early nineties particularly with HBO Sports We did at least half a dozen baseball-themed topics. The earliest was When It Was a Game, through, so far, Mantle in 2005.”

Earlier, Roy and partner Steven Stern had been producers of the 1985–1986 sports series Greats of the Game for Major League Baseball Productions. Diamonds on the Silver Screen (1992), a documentary about baseball and its representation in theatrical films, was narrated by James Earl Jones. Among the featured interviews were those with Glenn Close, Bob Costas, Frank Deford, Phil Dusenberry, Barry Levinson, Mickey Mantle, Charlie Sheen, Joel Siegel, Gene Siskel, and Teresa Wright (who played Mrs. Lou Gehrig 50 years earlier in Pride of the Yankees). It was produced by American Movie Classics and shown as a special on The Movie Channel (TMC). Writer/director Nathan Kaufman’s syndicated documentary, Minor Leagues/Major Games (1992), followed the Visalia Oaks, the California

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League Class A farm team of the 1991 World Champion Minnesota Twins, through a season. The San Francisco Examiner found it to be “an intimate, compelling look at baseball illustrating the difficult road from the farm to the big leagues.” And Entertainment Weekly named it “One of the best 100 documentaries ever produced.” Thanks to producer Joe Lavine and Major League Baseball Productions, Roberto: The Roberto Clemente Story (1993) documented the story of one of the first Latino baseball stars, a Pittsburgh Pirates powerhouse from 1955 through 1972 (he spent his entire career with that team). During the offseason on New Year’s Eve 1972, while involved in a mission for mercy taking medical, food, and clothing supplies to earthquake-stricken Nicaragua, he died in a tragic plane crash. Clemente later became the first Latino to be elected to the National Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown. The documentary about him was narrated by Hector Elizondo and Raul Julia. Fifteen years later, PBS’s American Experience provided another profile of Clemente. Ken Burns’ Baseball (1994) was a “nine-inning” 18½ hour PBS documentary on the history of baseball. Old-time photos and illustrations depict the game’s early years, while newsreels, game films, and video clips highlight more recent times. Players and participants speak in their own words, and sports writers and broadcasters offer commentary on the games and events they witnessed. HBO Sports also produced three hour-long documentaries on Yankees’ baseball legends DiMaggio, Ruth, and Mantle, which aired in 1997 and 1998. Actor Liev Schreiber narrated all three homages: Where Have You Gone Joe DiMaggio?, Babe Ruth: The Life Behind the Legend, and The Definitive Story of Mickey Mantle. All three are available on a single DVD titled Legends in Pinstripes. Schreiber, who has developed a long history of narrating TV sports documentaries for Ross Greenburg, who is currently the president of HBO Sports, and documentary producer George Roy, also was the voice behind the 1998 City Dump: The Story of the 1951 CCNY Basketball Scandal. TBS’s Hank Aaron biodocumentary of 1995, Hank Aaron: Chasing the Dream, was executive produced by, among others, Denzel Washington. As Variety wrote at the time, it was “a docudrama in the truest sense of the word.” Director/ writer Mike Tollin skillfully intercut Aaron’s amazing on-field heroics with the nation’s social upheaval during the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s. Dorian Harewood narrated, and an impressive array of admirers, from Sandy Koufax to Yogi Berra to Jimmy Carter, offered testimonials to Aaron. The film also received a brief theatrical run and was nominated for an Oscar as Best Documentary. Ted Williams: A Baseball Life (after Michael Seidel’s 1991 book on him) profiled the Splendid Splinter in an hour-long ABC documentary that aired

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on a Saturday afternoon in spring 1997, hosted by Al Michaels. Ted himself participated, along with Bobby Doerr, Dom DiMaggio, Johnny Pesky, Gerry Coleman, Curt Gowdy, and others. Promoting the show, the long reticent Williams (he’d hosted an occasional fishing show on TV) was asked by the New York Times why he consented to an ABC interview. “I never had any trouble with radio or television people. It was always what was written, that someone misquoted me or didn’t know a thing about baseball.” A loving paean to the legendary Yankees catcher, manager, and linguist (whose sayings are included in Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations) turned up in an hour-long PBS profile called Yogi Berra: Déjà Vu All Over Again in the summer of 1999, hosted by Bob Costas. It followed a screening at the Yogi Berra Museum and Learning Center at Montclair State University in New Jersey, near his home. How many other sports figures can boast such an edifice? The darker side of baseball—as a business—was spotlighted in a 1993 report on PBS’s Frontline investigative series, “The Trouble With Baseball.” Producer Michael Kirk focused primarily on Carlton Fisk, onetime Red Sox and then White Sox catcher, and Jerry Reinsdorf, the White Sox owner since 1981. It was far from the picture etched through the decades right up there with mom and apple pie. The New York Times called the show “a languidly paced, comprehensible documentary that examines the game’s myriad problems without resorting to the type of numbing micro-analysis that has drowned out many phases of baseball . . . [it] is not a rousing baseball-lover’s pitch for the start of the season [but] a somber, depressing look at a badly damaged industry.” Baseball, Minnesota was a cinema-vérité-style documentary following the activities of members of the minor league St. Paul Saints baseball team, of which actor Bill Murray was co-owner. Described by some as a weekly “baseball-umentary,” this 1996 show on the FX network followed a number of major leaguers on their way down and a handful on their way back up (among them, Darryl Strawberry). “The essence of baseball—where anything can happen—is the stuff of many great stories, but very few good TV shows. For one thing, the unpredictability of the game is incompatible with the nature of television (where spontaneity is always carefully planned),” said TV historian and pop culture critic Ed Robertson, who also wrote this of the show. You can’t create a moment like Kevin Mitchell’s barehanded catch without making it look contrived. And players in sitcoms like Hardball and Ball Four usually come across as caricatures. The one show that captures the rhythm of the game is the only one that’s not scripted: FX’s weekly Baseball, Minnesota.

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From 1996 well into the next decade, The American Athlete is a syndicated half-hour sports documentary/talk show, hosted by onetime standup comic Byron Allen, who also is the executive producer. Allen has sitdowns each week with the likes of not only baseball stars Reggie Jackson and Sandy Koufax, but also basketball greats Dennis Rodman and Shaquille O’Neal; tennis star Serena Williams; football pros John Elway, Ronnie Lott, Eddie George, and Drew Bledsoe; boxing champ Sugar Ray Leonard; and more. In some TV markets, it’s virtually a throwaway. In New York, for one, it airs in the wee hours of Sunday morning. And in the mid-1990s on Seinfeld, George Costanza ( Jason Alexander) got his dream job—working for the New York Yankees as assistant travel manager. Often he’d be seen parrying with and toadying to his boss, George Steinbrenner. Steinbrenner invariably would be seen from the rear in his executive seat. It came out later that Larry David, the show’s producer and writer, played “The Boss.” The George/George episodes aired periodically through the 1995–1997 seasons, when Costanza fouls up and is out, getting his walking papers. In another Seinfeld episode, Elaine ( Julia Louis-Dreyfus) dated New York Mets star first baseman Keith Hernandez. As in previous decades, football was a popular TV topic in the 1990s. Frankenstein: The College Years was a 1991 Fox comedy about a pair of medical students who breathe life into a 100-year-old corpse, a seven-foot-tall bon vivant who wants to party and becomes both a football hero and BMOC (Big Monster on Campus). Vincent Hammond made his TV debut as Frank N. Stein. A Triumph of the Heart: The Ricky Bell Story (1991) was a fact-based TV movie drama dealing with pro football star Ricky Bell, of the Tampa Bay Buccaneers (1977–1981), and his inspiration on a youngster with severe physical and verbal disabilities (played by physically challenged young actor Lane Davis), only to learn of his own terminal illness. Mario van Peebles played Bell who died at age 29. Several real-life football stars put in appearances as themselves. In 1993, the PBS series American Experience recounted, in Knute Rockne and His Fighting Irish, the exploits of legendary Notre Dame head coach, his

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storied career, and his death in a plane crash at age 43 in March 1931. Written by Ken Chowder, the Rockne portrait was narrated by Joe Mantegna. Rise and Walk: The Dennis Byrd Story (1994), adapted from New York Jets football star Dennis Byrd’s 1993 autobiography, written with Michael D’Orso, chronicled Byrd’s story from his small-town beginnings on the Oklahoma prairie as the son of an ordained minister through his years of gridiron glory to his paralyzing injury on the field in 1992 and his miraculous victory over it through months of rehabilitation. Actor/director Peter Berg had the lead role. The O. J. Simpson Story (1995) was a quickie TV movie chronicling the events leading up to the most celebrated crime of its day, with former UCLA Bruin football star Bobby Hosea in the titular role. The fact-based drama (with the expected embellishments) followed The Juice out of the ghetto of Portero Hill in San Francisco to an inspiring meeting with baseball hero Willie Mays and an idol’s life on the football field and—in broad strokes, his days as a commercial spokesman and TV and movie actor—up to the events of June 12, 1994, when his estranged wife Nicole Brown Simpson and her friend Ron Goldman were murdered in Los Angeles. Family-friendly, Canadian-made The Halfback of Notre Dame (Showtime 1996) was a written-by-committee contemporary takeoff on Victor Hugo’s The Hunchback of Notre Dame, set on a college campus. Gabriel Hogan plays an awkward teenage football star who, despite opposition from his father, the coach, falls for a beautiful French exchange student named Esmeralda. Angels in the Endzone (1997) was a made-for-cable sequel to Disney’s 1994 baseball-themed comedy feature Angels in the Outfield. Christopher Lloyd is once again Al the Angel, this time to help a high school football star (Matthew Lawrence) regain his faith after his father’s tragic death, and help turn the losing team around. The satirical, blind-ambition 1997 HBO comedy Weapons of Mass Distraction by writer and executive producer Larry Gelbart depicted rival media moguls competing for the purchase of the same pro football team. Gabriel Byrne played a Rupert Murdock type opposite Ben Kingsley’s megalomaniacal Ted Turner under another guise and a “mittel”-European accent. The Atlanta Constitution’s TV critic wrote: “Bitter rivals, they’re vying for ownership of a Tucson football team, the aptly named Titans. In a scandal-ridden game of one-upmanship, they savage each other’s professional fortunes like competitive schoolboys. Then it gets personal. “Weapons picks up where the 1976 multi-Oscar-winning film Network left off. But viewers are not ‘mad as hell’ anymore. Instead they’ve been sucked

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into a collective coma by trashy talk shows, infotainment news programs, and supermarket tabloids owned by Powers and Messenger.” High school football got its licks via two fact-based movies about a woman who solicits the murder of her cheerleader daughter hopeful’s rival for a spot on the squad. The first, done as a straight network docudrama in late 1992, was called Willing to Kill: The Texas Cheerleader Story starring Lesley Ann Warren as obsessed, real-life Wanda Holloway. The second, several months later on cable, starred Holly Hunter, who won an Emmy as Wanda in the black comedy The Positively True Adventures of the Alleged Texas Cheerleader-Murdering Mom, in which she coerces her ex-brother-in-law (played by Beau Bridges) to arrange for the hit. Backfield in Motion (ABC 1991) was Roseanne Arnold’s TV acting debut role in this sports-themed comedy in which she played a widowed realestate agent who moves with her teenage son (Johnny Galecki) to an upstate football-crazed California town, where he finds a spot on the school’s varsity team. To get closer to him, she manages to rile the locals by organizing a “mothers versus sons” football game. Her real-life husband at the time, Tom Arnold, costarred as the school’s vice-principal, who puts his standing in town on the line when he falls in love with the brazen mom. Actressproducer Shelley Duvall (of Faerie Tale Theatre, among other series) was one of the executive producers for her Think Entertainment. Another football-themed comedy of the decade, from Disney, was 1998’s The Garbage Picking Field Goal Kicking Philadelphia Phenomenon, which starred Tony Danza as a garbage man who develops his leg muscles kicking the hydraulic lever on his truck and decides that he’s good enough to be a pro football player. He realizes his dream by becoming a Philadelphia Eagles kicker. Bruce Boxleitner was washed-up football star Eddie Dillon in Sporting Chance, an unsold CBS pilot in 1990, given one last chance on the gridiron but finding himself at odds with the team’s new owner (played by G. D. Spradlin). Where this could have gone had the show been picked up for a series is anybody’s guess. Football was part of the plot of a CBS sitcom, Good Sports, in 1991, putting together Farrah Fawcett and her real-life significant other Ryan O’Neal. In this spoof of sports programming on television, she was a hardworking sports journalist who’s given a cable-TV magazine show, and he’s an egotistical jerk of a jock. A former Green Bay Packers star, O’Neal’s character once had a weekend fling in college with Fawcett’s character and now finds himself co-anchoring the program with her. The series, brief as it was, managed to do comic interviews with George Steinbrenner, Kareem Abdul-

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Jabbar, Lyle Alzado, Bruce Jenner, Pete Rose, and George Foreman. And on the hugely popular Cosby Show on NBC, a 1999 episode called “Superstar” took a knowing but lighthearted look at the elite status and salary, compared to teachers, of pro athletes and movie stars. Bill Cosby (early on a college football and track and field star himself at Temple in the 1950s) coaxed onto the show such players as NBA Hall of Famer Patrick Ewing as well as NFL stars Doug Flutie and Jerry Rice and Ahmad Rashad, also an NFL star who turned sportscaster, and, at that time, the husband of Cosby costar Phylicia Rashad. Against the Grain (NBC, 1993) was a well-received Friday night series about the trials and tribulations of an insurance salesman-turned-football coach ( John Terry) who vows to revive his floundering high-school team in a gridiron-obsessed Texas town. The show never attracted an audience, however, and was pulled by the network after a handful of episodes. A young Ben Affleck starred as the coach’s player son, Joe Willie Clemons. This show predated by a decade NBC’s not too dissimilar Friday Night Lights. Charlie Brown and the Peanuts Gang tackled football in the 1994 entry of Charles Schultz’s beloved animated series. In You’re in the Super Bowl, Charlie Brown, the gang competes in a punt, pass, and kick contest for a proposed trip to the Super Bowl—this one for the AFL (Animal Football League) with Snoopy and friends. The life and career of the legendary football star Johnny Unitas were— three years before his death—hailed in the 1999 HBO Sports documentary, Unitas. The Hall of Famer sparked the Baltimore Colts for so many seasons and was voted by the NFL as “the greatest quarterback of all time.” Another great HBO Sports documentary, Rebels With a Cause: The Story of the American Football League, aired in 1995. With narration by Curt Gowdy and Liev Schreiber, it chronicled the story of the AFL from its founding in 1960 through its merger with the NFL six years later—along with archival footage from the first four Super Bowls. Among the “witnesses” were Joe Namath, Jack Kemp, John Madden, Hank Stram, and Paul Maguire. Shooting and often scoring from TV’s basketball court in the 1990s were the following. Michael Jordan: An American Hero (1990) was a surface biography based on onetime New York Times sports columnist Jim Naughton’s 1990 book, of the basketball superstar from his youth in North Carolina to greatness with the Chicago Bulls, along with his dabbling in baseball and the murder of his beloved father and biggest fan. Michael Jordan: Air Time (1993) documented Jordan and the Chicago Bulls’ 1991–1992 season. It included Jordan dealing with his friend and rival Magic Johnson’s retirement announcement, gambling allegations, talk of the team possibly breaking the

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long-in-place season win record with 70 victories, filming a music video with Michael Jackson, and other obstacles throughout the course of the year. The video follows this with the “Dream Team” ( Jordan and his fellow NBA stars) gaining worldwide attention as they participate in and dominate the 1992 Summer Olympics in Barcelona, and concludes with the Bulls’ championship ring ceremony in the fall of 1992. A syndicated 1992 made-for-TV movie, Final Shot: The Hank Gathers Story, was about the popular Loyola Marymount basketball star, his rise from the projects of North Philadelphia, and his sudden death from heart failure on the courts after collapsing during an NCAA semifinal game in 1990. Victor Love had the lead role; Nell Carter played his mother. Never Give Up: The Jimmy V Story was a 1996 CBS biopic of famed college basketball coach Jim Valvano (portrayed by Anthony La Paglia) who led North Carolina State to an NCAA championship in 1983 over Houston. He was forced to resign his job in 1990 when his school came under league investigation for alleged rules violation and later found himself battling cancer. Rebound—The Legend of Earl “The Goat” Manigault (1996) dramatized the true story of the rise, fall, and redemption of the Harlem street basketball legend, Earl “The Goat” Manigault, in the 1960s and 1970s. Among the greats of the game portrayed in this HBO cable movie are Wilt “The Stilt” Chamberlain, Earl “The Pearl” Monroe, and Lew Alcindor (who became Kareem Abdul-Jabbar and turned up briefly as himself ). Don Cheadle had the lead role; his younger brother Colin played “The Goat” as a youngster. Bad as I Wanna Be: The Dennis Rodman Story was the loose-limbed 1998 chronicle of the flamboyant NBA superstar on ABC, based on the 1996 book Dennis Rodman wrote with Tim Keown. It traced Rodman’s rise from a troubled young man from the projects in Dallas, Texas, to the big time with the Detroit Pistons in the late 1980s and then the San Antonio Spurs and Chicago Bulls. Rodman himself turned up occasionally—and none too shyly—as a Greek chorus of sorts. John Larroquette was the star of the fact-based 1991 TV-movie, One Special Victory, playing a cocky, glad-handing real estate salesman who ends up in legal trouble and is sentenced to community service coaching a mentally—challenged basketball team. The movie was “suggested” by the 1991 book B-Ball: The Team That Never Lost a Game by Ron Jones and made in conjunction with the Special Olympics Organization. A Showtime Original Movie for Kids in 1995, the Canadian-made Annie O, was about a teenage girl (played by Coco Yates) who happens to possess a gift for shooting hoops, with a mean outside shot. She wants to be on the boys’ high school basketball team. This was a thinly disguised 1990s

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update of the legend of Annie Oakley (hence the title), with basketballs instead of sharp-shooting rifles. That Championship Season (1999) was a contemporized version of Jason Miller’s Pulitzer Prize and Tony winning play of 1972 that was turned into a feature film a decade later, dealing with the 20-year reunion of four members of a Pennsylvania high school basketball team and their coach, a narrowminded bigot—all of whom shared a moment of glory when they won the state championship. A night of reminiscing turns into soul-searching and the airing of dirty laundry. Paul Sorvino, who starred in the stage and screen versions (in another role) here plays the coach and also directs. In the 1999 TV movie, Passing Glory, based on the true story of the first integrated basketball game in New Orleans’ history, André Braugher is an angry black priest who, in 1960, goes against the wishes of his parish leader (Rip Torn) and pushes for a game between his talented all-black team at St. Augustine High School and an undefeated all-white prep school team, Jesuit High. The drama had as its executive producers basketball superstar Magic Johnson and music mogul Quincy Jones It was written by New Orleans native Harold Sylvester, basically known as an actor with an extensive career dating back to the mid-1970s, and before that was the first black student to win an athletic scholarship from Tulane (he is in the Tulane Athletics Hall of Fame). Sylvester’s son, also named Harold, played basketball for the UCLA Bruins in the mid-1990s. In the popular weekly half-hour NBC comedy Hang Time (1995–2001), set at fictional Dearing High School in Indiana, Julie Connor (Danielle Deutscher) is the only female member on the all-male basketball team, the Tornados (she plays point guard). Ex-footballer Dick Butkus was the team’s coach, Mike Katowinski, during its first couple of seasons. Not as popular (it lasted just three weeks) was CBS’s 1993 sitcom Tall Hopes, which featured, among others, Terrence Howard. At the time he was 24 years old and billed as Terrence Dashon Howard, but he was playing a 16-year-old basketball prodigy who ran rings around his young brother who was his inner city family’s shining light for court stardom. The Hoop Life was a Showtime series (1999–2000) based on the lives of professional basketball players off the court, centering around the fictional UBA (United Basketball Association). It followed the lives of three players from one of the teams, The New England Knights—Greg Marr, Marvin Buxton, and high school phenom Curtis Thorpe—how they played the game, and how they reacted to the money, the pressure, and the subsequent fame. Dan Lauria rounded out the main cast as the Knights head coach, Leonard Fero.

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Two of the best of the periodic CBS Schoolbreak Specials of the 1990s dealt with kids on the basketball court. In one, “Malcolm Takes a Shot?” (1990), a teen athlete, in denial about his epilepsy, tries to compensate by making it big playing hoops on the court. Young Jon Clair had the lead role, Tony Lo Bianco played his coach, and superstar Kareem Abdul-Jabbar turned up as himself. In another, titled “Other Mothers,” several years later, a high school basketball player ( Justin Whalen) finds he has to come to grips with his classmates’ taunts about having two lesbian moms (played by Joanna Cassidy and Meredith Baxter). The story of the championship women’s basketball team of the University of Tennessee of 1996 and 1997 under head coach Pat Summitt was documented in HBO’s A Cinderella Season: The Lady Vols Fight Back. LA Lakers’ great turned entertainment biz entrepreneur Earvin “Magic” Johnson tried his hand at hosting a late night TV talk show, The Magic Hour, in 1998. He was legendary on the courts, but, as many noted, he was no Johnny Carson. The magic simply wasn’t there and Fox Television, still hoping after the earlier Joan Rivers fiasco to crack the late night competition tossed in the towel after a handful of episodes. Magic did turn up occasionally guest starring on sitcoms, like the 2002 episode on Malcolm in the Middle called “Company Picnic” as a star hockey player! The 1996 HBO Sports documentary, The Journey of the African American Athlete, explored the rise of blacks to positions of greatness in American sports. Samuel L. Jackson was the narrator of stories of basketball players, runners, boxers, tennis players, and others, athletes who in many cases suffered indignities of racism and helped break down its walls. Hardly a sport over the last 100 years went uncovered. Among those mentioned relatively briefly was Althea Gibson, the 1950s star of the grass courts who was as much a part of a landmark figure in her game as the first black woman professional tennis champion, as Jackie Robinson was in his not long before. There has never been a documentary devoted to Gibson and her extraordinary contribution to tennis, paving the way for Serena and Venus Williams decades later. The 1990s produced several programs where the focus was on golf. Producer David L. Wolper was the man behind a TV series of golf documentaries in 1994 under the umbrella title Heroes of the Game. There were 13 individual hour-long films on Bobby Jones, Byron Nelson, Ben Hogan, Babe Didrickson Zaharias, Sam Snead, Jack Nicklaus, Arnold Palmer, Lee Trevino, Patty Berg, and Mickey Wright, plus Heroes of the Open and Great Women Golfers. Wolper also produced Golf: The Greatest Game in 1994 to commemorate the sport’s centennial year, tracing the origins of the game as

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it is today, and showing some of the greatest players in action. These golf films were commissioned by the United States Golf Association and aired on NBC. The Golf Channel launched on cable television on January 17, 1995, providing wall-to-wall golf programming, including PGA and LPGA tours. The idea of a 24-hour-a-day golf network came from media entrepreneur Joseph E. Gibbs of Birmingham, Alabama, who first got the idea for the channel in 1991. Gibbs felt there was enough interest in golf among the public to support such a network and commissioned a Gallup Poll to see if his instincts were right. They were, and Gibbs and legendary golfer Arnold Palmer then secured $80 million, which helped them found The Golf Channel. The channel devotes considerable time to news coverage of golf, including a nightly program, Golf Central, a post-tournament program, the Sprint Post Game, and College Central, devoted to college golf. The Tiger Woods Story (1998) was a quickly-made dramatization (for MTV!) of the then-young golfer’s private struggles with racism and cultural identity and his sudden fame as the winner in 1997, at age 21, of the Masters Golf Tournament, an event that took place one year to the day of the premiere of this film. Based on the 1997 biography Tiger by John Strege, who followed Tiger’s career since the golfer was a child prodigy, the film—with a relatively unfamiliar cast, and actor Albert Hall turning up as baseball star Hank Aaron to offer some sage advice to the young golfer—was directed by LeVar Burton. The 1990s ended with a Christmas movie that had a golf theme, CBS’s Miracle on the 17th Green. Robert Urich was cast as a man who loses his job during the holidays and decides to pursue his childhood dream of becoming a professional golfer. Based on the 1998 novel by James Patterson and Peter De Jonge, it also featured golf pros Lee Trevino and Tom Watson turning up in cameos. Boxing-oriented programming was also all over the tube during the 1990s. Filmmaker Barbara Kopple’s engrossing two-hour NBC documentary, Fallen Champ: The Untold Story of Mike Tyson (1993), was, in the words of Variety’s reviewer at the time, “a compilation of archival footage and film interviews that presents an interesting and disturbing picture of a huge conglomerate circus starring the highest high-wire act in the world, working without one thing the planners forgot for him: a net. It’s an enormous piece that doesn’t necessarily support the title but the show is worth a look.” Hustling Don King, Tyson’s actress wife Robin Givens, trainer Teddy Arliss, manager Cus D’Amato, bodyguard Ken Simmons, and two early Tyson handlers, Bill Clayton and Jim Jacobs, were among the witnesses and talking heads.

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Tyson was a 1995 biopic tracing the rise and fall of the boxer with relative unknown Michael Jai White in the lead and veteran George C. Scott as Cus D’Amato, the trainer who took young Mike under his wing and steered him to the championship. Paul Winfield portrayed boxing promoter Don King. The film, tracing Tyson’s career from his youth to his bout in Japan with Buster Douglas, in February 1990, when he lost the championship, was based on the 1989 biography Fire and Fear: The Inside Story of Mike Tyson by José Torres. Tyson also was the subject of an A&E Biography in 1995, titled “Mike Tyson: Fallen Champ.” Don King: Only in America (1997) was an Emmy-winning (Outstanding Made-for-Television Movie) biographical drama that chronicled the life and times of flamboyant, larger-than-life boxing promoter Don King through his own eyes. It featured a blustering, frequently maniac performance by Ving Rhames in an outrageous King hairstyle as the subject’s own Greek chorus. This film was adapted by actor-writer Kario Salem from sportswriter Jack Newfield’s 1995 book, The Life and Crimes of Don King: The Shame of Boxing in America. An original drama by writer Art Washington set in the world of boxing, Percy and Thunder (TNT 1993) featured James Earl Jones as a veteran trainer who takes promising fighter Courtney B. Vance under his wing and lives his dreams through his protégé. Billy Dee Williams played a slick promoter who covets the young boxer for his own stable. ( Jones and Vance earlier were father and son on Broadway in August Wilson’s Fences.) Directed by Ivan Dixon, this was the first of the TNT Screenworks series, initially dedicated to bringing the works of talented playwrights to television. The 1995 HBO boxing documentary Sonny Liston: The Mysterious Life and Death of a Champion explored the somewhat sordid life of the fighter who held the heavyweight title from 1962 through 1964. Executive producer Ross Greenburg has endeavored to reassemble Liston’s life, including his two fights with Muhammad Ali in the 1960s and has told the story with those close to Liston: sportswriters, boxing historians, sparring partners, FBI agents (they tracked him for alleged connections to organized crime), police officers (who pursued him for assorted run-ins with the law and for his mysterious death), his widow Geraldine, and fighters George Foreman, Chuck Wepner, and Floyd Patterson, whom Sonny defeated for the championship—KOing him in the first round, and again in their rematch. Regrettably there was nothing from Ali. Scowling Sonny Liston was pictured to be more feared in the ring and tougher than Mike Tyson and the first incarnation of Big George Foreman. One critic wrote: “It was said that his opponents would start to bleed just from receiving his stare. Most of the

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story of Sonny Liston is sad—no one knows for sure when he was born, and no one knows for sure when he died.” There was just that presence in the ring. Liston supposedly was born in 1929, the 11th of 12 children, and he died on December 30, 1970 in Las Vegas. The death remains a mystery, but many have become convinced of a police cover-up. Of all the modern fighters, Liston has been ranked as Number 2 among the heavyweights, and he has been in the Boxing Hall of Fame since 1990. Liston’s death was documented on the long-running Robert Stack series Unsolved Mysteries. The HBO documentary tellingly points out that when Liston returned to Philadelphia after winning the title from Patterson, there was no celebration. Muhammad Ali: The Whole Story aired in 1996 on TNT as an eloquent twohour documentary. Subsequently it was released on DVD as a six-volume set, running 350 minutes. The program, lovingly written and directed by documentarians Joseph and Sandra Consentino, covered the iconic fighter’s life to that time, from his early days as Cassius Clay in Kentucky. The New York Times called it “an extraordinary film. The tale is well told, with much rare archival footage and terrific interviews, from the trainer Angelo Dundee to three of Ali’s wives and two of his mistresses.” Two years later, in tribute to one of boxing’s great middleweights who recently had died, HBO Sports aired the documentary Sugar Ray Robinson: The Bright Lights and Dark Shadows of a Champion. Among those participating were sports writer Dave Anderson, who wrote Ray’s memoirs; Ray’s sister Evelyn Nelson; his son Ray Robinson Jr.; Ring Magazine editor Nigel Collins; and others. The Hollywood Reporter wrote in its review of the show: Although Sugar Ray Robinson was one of the most prominent sports icons of the postwar era, his fame and career were eclipsed by those who followed in his graceful footsteps and approximated his powerful punches. . . . Backed by a cool musical score written and played by Wynton Marsalis, [executive producer] Ross Greenburg’s hour-long documentary traces the life and times of the great fighter. Robinson’s epic battles and comebacks after he had passed his peak came to symbolize those qualities of nobility and style that to many justified the brutality of the sport. He was a personality whose aura fueled the growth of television in the early 1950s when Friday night at the fights was a family viewing event.

Television’s favorite medical examiner, Jack Klugman, in the guise of Quincy, M. E., found himself in the world of boxing in a 1977 episode titled “A Blow to the Head . . . A Blow to the Heart,” after being called to a sports arena after a championship boxer named Luke Stokes (Rodney Houston) suddenly collapses and dies following a big profile match against Ray Ringo

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(Randy Shield). He comes to conclude that the death was not accidental. Joe Louis turned up as himself, playing a pal of Quincy’s. Ex-boxer turned TV pitchman and home grill king George Foreman starred in his own 1990s’ TV sitcom George on ABC, playing an ex-boxer turned substitute school teacher. Many of the episodes dealt in some way with his former avocation. In one of these, “Requiem for a Lightweight,” he discouraged one of his students from dropping out to become a professional boxer. And boxing was one of the sports spoofed somewhere along the way of the nearly two decades of the most successful of television’s primetime animated series, The Simpsons, on FOX. “The Homer They Fall,” in which Homer Simpson is goaded by Moe to enter the ring, was an obvious takeoff on Humphrey Bogart’s final film The Harder They Fall 40 years before. Another sports topic for much programming in the 1990s was hockey. Gross Misconduct (1993) recounted the rise and fall of Canadian hockey star Brian “Spinner” Spencer, who grew up in Fort St. James, British Columbia. His father did everything he could to give his son a chance to play the sport, including scraping together enough money to send Brian to a hockey school. It was there that Spencer learned how to skate and how to believe that he could play in the NHL. After two seasons in Canada’s WCJHL, Spencer was selected by the Maple Leafs in the 1969 Amateur Draft, and he later played with the Buffalo Sabres, New York Islanders, and Pittsburgh Penguins. After ending his career in 1979, Spencer, portrayed in the TV movie about him by Daniel Kash, drifted into drugs and other problems and was shot to death in Florida in June 1988. Net Worth, another Canadian-made hockey movie—apparently never shown on United States TV—was aired in 1995. It was the tale of the NHL’s early years and follows Ted Lindsay, an all-star for the Detroit Red Wings, in his quest to create a Players’ Association to protect the rights of players. Spurred on by the memory of a former teammate who died broke because he couldn’t access his pension, Lindsay (played by Aidan Devine), who was with the Red Wings from 1944 through 1965—with a couple of seasons out for the Chicago Blackhawks in the late 1950s—mobilizes players from around the league to his cause, among them Gordie Howe (Kevin Conway), Marty Pavelich (Carl Marotte), and Larry Sukarchuk (Roman Podhora). The film was based on the 1991 book by David Cruise and Alison Griffiths. Disney’s animated Saturday morning cartoon series Mighty Ducks (1996), about an intergalactic ice hockey team from another dimension, had its genesis in the studio’s 1992 theatrical hit of the same title (and its sequels in 1994 and 1996) that in turn gave its name to the Anaheim Mighty Ducks hockey team owned by the Disney Organization.

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The Making of the NHL’s Mighty Ducks was a 1993 PBS documentary about the creation of Anaheim’s professional ice hockey team. And the 1997 Gretzky: The Great One and the Next Ones was a Fox Sports hour-long documentary in which superstar Wayne Gretzky examined the styles of the new generation of NHL’s young players. NHL Power Plays: All-Stars of the Game, the same year, was a documentary about Gretzky, Messier, Lemieux, Fedorov, Bure, and others. In the 1999 Disney Channel TV-movie, H-E-Double Hockey Sticks, a comedic take on the Faust tale, Rhea Perlman is Ms. Beezlebub, running a vocational school in Hades for demons in training. She sends one of her underlings to the surface to get a promising young pro hockey player with the hopes of winning the Stanley Cup to sign over his soul to make grabbing the cup a sure thing. Canadian actor/writer Brigitte Gall, co-host of The Dish Show on the Comedy Network, among others, in 1999 starred in a one-woman, hour-long special, Brigitte Gall: Joan of Montréal, about a girl who aspires to be the best goalie in the National Hockey League. It was written by Saskatchewan-born Gall, David MacKenzie, Arlene Bishop, and Blair Packhand. One Toronto critic described it when it was staged in one of the fringe theatres there where it was performed in 1998: “Joan of Montréal soft-sells an affable but worthwhile feminist take on Canada’s game. Joan . . . is a whimsical satire about a young Quebecois woman thwarted in her attempts to rise in minor hockey until she receives motivation from what she interprets as the disembodied voice of the Almighty.” The popular Canadian comedy/drama hockey series Power Play (1998– 2000) revolved around a ruthless New York sports agent Brett Parker (part Robert Wuhl’s Arli$$ from HBO, part Tom Cruise’s theatrical Jerry McGuire). Parker, played by Michael Riley, has returned to his hometown of Hamilton, Ontario, intending to move the Steelheads, their fictional NHL franchise, to Houston. Things go awry, however, when the current general manager drops dead in front of him, and Parker finds himself with the job and spends the rest of the series parrying with the team’s somewhat crazed owner, Duff McCardle (played by veteran Canadian actor Gordon Pinsent). Power Play aired briefly in the United States on UPN (United Paramount Network) in the late 1990s. At least four TV movies about real-life skaters aired on network television during the 1990s. Tonya & Nancy: The Inside Story (NBC 1994) was a tabloidstyle dramatization of the story of Olympic ice-skating rivals Tonya Harding and Nancy Kerrigan and the plot by the Harding camp to eliminate Kerrigan from the Nationals competition and the 1984 Olympics with a baseball bat

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to the knees. The subsequent media frenzy only made Kerrigan America’s skating sweetheart, put Harding’s husband Jeff Gillooly and bodyguard Shawn Eckhardt behind bars, and permanently banning Harding from international figure skating. A Promise Kept: The Oksana Baiul Story (1994) was a CBS drama about teenage Ukranian figure skater Oksana Baiul and her struggle to overcome personal tragedy to become a gold medal winner at the 1994 winter Olympics. Canadian actress Monica Keena made her television debut in the title role, with Baiul herself getting on the ice to perform a special number. A Brother’s Promise: The Dan Jansen Story (1996) was a Canadian-made drama based on the life of the Olympic skater (played by Matt Keeslar) who overcame personal tragedy after the death from leukemia of his beloved sister who skated in the 1988 games in Calgary. He went on to win the gold medal in speed skating at the 1994 winter games in Lillehammer, Norway. My Sergei (1998), airing on CBS to tie in with the Winter Olympics in Nagano, Japan, dramatized the ill-fated fairy tale of Russian pairs skaters Ekaterina Gordeeva and her late husband Sergei Grinkov. Adapted from her book, it was a docudrama of sorts telling how they met as kids, became skating partners and soon a championship Olympics act, won gold medals in the 1988 and 1994 games, fell in love, and married. Then, in 1995, Sergei collapsed on the ice from a heart attack and died at age 28. “What’s perhaps most notable about My Sergei, however, is that even a network with a vested interest like CBS would agree to turn over two hours of primetime to an original project centering on Russian athletes,” Variety wrote in its review of the show. The Cutting Edge (1992), a fictional sports tale, told the story of NHL prospect Doug Dorsey (D. B. Sweeney), who was injured in a hockey game at the 1988 Olympics, leaving him unable to play professionally. It also told of pairs skater Kate Moseley (Moira Kelly), a driven figure skater with an attitude and with whom no one will pair up after a fall during the same Olympic games. There’d be a sequel about a decade later, followed a couple of years after that by a second sequel. In the 1997 made-for-cable movie, Ronnie & Julie, a modernized adaptation of Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, the young lovers here are ice skaters. He’s a high school hockey star; she’s a dazzling figure skater. Much to the consternation of their families, the Monroes and the Capells, they start seeing too much of each other. As part of Showtime’s Original Pictures for Kids series of cable movies, this lighthearted tale was set in Spokane, Washington (although it was filmed as a Canadian production), and costarred Canadian teens Joshua Jackson and Alexandra Purvis (Teri Garr and Margot Kidder played their respective moms).

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On the documentary front, in 1992, there was, from Canada, the story of figure skater Kurt Browning, in his pursuit of excellence. Kurt Browning: Life on the Edge illustrated what makes a world-class athlete and Olympics star. Browning himself appeared, together with fellow skaters Victor Petrenko, Elvis Stojko, Petr Barna, Todd Eldredge, and others. Veteran Canadian actor Kenneth Welsh narrated. Robert A. Duncan wrote and co-directed (with Tom Radford). Reflections on Ice: A Diary of Ladies’ Figure Skating, a 1998 documentary, was, in the view of The New York Times’s Richard Sandomir, “a classy HBO gem.” Narrated by Susan Saint James, it spanned the years from 1902 to 1976, from Madge Syers to Sonja Henie to Tenley Albright (1956 Gold Medalist) to Dorothy Hamill and Peggy Fleming. The program, executive produced by Ross Greenburg, offered not only glimpses of the world of school “figures” but also the 1961 airplane crash that killed the U.S. team and the controversy that denied Janet Lynn a world championship medal in 1971. In addition there were interviews with old-timers like Fritzi Burger, the silver medalist in the 1928 and 1932 Winter Olympics. Wrestling was featured in the 1990s both in drama and in live action. The Jesse Ventura Story (NBC 1999) was a slapdash biopic of the flamboyant professional wrestler (and former Navy SEAL and nightclub bouncer) and his rise to national political prominence as activist, then mayor of Brooklyn Park, Minnesota (1990–1994), and bizarrely, colorful governor of Minnesota in the 1998 elections. Another pro wrestler, Nils Allen Stewart, portrays Ventura. Jesse Ventura himself went to the mat along with fellow wrestler Rowdy Roddy Piper in an unsold 1991 ABC pilot called Tag Team. They played Bobby “The Body” Youngblood and Tricky Ricky McDonald, respectively, longtime buddies who are bounced from the wrestling ring through complicated shenanigans and end up as private dicks who use their ring moves to nab bad guys. Wrestling itself continued its new-found growth in popularity on cable television in the 1990s, thanks to promoter Vince McMahon and the World Wrestling Federation (WWF), which fought back from a steroids scandal, the loss of many of its name performers, and a trademark dispute with the World Wildlife Fund (which also claimed the WWF acronym). Ultimately the wrestling group changed its name to WWE (World Wrestling Entertainment). In August 1999, Extreme Championship Wrestling—known familiarly as ECW—came to weekly television on TNN (then The Nashville Network; today it’s Spike TV). It offered a no-rules sport, hosted by Cyrus the Virus and was “hailed” as the first national broadcast of this aspect of wrestling. It lasted until 2001, only to be reborn later in the new millennium.

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Tennis had a match or two on TV during the 1990s. Phenom (1993–1994) was a one-season sitcom on ABC about a teenage girl (played by Angela Goethels), a prodigy with the potential to become a “phenom,” a top tennis star. Judith Light played her mom and William Devane her abrasive, egotistical coach. The title song was written by Carly Simon. HBO Sports presented the 1994 documentary of the tennis great who died of AIDS, Arthur Ashe: Citizen of the World. This was the first of a number of sports documentaries written by Frank Deford, a Sports Illustrated columnist. Five years later he followed with Dare to Compete: The Struggle of Women in Sports, with tennis superstars Billie Jean King and Martina Navratilova, among others. Lauren Hutton narrated. Track was highlighted in several factual dramas of the 1990s. The factbased drama Run for the Dream: The Gail Devers Story (1996) chronicled five years in the life of the Olympic track champion (played by Charlayne Woodard) who won a gold medal at the 1992 games in Barcelona, less than a year and a half after complications from Graves’ disease caused doctors to consider amputation of her feet. (Not long after this Showtime film initially aired, she became a medalist again in the 1996 games in Atlanta.) Louis Gossett played her friend and demanding coach, Bob Kersee. In that same year came the ABC TV movie Dying to Be Perfect: The Ellen Hart Peña Story. It was based on the life of world-class runner and Olympics hopeful Ellen Hart (played by Crystal Bernard), her struggle with bulimia, and her romance with and marriage to Federico Peña (Esai Morales), the Denver mayor who became secretary of transportation in the first Clinton administration. Hart’s running career had its highlight with her 11th place finish in the 1984 Olympic marathon trials. Four years later, Clinton named her as a member of the President’s Council on Physical Fitness and Sports. Another running documentary was the 1998 CBC 44-minute film, Dying to Win, which aired in the United States on A&E as part of host Bill Kurtis’s “Investigative Reports.” It examined, in the sports of track and field, swimming, and cycling, the effects of banned substances such as EPO, testosterone, anabolic steroids, and human growth hormones on various athletes, with assorted sprinters and marathoners sharing their impressions on doping, going back to the 1972 Olympics. At least one show in the 1990s dealt with auto racing. In Thunder Alley (1994–1995), an ABC sitcom, older, retired stock car driver Ed Asner relished his own successful Detroit specialty car garage, Thunder Alley, where the stubborn, often gruff widower hangs out with the boys and charms the ladies. The world of swimming was the topic of Breaking the Surface (1997), which proved a pedestrian telling of the story of four-time Olympic Medalist Greg

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Louganis. It was adapted from his 1995 autobiography (written with Eric Marcus), which covers his difficult childhood, the abusive relationships with those close to him, his rise to glory as a champion diver, his homosexuality, and his HIV-positive status, which became headline news, at least on the sports pages, during the 1996 Olympics. Mario Lopez portrays Louganis. And horse racing was spotlighted in The Canadian-made Derby (1995), a family drama on ABC about a female jockey who rides in the Kentucky Derby in order to keep the horse farm on which she grew up. This TV film was shot primarily at Churchill Downs in Louisville. Between 1999 and 2001, roller derby, now called Roller Jam, was revived on The Nashville Network, now, as mentioned earlier, known as Spike. The sport returned many years after Raquel Welch’s notable theatrical Kansas City Bomber in 1972, and somewhat before the big screen documentary Jam in 2006, which followed a group of fading Roller Derby stars of the 1950s and 1960s determined to make the sport a national sensation again. A number of Derby stars of yesteryear were recruited. The show consisted of seven men and seven women divided into teams, but the concept didn’t go over too well with diehard Derby fans and it was canceled. Much TV sports programming in the 1990s involved the Olympics. In its series In Search of History, the History Channel aired a documentary, “The First Olympics,” in 1997. Sports such as wrestling, boxing, and even chariot racing were discussed in detail, creating a frame of reference for the modern games. Narrating was David Ackroyd, the regular voice behind the In Search of History series. The HBO 1999 Olympics documentary, Fists of Freedom: The Story of the ’68 Summer Games, explored one of sports’ indelible images, when runner Tommie Smith and teammate Carlos Bernard, in a gesture of racial defiance, raised a gloved fist to the sky on the 200-meter stand in Mexico City. (Both were banished from the Games.) In his later years, Smith taught physical education at Santa Monica College and coached its track team. Bud Greenspan’s The Measure of Greatness (1992), a film about the history of timing at the Olympic Games, aired on The Discovery Channel. Greenspan’s patriotic America’s Greatest Olympians, on TNT in 1996 on the eve of the Atlanta Summer Games, led Variety to report: “Even cynical sports fans will be cheering ‘USA! USA! USA!’ ” Among those whose accomplishments and compelling stories Greenspan focused on were Betty Robinson, the first woman to win a gold medal in track ands field in 1928, as well as a gold in the 1936 Berlin Games; swimmer Jeff Farrell, who was struck down with appendicitis a month before the 1960 Rome Games but got into the water and won two golds; Greg Louganis, who bashed his head on a diving

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board but came back the next day to win gold in 1988 in the springboard; Jesse Owens; Mary Lou Retton; and others in the two-hour documentary. “Most of all,” Variety said, “Greatest Olympians portrays the spirit of the Olympic Games.” Atlanta’s Olympic Glory (1997) was produced for PBS by Greenspan and narrated by Will Lyman. Emmy-winning filmmaker and writer Greenspan had established himself since the 1960s as the foremost producer of Olympic films through his Cappy Productions. His first film was Jesse Owens Returns to Berlin (1964), with Owens himself narrating in Greenspan’s multipart Olympiad series. Also in the 1990s were Barcelona ’92: 16 Days of Glory and Lillehammer ’94: 16 Days of Glory, both of which Greenspan’s Cappy Productions aired on the Disney Channel, and Nagano’98 Olympics: Bud Greenspan’s Stories of Honor and Glory that aired on Showtime. The Olympics-themed ABC drama Push lasted just two episodes in April 1998 (plus one more of the eight produced months later) was about a bunch of young athletes training for the 2000 Olympics at fictional Cal Southern University in California. The New York Times TV critic dismissed it as “pure teenage gush in leotards, a Melrose Place for Olympic hopefuls set at a generic Sun Belt university (and actually filmed in San Diego) that boasts nine major characters, only one of them black.” Another Olympics-themed documentary, dealing with the Special Olympics and handicapped young players, aired on ABC in September 1991. Directed by Steve Binder and titled Victory & Valor: Special Olympics World Games, it featured such celebrities as Arnold Schwarzenegger and Warren Beatty and, from the world of music, Prince, Jon Bon Jovi, Bob Seger, and others. The 1997 HBO Sports documentary Sports on the Silver Screen summed up in its title the whole thrust of what was really an anthology, written by Frank Deford and Leslie D. Farrell and produced in association with the American Film Institute. It looked at sports-oriented films through the narration of Liev Schreiber, from the silents—including glimpses of historical figures on the field or in the ring—through the early 1990s. Featured were reminiscences from Robert Redford, Gene Hackman, Vicki LaMotta ( Jake’s wife), Billy Crystal, Jackie Cooper, Jerry Lewis, Talia Shire (“Rocky’s” wife), and others. Naked Sport, a six-part British-made documentary produced by Andy Paterson that aired in the United Kingdom in 1993 and in the United States beginning in February of the next year, was not about a lot of nude athletes running around the field. It was a series about the American sports

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business. Episode 1 (“Welcome to the Sewer”) offered a report on boxing, featuring world champ Evander Holyfeld’s promoter, Dana Duva, and newcomer Shannon Briggs’s enthusiastic supporter, ex-journalist Mike Marley. In Episode 2 (“Be Like Mike”), there was a look at basketball superstar turned entrepreneur Michael Jordan. Episode 3 (“Fields of Blood”) dealt with Dallas Cowboys owner Jerry Jones. Episode 4 (“Home of the Brave”) reported on the management of three baseball teams: the minor league Salt Lake City Trappers, the Chicago White Sox (and the Chicago Bulls), and the Cincinnati Reds. In Episode 5 (“The Big Pitch”), sports agents David Levine, Norby Walters, and Lloyd Bloom discuss, respectively, Miami University football player Daryl Williams, and the latter two’s downfall in a scandal over recruitment of top-flight college players. And in the final episode (“That’s Entertainment”) there was a look at NBA commissioner David Stern. HBO premiered its signature Real Sports with Bryant Gumbel in April 1995. A monthly hour-long sports magazine show, like CBS’s longtime 60 Minutes but dealing with stories devoted to sports issues, it continues to the present, having won all sorts of awards through the years. ESPN SportsCentury, narrated primarily by Dick Schaap (later Chris Fowler was the host), began a series in January 1999 of sports biographies and significant sporting events (the show continued often nightly five times a week through mid-2006). One focused on the 10 most influential figures in sports during the twentieth century: (1) Branch Rickey, (2) Pete Rozelle, (3) Roone Arledge, (4) Marvin Miller, (5) Kenesaw Mountain Landis, (6) David Stern, (7) Avery Brundage, (8) Walter O’Malley, (9) George Halas, and (10) Mark McCormick. Note than none were players. There also was a countdown of the 100 most important sports figures of all time (basketball’s Michael Jordan ranked first, followed by Babe Ruth). Three of them were thoroughbreds: Man o’ War, Secretariat, and Citation. ESPN SportsCentury remains an Emmy-winning biography program that encapsulated the lives of people (several hundred of them through the years) and the athletic events that defined sports in North America throughout the twentieth century and into the first decade of the twenty-first. It was, arguably, the most influential, all encompassing sports-oriented program since the glory days of ABC Wide World of Sports. It also spun off into specials that included the greatest games, the greatest coaches, the greatest dynasties, and the most influential individuals. The first program, in 1999, began a countdown of the Top 50 athletes in reverse order, profiling each, one per show. The final original show was on racecar driver Dale Earnhardt Jr. (ESPN SportsCentury continues on in reruns with an occasional new one tossed in.)

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One particularly interesting profile, in 2005, was on Pat Tillman, NFL star of the Arizona Cardinals who made headlines by foregoing his career and millions of dollars to enlist in the U.S. Army in May 2002. He was killed while serving in Afghanistan in 2004. The Pentagon disclosed to his family over a month after his death that he died as a result of friendly fire and not from an enemy attack, as initially reported. Today the premiere broadcaster of sports airing 24 hours a day is ESPN. It was founded by Bill and Scott Rasmussen, father and son, as the Entertainment and Sports Programming Network, and launched on September 7, 1979, under the direction of Chet Simmons, the network’s first president and CEO, as well as the United States Football League’s first commissioner. Fox Television’s Between Brothers in 1997–1998 (and later moving to UPN for a season) was a sitcom dealing with four black men sharing an apartment in Chicago—one a sports writer for the fictional Chicago Examiner, another a local TV weatherman. Dealing in one way or another with both television and sports, the show managed realistically to bring on sports figures such as Pete Rose, Darryl Strawberry, and Indians outfielder Kenny Lofton, among others and work them (as themselves) into the plot. Sports Night, an ABC sitcom that premiered in September 1998 and lasted for two seasons, focused, among other things, on two rival television sportscasters (played by Peter Krause and Josh Charles), both with huge egos, at a fictional New York-based cable network. Felicity Huffman was the overworked producer of their show, and Robert Guillaume was the station manager. And then there was Arli$$ (HBO, 1996), a comedy about Arliss Michaels, a high-powered, wheeler-dealer, often obnoxious sports agent who, for the big bucks, catered to his clients’ every wishes, no matter how outrageous. The character was a creation of Robert Wuhl, actor/writer/comedian. Wuhl, in the title role, corralled many real-life sports notables for the weekly series that ran until 2002, when it simply went away along with its acquired-taste audience. Actress Sandra Oh (later of the movie Sideways and the TV hit Grey’s Anatomy) played his savvy assistant. And lest it be forgotten, there was an animated “superhero” series on NBC on Saturday mornings briefly in 1991: ProStars, from DIC Enterprises. Super athletes Wayne Gretzky, Bo Jackson, and Michael Jordan used their athletic prowess as animated figures to right wrongs. The three appeared in the live-action openings and closings, but in cartoon form, they were voiced by others.

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memorable sports documentary, The Life and Times of Hank Greenberg, emerged on television in 2001. Produced for theatrical release in the late 1990s, it was named Best Non-Fiction Film by the New York Film Critics and Best Documentary by the National Board of Review and the Chicago Film Critics. It received a few big screen bookings before Cinemax gave it its television premiere, where it was recipient of a George Foster Peabody Award. Hammerin’ Hank, baseball’s most famous Jewish player, was first baseman and outfielder for the Detroit Tigers from 1933 through 1946, and in 1947, for the Pittsburgh Pirates. One of the greats of his time, he fell two homers short of matching Babe Ruth’s 60 in a single season. Greenberg was the first star player to enlist in the armed services after Pearl Harbor, and when he returned to the Tigers in 1945, hit the first pitch thrown to him out of the park. Film critic Lawrence Van Gelder wrote in his January 2000 review in the New York Times: “The unabashed valentine by Aviva Kempner to baseball’s Hall of Fame slugger demonstrates [referring to derogatory remarks at the time of Atlantic Braves pitcher John Rocker] how little mankind and some of its sports figures have advanced since the 1930s and ’40s and reminds us how the persistence of bigotry stains a nation founded on ideals like religious tolerance.” The Times critic observed: “[The film] examines Greenberg’s remarkable career from the standpoint of his Jewishness.” Curiously, neither baseball’s Sandy Koufax, Al Rosen, Shawn Green, Ken Holtzman, Mickey Rutner, Ryan Braun, Jason Marquis,

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nor 1940s football great Sid Luckman, several of the more prominent Jewish sports stars (whose religion, at least to some of them, was as much a part of their fame as their undeniable talents on the diamond or the gridiron) had feature-length documentaries either theatrical or for television. In its American Experience series, PBS offered Joe DiMaggio: The Hero’s Life, a 2000 documentary running 90 minutes, written and narrated by Richard Ben Cramer. The DiMaggio program was described by PBS as “an unconventional, sharp-edged portrait of a man who lived a life of public triumph and private pain.” The same year, not long after the Yankees’ No. 5 died, FOX Sports Network presented Joe DiMaggio: The Final Chapter. The documentary, produced, written, and directed by Marino Amoruso and narrated by Bill Patrick, featured lots of DiMag footage, on and off the field, and fond observations and remembrances about Joltin’ Joe by Whitey Ford, Mickey Mantle, Yogi Berra, Willie Mays, Tommy Lasorda, writer Gay Talese, comedian Pat Cooper, and actor Robert Loggia. And of course there were the Andrews Sisters singing the 1940s hit record, “Joltin’ Joe DiMaggio.” (Few sports figures ever had an iconic song written about them. Other than DiMag’s song, there are, among others, The Treniers’ “Say Hey [The Willie Mays Song],” Bob Dylan and Jacques Levy’s “Catfish,” Buddy Johnson and Count Basie’s 1949 “Did You See Jackie Robinson Hit That Ball?,” Bruce Springsteen’s “Glory Days,” and Terry Cashman’s series of “Talkin’ Baseball” songs, each devoted to a different team with the names of all the current players in the lyrics and updated over the years.) Dem Bums: The Brooklyn Dodgers, narrated by David Hartman, was produced by PBS’s New York outlet WNET/13. The hour-long 2001 documentary featured profiles of five “boys of summer” who were the core of the 1955 championship team: shortstop Pee Wee Reese, first baseman Gil Hodges, center fielder Duke Snider, catcher Roy Campanella, and second baseman Jackie Robinson. Another Dodgers documentary, airing in two parts in July 2007, was Brooklyn Dodgers: The Ghosts of Flatbush, from HBO Sports. Narrated, per usual by Liev Schreiber, it was designed to capture the unique relationship between the team and the borough of Brooklyn. The 10 crucial years in the team’s history were examined, from 1947 when Jackie Robinson first came to the majors to 1957 when Dem Bums and the fabled franchise left Ebbets Field for the West Coast. In association with Major League Baseball Productions, HBO Sports offered this documentary commemorating, more or less tearfully, 50 years since the team’s departure, and won an Emmy as Outstanding Sports Documentary. HBO Sports produced a number of baseball documentaries during the early 2000s, beginning with the July 2001 Shot Heard ‘Round the World, from

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producers George Roy and Steven Stern, celebrating the 50th anniversary of what might be called baseball’s greatest homer, Bobby Thomson’s historic hitting of Ralph Branca’s pitch over the left field wall of the Polo Grounds to put the New York Giants into the1951 World Series. Variety called the show “a delightful hour.” Thomson and Branca appeared on the documentary as did fellow player Duke Snider and Jerry Lewis and Larry King. Liev Schreiber narrated, as he also did with 2002’s A City on Fire: The Story of the ’68 Detroit Tigers. In 2003, The Curse of the Bambino, narrated by Ben Affleck, traced the history of the bitter, decades-long Boston Red Sox/New York Yankees rivalry; and then, after the Sox finally won the World Series, Schreiber narrated The Reverse of the Curse of the Bambino. Schreiber also narrated HBO’s Rebels of Oakland: The A’s, the Raiders, the ’70s, a top-notch 2003 documentary, and Nine Innings From Ground Zero in 2004, after the 2001 World Series between the Yankees and the Arizona Diamondbacks, just weeks after 9/11. Still another HBO documentary, this one from 2002, was the outstanding Picture Perfect: The Stories Behind the Greatest Photos in Sports, written by Frank Deford and narrated, as usual, by Liev Schreiber. “A great photograph usually speaks for itself. The image illuminates a moment, freezes action, or deserves an aspect of a person that words do not,” Richard Sandomir wrote in his New York Times review of the documentary with memorable shots—moments in time—from the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s. There’s a poignant snapshot, from behind, of a gravely ill Babe Ruth leaning on his bat in the Yankees dugout two months before his death; anguished runner Mary Decker after tripping over Zola Budd in the 3,000 meter race at the Olympics in Los Angeles; Muhammad Ali decking Sonny Liston in the first round of their celebrated rematch in 1965; New York Giants quarterback Y. A. Tittle on his knees, his helmet off, his bald head bloodied and bowed after being sacked by the Pittsburgh Steelers’ John Baker in 1964. “The point of Picture Perfect,” Sandomir observed, “is not to tell the stories behind noted photographs. Rather it makes a compelling case that even as the technology of photography has improved, the impact has been diminished by the image blizzard exploding minute by minute out of the multimedia world.” ESPN’s 2002 documentary, programmed as part of Black History Month, was Seasons of Change: The African-American Athlete, honoring what has come to be known as sports’ “foot soldiers”—the next generation of barrier breakers, conducting in the 1950s and 1960s their own nonviolent revolution. It was written by David Pruner and directed by Jeff Winn. The next year ESPN aired a sequel with the same title but different personnel. Another ESPN documentary in 2003 (running just 47 minutes), The Teammates: A Portrait

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of a Friendship, was inspired by writer David Halberstram’s book about the 60-year friendship of four Boston Rex Sox legends who played together in the 1940s and 1950s: Ted Williams, Johnny Pesky, Bobby Doerr, and Dominic DiMaggio. The Red Sox also were spotlighted in the regionally produced and shown Wait ’Til This Year, a documentary following the team’s historic 2004 championship season. (Many teams and sports, through the years, likely have had films made and shown regionally rather than nationally. The Sox doc is just one example.) Curiously, the Red Sox documentary was shot not at Fenway Park but in New Haven! It initially aired in Boston in October 2005 by the New England Sports Network. In 2005, Mantle, a documentary on Mickey Mantle, was produced by HBO Sports. Described by Bob Costas as a “God-made ballplayer,” the Yankees slugger who had died nearly a decade earlier at the age of 63, received a kind of cinematic hero worship (by producer George Roy and writer Steven Stern, along with narrator Liev Schreiber) more than a detailed account of what set him apart on the field. In addition to interviews with dozens of baseball greats, there were those with show biz luminaries headed by Billy Crystal (who had directed the TV movie dramatizing the race between Mantle and Roger Maris to beat Babe Ruth’s home run record), actor Ed Harris, and comic Richard Lewis. The 2006 HBO Sports documentary Wait ’Til Next Year: The Saga of the Chicago Cubs, “cleverly juxtaposes the team’s most bitter past century,” The Hollywood Reporter wrote on its premiere, “with the eternal hope of another opening day.” Onetime Chicago cop turned actor and unabashed fan Dennis Farina offered an enthusiastic narration, tracing, along side interviewees like Bryant Gumbel and comic actor Jeff Garlin (of Curb Your Enthusiasm), the fate of the Cubbies who have been denied a championship since the Teddy Roosevelt administration. Producer Bud Greenspan’s 90-minute Showtime baseball biography, Pride Against Prejudice: The Larry Doby Story (2007), followed the career of the second black player in the majors with the Cleveland Indians. Louis Gossett Jr. narrated. “This is an unknown black hero,” Greenspan said at the time. “He dealt with the same adversity and prejudices in his life and career as Jackie Robinson. But being second [by just 11 weeks], he has been overlooked by many of us for a long time.” Doby, who made it into the Baseball Hall of Fame in 1998, nearly two decades after leaving the game, died in 2003. The Greenspan documentary was inspired by the 1988 Larry Doby biography by Joseph Thomas Moore. The life and career of the Pittsburgh Pirates’ star player and humanitarian Roberto Clemente, who challenged racial discrimination to become

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baseball’s first Latino superstar, were the thrust of a PBS American Experience program that aired in spring 2008. No. 21, Clemente played for 18 seasons with the Pirates, leading the team to two World Series championships, winning four National League titles, earning 12 consecutive Golden Gloves, and receiving the MVP award. Puerto Rico’s favorite baseball son died on New Years Eve 1972 while on a humanitarian mission to ferry supplies to survivors of a catastrophic earthquake in Nicaragua. “Even before Roberto Clemente boarded a DC-7 aircraft that would plunge into the Atlantic Ocean, his status as a legendary enigma was already sealed, Ken Parish Perkins wrote in the Washington Post on the documentary’s premiere of “the silkysmooth outfielder with the rocket arm and textbook hitting skills.” Perkins commented: “Major League Baseball had commissioned profiles of Clemente, but [filmmaker Bernardo] Ruiz said he had seen nothing that dug into Clemente’s interior life or showed how race and identity played a vital role during his time in Pittsburgh.” Actor Jimmy Smits narrated the documentary, which had, among other “witnesses,” journalist George Will, who’d written a couple of notable books about baseball. He observed: “Clemente played hard all the time [and] he played all the time. But he talked, all the time, about how hard it was to do what he did.” Another half-hour documentary on what once was the great American pastime, on PBS in 2002, All Games Are Home Games, explored baseball behind bars in San Quentin prison. Dick Conte was the narrator. Baseball was now well on its way to ceding its premiere designation. By 2007, according to polls of TV audiences and viewing habits, the Super Bowl was number one, followed by college football, and Major League Baseball (with only a third of the audience popularity as the Super Bowl), followed by NASCAR racing and the NBA Finals, in fourth and fifth place. In 2008, for instance, Super Bowl XLII drew an estimated 97.5 million viewers, according to the New York Times, one of the largest sports audiences ever. That’s approximately three times as many viewers as American Idol. With regard to TV movies, Angels in the Infield, the 2000 Disney comedy follow-up to the company’s earlier Angels in the Outfield (1994), found a gaggle of prospective angelic hopefuls waiting to earn their wings by coming to the aid of a down-on-his-luck big-league pitcher, Eddie “Steady” Everett (played by Patrick Warburton). Eddie’s having trouble not only on the mound but at home with his teenage daughter and the wife who moved out on him. Finding Buck McHenry (Showtime 2000) told the tale of an 11-year-old (Michael Schiffman) who gets cut from his Little League baseball team and forms his own team, persuading a school custodian Buck (Ossie Davis) to

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be the coach. As Buck starts working with the team, in this adaptation by Alfred Slote of his 1991 novel, the old man’s baseball knowledge leads the kid to suspect that Buck is really an ex-Negro League legend who disappeared from sight years ago, and the boy sets out to find out the truth about the man’s background. Former Chicago Cubs star, Ernie Banks, also appears as a Negro League player. A remake of the 1978 PBS television adaptation by the same name, the 2001 Bleacher Bums, directed for Showtime by versatile Canadian actor Saul Rubinek and starring Sarain Boylan, Maury Chaykin, Matt Craven, and Charles Durning, was a sports tale based on the baseball play originally produced by the Organic Theatre Company of Chicago in the 1970s, and then OffBroadway. Written by nine of Organic’s actor members, including Joe Mantegna, who conceived the project, it follows nine die-hard Chicagoans—a rather unique social organization—as they root for a team that never seems to win, the Bruins [actually the Cubs, but the producers could not use the name]. 61* (2001) dramatized Roger Maris and Mickey Mantle’s competition to break the most hallowed record in U.S. sports, Babe Ruth’s single-season 60 home runs. The film highlights the pressures they faced, their friendship, and Commissioner Ford Frick’s controversial decision to add an asterisk to any record set beyond the 154 game schedule Ruth had played under. Billy Crystal, the Yankees’ self-acknowledged No. 1 fan, co-wrote and directed this home run of a cable movie. Disney’s Eddie’s Million Dollar Cook-Off in 2003 was an amiable comedy about a devoted teenage baseball fan whose dad is his coach and his best buddies his teammates. But Eddie is willing to trade his baseball glove for an oven mitt when he finds he has a gift for cooking. In the “Peanuts” world, the 2003 animated special Lucy Must Be Traded finds good old Charlie Brown, the manager of a losing team, hoping that persnickety Lucy will not sign up to play the new (little league) baseball season, since he and philosophical, blanket-carrying Linus believe that she is the worst player in the history of the game. Her performance in right field, they feel, is the cause of most of their 900 straight losses. This was the first new Peanuts special since the death in February 2000 of creator, supervisor, and/or producer Charles M. Schulz, and, like a great many of the TV adventures of the gang, it had a sports theme. Showtime’s once-in-awhile cable series of Movies for Young People, which aired in the late 1990s and early 2000s, offered a number of sportsthemed entries. One, Canadian-made Frankie & Hazel, was a feel-good, family-oriented drama about a 12-year-old girl (played by Mischa Barton)

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who is torn between taking ballet lessons and, with the encouragement of her Latina girlfriend (Ingrid Uribe), tries out for the boys’ baseball team. Veteran actress Joan Plowright played her loving grandmother, who’s raising her. Another actress, JoBeth Williams, directed this story by Elisa Guest and Jenny Bogart. An adaptation on Showtime of writer Pete Hamill’s coming-of-age novel, Snow in August, set in Brooklyn in the late 1940s was not really about sports, although it evoked the man and the myth Jackie Robinson as part of its storyline, and even had a commemorative Robinson pin being worn by a newly created Golem (a Frankenstein monster-like character of Jewish lore). Hamill’s story focused on a local Irish-Catholic preteen tough who strikes up a friendship with a local rabbi in a shabby neighborhood synagogue, where the kid, to the displeasure of his peers, becomes a paid “Shabbos goy.” In exchange for the pittance, the kid is drawn into the world of Jewish arcane and is taught to speak Yiddish while the rabbi, as his mentor, learns the nuances of English and baseball—Jackie Robinson in particular. So although Snow in August is a bit far afield to be included among sports-themed dramas, it is a hoot to see the monster, conjured up by the youngster at the behest of the rabbi who has been mugged and whose synagogue has been trashed, with a Jackie Robinson memento. In the 2004 baseball fantasy, The Winning Season, a contemporary youngster finds a rare mint-condition trading card featuring Honus Wagner, the legendary pitcher who helped the Pittsburgh Pirates win the 1909 World Series, and he time travels back to meet the star player himself. This film was based on the 1997 novel Honus & Me, one of a series of Dan Gutman books called “Baseball Card Adventures.” The Winning Season of 2004 about Wagner (played by Matthew Modine) should not be confused with The Winning Team of a half century earlier about another baseball star, pitcher Grover Cleveland Alexander (played by Ronald Reagan). Hustle was a paper-thin 2004 docudrama, written by Christian Darren and directed by Peter Bogdanovich, about onetime Cincinnati Reds baseball legend Pete Rose (aka “Charlie Hustle”) and his downfall during the mid-tolate 1980s in the wake of accusations about his gambling addiction and his admitted (in 2007) betting on his own team, leading to lifetime banishment from the game. Tom Sizemore, an actor with his own legal run-ins and doing jail time, starred as Rose. A year before this ESPN movie, the network presented a speculative docudrama called Pete Rose on Trial, a mock proceeding. After hearing three hours of testimony and deliberating for 90 minutes at Harvard Law School, it was found that Rose deserves to be in the Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown. Johnnie Cochran was the defense attorney for

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Rose, and Alan Dershowitz the prosecuting attorney; Elon Dershowitz, his son, was the producer. Among those talking for one side or the other were baseball stars Hank Aaron and Steve Garvey, and broadcaster Jim Palmer. Catherine Crier presided over events as trial judge. The Bronx Is Burning, a multipart drama dealing primarily with the New York Yankees during the summer of 1977 and the team’s race for the pennant, was produced by ESPN. Based on the book, Ladies and Gentlemen, the Bronx Is Burning: 1977, Baseball, Politics, and the Battle for the Soul of a City, by Jonathan Mahler, it featured John Turturro as manager Billy Martin, Oliver Platt as owner George Steinbrenner, Christopher MacDonald as slugger Joe DiMaggio, Daniel Sunjata as Reggie Jackson, Evan Hart as Bucky Dent, Joe Grifasi as Yogi Berra, Erik Jensen as Thurman Munson, Alex Cranmer as Graig Nettles, Matthew Zinkel as Lou Piniella, Bill Forchion as Elston Howard, Rob Lavin as Kenny Holtzman, Lou Provenzano as Ron Guidry, Dock Pollard as Willie Randolph, Tom Wiggin as Whitey Ford, and others. Jeremiah Chechik directed; writers James Solomon and Gordon Greisman produced. The show ran in hour-long segments over eight weeks, but many TV critics found it somewhat less than engaging. ESPN’s two-hour 2008 documentary, The Zen of Bobby V, focused on former Major League player and Texas Rangers and New York Mets manager, Bobby Valentine, and his current job managing the Chiba Lotte Marines, one of Japan’s premiere baseball teams. In 2008 A&E told the story of José Canseco, a baseball star of the 1980s and 1990s who seemed to have it all. Canseco was a Cuban who realized the American dream by coming up from the minors to the Oakland A’s in 1985. But over the years, as portrayed in José Canseco: My Life on Steriods, he lost it all to body-enhancing drugs, which he continues to use. Another baseball-themed drama, a two-part HBO film announced in late 2007 for a 2008 summer airdate, was Faithful: Two Diehard Boston Red Sox Fans Chronicle the Historic 2004 Season. The two fans were novelist Stewart O’Nan and cult mystery writer Stephen King, who collaborated on the book of the same title, published by Scribner’s just after the close of the championship season. (As of the close of the 2008 baseball season, however, the documentary was still only on the drawing board.) The unwieldy-titled Oprah Winfrey Presents: Mitch Albom’s For One More Day, was adapted by Albom from his 2006 best seller and aired on ABC as “a two-hour television event motion picture” just before Christmas 2007. Michael Imperioli starred as Chick Benetto, a broken-down former baseball player with the New York Mets who was plagued by thoughts of suicide. He is given another chance at life when he returns to his hometown and finds

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himself granted one more day with his mother who had died eight years before. She was played by Ellen Burstyn. Clubhouse (CBS 2004–2005) followed the relatively brief fortunes of a teenager (Jeremy Sumpter) living out his biggest dream as the batboy for a major league baseball team, the New York Empires. Dean Cain was the team’s egotistical captain and star third baseman; Christopher Lloyd was the gruff equipment manager. Clubhouse was dumped after first five outings on CBS, but the entire 11 filmed episodes later were shown on HDNet. And then there was a 2004 ESPN documentary, Whose Curse Is Worse? Red Sox and Cubs on Trial, with a plethora of sports figure, living and in archival footage, participating. (This of course was before the Red Sox went on to win the World Series.) In 2006 ESPN also offered a three-part program, around World Series time, called DHL [after the sponsor] Presents Major League Baseball Hometown Heroes. The conjunction with Major League Baseball, the program was the culmination of a “contest” during the summer in which fans could name the most outstanding player in the history of each of the 30 Major League Baseball franchises (five were to be nominated for each team based on specific criteria that make the winner deserving of being called a hero. The names of 30 of them, chosen by the number of votes, were compiled and their greatest moments were showcased. (This appears to be a one-time-only program, not a continuing series like the American Film Institute top 100 lists that are turned into periodic CBS specials.) The first decade of the new millennium has been full of football TV fare. Monday Night Mayhem (2002) was a lighthearted chronicle about the launch with broadcast boothmates Howard Cosell, Frank Gifford, and Dandy Don Meredith and the impact of ABC’s fabled Monday Night Football in 1970, under the tutelage of the network’s sports president, Roone Arledge. Based on the candid 1988 book by Marc Gunther and Bill Carter, this TNT cable film, directed by Ernest Dickerson, devolved into less the story of how the show became a cultural institution and more about the colorfully bombastic Cosell. John Turturro’s Cosell should be compared to Jon Voight’s interpretation in the feature film, Ali, which premiered not long before. In 2002, ESPN offered in The Junction Boys a dramatization of legendary football coach Paul “Bear” Bryant’s unforgiving efforts to whip his hopefuls on the 1954 Texas A&M team into a cohesive gridiron force in training camp in desolate, drought-ridden Junction, Texas (although it was filmed outside Sydney, Australia). Tom Berenger had the starring role. Only 35 players survived the grueling regimen. The film was based on Jim Dent’s 1999 book, The Junction Boys: How Ten Days in Hell With Bear Bryant Forged a Championship Team.

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Code Breakers was a 2005 docudrama on ESPN about the 1951 West Point cheating scandal surrounding the Army football team coached by Earl “Red” Blaik (Scott Glenn). His own son was on the team that violated the storied “Cadet Honor Code”—hence the film’s title. More than 90 cadets were disciplined or expelled as a result of the Korean War era affair. Code Breakers was based on the 2000 book, A Return to Glory: The Untold Story of Honor, Dishonor & Triumph at the United States Military Academy, 1950–53 by Bill McWilliams. Richard Zeppieri played a young Vince Lombardi, who was one of Blaik’s assistant coaches, before later becoming legendary in his own right. Filmmaker Spike Lee’s worshipful, arresting 2000 documentary, Jim Brown: All American was a two-hour plus film, co-produced by HBO Sports, had a brief theatrical run (at the Film Forum in New York) before going, in an abridged 90 minute version, to cable TV. “As the movie traces Mr. Brown’s athletic exploits,” critic Stephen Holden wrote in the New York Times, “it is impossible not to be awed by the power and grace of one of the greatest natural sportsmen of modern times. He is still considered as a candidate for the best running back of all time.” In 2002, Jim Brown was named by The Sporting News as the greatest professional football player ever. Sportswriter Bert Sugar named Brown number one in his book The Greatest Athletes of All Time. Friday Night Lights (2006–present) is an NBC series based on the feature film. The show, which was embraced by the critics and had a coterie of fans, never received a large audience, but the network rather half-heartedly chose to pick it up for a second season after it received a Peabody Award with the notation: “No dramatic series, broadcast or cable, is more grounded in contemporary American reality than this clear eyed serial about the hopes, dreams, livelihoods and egos intertwined with the fate of high-school football in a Texas town.” In a lengthy piece in the New York Times Magazine in early 2008, during the show’s second season that was abbreviated by a lengthy writers’ strike, media critic Virginia Heffernan offered: “Why is Friday Night Lights such a bust? It hurts to pose the question.” She continued: “[It] is a luminous slow dance set in the smoldering landlock of fictional Dillon, Tex. Like a late-life romance, it induces both grief and euphoria and casts a kind of high-lonesome bluegrass spell. I love Friday Night Lights. And it’s not just me.” The series is only secondarily about football; the producers use it as a metaphor of life in rural America where high school football is weekly entertainment now that local movie houses have made their way to cineplexes in the not necessarily nearby malls and drive-ins have long since been plowed over by land developers. NBC, in the spring of 2008, was ambivalent about

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continuing the series and talked about selling it off to an interested cable party, but ultimately returned it to the next season’s program lineup. The 2008 ESPN high school football documentary, Hellfighters, proved the polar opposite of Friday Night Lights. It was set in Harlem, where, as the network’s press release noted, “the bleachers are empty, practice space scarce, and the Board of Education ruthless, but under the perseverance of coach Duke Ferguson, the Hellfighters are fighting to overcome it all, one touchdown at a time.” This documentary, directed by Jon Frankel, had a premiere screening at the 2007 Tribeca Film Festival. The Man Who Lost Himself (aka The Stranger I Married) was a Canadianmade 2005 TV docudrama about Terry Evanshen, a Canadian Football League star who fell into a coma after a near-fatal car crash. When he awakened, he had no recollection of his family or anything else in his life. David James Elliott, late of J.A.G., starred. While not actually dealing with football, 2000’s American Tragedy was about onetime football star O. J. Simpson and his sensational trial for the murder of his wife and her friend. The two-part, four-hour CBS adaptation by Norman Mailer of the 1996 best-seller by Lawrence Schiller and James Willwerth detailed the drama behind the closed doors of O. J. Simpson’s famed “dream team” of defense lawyers (led by Johnnie Corcoran, played by Ving Rhames): the warring personalities, the power struggles, and O. J.’s role from his prison cell. O. J. was portrayed in shadows and from behind by Raymond Forchion. Co-author Schiller also produced and directed. Ron Silver, who here portrayed egotistical Robert Shapiro, earlier played Alan Dershowitz (another member of the team featured here) in the theatrical film Reversal of Fortune. ESPN offered its first original drama series, Playmakers, in 2003 (it lasted just 11 episodes). It was sort of a sports soap opera that followed the fortunes of the Cougars, a fictional NFL team, but it focused on the off-field lives of its players and how they deal with the pressures of professional football. The New York Times, in its review, called it “a show about football that shows almost no football . . . well written and well acted but it is professional football as observed by Joan Didion rather than John Madden.” The Game (The CW series 2006–2007), a sitcom, executive produced by, among others, Kelsey Grammer, focused on how three women deal with their men who play for the fictional NFL team, San Diego Sabers. The Game was a spin-off from the popular series Girlfriends, dealing with a bunch of twenty-something African American women. Like The Game, the 2007 one-hour ABC pilot Football Wives revolves around women whose lives are transformed when they marry NFL superstars. The project is based on the popular British primetime soap Footballers’ Wives

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that began in 2002 and is airing in the United States on BBC America. In the American version, the pilot of which had not aired as of the start of the 2008–2009 television season, Ving Rhames (who earlier had portrayed flamboyant Don King in a TV movie and O. J. Simpson’s lawyer in another) plays the general manager of a pro football team, a fictional NFL franchise in Orlando. Gabrielle Union, Lucy Lawless, and Lost co-star Kiele Sanchez, play three of the wives, and Anelle Kebbel, the younger sibling of one of them who adapts quickly to her sister’s new lifestyle. ESPN offered a high school football reality show in 2005 that unexpectedly got mired in controversy. Bound for Glory was destined to follow the Spartans of Montour High in McKees Rocks, a coal-mining town 12 miles from Pittsburgh, through the eight weeks of their 2005 season, with their “faux” coach, football greats Dick Butkus as the head coach and Ray Crockett as his assistant. The Spartans had been a high school football powerhouse in an earlier time, but come up losers for the past couple of decades. Butkus reportedly chided the players for their poor attitude, became frustrated, and left with two games to go to finish the season. (The team’s real head coach, Lou Cerro, took over.) Similar to ESPN’s 2005 Bound for Glory, the MTV reality series Two-ADays, the next year, about a small town football team, followed (at least for eight episodes before it was sacked) the 2005 gridiron season of the Hoover (Alabama) High School Buccaneers. The Bucs, who entered their season ranked second in the nation, were chasing their fourth state championship title in five years, but they were also balancing the normal pressures of being high school seniors—personal relationships, parents, academics, community, demanding coaches, and two practices every day—in their pursuit of a championship ring. In My Boys (TBS 2006–), a twenty-something female Chicago sports columnist (Jordana Spiro) deals in this lighthearted series with the men in her life including her brother (Jim Gaffigan), her ex-boyfriend who had a front office job with the Cubs (Jamie Kahler), her best friend (Reid Scott), and a sportswriter for a rival publication (Kyle Howard). Beginning in September 2007, the NFL Network offered Put Up Your Dukes, a sports television talk show hosted by former NFL center Jamie Dukes. He and contributors including (among others) former two-sport athlete Deion Sanders, NFL.com writers Adam Schefter and Pat Kirwan, college football analyst Charles Davis, and commentator Brian Baldinger (from NFL on Fox) discuss and debate news of the day in the league. Among the television documentaries produced for HBO Sports dealing with football during the decade was The Bear: The Legend of Coach Paul Bryant

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(2001), narrated by Tom Wopat. Also aired was The Game of Their Lives: Pro Football’s Wonder Years (2001), O. J.: A Study in Black and White (2002), and The Wild Ride to Super Bowl I (2004). Again Liev Schreiber narrated. Hard Knocks, a once-in-awhile HBO docureality series that gives football fans behind-the-scenes access to the training camp of an NFL team, premiered a little over a month before 9/11 and followed the then-defending Super Bowl champion Baltimore Ravens. The next year, the subject was the Dallas Cowboys. Five seasons later, in the third installment, Hard Knocks: Training Camp With the Kansas City Chiefs, HBO Sports’ behind-the-scenes football cinema verité series aired in summer 2007, focusing for five weeks on the players and coaches’ daily lives and the routines as the Chiefs. In summer 2008, the Dallas Cowboys were back in the Hard Knocks spotlight once again for another five weeks. NBC Sports half-hour 2007 documentary, Every Man a Tiger: The Eddie Robinson Story, looked at the career of the legendary Grambling State University football coach who, in his 57 seasons, sent more than 200 players to the NFL, retiring as the all-time winningest coach in NCAA Division I history. Harry Belafonte played Robinson in the 1980s TV movie Grambling’s White Tiger. The documentary was narrated by André Braugher. Another 2007 HBO Sports documentary dealing with college football and one if its greatest rivalries, going back 110 years, examined Michigan vs. Ohio State: The Rivalry, using rare footage and interviews with well-known grads, players, and coaches. The New York Times wrote: “The hour-long program produced by George Roy proves that the Wolverines and the Buckeyes have everything needed for a rivalry: 110 years of history, regional snobbery, a fixed time of year to play, juvenile insults, border skirmishes (many Ohioans have played for Michigan), indelible personalities and the pro-Buckeyes punk rock band, the Dead Schembechlers, whose members dress as Woody Hayes, the Ohio State coaching icon whose career ended after he slugged a Clemson player at the 1978 Gator Bowl . . . The 10-year battle between [Bo] Schembechler and Hayes is the emotional core of the documentary, but it is played largely for its amusing elements, which can be ascribed to Hayes’s snarling, meshuga intensity, his cold war-level paranoia and his loathing for Michigan.” In the Wall Street Journal there were these remarks: “The game continues to carry the most genuine mark of a great rivalry. The feud between the two schools injects itself into everything from business and politics to an actual blood drive where volunteers from the two campuses vie to see which side can siphon the most plasma.” An HBO Sports’ documentary that examines integration during the 1960s civil rights movement of college football in the South at historically black

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colleges and universities aired in December 2008 as Breaking the Huddle: The Integration of College Football. The Sports Pages offered two satirical, diverse “sports” stories on Showtime in 2001 tied together as a single movie, by actor/director Richard Benjamin. In the first, “How Doc Waddems Finally Broke 100,” by Donald Todd from a short story by Don Marquis, curmudgeonly Bob Newhart insists on standing trial for the golf links murder of his smug, rules-quoting, by-the-book golf partner, Kelsey Grammer. The second, “The Heidi Bowl,” by George Zaloom, is a fictitious retelling of the events of the infamous (to football fans) 1968 Jets/Raiders game that was cut short by the airing of the TV movie Heidi, causing hysteria among angry sports fans. Among the “witnesses” giving their sardonic spin on the events of the time is Jennifer Edwards (daughter of Julie Andrews) who in actuality as a child played the young Heidi in the unwittingly controversial 1960s film. The sport of basketball has continued to be a source of TV drama since 2000. Pistol Pete: The Life and Times of Pete Maravich is an Emmy Awardwinning 90-minute documentary of “Pistol” Pete Maravich that initially aired on CBS during the Final Four Tournament on April 1, 2001. It was produced by George Roy, written by Steven Stern, and narrated by Harry Connick Jr. In 1996, Maravich was named one of the 50 greatest players in NBA history by a panel made up of NBA historians, former players, and coaches. After graduating from Louisiana State University (LSU) in 1970, he signed with the Atlanta Hawks for one of the highest salaries at the time. And after four seasons, he was traded to the New Orleans Jazz for eight players, where he peaked as an NBA superstar. He was waived by the Jazz in January 1980 and was quickly picked up by the Boston Celtics where he played the rest of the season alongside Larry Bird. Maravich retired in the fall of 1980. In 10 NBA seasons, he was a seven-time All-Star and one of basketball’s top showmen of the day. After a game injury in 1980, Maravich disappeared for several years. On January 5, 1988, while warming up to play a pickup basketball game, he collapsed and died of a heart attack at the age of 40. Maravich was put into the Basketball Hall of Fame in May 1987, the youngest player ever to be inducted. The 2000 TNT documentary On Hallowed Ground: Streetball Champions of Rucker Park, narrated by André Braugher, dealt with street basketball as practiced at Rucker Park in New York’s Harlem (former site of the legendary Polo Grounds) by such athletes as Earl “the Goat” Manigault, a drug user who squandered his skills and never made it to the NBA; Wilt Chamberlain; Kareem Abdul-Jabbar; and Julius Erving. The documentary focused on the Entertainers Basketball Classic that has become an annual tournament that

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draws thousands. “They don’t have celebrated nicknames like Magic or Dr. J, but the hoopsters featured on TNT’s On Hallowed Ground are still recognized legends—just ask them,” the Variety critic wrote in his review. “The cable web hits Harlem and shoots a swish in this brisk docu about Rucker Park, a neighborhood hot spot that serves as New York’s basketball mecca.” The film tells the story of Pee Wee Kirkland, the first true idol of Rucker Park, who, according to Variety, “admits to have bypassed on the pros in order to heighten his legendary status close to home. The result: He spent a decade in prison for a drug offense, and now communicates his accrued wisdom at a yearly camp for young showboat wannabes.” On Hallowed Ground won an Emmy for Outstanding Sports Documentary. Another TNT sports documentary, also in 2000, was Whatever Happened to Micheal Ray?, produced by NBA Entertainment and narrated by Chris Rock. It was, as one critic called it, an introspective documentary that scrutinizes the rise and fall of All-Star point guard, Micheal Ray Richardson, a confused soul. He was a relatively unknown collegiate player from the University of Montana when chosen by the New York Knicks in the 1978 NBA draft. He was hailed as the next Walt “Clyde” Frazier, but an increasing drug habit made the Knicks question whether its investment in him was worth it. He and the Knicks sort of regressed together in 1981–1982, and he was traded to the Golden State Warriors, and then to the New York Nets where he was named comeback player of the year in 1985. But his fortunes there were short-lived. At the time of the documentary’s premiere, Richardson was playing in Italy. By 2007, he was no longer an active player but coaching in the Continental Basketball Association (CBA). And there was the HBO Sports documentary in 2000 of Boston Celtics great, Bill Russell. With the usual production triumvirate of executive producer Ross Greenburg, writer Frank Deford, and narrator Liev Schreiber, the story of arguably the most successful team player of modern times. Bill Russell: My Life, My Way, told the story of this complex, iconoclastic intellectual, activist, and a pioneer. “Docu places Russell on the Jackie Robinson timeline of black advancement in sports,” Variety’s critic wrote. He later became the first black coach of a U.S. pro team (in 1967), when he succeeded Red Auerbach as coach of the Celtics. In early 2002, sociologist Jason Jimerson, from Indiana University in Bloomington, wrote the script for a documentary Shirts & Skins: The Sociology of Basketball (aka Pickup), and produced with director Ron Osgood this half-hour TV study that aired locally in Indiana and has been syndicated. It tells the story of pickup basketball through the thoughts and plays of the participants “Pickup b-ball is no spectator sport,” Dr. Jimerson pointed out.

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“In fact, players often outnumber spectators and spectators are usually waiting to become players. Still participants, age 18 to 56 wouldn’t be anywhere else at lunchtime.” He also observed: “Doctors, lawyers, academics, bluecollar workers, professionals, students, and others who don’t fit in a category show up to take their turns in a game. A smattering of women come to play. Everyone must wait to become ‘next’. . . . Pickup is ‘democracy in action.’” SkyWalker: The David Thompson Story, a 45-minute syndicated 2004 TV documentary written by Rob Goldman and Rick Clemens and directed by Clemens, followed the life and career of the player from North Carolina State who often was compared in his court days to Julius Erving. He had a storied college career and became a pro superstar in the ABA with the Virginia Squires and the NBA with the Atlanta Hawks (1975–1981) and then the Seattle Supersonics and finally the Denver Nuggets. But it was off the court that drugs and one injury after another did him in. “When Thompson was on,” one sports reporter was said to have observed, “perhaps only Dr. J was a more explosive player.” Thompson, who is in the Basketball Hall of Fame, has been credited with inspiring a generation of high flyers, including Michael Jordan and Bill Walton. The fall and rise of the Maryland Men’s Basketball program with stars like Len Bias on the court and how the team fought its way to the 2002 National Championship was chronicled by Black Canyon Productions in Tragedy to Triumph: The Maryland Terrapin Odyssey during CBS’s March Madness in 2003. Actor André Braugher narrated. Producer George Roy’s 2007 HBO basketball documentary The UCLA Dynasty recalled the 10 NCAA championships of the “Wizards of Westwood” under legendary coach John Wooden between 1964 and 1975. Among the former players who shared memories were Bill Walton, Lucius Allen, Henry Bobby, and Elvin Hayes, plus sportscaster Dick Enberg, actor and former UCLA football star Mark Harmon, and other alumni including Ray Manzarek (keyboardist of The Doors), director Penelope Spheeris, actor Beau Bridges, and TV personality Judge Joe Brown. “For anybody who enjoys basketball or admires Wooden,” Variety wrote, “it’s another sophisticated HBO Sports production that shoots and scores.” Another HBO basketball documentary, another slam dunk, was the 2005 Perfect Upset: The 1985 Villanova vs. Georgetown NCAA Championship, which chronicled two decades on one of the great upsets in college basketball history with hoops great Patrick Ewing at the heart. As one critic noted: “Not everything is about basketball as this excellent HBO documentary examines a struggling U.S. economy that turned around by the mid-1980s, Reagan’s first term as president, Georgetown’s pop icon status of the time

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period [under coach John Thompson] . . . Briskly paced sociology lesson that doubles as an intriguing U.S. and sports history documentary.” In the 2002 A Season on the Brink, Brian Dennehy (miscast primarily because of the disparity of his age and that of the guy he’s playing) starred as volatile basketball coach Bob Knight. His turbulent 1985–1986 Indiana Hoosiers season was the maiden made-for-TV film for the cable sports network, ESPN. The movie premiered with raw language and all on ESPN, while also being shown virtually simultaneously on sister network ESPN2 in a sanitized version. The Red Sneakers (Showtime 2002) told of a top high school math student, who really isn’t gifted athletically, but who aspires to play hoops on his school’s team. Then a pair of red sneakers that once belonged to a Negro League basketball player finds its way to his feet and things take off from there. Actor/dancer Gregory Hines made his directing debut here and acted in a brief cameo. Double Teamed, a 2002 Disney Channel drama, was based on the true story of California twins Heidi and Heather Burge and the high school years of the sibling rivals who went on to become WNBA basketball stars. Another fact-based Disney Channel hoops tale, Full-Court Miracle (2003) was a dramatization of how Lamont Carr (played by Richard T. Jones), a former University of Virginia college basketball star in 1976 hoping for a second shot at the NBA with the Philadelphia 76ers, became sidelined by a knee injury and inadvertently became recruited to coach a struggling Hebrew Academy team to a championship. The lighthearted tale mixes in the biblical story of Judah Maccabee and the holiday of Hanukah with a contemporary twist on the basketball court. High School basketball was one of the continuing themes in the contemporary youth-oriented series One Tree Hill (which began a popular run in 2003 on The WB and continued into 2008, several years after The WB merged into the CW). Set in the North Carolina town of Tree Hill, it pits a high school star of the Ravens, just as his businessman dad was, and who pushes him harder than even the coach against his own half-brother. The basic stars on the sports side of the ledger were Chad Michael Murray and James Lafferty as Lucas Scott and brother Nathan, Paul Johanson as their demanding dad, and Barry Corbin as gruff Coach Whitey Durham (who happened to coach all of them). Another show with high school basketball at its core was the 2007 eight-part Sundance Channel documentary of small town life, Nimrod Nation. Set in tiny Watersmeet, Michigan, on the state’s Upper Peninsula, it followed the Watersmeet Nimrods through their 2006 season, looking to be undefeated. Filmmaker Brett Morgen directed.

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Edge of America (2005), inspired by a cross-cultural true story, is an upbeat feature that premiered on Showtime, following a girls’ high school basketball team on an Indian reservation in New Mexico as they learn how to win. Led by their black coach (James McDaniel), they discover the values of passion, dedication, and discipline as they climb from the bottom of their division to compete for the state title. It was the opening night film at the 2004 Sundance Film Festival. Aside from McDaniel and actor Tim Daly (the film’s executive producer), the cast was composed almost exclusively by Native American actors. It was directed by Chris Eyre, who is of Cherokee/ Arapaho descent. The 2005 PBS documentary, The Harlem Globetrotters: The Team That Changed the World, “exposed” the famed team’s impact socially and culturally, their lasting effect on the NBA, and how the players continue to serve as ambassadors of goodwill, touching audiences around the world. The 50minute show featured interviews with basketball players, celebrities, politicians, etc., from Bill Cosby and Bob Cousy to Henry Kissinger and Barack Obama. :03 From Gold, an hour-long 2002 documentary by producer George Roy and writer Steven Stern, was an HBO Sports presentation, narrated by Liev Schreiber, about the controversial match-up between the United States and Soviet basketball teams in the ill-fated 1972 Munich Summer Olympics (during which the Israeli athletes were murdered), and the U.S. was defeated at the last minute. As Roy pointed out: “It lays out the confusing details of the last moments of that historic game and puts in perspective the events as seen from a distance three decades removed.” Another of Roy’s HBO documentaries, also on basketball, in 2007 spotlighted coach John Wooden’s accomplishments in The UCLA Dynasty. “This brisk hour,” Variety observed, “crams in an enormous amount of material . . . a beautifully done tribute to Wooden’s sterling example.” ESPN’s short-lived documentary/ biography series in 2006, Back in the Day (there were just four episodes) explored in half-hour shows the careers of such sports figures—basically basketball—as Al Harrington, who played in the NBA for the Indiana Pacers; Rudi Johnson, who grew up on the streets and went from Auburn University to the NFL; Jermaine O’Neal, who would win three high school championships and would ultimately become the youngest person to drafted into the NBA; and Antonio Gates, who grew up loving basketball but didn’t make the cut with the NBA and moved into football as one of the NFL’s top players with the San Diego Chargers. And writer/director Dan Klores’s two-part, four-hour ESPN 2008 documentary Black Magic examined Civil Rights-era America through the prism

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of basketball and particularly its players and coaches at historically black colleges and universities (HBCU) from the mid-1940s onward. Samuel L. Jackson narrated, along with jazz great Wynton Marsalis and New Orleans Hornets star guard Chris Klein. It was co-produced by basketball legend Earl “The Pearl” Monroe, who put in an appearance at the beginning and featured “testimony” by Willis Reed, Earl Lloyd (the first black player to sign an NBA contract), Harold Hunter, Oscar Robertson, Dick Barnett, Bob “Butterbean” Love, Richard “Pee Wee” Kirkland, Ben Jobe, and John Chaney. The film was widely praised at its premiere. The Hollywood Reporter’s Ray Richmond, for one, noted: “ESPN will never be associated with a piece of work better than this . . . Black Magic instantly stands as the finest, most enlightening original program in the sports net’s history. . . . Thankfully, this riveting and important piece of work shines an overdue light on [the above mentioned players’] legacy.” The 2000s continued the airing of boxing-related programs. Bud Greenspan’s Kings of the Ring: Four Legends of Heavyweight Boxing was one of the first sports documentaries airing in 2000. Narrated by Will Lyman, it focused on the fabled careers of Jack Johnson, Jack Dempsey, Joe Louis, and Muhammad Ali. The year 2000 began sportswise with an ABC TV movie called Muhammad Ali: King of the World. It was a misnomer—which didn’t seem to bother the network—since it covered Cassius Clay’s early years through his fateful meeting with Malcolm X and the eve of his 1964 championship bout with Sonny Liston in Miami Beach that would give him the world heavyweight championship. (Young Cassius Clay, played by Terrence Howard—with Steve Harris as Liston—would not emerge as Muhammad Ali until after the time period covered by this film). The movie was adapted from David Remnick’s 1998 nonfiction book on Clay, called simply King of the World. Shortly thereafter came Ali: An American Hero (2000), a biopic chronicling the life of Clay from boyhood in Louisville, Kentucky, to the fabled Rumble in the Jungle in Zaire in 1974 against George Foreman, where he regained his heavyweight title. Along the way, there were the meeting with Malcolm X (played by Joe Morton), the conversion to the Muslim religion, the Vietnam War (in which Ali refused induction), and Howard Cosell (portrayed by Earl Boen). Another 2000 fight documentary, from HBO Sports and executive producer Ross Greenburg, and narrated by Liev Schreiber, was Ali-Frazier 1: One Nation . . . Divisible, about the so-called Fight of the Century when Muhammad Ali and Joe Frazier slugged it out on March 8, 1971 at Madison Square Garden. As Greenburg pointed out in the publicity for the fight, it clearly positioned Ali as the symbol of the civil rights struggle and the anti-Vietnam

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movement, while Frazier was viewed as the prowar, conservative symbol of American society. Included in the program were interviews with boxing legends and Ali opponents George Foreman and Joe Frazier, journalists Bryant Gumbel and Stanley Crouch, and trainers Eddie Futch, Gil Clancy, and Angelo Dundee, among others. PBS picked up the British-made documentary Muhammad Ali: Through the Eyes of the World and aired it in May 2003. Featured in it were interviews with Maya Angelou, George Foreman, Hannah Ali, James Earl Jones, and Billy Crystal. Another Ali documentary about his formative years, Muhammad Ali: Made in Miami, aired on PBS five years later and explored—as the publicity pointed out—“the critical role that Miami played in the evolution of one of the most significant cultural figures of our time.” Cassius Clay arrived in Miami in the fall of 1960, fresh from earning an Olympic gold medal as a light-heavyweight boxer in the Rome Olympics. In Miami he fell in with Malcolm X, adopted the black separatist teachings of the Nation of Islam, and in essence became Muhammad Ali. In February 1964, in one of boxing’s great upsets, he defeated Sonny Liston in Miami Beach for the world heavyweight championship, completing the metamorphosis. The uplifting story of popular Mexican-American boxer Oscar de la Hoya, often referred to as the “Golden Boy,” was recounted in a Biography Channel profile in 2001. The 1992 Olympic Gold Medalist for years has been one of the more popular fighters in HBO and Showtime’s fight cards. In the Showtime series, Resurrection Blvd. (2000–2002), three generations of the Mexican-American Santiago family, living in East Los Angeles, have forged their legacy in boxing. Ailing widower Roberto Santiago (Tony Plana) is worried about the children in his dysfunctional family who all take different paths in their lives. A mechanic, he is training his son Carlos (Michael DeLorenzo) as a boxing contender. Joe and Max (2002) was a cable sports drama dealing with heavyweight boxers Joe Louis and Max Schmeling in and out of the ring, and their strange lifelong friendship, until Louis’s death in 1981. (Schmeling was 96 years old when the film premiered.) Two lesser-known actors, Leonard Roberts and Til Schweiger, had the title roles in this American-German co-production, written by Jason Horwitch. An October 2004 episode of PBS’s American Experience, called “The Fight,” documented the landmark June 22, 1938 Louis-Schmeling heavyweight match at Yankee Stadium—their second. Courtney B. Vance was the narrator and a roster of people (in archival footage) included Muhammad Ali, Jimmy Braddock, and Jack Dempsey to Hitler, Goebbels, and Marlene Dietrich. Interweaving the stories of Joe and Max, “The Fight” was written and

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directed by Barak Goodman, based on David Margolick’s book Beyond Glory: Joe Louis vs. Max Schmeling, and a World on the Brink. Directed by and starring John Leguizamo, with Clifton Collins, Jr., Vanessa Ferlito, Omar Benson Miller, Nestor Serrano, and Robert Forster, the 2003 HBO movie Undefeated follows the fortunes of a Latino boxer, Lex Vargas, who must navigate the path between his newfound fame, with all its seductive trappings, and his humble yet proud roots growing up on the mean streets of Jackson Heights, Queens. Surrounded by his childhood friends and an old-school trainer, Vargas endures a devastating personal loss before turning professional, eventually signing with a high-profile promoter. Ultimately his fame and fortune threaten to undermine the longtime bonds he shares with his buddies from the old neighborhood. Early in 2005, PBS aired Ken Burns’s two-part Unforgivable Blackness: The Rise and Fall of Jack Johnson. The documentary about the first black heavyweight champion initially was shown at the Telluride, Toronto, and New York Film Festivals. Written by Geoffrey C. Ward, it was narrated by actor Keith David; Samuel L. Jackson was the voice of Johnson. “The monumental four-hour film,” the New York Times’s Stephen Holden wrote as it was about to premiere at the New York Film Festival for two showings before going to public television, “pursues a methodical approach to reconstructing the past that’s not unlike Johnson’s dogged, decade-long quest to be No. 1. History, in Mr. Burns’s films is a solid edifice built stone by stone on a foundation of primary sources—newspaper articles, archival photographs, vintage film clips and period music (composed by Wynton Marsalis)—and topped off with solemn scholarly commentary.” The Biography Channel, in February 2007, commemorated Black History Month with a profile of five influential African Americans, including sports icons Muhammad Ali and Jesse Owens. The special, titled Crucibles of Courage, was hosted by Senator Barack Obama. The 2007 ESPN boxing documentary Triumph and Tragedy: The Ray Mancini Story recalled the story that two decades earlier was dramatized as a CBS biopic. New York Times sports writer Richard Sandomir noted: While it tells the story of Mancini, the lightweight boxer, beginning with his youth in Youngstown, Ohio, and his decision to follow his father, Lenny Sr., into fighting, the program focuses on his title match 25 years ago today against Duk Koo Kim in Las Vegas. After Mancini knocked him out in the 14th round (the bout was on CBS), Kim rose from the canvas, but collapsed on his stool. He fell into a coma and died four days later after surgery on a blood clot in his brain. Less than three

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months later, Kim’s mother committed suicide. . . . The effects of Kim’s death on Mancini, the reforms that resulted and the shunning of boxing by network TV are also examined. Mancini fought eight more times, losing his last four bouts, two against Livingston Bramble, who taunted him as a murderer.

In the television era of reality shows, it was inevitable that there would be a boxing competition dealing with amateur hopefuls battling for a big payoff. First came The Next Great Champ (Fox 2004), with former champ Oscar de la Hoya mentoring young pugilists, but it was KO’d pretty quickly from the schedule. The show, in fact, was a rush job to contend with NBC’s announced The Contender produced by reality king Mark Burnett during the 2005–2006 season, then ESPN in 2007. It initially was hosted from Caesars Palace in Las Vegas by Sylvester Stallone, the big screen’s Rocky Balboa, and Sugar Ray Leonard. In Jump In! (2007), a teenage Brooklyn Golden Gloves hopeful, Izzy Daniels, his ex-boxer dad’s pride and joy, is in line to be the third generation of boxers in this family to be a Golden Gloves winner. Suddenly, though, he joins an all-girl jump-roping team in this popular Disney Channel movie and becomes a double-Dutch star. Family Foreman was a 2008 reality series that premiered on TV Land and followed the life of Big George, the bruising heavyweight champ-cumamiable nice guy and entrepreneur, and his family of Georges (a couple of whom co-executive produced the series with dad). Variety had this to report: “As likable as George Foreman is, television remains a ring in which he’s just another palooka. Having tried a short-lived ABC sitcom in 1993, the twotime heavyweight champ gets the whole family into the act in this TV Land series, but Big George’s rematch with TV again leaves him wheezing. . . . A knockout, it isn’t.” The 2008 HBO Sports documentary, Joe Louis: American Hero . . . Betrayed, about the legendary boxer and his impact on segregated America, brings this chronicle of sports on television full circle. The first championship boxing event on commercial television (although seen in just three cities on perhaps 5,000 sets) was the Joe Louis-Billy Conn match-up at Yankee Stadium on June 19, 1946. Variety, at the time, noted that “it took eight rounds for Joe Louis to knock out Billy Conn tonight, but it took show business’s newest medium, television, considerably less than that to emphasize its own lethal wallop. . . . It was significant because television, through NBC, helped produce all the thrills, all the excitement that one could have had at the stadium’s ringside.” In the February 2008 documentary, among the interviewees discussing Louis’s impact on sports and on America were his son,

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Joe Barrows Jr.; Pete and Louis Marciano, brothers of boxer Rocky Marciano; poet Maya Angelou, activist Dick Gregory, writer Gay Talese, comic Bill Cosby, Congressman Charles Rangel, and other biographers and historians. “While it grows a bit maudlin and rah-rah as it winds down, this 75-minute profile of the great American heavyweight champ and icon, Joe Louis, connects like an uppercut to the jaw,” said critic Ray Richmond in The Hollywood Reporter of “this exceptional, definitive and greatly detailed biopic.” So far in the twenty-first century, golf has been covered as a topic in the following. A golf documentary on Tiger Woods, called Tiger at 30, aired during CBS’s televised Masters tournament in April 2006. Jim Nantz narrated and many of Tiger’s colleagues and sports friends, along with Ed Bradley and George Bush—plus Tiger himself—participated in the tribute. Unfortunately Tiger lost the Masters that year to Zack Johnson. Tiger was celebrated by the Biography Channel’s Biography of the Year in 2006 The television program brought together some of the world’s top athletes to salute the international icon: Jack Nicklaus, Arnold Palmer, Michael Jordan, Lance Armstrong, Wayne Gretzky, Gary Player, Tom Lehman, and Annika Sorenstam, plus fellow golfers George H. W. Bush and Bill Clinton. CBS Sports offered an hour-long documentary, The Best Shot in Golf, in the spring of 2008 as part of the annual PGA Tour. It explored how the aerial shot (from the MetLife blimp, called Snoopy One) changed television coverage of golf with a unique above-ground view of the game. HBO Sports premiered its first golf documentary in June 2008, Back Nine at Cherry Hills: The Legends of the 1960 U.S. Open, recounting the finish nearly 50 years ago of the Championship, when Ben Hogan, Arnold Palmer, and Jack Nicklaus competed in suburban Denver. Executive producer Ross Greenburg’s aim, as the cable network’s press release pointed out, was to have his documentary span the early years of the three, all of whose lives were shaped by their relationships with their father. It featured interviews with Palmer and Nicklaus, as well as golfers Ken Venturi and Dow Finsterwald, plus author Dan Jenkins. Tennis has been covered in various ways in TV dramas and documentaries since 2000. When Billie Beat Bobby was a lighthearted 2001 drama inspired by the infamous, media-crazed male-versus-female tennis face-off in 1973 between champion Billie Jean King and tennis hustler Bobby Riggs. Goldie Hawn was one of the executive producers, as was Holly Hunter, who stars as Billie Jean (along with Ron Silver as Riggs, wearing an outlandish rug). In 2000, HBO Sports telecast a documentary, Playing the Field: Sports and Sex in America (among many figures from various sports, Billie Jean King was a part of this program, narrated by Liev Schreiber), and in 2006, Billie Jean

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King: Portrait of a Pioneer, exploring the tennis great’s impact on politics and culture, as well as on women’s athletics. The sports documentary, like the earlier one on Hank Greenberg, received a Peabody Award. The post-Billie Jean generation of tennis greats had Czech-born Martina Navratilova in the spotlight on an A&E Biography, shown for the first time in November 2004, a decade after her official retirement from the sport. She was named Female Athlete of the 1980s by National Sports Review, and, according to the network publicity on the bio-documentary’s premiere, she remains one of the wealthiest women in sports. About as far away in the sport from Billy Jean King and Martina Navratilova and Venus and Serena Williams, Bjorn Borg, John McEnroe, and fellow racketeers has been the enormously popular Japanese anime of the early 2000s called, in this country, The Prince of Tennis. It has developed a huge (junior) following on the Cartoon Network as a regular series beginning in 2006. The series is primarily set in a private Tokyo school famous for its strong tennis club. There a talented, 12-year-old tennis phenom who exudes cool confidence and has a deadly, unreturnable “twist serve” quickly defeats numerous upperclassmen shortly after entrance to secure himself a spot as one of the team’s regulars. From documentary, to reality shows, to dramas, NASCAR and auto racing have been popular topics in the 2000s. “3” (2004) was a biographical drama about legendary NASCAR driver Dale Earnhardt, who died in 2001 during the last lap of the Daytona 500. Barry Pepper, who stars, had earlier portrayed baseball great Roger Maris in another “numbered” title, 61*. Playing Earnhardt’s son, also a racecar-driving star, is Chad McCumbee, not an actor but an actual racecar-driving star. The film’s title stands for the number of Earnhardt’s car. A couple of TV seasons later, Dale, a documentary about Earnhardt, premiered on the Country Music Television (CMT) network, after having a spotty theatrical run. Narrating was racecar enthusiast and professional racer Paul Newman. On the TV premiere of Dale, critic David Hinckley of the New York Daily News wrote: “Those who don’t understand how auto racing got to be called a ‘sport’ in the first place might understand better after watching this new docu-film on Dale Earnhardt, who at the time of his death in 2001 defined auto racing the way Michael Jordan once defined basketball.” Earnhardt’s auto-racing son, in 2008, starred in a five-part ESPN reality series, Dale Jr.—Shifting Gears, chronicling Dale Jr.’s move from Dale Earnhardt Inc., the racing team founded by his dad, to his pursuit of NASCAR’s Sprint Cup.

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Girl Racers was a four-part documentary narrated by Jason Priestly on the Biography Channel in September 2005. It followed leading female race drivers Ashley Taws, Danica Patrick (who later became the first female driver to win the Daytona 500), Mika Duno, and Shirley Muldowney, called “The First Lady of Racing,” which also happened to be the title of an hourlong biography on the channel the next month of Muldowney’s story. (It also had been the basis of the 1983 theatrical movie, Heart Like a Wheel, in which Bonnie Bedelia portrayed Shirley.) NASCAR Driven to Win was a 2006 series (13 half hours) on the Biography Channel, offering, as the press people announced: “up close and personal profiles of some of the racing circuit’s most popular young drivers and delivers an ‘under-the-hood’ glimpse of life both on-and-off the track.” The premiere episode profiled Kasey Kahne. Auto-racing’s NASCAR in Primetime was a five-part ABC News series that aired in the summer of 2007. It offered a behind-the-scenes look at the preparation, logistics, drama, and competition of, arguably, America’s fastest growing sport. The network boasted that the program provided uncensored access to the lives of some of the top NASCAR drivers, including Tony Stewart, Jimmie Johnson, Juan Pablo Montoya, and Mark Martin. NASCAR Angels, a syndicated reality show that premiered in 2007, was hosted by Rusty Wallace, former NASCAR NEXTEL Cup Series Champion and current ESPN broadcaster, and Sharon Wiseman, NASCAR.com reporter. A different NASCAR driver and the Angel Automotive Technicians, known as the Goodyear Gemini, hit the road each week to help families and communities with their transportation needs, tackling, what the show’s publicists called, a challenging care overhaul in three days (a family-friendly cross of Extreme Makeover and Trick It Out). Another auto-racing reality show, ABC’s Fast Cars & Superstars—Gillette Young Guns Celebrity Race, had a seven-episode summer 2007 run. Following the Dancing With the Stars mold, it featured such celebrities behind the wheel as singer Jewel, skateboarding star Tony Hawk, rodeo champ Ty Murray, NBA great John Sally, Super Bowl champion John Elway, tennis star Serena Williams, surfer Laird Hamilton, actors William Shatner and Krista Allen, and several others, Driving Force (A&E 2006–), another pseudo reality show, offered dramatizations of the real-life drag racing legend John Force and his three dragracing daughters, Ashley, Brittany, and Courtney. According to the network’s publicity for the series, “Like golf’s Tiger Woods and basketball’s Michael Jordan, John Force is by far the most accomplished and dominant figure in his sport—Drag Racing, with 119 career victories, an unprecedented 14 team

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championships in 15 years, membership on ten straight Auto Racing AllAmerican teams, and the World Record for consecutive Funny Car championships.” In the show’s second season he was in pursuit of a 15th National Hot Rod Association (NHRA) championship. And in the 2008 TV movie, Finish Line (aka Redline), that aired on Spike TV but was from the Hallmark people, an ambitious guy with NASCAR dreams—he’s trying to move out of metal-crunching, tire-smoking minor league stock car racing to the pro circuit—is drawn into the shady maneuverings of a very rich underworld arms dealer played by Scott Baio (a long way from his days as lovable Chachi on Happy Days). Another stock car racing TV movie, The Circuit, followed on the heels of this one shortly afterward on the ABC Family channel. It had an estranged father and daughter (he’s a legendary ex-champ on his way down; she’s an up and comer with a chip on her shoulder who knows she’s the next big thing on the track) competing on the racecar circuit. Since 2000, several documentaries and dramas have tackled the topic of the sport of running. The Loretta Claiborne Story, an inspirational Disney movie airing initially on ABC in 2000, was written by Grace McKeaney and directed by actress Lee Grant. It dramatized the true story of the world-class athlete (played by Kimberly Elise) who was born to a large, poor, singleparent family, and was physically disabled (mildly retarded and partially blind). Encouraged to become involved in the Special Olympics, a pet project at the time of Eunice Shriver, she turned her life around and in 1996 received the Arthur Ashe Award for Courage. Natalie Portman narrated Hitler’s Pawn: The Margaret Lambert Story, a 2004 HBO Sports documentary (by Steven Stern and producer George Roy). It was the story of a Jewish athlete who excelled in track and field, especially the high jump, who was a German Olympic hopeful in 1931. In 1933, when Adolf Hitler came to power and the persecution of the Jews began, Lambert was kicked out of her sports organization and was not allowed to compete at all. This was the Berlin Olympics of 1936 when Jesse Owens ran. “Like other HBO Sports documentaries, Hitler’s Pawn is enriched with excellent archival footage, the New York Times wrote, “including film of Lambert winning the high jump at the 1934 British Track and Field Championships, photographs and riveting interviews, many of them with other Jewish athletes with whom Lambert trained.” The 2004 Canadian documentary, Race of the Century, narrated by Kiefer Sutherland, aired on CTV north of the border and on the Discovery Channel in the United States. It told of runner Ben Johnson and the climate in the sporting world that led him to be disqualified for a positive drug test for

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steroids after winning the gold in the 1988 Seoul Olympics 100-meter event. Johnson later claimed that “everyone” was on drugs and that his country did not protect him. A 2005 ESPN biopic, Four Minutes celebrated the accomplishments of runner Roger Bannister, with British actor Jamie Maclachlan as the then-young Olympic hopeful and medical student who, in May 1954, became the first man to break the four-minute mile, under the guidance of his crusty coach, played fictionally here by Christopher Plummer. Bud Greenspan and producing partner Nancy Beffa were among the producers of this biopic. Bannister also was one of the subjects of Greenspan’s documentary, Barrier Breakers, airing on ESPN in 2004, that profiled such other significant figures as Gertrude Ederle and her 1926 swim across the English Channel, and Edmund Hillary and his conquering of Mount Everest in 1952. Will Lyman narrated, as he did for most Greenspan documentaries. Wrestling, too, has been treated on TV in various ways in the new millennium. Worldwide Wrestling Enterprises (WWE) presented a documentary on one of its superstars, Chris Benoit (aka The Canadian Crippler), in 2004 and then released Hard Knocks: The Chris Benoit Story on DVD. After Benoit murdered his wife Nancy and his seven-year-old son Daniel (both of whom are featured in the documentary), and then hanged himself, the WWE pulled the DVDs off of their Web site and withdrew their sales to fans. Another of WWE’s many biographical documentaries was 2004’s exploration of the highs and lows in the life of WWE champion Eddie Guerrero. It was titled Cheating Death, Stealing Life: The Eddie Guerrero Story. Also from WWE were X-Treme Pro Wrestling (2001–2003); Extreme Championship Wrestling, reborn in 2005–2007, Monday Night Raw on USA Network (2005–2008); and Friday Night Smackdown, which began airing in summer 1999 on UPN and continued into 2008 on the network’s successor The CW. At the close of the 2007–2008 season, Smackdown was given the brush-off. The Los Angeles Times reported: “Wrestling didn’t fit in with the [network’s] other shows. . . . Nonetheless hanging onto the pseudo sports show helped attract the elusive young male audience desired by some advertisers [but] wrestling fans rarely watch other female oriented CW programs, making the night an island on the network schedule.” With Friday Night Smackdown being smacked down, a new reality show created by Hulk Hogan, who also is executive producer, was announced to premiere—Hulk Hogan’s Celebrity Championship Wrestling on CMT—in the fall of 2008. Ten celebrities compete weekly for the title, a la Dancing With the Stars, but in the ring rather than on the dance floor.

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A 2006 documentary, Wrestling With Destiny: The Life and Times of Daniel Igali, aired in Canada on the CBC. Igali, as captain of the Nigerian wrestling team, came to Canada to compete in the 1994 Commonwealth Games. As an émigré from political unrest back home, he became a Canadian, winning 116 consecutive matches from 1997 to 1999. He won the bronze at the 1999 Pan American Games, the gold at the 2002 Commonwealth Games, and finished in the semifinals in the 2004 Summer Olympics. He was acknowledged at the time as one of the world’s leading free-style wrestlers. Igali, in 2005, became involved in politics in British Columbia, where he currently lives, and was seriously injured during a violent robbery while visiting his former hometown in Nigeria in 2006. Another wrestling documentary airing on ESPN in April 2008 was The Streak, which chronicled the 451 consecutive wins (the longest in any sport, spanning 34 years) by the Brandon High School wrestling team of Tampa, Florida. It was produced by the company headed by Kelly Ripa and actor husband Mark Consuelos. The so-so British-made sitcom Nikki was set in Las Vegas, with its lead (Nikki Cox) a second-rate dancer at the Golden Calf Casino and her husband, Dwight White (Nick von Esmarch). Nikki was depicted as a chubby, struggling professional wrestler who goes into the ring under the name of Crybaby. The show aired in the United Kingdom in 2001–2002 and in the United States on The WB the next year. There were 35 episodes. Going to the Mat, a teen-oriented Disney drama (2004), starred Andrew Lawrence as a blind, musically talented high schooler from New York who moves to Utah with his family and, with the begrudging help of his new music teacher (played by D. B. Sweeney), also blind, decides to prove his mettle by winning a spot on the varsity wrestling team. Variety wrote: “(Writers) Chris and Laurie Nolan, Steve Bloom and Stu Krieger pepper the script with enough pop culture relevance to keep it fresh for teenagers, and cull a talented cast for a surprisingly entertaining if fairly predictable story. Disney Channel, not usually known for its understated handling of tricky subjects, deftly tackles this story—of a teen with disabilities—with more edge than usually afforded in its overly sunny movie franchise.” Wrestling with different moves, an American version of a Japanese anime about a kid who is the spoiled son of a superhero wrestler, was aimed at the Saturday morning audience on FOX beginning in 2002. This was what Ultimate Muscle: The Kinnikuman Legacy was all about, and it was quite a success (strangely, even more so in the United States than in Japan, for 77 episodes). Kid Muscle, as the youngster was known, unites with the Muscle League, a group of wrestlers from outer space training to defend the earth in this anime series.

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In the 2000s, hockey and skating both have been popular topics on TV. In Trapped in a Purple Haze, a 2000 made-for-TV movie, an 18-year-old with a picture-perfect family and a passion for ice hockey goes off to college, finds the perfect girlfriend, is introduced by her to her drug of choice, heroin, and becomes an addict. Soap actor Jonathan Jackson had his first starring role in primetime, falling off the deep end under pressure. Do You Believe in Miracles? The Story of the 1980 U.S. Hockey Team was a 2001 hour-long HBO documentary about the improbable win by the nearly ragtag American team over the Soviet Army hockey team at the Winter Olympics in Lake Placid. Al Michaels and Jim Lampley provided the commentary. A TV movie dramatized the events in the 1981 Miracle on Ice, with Karl Malden as coach Herb Brooks, and later in the theatrical Miracle in 2004 for the Disney people, with Kurt Russell. Another Olympic-themed “Miracle” program dealing with hockey was Bud Greenspan’s documentary The First Miracle: 1960 U.S. Olympic Men’s Ice Hockey Team, which first aired on ESPN in February 2006. A one-hour film, it chronicled the story of the gold-medal-winning stars from the winter games at Squaw Valley. Hockey’s Greatest Era 1942–1967 is a documentary by writer/director Matthew Fults that aired in early 2005 on Fox Sports Net. During these years, the NHL fielded just six teams, known in hockey lore as “The Original Six.” The story of the fondly remembered period features 30 interviews with players, team officials, journalists, and witnesses, including Jean Beliveau, Milt Schmidt, Ted Lindsay, and others who pioneered the game. Darren McCarty (once of the Detroit Red Wings and currently of the Calgary Flames) narrated. Sports-oriented Rival Films produced, among others, the previously mentioned Hockey’s Greatest Era and acclaimed Beyond the Games, which was an officially licensed film of the United States Olympic Committee. It aired on NBC affiliates in February 2004 and, like many of the other sports documentaries chronicled here, has been released on DVD. Being what amounts to the national sport of Canada, television there offers more hockey documentaries and sports dramas than just about anywhere else. In 2003, The Life and Times of Carl Brewer explored the career of agile Toronto Maple Leaf defenseman of the 1950s and 1960s (later he skated briefly with the Detroit Red Wings, the St. Louis Blues, and the Toronto Toros before ending his career with the Maple Leafs in 1980). Also examined was the four-time, all-star’s battle with player agent and union bigwig Alan Eagelson, leading to the latter’s jailing in 1998 after Brewer turned the spotlight

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on some of his business dealings that turned out to be fraudulent. Brewer died in 2001. In the Disney Channel’s Go Figure (2006), a high school coed gets a scholarship to play on the girls hockey team on her way to becoming an Olympic figure skater. Olympic star Kristi Yamaguchi had a cameo playing herself, as the teen’s role model. ABC’s MVP: The Secret Lives of Hockey Wives began airing on SOAPnet in mid-June 2008. It followed the on-and-off-the-ice drama surrounding the Canadian Mustangs hockey team and the women in their lives, known affectionately as “Puck Bunnies.” (“MVP is a fun, fabulous, sexy drama with a gorgeous cast and provocative stories,” according to ABC’s publicity team.) It starred a basically all-Canadian cast in a somewhat raunchy soap opera style in the mold of Great Britain’s The Footballers Wives. “MVP clearly hasn’t stemmed from a public relations effort on the part of the National Hockey League, the New York Times’s television critic wrote, “to get more women (or anyone) interested in hockey, which highbrow fans consider a low-rent game.” A two-hour A&E documentary Fire on Ice: Champions of American Figure Skating (2001) focused on the talents of Brian Boitano, Dick Button, Scott Hamilton, Rosalynn Sumners, Tara Lipinski, Katarina Witt, and others. Also woven in was footage of the immortal Sonja Henie, whose performance at the 1928 games propelled figure skating to prominence, plus the tragedy that dashed America’s skating hopes in 1961, and even the tawdry Nancy Kerrigan/ Tonya Harding fiasco. The documentary was produced and directed by Robert Dustin. The Cutting Edge 2: Going for the Gold was the 2006 sequel in which the teenage daughter of the 1992 Winter Olympics gold medalists from the earlier movie grows up with ambitions of winning her own medal. That dream seems to come to an end when she has a career-threatening injury. Enter a handsome hunk as her new pairs skate partner and a new chance at Olympic Gold. A sequel to this one, The Cutting Edge 3: Chasing the Dream, aired in the spring of 2008 on ABC Family. Motorcycling has not been overlooked as TV fare during the 2000s. Evel Knievel (2004) turned out to be an uninspired, clichéd, somewhat sloppily made TV biopic about the 1960s and 1970s motorcycle daredevil and showman, co-produced by Mel Gibson. Based on writer Steve Mandich’s book Evel Incarnate: The Life and Legend of Evel Knievel, the film was directed by John Badham and starred CSI’s George Eeds. Several months after the premiere of this sort of romanticized biopic, The History Channel offered up Absolute Evel: The Evel Knievel Story, a TV biography hosted by longtime fan

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Matthew McConaughey and told by Knievel himself. It spanned his days as a daredevil and the high price he paid for it, including the damage to his body over the years from his spectacular motorcycle jumps to his liver transplant in the late 1990s. His death in late 2007 brought him nearly a full-page obit in the New York Times. Evel’s son Robbie hosted a so-so (popularity wise) reality series entitled Knievel’s Wild Ride that had only a 13-week run on A&E in 2005 but also became a popular video game. The Kentucky Kid was a two-hour documentary on MTV in late 2007 following the life of pro motorcycle racer Nicky Hayden, starting with his final two races of the 2006 season on his quest to become the new MotoGP World Champion. The twenty-something racer (from the age of three) from Owensboro, Kentucky, was looking to defend his championship and add to his trophies as two-time Red Bull U.S. Grand Prix winner in a league where the majority of his audience is European, contrasting with his rural life in Kentucky. Hayden also was among the racers in Mark Neale’s 2006 direct-tovideo racing documentary The Doctor, the Tornado, and the Kentucky Kid, along with his counterparts and competitors Colin Edwards and Valentino Rossi. Cycling has been covered by The Discovery Channel, which aired The Science of Lance Armstrong in 2005, a documentary about the pro cyclist who won every Tour de France between 1999 and 2005 after having earlier been issued a virtual death sentence. As a cancer survivor, and a great athlete, he now devotes himself to raising research dollars through his Lance Armstrong Foundation to help conquer the disease. Even the Soap Box Derby and skateboarding have received attention on TV in the new millennium. Miracle in Lane Two (2000) proved to be an expectedly heartwarming Disney tale, inspired by the true story of a 12-year-old kid confined to a wheelchair. He becomes enamored with soap box derby racing and discovers he’s a natural at the sport. Similarly, Hallmark Channel’s inspiring 2007 You’ve Got a Friend (aka Derby) was about a 12-year-old who begins a new life with his aunt and uncle after his parents’ death. He endeavors not to have his personal problems get in the way of his dream: to win the American Soapbox Derby Championship with the help of a homeless Vietnam vet. But the odds were against him, including his school foe and main competition in the race. The 2007 MTV Reality Series, Life of Ryan, follows teenage Ryan Sheckler, a rising star on the skateboard scene. The teen lives with his mother and two younger brothers, juggles high school, relationships, and the drama of his parents’ recent divorce. Thirty years earlier during the 1977–1978 season, skateboarding provided the ongoing theme of CBS’s animated Saturday morning series, The

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Skatebirds. Three skateboarding birds (played by actors) hosted the hour, introducing several cartoons and a live-action segment. Wildfire (ABC Family 2005–present) is a popular series drama set in the world of horse racing that centers, at least initially, on the struggles of a teenage girl who, after serving time at a juvenile detention center, is given the opportunity to start a new life at a family run ranch on the brink of financial ruin. Thrown into a completely new environment, she must learn to deal with the challenges of fitting in, while trying not to disappoint the one family willing to give her a chance. The PBS American Experience feature in 2003 of Seabiscuit, named in his time by Walter Winchell as one of 1938’s top 10 newsmakers along with FDR and Hitler, aired just ahead of the theatrical movie about the famed knobby-kneed racehorse that died in 1947. Scott Glenn narrated the hourlong documentary that was based on Laura Hillenbrand’s best-selling book Seabiscuit: An American Legend. Two 2003 TV documentaries, the 13-minute Seabiscuit: The Making of a Legend and The True Story of Seabiscuit (running 45 minutes on A&E) were tie-ins with that year’s hit theatrical film about the famed chestnut colt of the Depression Era. Bud Greenspan of Cappy Productions completed a one-hour documentary film about racing’s legendary 1941 Triple Crown winner, inspired by Fred Broadhead’s 1995 book Here Comes Whirlaway! Under the title Bud Greenspan Presents: Whirlaway!, named after the book, it aired on ESPN Classic in May 2005. Bud Greenspan’s Stories of Olympic Glory, which he wrote, produced, and directed, focused on the experiences of five Summer Olympic athletes in a 90-minute Showtime special in August 2000: Romanian gymnast Nadia Comaneci, American decathlete Dan O’Brien, Australian swimmer Duncan Armstrong, Ethiopian marathon runner Abebe Bikila, and Russian wrestler Alexander Karelin. The program featured interviews and rare archival footage. Among Greenspan’s other documentaries in the new millennium on Showtime most dealing with the Olympics were these: Sydney 2000: Stories of Gold from Down Under; Salt Lake 2002: Stories of Olympic Glory; Bud Greenspan’s Athens 2004: Stories of Olympic Glory; Bud Greenspan Presents Torino 2006 Olympics; Bud Greenspan’s Favorite Stories of Summer Olympic Glory; Bud Greenspan’s Favorite Stories of Winter Olympic Glory; Bud Greenspan Remembers: 1984 L.A. Olympics; and the 1972 Munich Olympics Revisited. In the summer of 2008, Bud Greenspan headed to Beijing, along with producing partner Nancy Beffa, to cover still one more Olympics. Greenspan’s own story was told in the two-hour ESPN documentary in 2008, Bud Greenspan: At the Heart

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of the Games, profiling the legend who’s best known for his Olympic profiles. Among those Olympians making current day observations were Mark Spitz, Mary Lou Retton, Oksana Baiul, Brian Boitano, and Bonnie Blair. Will Lyman narrated. But back on track to the track and horse racing! Two nearly back-to-back 2007 docudramas dealt with a pair of famous racehorses. Barbaro, an hour-long HBO Sports documentary narrated by ubiquitous Liev Schreiber, was about the 2006 Kentucky Derby winner who broke his leg in a mishap at the Preakness Stakes. Despite heroic efforts by medical teams over the next few months, Barbaro had to be put down early in 2007. NBC Sports also aired a one-hour documentary on the famed thoroughbred: Barbaro: The Nation’s Horse. Narrated by Bob Costas, it included interviews with Barbaro’s owners, vet Dean Richardson, trainer Michael Matz, and jockey Edgar Prado. The story of Ruffian, hailed as the greatest thoroughbred filly of all time, was dramatized in, what else?, Ruffian, which was produced as an ESPN television movie but shown initially on ABC in early summer 2007. Ruffian, who won all of her races, was put into a match race with male Kentucky Derby winner Foolish Pleasure on July 6, 1975, broke her leg, and had to be destroyed. Sam Shepard portrayed trainer Frank Whitely, and actor Frank Whaley played persistent racing journalist Bill Nack. Never really a mainstream “sport,” but rather a regional one in the South and Southwest, rodeo, like stock car racing, which in recent years has exploded into nonstop, wheels burning popularity on cable and even its own niche network, found its way back to the tube nationally several decades after the 1960s series on the subject. In 2008, rodeo penning was the theme of a Hallmark Channel movie called Every Second Counts, which fell back on the not entirely original premise of having a onetime champion now past his prime looking somewhat reluctantly to the next generation, and seeing in his talented daughter a way to keep the normally man’s game championship ribbons in the family. Soccer continues to attract little attention to TV producers. Dare to Dream: The Story of the U.S. Women’s Soccer Team, a 2005 HBO documentary, has been one of the few American features about the sport. Along with archival footage, there were interviews with soccer stars Mia Hamm, Julie Foudy, Kristine Lilly, Brandi Chastain, Joy Fawcett, April Heinrichs, Briana Scurry, Carla Overbeck, and Michelle Akers; national team coaches Anson Dorrance and Tony DiCicco; journalists Robin Roberts, Kelly Whiteside, and Sally Jenkins; Olympic gold medal swimmer Donna de Varona; and former tennis champion Billie Jean King.

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“Giddy, gossipy and endearingly unslick,” the New York Times wrote in 2006 when this soccer documentary made by ESPN and narrated by Matt Dillon had a brief theatrical run before going to television, “Once in a Lifetime: The Extraordinary Story of the New York Cosmos chronicles the rise and fall of the most famous soccer team in the United States with slapdash glee. Fielding heroes and villains, gentlemen and rogues, booze and women, it plays like the Dynasty of sports documentaries. There’s even a little soccer.” Sports producer George Roy observed: “It tied in what New York was like in the seventies and the whole thing with Steve Ross of Time Warner and his involvement, and Giorgio Chinaglia was obnoxious in it so he kind of looks like the bad guy.” Despite having its own niche channel since 2006, to date soccer, before British superstar David Beckham’s emergence onto the American scene with the Los Angeles Galaxy (and then injuring himself in his fifth game and taking him out of his first U.S. season), has yet to catch on big time in the United States, although it is a worldwide phenomenon. Beckham, according to a 60 Minutes profile in March 2008, ranks second only to Tiger Woods as the highest paid sports figure in the world, and, with the Galaxy’s new season, is to make another start at kicking soccer into the sports stratosphere in the United States. But until American audiences develop a real passion for professional soccer, TV producers and documentarians prefer to bide their time. (Pro soccer had its brief bit of American popularity in the glow of Brazilian star Pelé in the 1970s when he starred with the aforementioned New York Cosmos. With both Pelé and the Cosmos long gone from the soccer scene, however, popularity in this country as a major sport has been underwhelming.) Despite Fox launching a soccer channel in 2005, the game has been put on a sports par with arm wrestling (Sylvester Stallone’s big screen Over the Top in 1987, anyone?), to say nothing of beach volleyball at Beijing and synchronized swimming, which seems to have found an unconventional if short-lived sport (rigorous if relatively dispassionate) on TV, thanks to a PBS fun documentary in July 2007. Part of filmmaker Mark Lewis’ The Pursuit of Excellence series of hour-long documentaries, it followed the exploits of the Aquamaids of Santa Clara, California. Testing the TV waters (or banked rink) once again in the new millennium— because of the huge Roller Derby popularity as one of sports’ premiere attractions of the time during TV’s early years just after World War II—was “an all-access look at the Texas Rollergirls from Austin” in 2003’s Across America: Queens of the Roller Derby, shot in high definition. A reality show of sorts, it was hosted by Ron Kruck and Kandace Krueger. There also was at least one mainstream drama series that incorporated Roller Derby into its

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plot. In a second season episode of CBS’s popular forensic series CSI: NY, the team headed by Gary Sinise and Melina Kanakaredes investigated the baffling death of a female Derby babe on the fictitious Manhattan Minx in “Jamalot.” Labeling surfing a (mainstream) sport might cause otherwise dedicated traditional sports fans to look askance, but the life of big wave surfer Laird Hamilton made for a compelling hour-long documentary in 2006 as part of MTV’s Untold series on sports, airing on Spike TV, and hosted by Marv Albert. As the network’s press material noted, Hamilton discussed “his personal challenges, growing up a victim of racism, his struggles with his father, 1960’s surfing legend Bill Hamilton, and the challenges of being true to the sport of surfing.” Earlier, when Leslie Stahl did a 2004 60 Minutes profile on Laird, CBS promoted him with these words: “Meet a man who is to his sport what Tiger Woods, Michael Jordan, and Lance Armstrong are to theirs.” If chess can be categorized as a sport, there was, based on real events, 2005’s Knights of the Bronx about a group of elementary school students from the South Bronx who discover some important life lessons when learning chess from a dedicated teacher (played by Ted Danson), a former corporate exec who was down-sized and took a job as a teaching substitute. The feelgood film was inspired by the story of real-life David MacNulty, who took his students to a national chess championship and then saw them go on to Ivy League schools. As posed earlier, is chess a sport or a game? Similarly, what about poker, which in recent years has developed a rabid television following on cable and lately on its own niche network? In the “where do you put ‘sports’ shows like these” category in the present TV world of reality, there is the popular new millennium incarnation, this time with hosts Hulk Hogan and Laila Ali, of American Gladiators (mentioned earlier but even bigger audience-wise the second time around). One critic (sports? television?) has described it as “a skills competition that pits regular contestants against a set of buff bodybuilders in various events. Throughout the show, the contestants receive points, which determine their start time in ‘The Eliminator,’ a gigantic obstacle course that ties all the types of events together. Whoever finishes ‘The Eliminator’ first wins.” The show has generally same appeal as “American Idol” auditions, but with known host quantities. American Gladiators premiered (for the second time) in January 2008 for eight segments. A second set of eight began airing in May 2008. In a somewhat different vein, there is The Ultimate Fighter, the Spike TV “sports” show with mixed martial arts artists squaring off mixing it up. It

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has been described as “anarchy-with-rules” competitions that permitted an assortment of down-and-dirty techniques. Sort of a “junior” version of American Gladiators, since 2007, The Adrenaline Project is a weekly Saturday morning show out of Canada. This taped reality show is described by its producers as taking five thrill-seeking teens and daring them to compete head-to-head through intense physical and mental challenges. Only three will survive elimination and earn a chance to put it all on the line in the final mystery competition to walk away with the prizes and the glory as “The Ultimate Andrenalite.” In summer 2008 a similar mixed martial arts series, Iron Ring, debuted on BET (Black Entertainment Television) some weeks after those. Headlining the show was boxing champ Floyd Mayweather along with hip-hop star Rick Ross, overseeing skilled competitors using the techniques of jiu-jitsu, judo, karate, boxing, kickboxing, and wrestling, going toe-to-toe—as it were—with $100,000 in prize money up for grabs. And there was in 2006 (as a one-shot special initially) and 2007 as a weekly series, on the Oxygen Channel, a reality show titled Fight Girls. It followed a series of seven amateur female fighters attempting, first in Las Vegas and then in Thailand (training with a Muay Thai instructor), to win a championship of sorts. The Hollywood Reporter said of the show initially: “A documentary [as opposed to a reality program] might have even explored the whiff of dilettantism hanging over amateurs. To Thai women with limited career opportunities, Muay Thai is a way of life. For Americans, it’s a means to opening a gym. Still, Fight Girls is a lively look into a rarely seen world that makes significant note of female outer and inner strength.” This was what one critic labeled “the bone-crunching combat sport popularly known as ‘cage fighting’. . . . Branded as barbaric by critics in the 1990s for the lack of rules, mixed martial arts, or MMA, has evolved into a more mainstream sport that bars biting, eye-gouging, head-butting, and strikes to the groin. But fierce punching, kicking, karate, judo, and wrestling moves—with no protective gear—are still very much part of the sport.” Fight Quest, another mixed martial arts reality series, aired just after Christmas 2007 on the Discovery Channel and moved well into the next year. The show followed kick boxing fighter Jimmy Smith and rookie Doug Anderson into rings around the world. A 2002 ABC documentary, tied in with the summer Olympics, commemorated the 30th anniversary of the Munich massacre and won the Emmy as Outstanding Sports Documentary that year. It was titled Our Greatest Hopes, Our Worst Fears: The Tragedy of the Munich Games, produced by Howard Katz. Another sports Emmy that year went to NBC’s documentary America’s Heroes: The Bravest and the Finest, a post 9/11 show about the

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30th anniversary game between the New York City firefighters (the Bravest) and its police officers (The Finest). It was produced by Marc Levy, also the producer for NBC of the 2002 Winter Olympics. Sports on TV began, arguably, with a tennis match back in the antediluvian TV days of the 1920s and the Berlin Olympics of the mid-1930s, and by the new millennium, had expanded beyond the periodic to regular offerings on a handful of established television networks to a widening variety of niche programming outlets with wall-to-wall, round-by-round, inningby-inning, checkered flag-to-checkered flag sports competitions. During the 2007–2008 season, NBC Sports, for one, was offering on a weekend basis: Arnold Palmer Invitational 2007 AVP Crocs Tour (Volleyball) on NBC AST Dew Tour (Action Sports) Football Night in America French Open Kentucky Derby National Heads-Up Poker Championship National Hockey League Sunday Game of the Week NBC Sunday Night Football Notre Dame Football PGA Tour Preakness Stakes President’s Cup Ryder Cup Senior PGA Championship U.S. Figure Skating Championship U.S. Open and USGA Championships U.S. Open Tennis Championships Wimbledon

During the same time frame, CBS Sports had these weekend, sometimes primetime, and late night offerings on its schedule: College Football NCAA Basketball (including the traditional March Madness and Final Four) NFL Today NFL on CBS PGA Tour and Championship (including the Masters for 52nd consecutive year) Superbowl XLI U.S. Open Tennis

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And in spring 2008, CBS introduced live mixed martial arts to primetime television with its once-a-month CBS EliteXC Saturday Night Fights—the first show having champion “Ruthless” Robbie Lawler putting his title on the line against Scott “Hands of Steel” Smith in a middleweight championship bout, live from Prudential Center in Newark, New Jersey. Hot on the heels of CBS’s martial arts show, although not in primetime but airing in the wee hours of the morning, was Strikeforce on NBC, and according to the network’s press release, an “adrenaline-filled mixed martial arts cage fight series.” ABC Sports by this time had merged into ESPN Sports. And one other basic television network that didn’t exist way back when we had FOX Sports. Everything else is now on cable, primarily HBO Sports (with recurring series like Real Sports with Bryant Gumbel, Costas Now with Bob Costas, since 2005, Boxing After Dark, and World Heavyweight Boxing), Showtime, ESPN, of course, along with the newly minted ESPN Action Sports Network (launched in fall 2008), and the basically male-oriented Spike Television, which regularly features series such as UFC Friday Night Live, The Ultimate Fighter (with mixed martial arts), and TNA Wrestling. Bob Costas, in late 2008, had an historic chat on Costas Now with two baseball hall of fame legends, Hank Aaron and Willie Mays, more than 30 years after the end of their careers. And new TV outlets keep on coming: “niche” sports networks like The Golf Channel, The Tennis Channel, FOX Soccer Channel, Big Ten Network, Horse Racing TV, Speed Channel, NBA TV, NFL Network, Men’s Outdoor and Recreation, and an assortment of regional sports channels. All of these prove that there’s something out there for every sports enthusiast.

CHAPTER 8

Scorecard Endnotes

hrough the years, a handful or so of sports figures—most of whom had made their names in the Olympics—continued their individual careers in one way or another on television. Take Johnny Weissmuller, for instance. Before becoming a movie star in the early 1930s as Tarzan, he was an Olympic swimmer—a five-time gold medalist between 1924 and 1928. After his film career ended in the early 1950s with a series of Jungle Jim flicks, he reprised his role in the syndicated 1955–1956 Jungle Jim series on television (his only “acting” on the tube). In another generation, there was Mark Spitz, the swimmer who made his big splash at the 1972 Olympics in Munich, the one that lives in sports infamy because of the terrorist massacre of more than a dozen Israeli athletes. (Luckily, being Jewish himself, although not Israeli, Spitz got out with his life and his Gold Medal.) Spitz really never got into acting but later would guest star as himself in an assortment of TV programs. One was Bud Greenspan’s 1992 film Mark Spitz Returns to Munich that aired on NBC. Another was in the 1996 ESPN documentary, written and directed by Jeff Scheftel, Bearing the Torch: Politics & the Olympics. Bruce Jenner, Olympics decathlon winner in 1976 (he’d placed tenth in 1972), had an on-again off-again TV acting career between 1978 and 2002. He reportedly even turned down the title role in the 1978 Superman—it went, of course, to Christopher Reeve. Dorothy Hamill, the darling of the ice for so many years who won a gold medal in women’s figure skating in the 1976 Winter Olympic Games

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in Innsbruck, Austria, went on to become an international skating star and dabbled in television in assorted specials through the years. She married Dean Martin’s son, Dean Paul, but they later divorced (before his death in an airplane crash). She was the featured attraction for many years with the Ice Capades, which she and her second husband bought. She revealed in her autobiography in 2007 that she lived with personal demons for much of her life and suffered from depression. Probably most successful has been Cathy Rigby, the prizewinning gymnast from the 1968 Mexico City Olympics (and also the 1972 Olympics in Munich along with Spitz and Jenner). The first American woman to win a World gymnastics medal, she later acted on a variety of television programs between 1974 and 1997 while also becoming a theatrical entrepreneur with her husband Tom McCoy, and a musical comedy star in touring companies of The Wizard of Oz, Annie Get Your Gun, and Meet Me in St. Louis. She received a Tony nomination as Best Actress in a Musical for her popular Peter Pan on Broadway. ABC Wide World of Sports once named her one of America’s most influential women in sports. Diminutive Mary Lou Retton, gymnastics gold medal winner in the 1984 Olympics, dabbled in television in several acting roles and sports show host among them: American Sportswomen, a 1995 TV documentary, and later, Flip Flop Shop, a children’s series, but mostly as herself. And tennis great Chris Evert, who won 18 singles title between 1972 and 1989 and whom People dubbed the “Sexiest Female Athlete” in 1980, had a TV career of sorts commenting on and calling top tennis matches for many years after leaving the clay court. Another early Olympic stars who eventually had a post-professional career was five-time world champion Dick Button, who won the gold in figure skating in 1948 and 1952. On post-Olympic television through the years, he appeared occasionally as himself, and acted in a 1958 Hallmark Hall of Fame production of Hans Brinker and the Silver Skates (Tab Hunter played Hans). He also has been a sports analyst. At the other end of the spectrum (rink?) are the two ice princess of the so-called modern era. Kristi Yamaguchi, a gold medalist at the 1992 Winter Olympics at Albertville, France, has skated her way through a couple of dozen television ice specials, and even was one of the star contestants on Dancing With the Stars in spring 2008. And her friendly competitor and rival, five-time world champion figure skater was Michelle Kwan, who won silver in the 1998 Olympics and bronze in 2002, but withdrew from the 2006 Winter Olympics because of injury. In addition, she starred in the Disney TV spectacular Michelle Kwan: Princess on Ice in 2001 (along with Dorothy Hamill and Katarina Witt, Kwan has skated on television and appeared as herself in

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assorted sports documentaries through the years). And in 2002, there was the CBS ice skating special Bud Greenspan Presents Michelle Kwan. Jimmy “The Greek” Snyder was fired after 12 years as a CBS football analyst for remarks he made to a Washington, D.C, television reporter (on Martin Luther King’s birthday, no less), about the physical abilities of black and white athletes. Among other things, Snyder, 70, said the black athlete was “bred to be the better athlete because, this goes all the way to the Civil War when . . . the slave owner would breed his big woman so that he would have a big black kid.” Snyder later apologized for the comments but his career as a broadcaster was over. In 2003, influential radio talk show host Rush Limbaugh, hired as a celebrity football commentator at ESPN, but just weeks into his new extracurricular TV sports gig, was forced off the show amid allegations of racism, after saying in a telecast that Philadelphia Eagles quarterback Donavan McNabb was overrated, given “extra credit” because the league and the media wanted a black quarterback to be successful. Tangentially, sports was involved in a major TV incident in April 2007, when longtime radio shock jock Don Imus, who also had been simulcast daily on MSNBC, got into hot water (and first was suspended and then lost his TV show and, a day later, his radio program) for racially insensitive remarks he made about the newly championed women’s basketball team at Rutgers University. It became headline news throughout the country—nearly wall-to-wall for more than a week. The story of the Rutgers University Women’s Basketball Team and its legendary coach, C. Vivian Stringer, incidentally, was explored in a 2004 PBS documentary titled This Is a Game, Ladies, produced by Peter Schnal. Imus himself negotiated a return to the American airwaves in December 2007. On the 24-hour Golf Channel, which launched in early 1995, golf’s first female anchor, Kelly Tighman, was suspended from the air (in early January 2008) for an unfortunate comment said laughingly in an exchange with analyst Nick Faldo at the Mercedes Benz Championship. Discussing young players who could challenge Tiger Woods, the world’s No. 1 golf star, Faldo suggested that “to take Tiger on, maybe they should gang up for a while.” To which Tighman replied, “Lynch him in a back alley.” To compound “bad taste” matters, the editor of the magazine Golfweek was replaced soon thereafter for putting a noose on the cover to illustrate the embarrassing gaffe faced by the Golf Channel. And in December 2007 came the bombshell report—occupying hours of television time—by former United States Senator George Mitchell, who had

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been hired by Bud Selig, the commissioner of baseball, to look into a growing scandal around the use of anabolic steroids and performance-enhancing drugs by dozens of big name “marquee” players dating back to the late 1980s. All of this spilled over to black-eye-making congressional investigations of such stars as hitter Barry Bonds and pitcher Roger Clemens. In the wake of the baseball steroids scandal, a look at an earlier sports black eye internationally dealing with body-enhancing drugs came in 2008 when, on the ongoing Secrets of Death series on PBS (that premiered in May 2000), there was a disturbing examination in “Doping for Drugs” of East Germany’s systematic use in the 1970s of steroids and testosterone to bolster its athletes (particularly the women) in their medal counts in the Olympics and other international competitions. As the Cleveland Plain Dealer’s TV critic observed on the show’s premiere, “the [doping] program was institutionalized in the ’60s, yielded gold in the ’70s, and continued into the ’80s. But the cheating scandal and the long-time cover-up dwindle in importance as the documentary depicts the terrible price paid by the athletes. It was called ‘state plan theme 14–25’ . . . and Secrets of the Dead charts in frightening detail the length East Germany went to keep the secret.” Also in December 2007, there was the unique sports television event that got the following headline via Bloomberg.com: “Patriots-Giants Game Is Getting ‘State of the Union’ Exposure.” Because at the time the New England Patriots’ pursuit of the NFL’s first ever 16–0 season catapulted the team’s meeting with the New York Giants into a U.S. media event, Congress quickly urged the FCC to allow the game to air on three television networks at the same time. (Actually there were four, with the Giants’ games also being televised locally in New York on Channel 9.) This was the first sports simulcast since CBS and NBC aired the inaugural Super Bowl in 1967. The Patriots went on to win their next two games but lost out on a perfect season by losing to the New York Giants in the Super Bowl XLII, in what was reported (by TV Guide) to be the second most-watched program in TV history, with 97.4 million viewers. These viewership records were to be dwarfed, however, by fans worldwide watching the 2008 Beijing Olympics. After all the stats were in, Variety reported that the games (with swimmer Michael Phelps eclipsing all records in that sport, out-Spitzing Mark Spitz from earlier games) and the spectacular opening and closing night entertainment “attracted more than 211 million viewers during its two-week run, making it the most watched event [sports or otherwise] in TV history . . . although sports audiences rarely translate to primetime gold, as major events (such as the NFL and past Olympic Games) have proved through the years.”

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The Super Bowl, it has been observed through the years, has become more than a sporting event; it is now a cultural phenomenon. And in its history it has produced many memorable moments for sports fans. There have been equally memorable moments as well in its hugely popular and increasingly spectacular halftime entertainment, which has become a show in itself, produced independently from the game that surrounds it. One of the memorable moments of course—not one that lives in infamy, exactly, but endures in pop culture—was the so-called wardrobe malfunction of entertainer Janet Jackson at Super Bowl XXXVIII in 2004, when the top of her costume was “accidentally” ripped off during her number, exposing her breast for about five seconds. In the next few years, this incident would cause a rippling effect through the broadcast industry, with FCC “indecency” hearings, fines levied on television networks for perceived infractions, including language, and smirks over the contretemps, encouraging a modern generation of entertainers and comedians to push the decency envelope. By the first decade of the new millennium, sports on television (and not just individual games in individual sports) had become ubiquitous, with weekend programming on the major networks and everywhere on the various niche sports cable channels. The genre of the jocks, as it might be labeled, far surpassed news programming; scripted series, which had ceded airtime to a multitude of reality shows; made-for-TV movies and miniseries; and the basically cultural and educational aspects of the medium that David Sarnoff, William Paley, and their visionary colleagues of the 1920s, 1930s, and 1940s had imagined and championed. What better way to bow out of a book about Sports on TV than to give a tip of the baseball cap to the inimitable team of Bob Elliott and Ray Goulding, the broadcasting legends, and borrow Bob’s parting line as brash Biff Burns, who invariably ended his mangled faux sportscasts with “This is Biff Burns, rounding third and being thrown out at home.”

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Appendix: Sports-Themed Programs

Chronologically by sport. Baseball World Series (first broadcast by NBC in 1946) The Joe DiMaggio Show (NBC 1950) Jackie Robinson’s Sports Classroom (syndicated 1950) Happy Felton’s Knothole Gang (syndicated 1950–1957) Joe DiMaggio’s Dugout (NBC 1951) “The Screwball” (CBS drama 1950; recast and restaged 1951 and 1954) “Who’s on First” (Abbott and Costello routine first performed on TV in 1951) National Women’s Professional Baseball League Games (ABC 1951) “A Man’s Game” (NBC drama [Philco Television Playhouse] 1952; recast and restaged musically in 1957) “0 for 37” (NBC drama [Philco Television Playhouse] 1953) “Old MacDonald Had a Curve” (NBC drama [Kraft Television Theatre] 1953) “Baseball Blues” (ABC drama [United States Steel Hour] 1954) “How Charlie Faust Won a Pennant for the Giants” (ABC drama [TV Reader’s Digest] 1955) “The Mighty Casey” (CBS opera [Omnibus] 1955) “Rookie of the Year” (CBS drama [Screen Directors Playhouse] 1955) You Are There: “Lou Gehrig’s Greatest Day: July 4, 1939” (CBS series episode 1955) “The Man Who Caught the Ball at Coogan’s Bluff” (CBS drama [Studio One] 1955)

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“O’Toole From Moscow” (NBC drama [Matinee Theatre] 1955) “Man on Spikes” (NBC drama [Goodyear Television Playhouse] 1955) “Million-Dollar Rookie” (NBC drama [Kraft Television Theatre] 1955) “Rookie of the Year” (NBC drama [Screen Directors Playhouse 1955) “Fear Strikes Out” (CBS drama [Climax!] 1955) “The Last Out” (CBS drama [Schlitz Playhouse of Stars] 1955) “The Pee Wees Take Over” (CBS drama [Damon Runyon Theatre] 1956) “The Comeback” (ABC drama [Crossroads] 1956) “Little League” (NBC drama [The Loretta Young Show] 1956) “The Jackie Jensen Story” (ABC drama [DuPont Cavalcade of America] 1956) “The Life of Mickey Mantle” (NBC drama [Kraft Television Theatre] 1956) “The Lou Gehrig Story” (CBS drama [Climax!] 1956) “Bang the Drum Slowly” (CBS drama [United States Steel Hour] 1956) Starr, First Baseman (syndicated 1957, unaired until 1965) “The Hillbilly Whiz” (CBS series episode [The Phil Silvers Show] 1957) “The Littlest Little Leaguer” (NBC drama [Philco Television Playhouse] 1957) “Comeback” (CBS drama [Desilu Playhouse] 1959) “Moochie of the Little League” (ABC drama [Walt Disney Presents] 1959) “The Mighty Casey” (CBS drama [The Twilight Zone] 1961) “Take Me Out to the Ball Game” (ABC series episode [The Flintstones] 1962) “Long Distance Call” (ABC series episode [Leave It to Beaver] 1962) “Flashing Spikes” (NBC drama [Alcoa Premiere] 1962) “Leo Durocher Meets Mr. Ed” (CBS series episode 1963) A Man Named Mays (NBC documentary 1963) Biography of a Rookie: The Willie Davis Story (CBS documentary 1963) “Play Ball” (ABC series episode [The Donna Reed Show] 1964) “My Son, the Catcher” (ABC series episode [The Donna Reed Show] 1964) “Herman the Rookie” (CBS series episode [The Munsters] 1965) October Madness: The World Series (ABC sports documentary 1965) Mickey Mantle: A Self Portrait (local in New York 1965) Agganis the Man (local in Boston 1965) Charlie Brown’s All-Stars (CBS animated special 1966) “Calling Willie Mays” (ABC series episode [The Donna Reed Show] 1966) Damn Yankees (staging of the Broadway musical) (NBC 1967) “The Big Game” (ABC series episode [The Flying Nun] 1969) “The Dropout” (ABC series episode [The Brady Bunch] 1970) The Baseball World of Joe Garagiola (NBC sports series 1972–1975) Willie Mays and the Say-Hey Kid (ABC animated special 1972) My Sister Hank (CBS pilot 1972) ABC Afterschool Special: Rookie of the Year (ABC drama 1973) It’s Good to Be Alive (CBS TV movie 1974) Monday Night Baseball (ABC 1976–1988) “Take Me Out to the Ball Game” (ABC series episode [Good Heavens] 1976)

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Ball Four (CBS series 1976) Biography: The Babe (The Story of Babe Ruth) (A&E documentary 1977) The Glory of Their Times (PBS documentary 1977) Murder at the World Series (ABC TV movie 1977) A Winning Tradition (The 1977 Yankees) (syndicated 1977) The Flintstones Little Big League (NBC animated special 1978) A Love Affair: Eleanor and Lou Gehrig (NBC TV movie 1978) One in a Million: The Ron LeFlore Story (CBS TV movie 1978) ABC Afterschool Special: Thank You, Jackie Robinson (ABC drama 1978) Flatbush (CBS pilot 1979) The Kid From Left Field (NBC TV movie 1979) Aunt Mary (CBS TV movie 1979) Bleacher Bums (PBS drama 1979; restaged and recast later) The Bad News Bears (CBS series 1979–80) Dribble (NBC pilot 1980) Take Me Up to the Ball Game [Canadian animated TV film 1980] The Comeback Kid (CBS TV movie 1980) Don’t Look Back (ABC TV movie 1981) “The Two-Hundred-Mile-an-Hour Fast Ball” (ABC series episode [The Greatest American Hero] 1981) Casey Stengel (PBS drama 1981) “Reggie-3, Archie-0” (CBS series episode [Archie Bunker’s Place] 1982) Million-Dollar Infield (CBS TV movie 1982) The Baseball Bunch (syndicated series 1982–1985) Bay City Blues (NBC series 1983) Tiger Town (Disney Channel TV movie 1983) “Take Me Out to the Ball Game” (NBC series episode [Punky Brewster] 1984) Greats of the Game (syndicated series 1985–1986) The Babe (ESPN drama 1985) Amos (CBS TV movie 1985) Workin’ for Peanuts (HBO cable movie 1985) Casey at the Bat (Showtime drama 1986) A Winner Never Quits (ABC TV movie 1986) “Magic Saturday” (NBC [Steven Spielberg’s Amazing Stories] 1986) Pinstripe Power: The Story of the 1961 New York Yankees (PBS documentary 1986) 1986 Mets: A Year to Remember (PBS documentary 1986) A Silver Odyssey: 25 Years of Astros Baseball (PBS documentary 1987) A League of Their Own (PBS documentary 1987) Long Gone (HBO cable movie 1987) “Extra Innings” (CBS series episode [The New Twilight Zone] 1988) “Genesis” (NBC series episode [Quantum Leap] 1989) “Forever Baseball” (PBS [American Experience] 1989) The Court-Martial of Jackie Robinson (TNT cable movie 1990)

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Babe Ruth (NBC TV movie 1991) “Play Ball” (NBC series episode [Quantum Leap] 1991) When It Was a Game (HBO Sports documentary 1991) When It Was a Game II (HBO Sports documentary 1992) Diamonds on the Silver Screen (AMC documentary 1992) Comrades of Summer (HBO cable movie 1992) Minor Leagues/Major Dreams (syndicated documentary 1992) It’s Spring Training, Charlie Brown (CBS animated feature 1992) Frontline: The Trouble With Baseball (PBS 1993) The Man From Left Field (CBS TV movie 1993) Roberto: The Roberto Clemente Story (Major League Baseball documentary 1993) Cooperstown (TNT cable movie 1993) A League of Their Own (CBS series 1993) Hardball (FOX series 1994) Ken Burns’ “Baseball” (PBS documentary 1994) A Whole New Ballgame (ABC series 1995) Hank Aaron: Chasing the Dream (TNT documentary 1995) Past the Bleachers (ABC TV movie 1995) Soul of the Game (HBO TV movie 1996) Baseball, Minnesota (FX unscripted series 1996) Ted Williams: A Baseball Life (ABC documentary 1997) Joe Torre: Curveballs Along the Way (Showtime cable movie 1997) Where Have You Gone Joe DiMaggio? (HBO Sports documentary 1997) Babe Ruth: The Life Behind the Legend (HBO Sports documentary 1997) The Definitive Story of Mickey Mantle (HBO Sports documentary 1998) Yogi Berra: Déjà vu All Over Again (PBS documentary 1999) When It Was a Game III (HBO Sports documentary 2000) Joe DiMaggio: The Hero’s Life (PBS American Experience, 2000) Joe DiMaggio: The Final Chapter (FOX Sports documentary 2000) Frankie and Hazel (Showtime cable movie 2000) Angels in the Infield (ABC TV movie 2000) Finding Buck McHenry (Showtime cable movie 2000) The Life and Times of Hank Greenberg (Cinemax documentary 2001) Dem Bums: The Brooklyn Dodgers (PBS documentary 2001) Shot Heard ’Round the World (HBO Sports documentary 2001) Bleacher Bums (Showtime cable movie 2001) 61* (HBO cable movie 2001) All Games Are Home Games (PBS documentary 2002) A City on Fire: The Story of the ’68 Detroit Tigers (HBO Sports documentary 2002) The Curse of the Bambino (HBO Sports documentary 2003) The Reverse of the Curse of the Bambino (HBO Sports documentary 2003) The Teammates: A Portrait of a Friendship (ESPN documentary 2003) Eddie’s Million Dollar Cook-Off (Disney Channel TV movie 2003) Lucy Must Be Traded (ABC animated special 2003)

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Pete Rose on Trial (ESPN docudrama 2003) Nine Innings From Ground Zero (HBO Sports documentary 2004) Whose Curse Is Worse? Red Sox and Cubs on Trial (ESPN documentary 2004) Hustle (ESPN cable movie 2004) The Winning Season (TNT cable movie 2004) Clubhouse (CBS series 2004–2005) Wait ’Til This Year (New England Sports Network 2005) Mantle (HBO Sports documentary 2005) Baseball Bunch (syndicated series 2006) DHL Presents Major League Baseball Hometown Heroes (ESPN documentary 2006) Wait ’Til Next Year: The Saga of the Chicago Cubs (HBO Sports documentary 2006) The Republic of Baseball: The Dominican Giants of the American Game (PBS documentary 2006) Brooklyn Dodgers: The Ghosts of Flatbush (HBO Sports documentary, 2007) Pride Against Prejudice: The Larry Doby Story (Showtime documentary 2007) The Bronx Is Burning (ESPN series 2007) Oprah Winfrey Presents: Mitch Albom’s For One More Day (ABC TV movie 2007) Roberto Clemente (PBS American Experience 2008) The Zen of Bobby V (ESPN Sports documentary 2008) José Canseco: My Life on Steriods (A&E documentary 2008) Costas Now With Aaron and Mays (HBO Sports 2008) Football “Education of a Fullback” (NBC drama [Philco Television Playhouse] 1951) “Homecoming” (CBS drama episode [Schlitz Playhouse of Stars] 1952) “Saturday Story” (ABC drama episode [Cavalcade of America] 1954) “The Red Sanders Story” (NBC drama episode [Matinee Theatre] 1955) “The Boy and the Coach” (ABC drama episode [Pepsi Cola Playhouse] 1955) “Like Father, Like Son” (CBS drama episode [Studio One] 1955) “The Army Game” (NBC drama [Kaiser Aluminum Hour] 1956) “80-Yard Run” (CBS drama [Playhouse 90] 1957) “The Army-Navy Game” (CBS drama episode [West Point] 1957) “His Highness and the Halfback” (CBS drama episode [West Point] 1958) Moochie of Pop Warner Football (ABC drama 1959) The NFL on NBC (NBC series 1960–1998) “Idylls of a Running Back” (ABC drama episode [The Naked City] 1962) “The Long Walk Home” (ABC drama episode [Alcoa Premiere] 1962) First Super Bowl Game (annually 1967, initially on CBS and NBC, to present) Pro Football: Mayhem on a Sunday Afternoon (ABC documentary 1965) Coach Bryant: Alabama’s Bear (ABC documentary 1967) “A Punt, a Pass, and a Prayer” (NBC drama episode [Hallmark Hall of Fame] 1968) “The Heidi Game” (NBC drama 1968) The Joe Namath Show (syndicated audience participation, 1969)

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ABC Monday Night Football (1970–2006) Where’s Huddles? (CBS animated series 1970–71) Plimpton: The Great Quarterback Sneak (ABC documentary 1971) Brian’s Song (ABC TV movie 1971) Footsteps (CBS TV movie 1972) The Living End (CBS pilot 1972) Two’s Company (CBS pilot 1973) Portrait: Legend in Granite (ABC drama 1973) “Mail Order Hero” (ABC series episode [The Brady Bunch] 1973) O. J. Simpson: Juice on the Loose (ABC documentary 1974) Mighty Moose and the Quarterback Kid (ABC drama 1976) Something for Joey (CBS TV movie 1977) Superdome (ABC TV movie 1978) The Dallas Cowboys Cheerleaders (ABC TV movie 1979) The Dallas Cowboys Cheerleaders II (ABC TV movie 1980) Semi-Tough (ABC series 1980) Coach of the Year (NBC TV movie 1980) Fighting Back (ABC TV movie 1980) The Sophisticated Gents (NBC-TV movie 1981) The Oklahoma City Dolls (ABC TV movie 1981) Grambling’s White Tiger (NBC TV movie 1981) Quarterback Princess (CBS TV movie 1983) Pigs vs. Freaks (NBC TV movie 1984) 1st and 10 (HBO series 1984–1990) Glory Days (CBS TV movie 1988) Quiet Victory: The Charlie Wedemeyer Story (CBS TV movie 1988) The Comeback (CBS TV movie 1989) “All Americans” (NBC series episode [Quantum Leap] 1990) Sporting Chance (CBS pilot 1990) Frankenstein: The College Years (FOX TV movie 1991) A Triumph of the Heart: The Ricky Bell Story (CBS TV movie 1991) Backfield in Motion (ABC TV movie 1991) Good Sports (CBS sitcom 1991) Willing to Kill: The Texas Cheerleader Story (ABC TV movie 1992) The Positively True Adventures of the Alleged Texas Cheerleader-Murdering Mom (HBO cable movie 1993) Knute Rockne and His Fighting Irish (PBS American Experience 1993) Against the Grain (NBC series 1993) You’re in the Super Bowl, Charlie Brown (CBS animated program, 1994) Rise and Walk: The Dennis Byrd Story (FOX TV movie 1994) The O. J. Simpson Story (FOX TV movie 1995) Rebels With a Cause: The Story of the American Football League (HBO Sports documentary 1995)

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In the House (NBC sitcom 1995–1996, then UPN 1996–1998) The Halfback of Notre Dame (Showtime cable movie 1996) Angels in the Endzone (ABC TV movie 1997) Weapons of Mass Distraction (HBO cable movie 1997) The Garbage Picking Field Goal Kicking Philadelphia Phenomenon (ABC TV Movie 1998) “Superstar” (NBC series episode [The Cosby Show] 1999) Unitas (HBO Sports documentary 1999) Jim Brown, All American (HBO Sports documentary 2000) The Bear: The Legend of Coach Paul Bryant (HBO Sports documentary 2001) The Game of Their Lives: Pro Football’s Wonder Years (HBO documentary 2001) Hard Knocks: The Baltimore Ravens (HBO reality show 2001) Brian’s Song (ABC TV movie 2001) The Sports Pages: “The Heidi Bowl” (Showtime cable movie 2001) Monday Night Mayhem (TNT cable 2002) The Junction Boys (ESPN cable movie 2002) Hard Knocks: Training Camp With the Dallas Cowboys (HBO reality show 2002) O. J.: A Study in Black and White (HBO Sports documentary 2002) Rebels of Oakland: The A’s, the Raiders, the ’70s (HBO Sports documentary 2003) Playmakers (ESPN drama series 2003) The Wild Ride to Super Bowl I (HBO Sports documentary 2004) Code Breakers (ESPN cable movie 2005) Bound for Glory (ESPN reality series 2005) The Man Who Lost Himself (aka The Stranger I Married) (Lifetime TV movie 2005) The Game (CW series 2006–2007) Friday Night Lights (NBC series 2006–) NBC Sunday Night Football (NBC 2006–) Back in the Day (ESPN series 2006) Two-A-Day (MTV reality series 2006) Hard Knocks: Training Camp With the Kansas City Chiefs (HBO reality show 2007) Michigan vs. Ohio State: The Rivalry (HBO Sports documentary 2007) The Complete History of the New York Jets (NFL network 2007) Football Wives (unaired ABC pilot 2007) Put Up Your Dukes (NFL Network talk show series, 2007–2008) Every Man a Tiger: The Eddie Robinson Story (NBC Sports documentary 2007) Hellfighters (ESPN Sports documentary 2008) Hard Knocks: Training Camp With the Dallas Cowboys (HBO reality show 2008) Breaking the Huddle: The Integration of College Football (HBO Sports documentary 2008) Boxing Knockout (NBC drama 1946) Cavalcade of Sports (NBC 1946–1960)

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Greatest Fights of the Century (NBC 1948–1954) International Boxing Club Bouts (later Pabst Blue Ribbon Bouts) (CBS 1949–1955) The Final Bell (NBC drama 1950) Never Hit a Pigeon (CBS drama 1950) Come Out Fighting (NBC drama 1950) Kid Gloves (CBS audience participation 1951) TKO (syndicated drama 1951) “The Knockout” (NBC drama episode [The Roy Rogers Show] 1952) “The Sunday Punch” (NBC drama [Robert Montgomery Presents] 1953) “The Battler” (CBS drama [Omnibus] 1953; later restaged and recast 1955) “Homecoming” (NBC drama [Robert Montgomery Presents] 1954 Greatest Sport Thrills (ABC series 1954–56) “The Next Champ” (CBS series episode [The Honeymooners] 1954) The Joe Palooka Story (syndicated series 1954) The Duke (NBC series 1954) “The Contender” (NBC drama [Armstrong Circle Theatre] 1954 “The Boxing Show” (CBS series episode [December Bride] 1955) You Are There: The Birth of Modern Boxing (CBS series 1955) “The Lady and the Prizefighter” (NBC series episode [I Married Joan] 1955) “Shadow of the Champ” (NBC drama [Philco Television Playhouse] 1955) “Champion” (CBS drama [Climax!] 1955) “The Return of Gentleman Jim” (CBS drama [G. E. Theatre] 1955) “Winner by Decision” (CBS drama [G. E. Theatre] 1955) “The Face of Johnny Dolliver” (CBS drama [Damon Runyon Theatre [1955]) “The Big Umbrella” (CBS drama [Damon Runyon Theatre [1955]) “The Battler” (NBC drama [Playwrights ’56] 1955) “The Big Payday” (CBS drama [Schlitz Playouse of Stars] 1956 “The Bensonhurst Bomber” (CBS series episode [The Honeymooners] 1956) “Requiem for a Heavyweight” (CBS drama [Playhouse 90] 1956) “His Brother’s Fist” (CBS drama [West Point Story] 1956) “Ringside Padre” (ABC drama [Crossroads] 1956) “Father and Son Night” (CBS drama [G. E. Theatre] 1957) “K.O. Kitty” (CBS drama [Desilu Playhouse] 1958) “The Fight” (NBC series episode [M Squad] 1958) “The Killer Instinct” (CBS drama [Desilu Playhouse] 1959) “The Canvas Bullet” (ABC series episode [Naked City] 1959; later restaged and recast) “The Big, Tall Wish” (CBS series episode [The Twilight Zone] 1960) “The Opponent” (CBS series episode [Route 66] 1961) “Five Cranks for Winter . . . Ten Cranks for Spring” (ABC series episode [Naked City] 1962) “Memory in White” (CBS drama [G. E. Theatre] 1961) “The Last Round” (ABC drama [One Step Beyond ] 1961)

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“Ten O’clock Tiger” (NBC drama [Alfred Hitchcock Presents] 1962) “Steel” (CBS series episode [The Twilight Zone] 1963) “Decision in the Ring” (ABC series episode [The Fugitive] 1963) “Puncher and Judy” (NBC series episode [Car 54, Where Are You?] 1963) “The Meal Ticket” (NBC drama [Bob Hope Chrysler Theater] 1964) Three on an Island (CBS pilot 1965) “Body and Sol” (CBS series episode [The Dick Van Dyke Show] 1965 “Monkees in the Ring” (NBC series episode [The Monkees] 1967) “Love and the Champ” (ABC series episode [Love American Style] 1970) “The Meal Ticket” (ABC series episode [Dan August] 1971) “The Ring With the Red Velvet Ropes” (NBC drama [Night Gallery] 1972) HBO World Championship Boxing (HBO 1973-present) “The Adventures of the Sunday Punch” (NBC series episode [Ellery Queen] 1976) “The Final Round” (CBS series episode [The Incredible Hulk] 1978) I Am the Greatest: The Adventures of Muhammad Ali (NBC animated series 1977–78) “The Lady on Thursday at Ten” (ABC series episode [The Nancy Drew Mysteries] 1978) Ring of Passion (NBC TV movie 1978) Marciano (ABC TV movie 1979) Flesh and Blood (CBS TV movie 1979) The Duke (NBC series 1979) “The Eleventh Event” (ABC series episode [Vega$] 1979) “Arnold’s Hero” (NBC series episode [Diff’rent Strokes] 1979) Goldie and the Boxer (NBC TV movie 1979) Goldie and the Boxer Go to Hollywood (NBC TV movie 1981) “Pros and Cons” (NBC drama [The A-Team] 1983) “TKO” (ABC series episode [The Fall Guy] 1983) Dempsey (CBS TV movie 1983) Terrible Joe Moran (CBS TV movie 1984) Heart of a Champion: The Ray Mancini Story (CBS TV movie 1985) “The K.O. Kid” (NBC series episode [Punky Brewster] 1985) “The Trouble With Harry” (NBC series episode [The A-Team] 1986) “Redemption of a Champion” (NBC series episode [Knight Rider] 1986) “Down for the Count” (NBC series episode [Miami Vice] 1987) “Ring of Honor” (NBC series episode [Hunter] 1989) “The Right Hand of God” (NBC series episode [Quantum Leap] 1989) “The Boxer” (NBC series episode [Amen] 1989) Percy and Thunder (TNT cable movie 1993) George (ABC sitcom 1993–1994) Fallen Champ: The Untold Story of Mike Tyson (NBC documentary 1993) “Mike Tyson: Fallen Champ” (A& E series [Biography] 1995) Tyson (HBO cable movie 1995)

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Sonny Liston: Mysterious Life and Death of a Champion (HBO Sports documentary 1995) Muhammad Ali: The Whole Story (TNT documentary 1996) “The Homer They Fall” (FOX series episode [The Simpsons] 1996) Don King: Only in America (HBO cable movie 1997) Sugar Ray Robinson: The Bright Lights and Dark Shadows of a Champion (HBO Sport documentary 1998) “Fighting the Good Fight” (CBS series episode [Touched by an Angel] 1999) Muhammad Ali: King of the World (ABC TV movie 2000) Resurrection Blvd. (Showtime series 2000–02) Bud Greenspan’s Kings of the Ring: Four Legends of Heavyweight Boxing (Showtime documentary 2000) Ali-Frazier 1: One Nation . . . Divisible (HBO Sports documentary 2000) Ali: An American Hero (FOX TV movie 2000) “George Foreman: Blow by Blow” (Biography Channel series [Biography] 2000) “Oscar de la Hoya: Body and Soul” (Biography Channel series [Biography] 2001) Joe and Max (Starz! cable movie 2002) Muhammad Ali: Through the Eyes of the World (PBS documentary 2003) Undefeated (HBO cable movie 2003) The Fight (PBS American Experience 2004) The Next Great Champ (FOX unscripted series 2004) Unforgivable Blackness: The Rise and Fall of Jack Johnson (PBS documentary 2005) The Contender (NBC unscripted series 2005–06; then ESPN) Jump In! (Disney Channel TV movie 2007) Triumph and Tragedy: The Ray Mancini Story (ESPN documentary 2007) Muhammad Ali: Made in Miami (PBS documentary 2008) Joe Louis: America’s Hero . . . Betrayed (HBO Sports documentary 2008) Family Foreman (TV Land reality series 2008) Basketball “Fast Break” (CBS drama [Schlitz Playhouse of Stars] 1955) “Shadow of a Hero” (CBS series episode [General Electric Theater] 1962) The Harlem Globetrotters (CBS animated series 1970–1972, 1976 on NBC) Shirts/Skins (ABC TV movie 1973) The Harlem Globetrotters Popcorn Machine (CBS series 1974–76) The Rag Tag Champs (ABC drama 1976) The Waverly Wonders (ABC series 1978) The White Shadow (CBS series 1978–1981) Magic vs. Bird: The 1979 NCAA Championship Game (NBC Sports 1979) The Harlem Globetrotters on Gilligan’s Island (NBC TV movie 1981) The Hero Who Couldn’t Read (ABC drama 1984) A Mother’s Courage: The Mary Thomas Story (ABC TV movie 1989)

Appendix

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Michael Jordan: An American Hero (FOX Family TV movie 1990) CBS Schoolbreak Specials: “Malcolm Takes Shot” (CBS drama 1990) One Special Victory (NBC TV movie 1991) Final Shot: The Hank Gathers Story (syndicated TV movie 1992) Hangin’ With Mr. Cooper (ABC series 1992) Michael Jordan: Air Time (syndicated video 1993) Tall Hopes (CBS series 1993) CBS Schoolbreak Specials: “Other Mothers” (CBS drama 1993) Annie O (Showtime cable movie 1995) Hang Time (NBC drama series 1995–2001) Never Give Up: The Jimmy V Story (CBS TV movie 1996) Rebound—The Legend of Earl “The Goat” Manigault (HBO cable movie 1996) Bad as I Wanna Be: The Dennis Rodman Story (ABC TV movie 1998) A Cinderella Season: The Lady Vols Fight Back (HBO sports documentary 1998) City Dump: The Story of the 1951 CCNY Basketball Scandal (HBO documentary 1998) Passing Glory (TNT cable movie 1999) That Championship Season (Showtime cable movie 1999) The Hoop Life (Showtime series 1999–2000) Bill Russell: My Life, My Way (HBO Sports documentary 2000) On Hallowed Ground: Streetball Champions of Rucker Park (TNT documentary 2000) Whatever Happened to Micheal Ray? (TNT documentary 2000) Pistol Pete: The Life and Times of Pete Maravich (CBS Sports documentary 2001) :03 From Gold (HBO Sports documentary 2002) A Season on the Brink (ESPN cable movie 2002) The Red Sneakers (Showtime cable movie 2002) Shirts & Skins: The Sociology of Basketball (syndicated documentary 2002) Double Teamed (Disney Channel cable movie 2002) Full-Court Miracle (Disney Channel cable movie 2003) One Tree Hill (The WB/CW series 2003–2008) Tragedy to Triumph: The Maryland Terrapin Odyssey (CBS Sports documentary 2003) SkyWalker: The David Thompson Story (syndicated 2004) This Is a Game, Ladies (PBS documentary 2004) Edge of America (Showtime cable movie 2005) Perfect Upset: The 1985 Villanova vs. Georgetown NCAA Championship (HBO Sports documentary 2005) The Harlem Globetrotters: The Team That Changed the World (PBS documentary 2005) Back in the Day (ESPN series 2006) The UCLA Dynasty (HBO Sports documentary 2007) Nimrod Nation (Sundance Channel documentary 2007) Black Magic (ESPN documentary 2008)

154

Appendix

Golf “The Golfer” (CBS series episode [The Honeymooners] 1955) The Masters Tournament (CBS 1956–present) All-Star Golf (ABC 1957–1960; then NBC) World Championship Golf (NBC 1959–1960) Celebrity Golf with Sam Snead (NBC 1960) “The Golf Champion” (ABC series episode [The Flintstones] 1960) Shell’s Wonderful World of Golf (NBC 1962–1970) “Country Club Munsters” (CBS series episode [The Munsters] 1967) A Couple of Days in the Life of Charlie Boswell (Syndicated 1970) Babe (CBS TV movie 1975) Dead Solid Perfect (HBO cable movie 1988) Heroes of the Game (ESPN documentary series 1994) Golf: The Greatest Game (NBC documentary 1994) The Tiger Woods Story (Showtime cable movie 1998) Miracle on the 17th Green (CBS TV movie 1999) The Sports Pages: “How Doc Waddems Finally Broke 100” (Showtime cable movie 2001) Tiger at 30 (CBS documentary 2006) Biography of the Year: Tiger Woods (Biography Channel 2006) Jim Nantz Remembers Augusta: The 1960 Masters (CBS sports documentary 2007) The Best Shot in Golf (CBS Sports documentary 2008) Back Nine at Cherry Hills: The Legends of the 1960 U.S. Open (HBO Sports documentary 2008) Hockey First Stanley Cup Playoffs on television (NBC 1966) The Deadliest Season (CBS TV movie 1977) The Boy Who Drank Too Much (CBS TV movie 1980) Miracle on Ice (ABC TV movie 1981) Hockey Night (Canadian/PBS WonderWorks 1984) CBS Schoolbreak Special: “Contract for Life: The S.A.D.D. Story” (CBS drama 1985) The Making of the NHL’s Mighty Ducks (PBS documentary 1993) The Boys on the Bus (Canadian reality show 1987) Gross Misconduct ([Canadian TV movie] 1993) Net Worth ([Canadian TV movie] 1995) Mighty Ducks (ABC animated series 1996–97) Gretzky: The Great One and the Next Ones (FOX Sports documentary 1997) NHL Power Plays: All-Stars of the Game (FOX Sports documentary 1997) Power Play ([Canadian ensemble comedy drama] 1998–2000) Brigitte Gall: Joan of Montreal (Comedy Network/CTV 1999)

Appendix

155

H-E-Double Hockey Sticks (ABC TV movie 1999) Trapped in a Purple Haze (ABC TV movie 2000) Do You Believe in Miracles? The Story of the 1980 U.S. Hockey Team (HBO Sports documentary 2001) The Life and Times of Carl Brewer ([Canadian documentary] 2003) Hockey’s Greatest Era 1942–1967 (FOX Sports Net documentary, 2005) Go Figure (Disney cable movie, 2005) The First Miracle: The 1960 US Olympic Men’s Ice Hockey Team (ESPN documentary 2006) MVP: The Secret Lives of Hockey Wives (SOAPnet series 2008) Tennis “Disappearing Trick” (CBS series episode [Alfred Hitchcock Presents] 1958) Little Mo (NBC TV movie 1978) Second Serve (CBS TV movie 1986) Phenom (ABC series 1993–1994) Arthur Ashe: Citizen of the World (HBO Sports documentary, 1994) Dare to Compete: The Struggle of Women in Sports (HBO Sports documentary 1999) When Billie Beat Bobby (ABC TV movie 2001) Martina Navratilova (A&E Biography 2004) Billie Jean King: Portrait of a Pioneer (HBO Sports documentary 2006) The Prince of Tennis (Japanese anime on Cartoon Network 2006–) Horse Racing “The Lady Was a Flop” (CBS drama [Schiltz Playhouse of Stars] 1957) National Velvet (NBC series 1960–1962) “The Last Night of a Jockey” (CBS series episode [The Twilight Zone] 1963) Little Vic (syndicated series 1978) Derby (ABC TV movie 1995) Seabiscuit: An American Legend (PBS American Experience 2003) The True Story of Seabiscuit (A&E documentary 2003) Bud Greenspan Presents: Whirlaway! (ESPN documentary 2005) Wildfire (ABC Family series 2005–2006) Barbaro (HBO Sports documentary 2007) Barbaro: The Nation’s Horse (NBC Sports documentary 2007) Ruffian (ABC TV movie 2007) Running/Track The Loneliest Runner (NBC TV movie 1976) Wilma (NBC TV movie 1977) See How She Runs (CBS TV movie 1978)

156

Appendix

A Shining Season (CBS TV movie 1979) The Jericho Mile (CBS TV movie 1979) Marathon (CBS TV movie 1980) The Miracle of Kathy Miller (CBS TV movie 1981) ABC Afterschool Special: “It’s a Mile From Here to Glory” (ABC drama 1972) The Terry Fox Story (HBO cable movie 1983) The Jesse Owens Story (syndicated TV movie 1984) If I Die Before I Wake (ABC drama 1985) Finish Line (TNT cable movie 1988) “Running for Honor” (NBC series episode [Quantum Leap] 1992) Run for the Dream: The Gail Devers Story (Showtime cable movie 1996) Dying to Be Perfect: The Ellen Hart Peña Story (ABC TV movie 1996) Dying to Win (Canadian documentary shown on A&E 1998) The Loretta Claiborne Story (ABC TV movie 2000) Race of the Century (Discovery Channel documentary 2004) Four Minutes (ESPN TV movie 2005) Auto Racing (NASCAR, Daytona 500) Men Against Speed (ABC 1955) First network Daytona 500 (CBS 1960; then 1975–2000) Straightaway (ABC series 1961–1962) Tack Reynolds (ABC pilot 1962) The Challengers (ABC TV movie, 1968, unaired until 1970) Wacky Races (CBS animated series 1968–1970) Movin’ On (NBC pilot 1972) Aces Up (CBS pilot 1974) Silent Victory: The Kitty O’Neil Story (CBS TV movie 1979) The Stockers (NBC pilot 1981) The Dukes (CBS animated series 1983) Elke Sommer’s Speed and Beauty (syndicated series 1984) Thunder Alley (ABC series 1994–1995) “3” (ESPN TV-movie 2003) Girl Racers (Biography Channel documentary 2005) “Shirley Muldowney: First Lady of Racing” (Biography Channel series [Biography] 2005) NASCAR Driven to Win (Biography Channel series 2006) Dale (CMT sports documentary 2007) Fast Cars & Superstars—Gillette Young Guns Celebrity Race (ABC reality series 2007) NASCAR Angels (syndicated reality show 2007) Dale Jr.—Shifting Gears (ESPN reality series 2008) Finish Line (Spike TV movie 2008) The Circuit (ABC Family cable movie 2008)

Appendix

157

Wrestling AWA All-Star Wrestling (syndicated series 1960–1990) “A Feat of Strength” (ABC series episode [Route 66] 1962) Mad Bull (CBS TV movie 1977) World Wide Wrestling (syndicated series 1975–2001) G.L.O.W. (Gorgeous Ladies of Wrestling) (syndicated series 1986–1990) Learning the Ropes (syndicated series 1988–1989) Halloween Havoc (pay-per-view 1989–2000) “Heart of a Champion” (NBC series episode [Quantum Leap] 1991) Tag Team (ABC pilot 1991) Extreme Championship Wrestling (TNN 1999–2001, then 2005–2007) The Jesse Ventura Story (NBC TV movie 1999) Biography: André the Giant (A&E series 1999) Friday Night Smackdown (UPN then The CW 1999–2008) Xtreme Pro Wrestling (syndicated series 2001–2003) Nikki (The WB 2002) Ultimate Muscle: The Kinnikuman Legacy (FOX animated series 2002–2004) Going to the Mat (Disney Channel cable movie 2004) Hard Knocks: The Chris Benoit Story (WWE documentary 2004) Cheating Death, Stealing life: The Eddie Guerrero Story (WWE documentary 2004) WWE Monday Night Raw (USA 2005–2008) Wrestling with Destiny: The Life and Times of Daniel Igali (Canadian documentary 2006) The Streak (ESPN Sports documentary 2008) Hulk Hogan’s Celebrity Championship Wrestling (CMT reality series 2008) Ice Skating Champions: A Love Story (CBS TV movie 1979) ABC Afterschool Special: “The Heartbreak Winner” (ABC drama 1980) Kurt Browning: Life on the Edge ([Canadian documentary] 1992) The Cutting Edge (ABC TV movie 1992) Tonya & Nancy: The Inside Story (NBC TV movie 1994) A Promise Kept: The Oksana Baiul Story (CBS TV movie 1994) A Brother’s Promise: The Dan Jansen Story (CBS TV movie 1996) Ronnie & Julie (Showtime cable movie 1997) Reflections on Ice: A Diary of Ladies’ Figure Skating (HBO Sports documentary 1998) My Sergei (CBS TV movie 1998) Fire on Ice: Champions of American Figure Skating (A&E documentary 2001) Michelle Kwan: Princess on Ice (ABC special 2001) Bud Greenspan Presents Michelle Kwan (CBS special 2002)

158

Appendix

The Cutting Edge 2: Going for the Gold (ABC TV movie 2006) The Cutting Edge 3: Chasing the Dream (ABC Family TV movie 2008) Soccer CBS Schoolbreak Special: “What If I’m Gay?” (CBS drama 1987) Dare to Dream: The Story of the U.S. Women’s Soccer Team (HBO documentary 2005) Once in a Lifetime: The Extraordinary Story of the New York Cosmos (ESPN documentary 2006) Rodeo The Wide Country (NBC series 1962–1963) Stoney Burke (ABC series 1962–1963) Goldenrod (CBS TV movie 1977) Rodeo Girl (CBS TV movie 1980) Every Second Counts (Hallmark cable movie 2008) Roller Derby Roller Derby (ABC 1949–1951) The Roller Girls (NBC series 1978) Roller Jam (TNN series 1999–2001) Across America: Queens of the Roller Derby (HDNet 2003) “Jamalot” (CBS drama episode [CSI: NY] 2004) Pool/billiards “A Game of Pool” (CBS drama episode [Twilight Zone] 1962; later restaged and recast) “Love and the Hustler” (ABC series episode [Love American Style] 1969) “A Game of Pool” (syndicated drama episode [The New Twilight Zone] 1989) Kiss Shot (CBS TV movie 1989) “Pool Hall Blues” (NBC series episode [Quantum Leap] 1990) Bowling Bowling Headliners (ABC 1949 then to DuMont) Jackpot Bowling (NBC 1956–1961) “Bowling Ballet” (ABC series episode [The Flintstones] 1962) Roller Skating and Skateboarding Bailey’s Comets (CBS animated series 1973–1975) The Skatebirds (CBS animated series 1977–1978) Life of Ryan (MTV reality series 2007)

Appendix

159

Olympics Berlin 1936: Games of the XI Olympiad (German television 1936) The Strongest Man in the World (Bud Greenspan documentary 1952) “Leap of Faith (The Bob Richards Story)” (ABC drama episode [DuPont Cavalcade of America] 1957) First Olympics on network television (CBS 1960) The Rafer Johnson Story (David L. Wolper documentary 1961) Jesse Owens Returns to Berlin (Bud Greenspan documentary 1964) The Ethiopians (Bud Greenspan documentary 1971) The 500-Pound Jerk (CBS TV movie 1973) 21 Hours in Munich (ABC TV movie 1976) The Olympiad (PBS 1976) (22 hour-long documentaries) Special Olympics (CBS TV movie 1978) Top of the Hill (syndicated TV movie 1980) The Golden Moment—An Olympic Love Story (CBS TV movie 1980) America at the Olympics (CBS documentary 1984) The First Olympics—Athens 1896 (NBC TV movie 1984) The Jesse Owens Story (syndicated TV movie 1984) Nadia (syndicated TV movie 1984) 16 Days of Glory (1984 Summer Olympics) (HBO Sports documentary1986) Time Capsule: The Olympic Games of 1932 (NBC documentary 1986) King of the Olympics: The Lives and Loves of Avery Brundage (syndicated. TV movie 1988) Going for the Gold: Preview of the 1988 Summer Olympics (NBC documentary 1988) Bud Greenspan’s An American Dream (Disney Channel documentary 1988) Calgary ’88: 16 Days of Glory (Disney Channel documentary 1989) Seoul ’88: 16 Days of Glory (Disney Channel documentary 1989) Victory & Valor: Special Olympics World Games (ABC documentary 1991) Bud Greenspan’s The Measure of Greatness (Discovery Channel documentary 1992) Mark Spitz Returns to Munich (NBC documentary 1992) Barcelona ’92: 16 Days of Glory (Disney Channel documentary 1993) Lillehammer ’94: 16 Days of Glory (Disney Channel documentary 1994) 100 Years of Olympic Glory (TBS documentary 1996) America’s Greatest Olympians (TBS documentary 1996) Spirit of the Games (HBO Sports documentary 1996) Bearing the Torch: Politics & the Olympics (ESPN documentary 1996) The Road to Olympic Gold (CBS Sports series 1996) Breaking the Surface (USA Networks TV movie 1997) Atlanta’s Olympic Glory (PBS documentary 1997) Perfect Body (NBC TV movie 1997) In Search of History: The First Olympics (History Channel documentary 1997)

160

Appendix

Push (ABC drama series 1998) Nagano ’98 Olympics: Bud Greenspan’s Stories of Honor and Glory (Showtime documentary 1998) Fists of Freedom: The Story of the ’68 Summer Games (HBO Sports documentary 1999) Bud Greenspan’s Favorite Stories of Olympic Glory (Showtime documentary 2000) Sydney 2000 Olympics: Bud Greenspan’s Gold From Down Under (Showtime documentary 2001) Do You Believe in Miracles? The Story of the 1980 U.S. Hockey Team (HBO Sports documentary 2001) Our Greatest Hopes, Our Greatest Fears: The Tragedy of the Munich Games (ABC documentary 2002) Bud Greenspan Presents: 1972 Olympic Games (Showtime documentary 2002) Bud Greenspan’s Stories of Winter Olympic Glory (Showtime documentary 2002) Bud Greenspan’s Stories of Summer Olympic Glory (Showtime documentary 2002) :03 From Gold (HBO Sports documentary 2002) Salt Lake 2002: Stories of Olympic Glory (Showtime documentary 2003) Hitler’s Pawn: The Margaret Lambert Story (HBO Sports documentary 2004) Beyond the Games (NBC documentary 2004) Race of the Century (Discovery Channel documentary 2004) Bud Greenspan Presents Athens 2004: Stories of Olympic Glory (Showtime documentary 2005) The First Miracle: The 1960 US Olympic Men’s Ice Hockey Team (ESPN documentary 2006) Bud Greenspan Presents: Torino 2006: Stories of Olympic Glory (Showtime documentary 2007) Bud Greenspan: At the Heart of the Games (ESPN documentary 2008) Secrets of the Dead: Doping for Gold (PBS documentary 2008) Miscellaneous Sports Programs Sports in Focus (ABC Sports 1957–1958) ABC Wide World of Sports (ABC Sports 1961–1997) American Sportsman (ABC Sports 1965–1985) Evel Knievel (CBS pilot 1974) The Way It Was (PBS series 1974–1978) James Michener’s World: Sports in America (PBS special 1980) Numero Uno (PBS Sports series in 13 parts 1982) ABC Afterschool Special: The Gymnast (ABC drama 1980) The Golden Age of Sport (HBO Sports documentary 1988) Naked Sport (six-part British documentary 1993; in U.S., early 1994) Idols of the Game (TBS documentary 1995) Real Sports with Bryant Gumbel (HBO Sports series, 1995–present) American Sportswomen (syndicated documentary 1995)

Appendix

161

The American Athlete (syndicated sports interview show 1996) The Journey of the African American Athlete (HBO Sports documentary 1996) Ultimate Athlete: Pushing the Limit (Discovery Channel documentary 1996) Arli$$ (HBO series 1996–2002) Sports on the Silver Screen (HBO Sports documentary 1997) Between Brothers (FOX sitcom 1997–98, then UPN 1999) The Magic Hour (FOX late night talk show 1998) Sports Night (ABC series 1998–2000) ESPN SportsCentury (ESPN biography series 1999–2007) Playing the Field: Sports and Sex in America (HBO Sports documentary 2000) Miracle in Lane Two (Disney Channel cable movie 2000) The Best Damn Sports Show Period (FOX sports 2001–2007) Picture Perfect: The Stories Behind the Greatest Photos in Sports (HBO Sports documentary 2002) America’s Heroes: The Bravest and the Finest (NBC documentary 2002) Seasons of Change: The African-American Athlete (ESPN 2002) Seasons of Change: The African-American Athlete 2 (ESPN 2003) The Barrier Breakers (ESPN documentary 2004) Pound for Pound (ESPN documentary 2004) Gymnasts: Little Girls, Big Dreams (E! True Hollywood Story series 2004) Evel Knievel (TNT cable movie 2004) Knievel’s Wild Ride (A&E reality series 2005) Costas Now (HBO Sports series 2005–present) Absolute Evel: The Evel Knievel Story (History Channel biography 2005) The Science of Lance Armstrong (Discovery Channel documentary 2005) Fight Girls (Oxygen Network reality show 2006 and 2007) You’ve Got a Friend (Hallmark Channel cable movie 2007) The Kentucky Kid (MTV documentary 2007) Fight Quest (Discovery Channel reality series 2007–2008) Iron Ring (BET series 2008) CBS EliteXC Saturday Night Fights (CBS/Showtime series 2008) Strikeforce on NBC (NBC series 2008)

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Selected Bibliography

Books Bedell Smith, Sally. In All His Glory: the Life and Times of William S. Paley and the Birth of Modern Broadcasting. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1990. Brooks, Tim, and Earle Marsh. The Complete Directory of Prime Time Network and Cable Shows. New York: Ballantine Books, 2003. Edelman, Rob. Great Baseball Films. Secaucus, NJ: Carol Publishing, 1994. Inman, David. The TV Encyclopedia. New York: Perigree Books, 1991. Kane, Joseph Nathan, Steven Anzovin, and Janet Podell. Famous First Facts. 5th ed. Bronx, NY: H. W. Wilson, 2008. Lyons, Eugene. David Sarnoff: A Biography. New York: Harper & Row, 1966. Marill, Alvin H. Big Pictures on the Small Screen. Westport, CT: Praeger, 2007. ———. Movies Made for Television 1964–2004. Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, 2005. McNeil, Alex. Total Television. 3rd updated ed. New York: Penguin Books, 1996. Monti, Ralph. I Remember Brooklyn. Secaucus, NJ: Carol Publishing, 1991. O’Neil, Thomas. The Emmys. 3rd ed. New York: Perigree Books, 2000. Paley, William S. As It Happened: A Memoir. Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1979. Paper, Lewis J. Empire: William S. Paley and the Making of CBS. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1987. Rowe, David. Sport, Culture and the Media: The Unruly Trinity. Philadelphia: Open University Press, 2004. Terrace, Vincent. Fifty Years of Television. London: Cornwall Books, 1991.

164

Selected Bibliography

Newspapers The Hollywood Reporter Los Angeles Times The New York Times TV Guide Variety Washington Post

Web Sites Cyber Boxing Zone, http://www.cyberboxingzone.com HBO Corporate Web Site, http://www.homeboxoffice.com History of American Broadcasting, http://jeff560.tripod.com/broadcasting.html Major League Baseball Official Web Site, http://www.mlb.com Reel Baseball, http://www.reelbaseball.net The Sandlot Shrink, http://www.sandlotshrink.com

Index

A&E, 57. 88, 94, 106, 128, 130 Aaron, Hank, 39, 59, 78, 87, 105, 123 Abbott, Bud, 9, 13, 21 ABC, 3, 5, 6, 11, 15,16, 17, 21, 22, 25, 26, 28, 29, 32, 34, 37, 38, 39, 40, 42, 45, 46, 47, 48, 60, 61, 62, 67, 70, 76, 78, 82, 90, 94, 95, 96, 97, 98, 107, 109, 117,123, 124, 128, 130, 134 ABC Afterschool Special, 42, 52, 67 ABC Wide World of Sports, 6, 37, 38, 46–47, 97 Abdul-Jabbar, Kareem, 82, 84, 86, 112 Absolute Evel: The Evel Knievel Story, 128 Aces Up, 53 Adrenaline Project, The, 134 “Adventures of the Sunday Punch, The,” 48 Affleck, Ben, 83, 101 Against the Grain, 83 Agganis the Man, 34 Albert, Eddie, 22, 62 Albright, Tenley, 93 Alcoa Hour, 17

Alcoa Premiere, 32, 40 Alcoa Presents One Step Beyond, 20, 31 Alexander, Grover Cleveland, 15, 105 Alfred Hitchcock Presents, 21, 81 Ali, Laila, 73, 133 Ali, Muhammad, 46–47, 51, 56, 88, 89, 101, 117–18, 119 Ali: An American Hero, 117 Ali-Frazier 1: One Nation . . . Divisible, 117–18 All Games Are Home Games, 103 Allen, Mel, 2, 6, 26, 57 All-Star Golf, 26 Alzado, Lyle, 70, 83 America at the Olympics, 56 American Athlete, The, 80 American Experience, 61, 78, 80–81, 100, 103 American Gladiators, 73, 133–34 American Sportsman, 38 American Sportswoman, 138 American Tragedy, 109 American Wrestling Association, 35 America’s Greatest Olympians, 95–96

166 Amos, 59 Amos, John, 45 Anaheim Mighty Ducks, 71 Anastas, Bob, 67 Anderson, Sparky, 59 André the Giant, 35 Andrews Sisters, 100 Angelou, Maya, 118, 121 Angels in the Endzone, 81 Angels in the Infield, 103 Angels in the Outfield, 81, 103 Annie O, 84–85 Aragon, Art, 10, 21, 22, 31, 48 Arcaro, Eddie, 17 Archie Bunker’s Place, 60 Arkin, Alan, 74 Arledge, Roone, 37, 38, 97, 107 Arli$$, 91, 98 Armstrong, Lance, 121, 129, 133 “Army Game, The,” 25 “Army-Navy Game, The,” 25 Arthur Ashe: Citizen of the World, 94 Ashe, Arthur, 56, 94 Asinov, Eliot, 15 “Assignment Champ,” 22 Astaire, Fred, 32 A-Team, The, 66 Atlanta Hawks, 112, 114 Atlanta’s Olympic Glory, 96 Aunt Mary, 44 Babe, 50, 52 Babe, The, 113 Babe Ruth, 74 Babe Ruth: The Life Behind the Legend, 78 Babe: The Story of Babe Ruth, The, 57 Backfield in Motion, 81 Back in the Day, 116 Back Nine at Cherry Hills: The Legends of the 1960 U.S. Open, 121 Bad As I Wanna Be: The Dennis Rodman Story, 84 Bad News Bears, The, 44

Index Baer, Max, 21 Bailey’s Comets, 53 Baio, Scott, 67, 124 Baiul, Oksana, 92, 131 Baker, John, 51–52 Bakula, Scott, 57, 75 Ball, Lucille, 9–10 Ball Four, 44, 79 Baltimore Colts, 38, 46, 82 Baltimore Ravens, 111 “Bang the Drum Slowly,” 20–21 Banks, Ernie, 59, 103 Bannister, Roger, 56, 125 Barbaro, 131 Barbaro: The Nation’s Horse, 131 Barber, Red, 1, 7, 11 Barcelona ’92: 16 Days of Glory, 96 Barnum, Joey, 23 Barrier Breakers, 125 Baseball, Minnesota, 79–80 “Baseball Blues,” 15 Baseball Bunch, The, 58 Baseball World of Joe Garagiola, The, 43 “Battler, The,” 19 Bay City Blues, 60 Bear: The Legend of Coach Paul Bryant, The, 110 Bearing the Torch: Politics & the Olympics, 137 Beffa, Nancy, 125, 130 Belafonte, Harry, 19, 62, 111 Beliveau, Jean, 127 Bell, Ricky, 80 Bellamy, Ralph, 25 Bench, Johnny, 58 Benny, Jack, 9–10 Benoit, Chris, 125 “Bensonhurst Bomber, The,” 10 Beradino, John, 20 Berenger, Tom, 48, 107 Berg, Patty, 86 Berle, Milton, 9–10, 26 Bernsen, Corbin, 76

Index Berra, Yogi, 18, 78, 79, 100, 106 Best Shot in Golf, The, 121 Between Brothers, 98 Beyond the Games, 127 Big Daddy, 52 “Big Game, The,” 35 “Big Payday, The,” 19–20 “Big, Tall Wish, The,” 30 Billie Jean King: Portrait of a Pioneer, 121–22 Bill Russell: My Life, My Way, 113 Biography, 34, 57, 88, 118, 121, 122, 123 Biography of a Rookie: The Willie Davis Story, 34 Bird, Larry, 49, 112 Birth of Legends, The, 49, Black Canyon Productions, 76–77, 114 Black Magic, 116–17 Blaik, Earl “Red,” 108 Blake, Robert, 64 Blanchard, Felix “Doc,” 25 Bleacher Bums, 44, 104 Bleier, Rocky, 61–62 “Blow to the Head . . . A Blow to the Heart, A,” 89 “Body and Sol,” 32, 165 Boitano, Brian, 128, 131 Bond, Ward, 16 Bonds, Barry, 140 Bono, Sonny, 55 Borg, Bjorn, 122 Borgnine, Ernest, 45 Boston Braves, 11 Boston Celtics, 15, 49, 112, 113 Boston Red Sox, 2, 17, 20, 34, 38–39, 79, 101, 102, 107 Bottoms, Timothy, 52 Bound for Glory, 110 Bouton, Jim, 44 “Bowling Ballet,” 34 Bowling Headliners, 5 Boxing After Dark, 136

167 Boxing From Eastern Parkway, 30 “Boxing Match, The,” 20 “Boxing Show, The,” 22 Boxleitner, Bruce, 82 “Boy and the Coach, The,” 25 Boys on the Bus, The, 67 “Boy Who Drank Too Much, The,” 67 Braddock, James J., 118 Bradshaw, Terry, 70 Brady Bunch, The, 35, 45 Branca, Ralph, 101 Brando, Marlon, 12–13 Braugher, André, 33, 76, 85, 112, 114 Breaking the Huddle: The Integration of College Football, 112 Breaking the Surface, 94–95 Breland, Mark, 66 Brewer, Carl, 127–128 Brian’s Song, 41 Brickhouse, Jack, 3 Brigitte Gall: Joan of Montréal, 91 Brissie, Lou, 15 Britt, Jim, 26 Brolin, James, 68 Brolin, Josh, 68 Bronson, Charles, 20, 31 Bronx Is Burning, The, 106 Brooklyn Dodgers, 6, 11, 17, 27, 42, 43, 100 Brooklyn Dodgers: The Ghosts of Flatbush, 100 Brooks, Herb, 55, 127 Brothers, Dr. Joyce, 24 Brother’s Promise: The Dan Jansen Story, A, 92 Brown, Jim, 108 Browning, Kurt, 93 Brundage, Avery, 97 Bryant, Paul “Bear,” 39, 107, 110 Bud Greenspan: At the Heart of the Games, 130–31 Bud Greenspan Presents Michelle Kwan, 139

168 Bud Greenspan Presents Torino 2006 Olympics, 130 Bud Greenspan Presents: Whirlaway!, 130 Bud Greenspan Remembers: 1984 L.A. Olympics, 130 Bud Greenspan’s Athens 2004: Stories of Olympic Glory, 130 Bud Greenspan’s Favorite Stories of Summer Olympic Glory, 130 Bud Greenspan’s Favorite Stories of Winter Olympic Glory, 130 Bud Greenspan’s Kings of the Ring: Four Legends of Heavyweight Boxing, 117 Bud Greenspan’s The Measure of Greatness, 95 Bud Greenspan’s Stories of Olympic Glory, 130 Burke, Delta, 63 Burns, Ken, 78, 118 Burton, LeVar, 43, 87 Butkus, Dick, 85, 110 Button, Dick, 37, 128, 138 Byington, Spring, 10, 21, 22 Byrd, Dennis, 81 Byrne, Gabriel, 81 Caan, James, 41 Cagney, James, 65 Calhoun, Rory, 19, 23 Callahan, Mushy, 10, 35 “Calling Willie Mays,” 35 Campanella, Roy, 11, 18, 43, 100 Campanella II, Roy, 63 Canadeo, Tony, 46 Canseco, José, 106 “Canvas Bullet, The,” 22–23, 32 Cappelletti, John, 27 Cappy Productions, 27, 51, 96, 130 Car 54, Where Are You?, 32 Carney, Art, 36, 62, 65 Carr, Lamont, 115 Carradine, Keith, 59 Carter, Jimmy, 38, 55, 78

Index Carver, Tim, 59 Casey at the Bat, 16, 60 Casey Stengel, 57 Casey, Bernie, 47 Cassavetes, John, 20, 48 CBS, 2, 4, 5, 6, 7, 11, 12, 13, 15, 16, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 24, 25, 26, 31, 32, 34, 36, 37, 39, 40, 41, 44, 45, 49, 51, 52, 53, 54, 56, 57, 60, 63, 64, 65, 67, 68, 69, 70, 75, 82, 84, 85, 86, 87, 92, 97, 107, 121, 135, 136 CBS EliteXC Saturday Night Fights, 136 CBS Golf Classic, 36 CBS Schoolbreak Special, 132 Celebrity Boxing, 65 Chacon, Bobby, 65 Challenge of a Lifetime, 71 Challengers, The, 40 Chamberlain, Wilt, 32, 47, 84, 112 Champion, 19 Champions: A Love Story, 52 Channing, Stockard, 52 Charles, Ezzard, 10, 12 Charlie Brown and Snoopy Show, The, 60 Charlie Brown’s All-Stars, 33 Chaykin, Maury, 30, 104 Cheadle, Don, 84 Cheating Death, Stealing Life: The Eddie Guerrero Story, 125 Chetwynd, Lionel, 52 Chicago Bears, 41, 61, 66 Chicago Blackhawks, 14, 90 Chicago Bulls, 83, 84, 96 Chicago Cubs, 2, 15, 44, 64, 102, 197 Chicago White Sox, 2, 43, 79, 96 Cincinnati Reds, 3, 15, 96, 105 Cinderella Season: The Lady Vols Fight Back, A, 86 Circuit, The, 124 Cirillo, Al, 5 City Dump: The Story of the 1951 CCNY Basketball Scandal, 78

Index City on Fire: The Story of the ’68 Detroit Tigers, A, 101 Clark, Susan, 50 Clay, Cassius. See Ali, Muhammad Clemens, Roger, 58, 140 Clemente, Roberto, 78, 102–3 Cleveland Browns, 25, 70 Cleveland Indians, 16, 17, 57, 102 Climax!, 17, 19, 20 Clinton, Bill, 121 Close, Glenn, 77 Clubhouse, 107 Coach Bryant, Alabama’s Bear, 39 Coach of the Year, 61 Cobb, Ty, 74 Code Breakers, 108 Coleman, Gary, 44, 47 Coleman, Gerry, 79 Comaneci, Nadia, 56, 130 “Comeback,” 18 Comeback, The, 63 Comeback Kid, The, 57 Come Out Fighting, 12 “Company Picnic,” 86 Comrades of Summer, 74 Conn, Billy, 2, 120 Connelly, Maureen, 50 Connors, Chuck, 15, 25 Conrad, Robert, 48, 61, 63 Contender, The, 120 “Contract for Life: The S.A.D.D. Story,” 67 Cooper, Jackie, 25–26, 68, 96 Cooperstown, 74 Corbett, James J., 19, 22 Corley, Pat, 60 Cosby, Bill, 83, 116, 121 Cosell, Howard, 28, 34, 38, 46, 60, 107, 117 Costas, Bob, 77, 79, 102, 131, 136 Costas Now, 136 Costello, Lou, 9, 13, 21 Costner, Kevin, 76, 77

169 “Count of Ten,” 22 “Country Club Munsters,” 36 Couple of Days in the Life of Charlie Boswell, A, 50 Court-Martial of Jackie Robinson, The, 73–74 Cousy, Bob, 116 Cowlings, Al, 46 Crabbe, Buster, 15 Crawford, Broderick, 22, 31–32 Crenna, Richard, 41 Cronkite, Walter, 22, 36 Crosby, Bing, 38 Crossroads, 15, 20 Crothers, Scatman, 49 Crucibles of Courage, 119 Crystal, Billy, 96, 192, 194, 118 Csonka, Larry, 73 Curse of the Bambino, The, 101 Curtis, Dan, 36 Curto, Vinnie, 66 Cutting Edge, The, 92 Cutting Edge 2: Going for the Gold, The, 128 Cutting Edge 3: Chasing the Dream, The, 128 Dale, 122 Dale Jr.—Shifting Gears, 122 Dallas Cowboys, 46, 96, 111 Dallas Cowboys Cheerleaders, 46 D’Amato, Cus, 87, 88 Damn Yankees, 33 Dan August, 48 Danner, Blythe, 43 Danza, Tony, 82 Dare to Compete: The Struggle of Women in Sports, 94 Dare to Dream: The Story of the U.S. Women’s Soccer Team, 131 Dark Shadows, 36 David, Keith, 119 Davis, John, 27

170 Davis, Ossie, 103–4 Davis, Sammy Jr., 31, 32, 47, 65–66 Davis, Willie, 34, 35 Daytona 500, 36–37, 38, 122, 123 Deadliest Season, The, 51 Dead Solid Perfect, 67–68 Dean, James, 13 DeBusschere, Dave, 39 December Bride, 10, 21, 22 “Decision in the Ring,” 32 Dee, Ruby, 32, 43, 73 Deford, Frank, 77, 94, 96, 101, 113 DeFore, Don, 15 de la Hoya, Oscar, 118, 120 Dem Bums, The Brooklyn Dodgers, 100 Demaret, Jimmy, 26 Dempsey, 64 Dempsey, Jack, 56, 64, 117, 118 De Niro, Robert, 20, 66 Dennehy, Brian, 52, 62, 115 Dennis, Sandy, 40 Dent, Bucky, 58, 106 Denver Broncos, 70 Denver Nuggets, 114 Derby, 95 Dern, Bruce, 30 Desmond, Connie, 11 Detroit Lions, 46, 52 Detroit Pistons, 66, 84 Detroit Red Wings, 90, 127 Detroit Tigers, 43, 59, 99, 101 Dewhurst, Colleen, 46 Dial M for Murder, 68–69 Diamonds on the Silver Screen, 77 Dickey, Bill, 43 Didrickson, Babe, 50, 52, 86 “Did You See Jackie Robinson Hit That Ball?” (song), 100 Diff’rent Strokes, 47 DiMaggio, Dominic, 79, 192 DiMaggio, Joe, 11, 16, 17, 75, 78, 100, 106 “Disappearing Trick,” 27

Index Discovery Channel, 95 124, 129, 134 Disney Channel, 59, 91, 96, 104, 115, 120, 125, 128, 129 Dixon, Ivan, 36, 88 Dobkin, Mary, 44 Doby, Larry, 57, 102 Doerr, Bobby, 79, 102 Don King: Only in America, 88 Donna Reed Show, The, 35 Don’t Look Back, 57 Double Teamed, 115 Douglas, Kirk, 19, 26, 59 “Down for the Count,” 66 Do You Believe in Miracles? The Story of the 1980 U.S. Hockey Team, 127 Drees, Jack, 23 Dribble, 57 Driving Force, 123 “Dropout, The,” 35 Dryer, Fred, 66 Drysdale, Don, 33 Duke, The (1954), 21 Duke, The (1979), 48 Dukes, The, 70 DuMont, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 7, 8, 14 Dundee, Angelo, 89, 118 Dunphy Don, 2, 13 DuPont Cavalcade of America, 17, 25, 34 Durning, Charles, 53, 57, 104 Durocher, Leo, 15, 26, 32, 45 Durso, Joseph, 43 Dutton, Charles S., 52 Duvall, Robert, 23, 32, 68 Dying to Be Perfect: The Ellen Hart Peña Story, 94 Dying to Win, 94 Earnhardt, Dale, 122 Earnhardt, Dale Jr., 97, 122 Ebbets Field, 6, 11, 42, 76, 100 Eddie’s Million Dollar Cook-Off, 104 Ederle, Gertrude, 125 Edge of America, 116

Index Edmonton Oilers, 67 “Education of a Fullback,” 24 Edwards, Blake, 22 Edwards, James, 32 Ed Wynn Show, The, 9 “80-Yard Run,” 24 “Eleventh Event, The,” 47 Elke Sommer’s World of Speed and Beauty, 70 Elliott, Sam, 33 Enberg, Dick, 42, 42, 114 Erving, Julius, 112, 114 ESPN, 37, 97, 98, 100, 105, 106, 107, 108, 109, 110, 115, 116, 119, 123, 125, 132, 137 Eubanks, Weeb, 39 Evanshen, Terry, 109 Evel Knievel (1974), 53 Evel Knievel (2004), 128 Every Man a Tiger: The Eddie Robinson Story, 111 Every Second Counts, 131 Ewing, Patrick, 83, 114 “Extra Innings,” 60 Extreme Championship Wrestling, 93, 125 “Face of Johnny Dolliver, The,” 18 Faithful: Two Diehard Boston Red Sox Fans Chronicle the Historic 2004 Season, 106 Fallen Champ: The Untold Story of Mike Tyson, 87 Fall Guy, The, 65 Family Foreman, 120 “Fast Break,” 35 Fast Cars & Superstars—Gillette Young Guns Celebrity Race, 123 “Father and Son Night,” 19 Fawcett, Farrah, 82 “Fear Strikes Out,” 20 “Feat of Strength, A,” 35 Feller, Bob, 17, 77 Field, Sally, 35 “Fight, The,” 118–19 “Fight for the Title,” 22

171 Fight Girls, 134 Fighting Back, 61–62 “Fighting the Good Fight,” 47 “Fight Manager, The,” 20 Fight Quest, 134 Final Bell, The, 12 “Final Round, The,” 49 Final Shot: The Hank Gathers Story, 84 Finding Buck McHenry, 103 Finish Line (1988), 68 Finish Line (2008), 124 Finney, Shirley Jo, 103 Finsterwald, Dow, 121 Fire on Ice: Champions of American Figure Skating, 128 1st and 10, 63 First Miracle: 1960 U.S. Olympic Men’s Ice Hockey Team, The, 127 First Olympics, The, 95 First Olympics—Athens 1896, The, 56 Fischer, Bobby, 50 Fisher, Ham, 21 Fisk, Carlton, 79 Fists of Freedom: The Story of the ’68 Summer Games, 95 “Five Cranks for Winter . . . Ten Cranks for Spring,” 23, 32 500-Pound Jerk, The, 52 Flashing Spikes, 16, 32–33 Flatbush, 45 Fleming, Peggy, 93 Flesh and Blood, 48,151 Flintstones, The, 34, 36, 42 Flutie, Doug, 83 Flying Nun, The, 35 Football Wives, 109–10 Footsteps, 41 Foran, Dick, 13 Force, John, 123–24 Ford, John, 16, 32–33 Ford, Whitey, 18, 100, 106 Foreman, George, 47, 83, 88, 90, 117, 118, 120

172 “Forever Baseball,” 36 “For the Record,” 17 Foster, Jodie, 42, 52 Four Minutes, 125 Four Star Playhouse, 22 Fox, Terry, 68 Fox Sports, 37, 75, 91, 199, 127 Fox Television, 90, 98, 120, 126 Frankenstein: The College Years, 80 Frankie & Hazel, 104–5 Franz, Dennis, 60, 71 Frazier, Joe, 47, 51, 117–18 Frazier, Walt, 113 Friday Night Lights, 83, 108–9 Friday Night Smackdown, 14, 125 Fugitive, The, 72 Full-Court Miracle, 115 Gail, Max, 57 Game, The, 109 “Game of Pool, A,” 30 Game of Their Lives: Pro Football’s Wonder Years, The, 111 Garagiola, Joe, 23, 43 Garbage Picking Field Goal Kicking Philadelphia Phenomenon, The, 82 Garvey, Steve, 105 Gathers, Hank, 84 Gazzara, Ben, 41 Gehrig, Lou, 17, 43 General Electric Theater, 19, 31, 35 George, 90 Gethers, Steven, 15 Gibson, Althea, 86 Gibson, Josh, 74 Gifford, Frank, 39 Gilford, Jack, 13 Gillette Cavalcade of Sports, 2, 4, 13, 23, 26 Girl Racers, 123 Gladiators 2000, 73 Gleason, Jackie, 9, 36 Gleason, James, 16, 18, 21

Index Glenn, Scott, 108, 130 Glickman, Marty, 24, 51 Glory Days, 61 Glory of Their Times, 45 G.L.O.W (Gorgeous Ladies of Wrestling ), 69 Go Figure, 128 Going for the Gold: The Bill Johnson Story, 70 Going to the Mat, 126 Goldberg, Mel, 13, 15, 17 Goldberg, Whoopi, 71 Golden Age of Sport, The, 56 Golden Moment—An Olympic Love Story, 55 Goldenrod, 52 Goldie and the Boxer, 48 Goldie and the Boxer Go to Hollywood, 48 “Golf Champion, The,” 36 Golf Channel, The, 27, 36, 86–87, 136, 139 “Golfer, The,” 36 Golf: The Greatest Game, 86–87 Gomez, Lefty, 44 Good Heavens, 45 Good Sports, 32 Goodyear Television Theatre, 15 Gorgeous George, 5–6 Gossett, Louis, 45, 57, 94, 102 Gould, Elliott, 60 Gowdy, Curt, 38–39, 42, 79, 84 Graham, Otto, 25 Grambling’s White Tiger, 62, 111 Grammer, Kelsey, 109, 112 Grange, Red, 56 Grant, Lee, 13, 22, 124 Gray, Pete, 50 Graziano, Rocky, 2, 23, 32, 39, 43 Great Baseball Films ( book), 74 Greatest American Hero, The, 60 Greatest Fights of the Century, 4 Greatest Sports Thrills, 24 Greats of the Game, 58–59, 77

Index Green Bay Packers, 39, 46, 82 Greenberg, Hank. 99, 122 Greenburg, Ross, 78, 88, 89, 93, 113, 117, 121 Greene, Graham, 74 Greenspan, Bud, 27–28, 37, 45, 50, 51, 55, 95, 96, 102, 117, 125, 127, 139, 131, 137, 138 Gregory, Dick, 121 Gregory, James, 62 Gretzky, Wayne, 67, 91, 98, 121 Gretzky: The Great One and the Next Ones, 91 Grier, Rosey, 52 Gross Misconduct, 90 Guerrero, Eddie, 69, 125 Guest, Christopher, 57 Guidry, Ron, 206 Gumbel, Bryant, 49, 97, 102, 118, 136 Guthrie, Janet, 56 Gymnast, The, 42 Hackman, Gene, 96 Hagler, Marvelous Marvin, 65 Halas, George, 41, 97 Halberstram, David, 102 Halfback of Notre Dame, The, 81 Hallmark Hall of Fame, 40, 44, 51, 138 Hamill, Dorothy, 93, 137–38 Hamill, Pete, 48, 105 Hamilton, Laird, 123, 133 Hamilton, Scott, 128 Hanalis, Blanche, 17 Hangin’ In, 45 Hang Time, 85 Hank Aaron: Chasing the Dream, 75 Hanna-Barbera, 34, 36, 40, 41–42, 49, 70 Happy Felton’s Knothole Gang, 11 Hardball, 75, 79 Harding, Tonya, 91–92, 128 Hard Knocks, 111 Hard Knocks: The Chris Benoit Story, 125

173 Hard Knocks: Training Camp With the Dallas Cowboys, 111 Hard Knocks: Training Camp With the Kansas City Chiefs, 111 Harewood, Dorian, 56, 71, 78 Harlem Globetrotters, 49, 116 Harlem Globetrotters on Gilligan’s Island, The, 66 Harlem Globetrotters Popcorn Machine, The, 9 Harlem Globetrotters: The Team That Changed the World, The, 116 Harmon, Mark, 114 Harmon, Tom, 62–63 Harrington, Al, 116 Hasselhoff, David, 61 Hawn, Goldie, 121 Hayden, Nicky, 129 Hayes, Elvin, 114 HBO, 47, 59, 63, 65, 67, 68, 74, 76, 81, 83, 84, 85, 93, 94, 95, 97, 97, 98, 100, 101, 103, 108, 110, 111, 113, 114, 120, 121, 127, 131 HBO World Championship Boxing, 47 “Heartbreak Winner, The,” 67 “Heart of a Champion,” 58 Heart of a Champion: The Ray Mancini Story, 64 “He Done Her Wrong,” 21 H-E-Double Hockey Sticks, 91 “Heidi Bowl, The,” 112 Heidi Game, The, 39, 112 Hellfighters, 109 Hemingway, Ernest, 19 Henie, Sonja, 93, 128 “Herman the Rookie,” 32 Hernandez, Keith, 80 Heroes of the Game, 86 Hero Who Couldn’t Read, The, 42 Herrmann, Edward, 43, 75 Hillary, Edmund, 125 “Hillbilly Whiz, The,” 18 Hines, Gregory, 115

174 Hirsch, Elroy “Crazylegs,” 25 “His Brother’s Fist,” 20 “His Highness and the Halfback,” 25 History Channel, 95, 128 Hitchcock, Alfred, 27, 68–69 Hitler’s Pawn: The Margaret Lambert Story, 124 Hockey Night, 67 Hockey’s Greatest Era 1942–1967, 127 Hodges, Gil, 77, 100 Hodges, Russ, 3, 12, 23 Hogan, Ben, 26, 86, 121 Hogan, Hulk, 6, 35, 66, 69, 73, 125, 133 Holliman, Earl, 29 Holmes, Larry, 65 Holyfeld, Evander, 97 “Homecoming” (1952), 24 “Homecoming” (1954), 25 “Homer They Fall, The,” 90 Honeymooners, The, 10, 36 Hoop Life, The, 85 Hope, Bob, 31, 36 Hornsby, Rogers, 15 Hornung, Paul, 46 Horton, Robert, 27 Hosea, Bobby, 81 Houston Astros, 44 Houston Oilers, 46 Howard, Ken, 49 Howard, Terrence, 85, 117 “How Charlie Faust Won a Pennant for the Giants,” 16 Howe, Gordie, 90 Huffman, Felicity, 42, 98 Hulk Hogan’s Celebrity Championship Wrestling, 125 Hulk Hogan’s Rock ‘n’ Wrestling, 69 Hunt, Helen, 62, 68 Hunter, 66 Hunter, Holly, 82, 121 Husing, Ted, 14, 23 Hustle, 105

Index I Am the Greatest: The Adventures of Muhammad Ali, 47 I Married Joan, 10 “Idylls of a Running Back,” 40 “If I Die Before I Wake,” 67 Igali, Daniel, 126 Imperioli, Michael, 107 Imus, Don, 139 Incredible Hulk, The, 49 Indiana Hoosiers, 115 Indiana Pacers, 116 Indiana State University, 98 Indianapolis 500, 6 In Search of History, 95 Iron Ring, 134 It’s a Mile From Here to Glory, 42 It’s Good to Be Alive, 43 It’s Spring Training, Charlie Brown, 75, 146 Jackie Robinson’s Sports Classroom, 13 Jackpot Bowling, 26 Jackson, Jonathan, 92, 127 Jackson, Reggie, 60, 80, 196 Jackson, Samuel L., 86, 117–18 James, Dennis, 3, 5 Jane Wyman Presents the Fireside Theatre, 22 Janssen, David, 32, 35, 46 Jenkins, Dan, 61, 67, 121 Jenner, Bruce, 62, 83, 137 Jensen, Jackie, 17, 34 Jericho Mile, The, 52 Jesse Owens Returns to Berlin, 37, 96 Jesse Owens Story, The, 55 Jesse Ventura Story, The, 93 Jim Brown: All American, 108 Jim Nantz Remembers Augusta: The 1960 Masters, 26 Joe and Max, 118 Joe DiMaggio: The Final Chapter, 100 Joe DiMaggio: The Hero’s Life, 100 Joe DiMaggio’s Dugout, 11

Index Joe DiMaggio Show, The, 11 Joe Louis: American Hero . . . Betrayed, 120 Joe Namath Show, The, 39 Joe Palooka Story, The, 21 Joe Torre: Curveballs Along the Way, 75 Johnny Staccato, 20 Johnson, Ben, 124–25 Johnson, Earvin “Magic,” 49, 83, 86 Johnson, George Clayton, 30 Johnson, Jack, 117 Johnson, Rudi, 116 “Joltin’ Joe DiMaggio” (song ), 100 Jones, Bobby, 56, 86 Jones, James Earl, 77, 88, 118 Jordan, Michael, 83, 84, 97, 98, 114, 121, 122, 123, 133 José Canseco: My Life on Steroids, 106 Journey of the African American Athlete, The, 86 Jump In!, 120 Junction Boys, The, 39, 107 Kaiser Aluminum Hour, 14, 25 Kaline, Al, 59 Kansas City Chiefs, 39 Karras, Alex, 42, 52 Keaton, Buster, 9–10 Keith, Brian, 20 Kellerman, Sally, 64 Kelly, Gene, 34 Kemp, Jack, 83 Ken Burns’ Baseball, 78 Kentucky Derby, 95, 131 Kentucky Kid, The, 129 Kerrigan, Nancy, 91–92, 128 Kid From Left Field, The, 44, 74 Kid Gloves, 13 “Killer Instinct, The,” 48 “Killer’s Wife,” 21 Killy, Jean-Claude, 56 Kiner, Ralph, 11 King, Billie Jean, 94, 121–22, 131 King, Don, 65, 87, 110

175 King, Stephen, 106 King of the Olympics: The Lives and Loves of Avery Brundage, 56 Kingsley, Ben, 81 Kinoy, Ernest, 40, 51 Kirkland, Pee Wee, 113, 117 Kirkwood, Joe Jr., 21 Kissinger, Henry, 116 Kiss Shot, 71 Klein, Chris, 117 Klores, Dan, 116–17 Klugman, Jack, 30, 89 Knievel, Evel, 128–29 Knievel, Robbie, 129 Knievel’s Wild Ride, 129 Knight, Bob, 115 Knight, Shirley, 23, 32 Knight Rider, 129 Knockout (1946), 3 Knockout (1953), 22 “Knockout, The,” 42 Knute Rockne and His Fighting Irish, 80–81 “K.O. Kid, The,” 65 “K.O. Kitty,” 10 Koch, Edward, 65 Kopple, Barbara, 87 Koufax, Sandy, 35, 78, 80, 99 Kraft Television Theatre, 5, 14, 15, 16 Kristofferson, Kris, 61 Kurt Browning: Life on the Edge, 93 Kwan, Michelle, 138 “Lady and the Prize Fighter, The,” 10 “Lady on Thursday at Ten, The,” 48 “Lady Was a Flop, The,” 26 Landon, Michael, 20, 22, 43, 51 Lang, Stephen, 94 LaPaglia, Anthony, 84 Larroquette, John, 84 Lasorda, Tommy, 58, 100 LaStarza, Roland, 24 “Last Night of a Jockey, The,” 30

176 “Last Out,The,” 16 “Last Round, The,” 20, 31 Lavagetto, Cookie, 76 Lazzeri, Tony, 43 Leachman, Cloris, 13 League of Their Own, A (documentary) 61 League of Their Own, A (series), 75 “Leap of Faith,” 28 Learning the Ropes, 70 Leave It to Beaver, 35 Lee, Spike, 108 Lee, Canada, 12 LeFlore, Ron, 43 Leguizamo, John, 119 Leonard, Benny, 22 Leonard, Sheldon, 19, 21, 53 Leonard, Sugar Ray, 80, 120 Let’s Look at Sports, 4 Levinson, Barry, 77 Lewis, Jerry, 36, 96, 101 Life and Times of Carl Brewer, The, 127–28 Life and Times of Hank Greenberg, The, 99 “Life of Mickey Mantle, The,” 16 Life of Ryan, 129 “Like Father, Like Son,” 25 Lillehammer ’94: 16 Days of Glory, 96 “Little League,” 16 “Littlest Little Leaguer, The,” 17 Limbaugh, Rush, 139 Lindo, Delroy, 74 Lindsay, Ted, 90, 127 Lipinski, Tara, 128 Liston, Sonny, 47, 88–89, 101, 117 Little Mo, 50 Littler, Gene, 26 Little Vic, 53 Living End, The, 45 Lloyd, Chris Evert, 56 Lloyd, Earl, 117 Lo Bianco, Tony, 48, 52, 86

Index Lofton, Kenny, 98 Loggia, Robert, 75, 100 Lombardi, Vince, 39, 45–46, 108 Loneliest Runner, The, 51 “Long Distance Call,” 35 Long Gone, 59 “Long Walk Home, The,” 40 Lopez, Danny, 65 Lopez, Nancy, 56 Lord, Jack, 30 Loretta Claiborne Story, The, 124 Los Angeles Dodgers, 34, 35 Los Angeles Lakers, 86 Los Angeles Raiders, 70 Los Angeles Rams, 25, 52, 66 Louganis, Greg, 94–95 Lou Gehrig Story, The, 17 Louis, Joe, 2, 19, 24, 47, 73, 89, 117, 118–19, 120–21 Louisiana State University, 112 Love Affair: Eleanor and Lou Gehrig, A, 43 Love American Style, 30, 95 “Love and the Champ,” 47 “Love and the Hustler,” 30 Lovejoy, Frank, 15 Lucy Must Be Traded, 104 Lucy Show,The, 10 Lyman, Will, 96, 117, 131 Macht, Stephen, 47, 67 Mad Bull, 52 Madden, John, 83, 109 Madison Square Garden, 1, 2, 4, 6, 24, 51, 117 Madsen, Virginia, 59 Magic Hour, The, 86 “Magic Saturday,” 52 Magic vs. Bird: The 1979 NCAA Championship Game, 49 Maglie, Sal, 17 Maida, Tami, 62 “Mail Order Hero,” 45 Mailer, Norman, 109

Index Major League Baseball, 2, 13, 43, 58, 76–77, 78, 100, 103, 107 Major League Baseball Hometown Heroes, 107 Making of the NHL’s Mighty Ducks, The, 91 “Malcolm Takes a Shot?,” 86 Malcolm X, 117, 118 Malden, Karl, 55, 127 Mancini, Ray “Boom Boom,” 64–65, 119–20 Mandel, Loring, 25 Manigault, Earl “The Goat,” 84, 112 Man From Left Field, The, 33 Mann, Michael, 52 Man Named Mays, A, 33 “Man on Spikes,” 15 “Man’s Game, A,” 14 Mantegna, Joe, 74, 80, 104 Mantle, 77, 102 Mantle, Mickey, 16, 35, 39, 77, 78, 100, 102, 104 “Man Who Caught the Ball at Coogan’s Bluff, The,” 15 Man Who Lost Himself, The, 109 Marathon, 68 Maravich, Pete, 112 March Madness, 6, 114 Marciano, Rocky, 23–24, 46–47, 65 Maris, Roger, 102, 104, 122 Marsalis, Wynton, 89, 117, 119 Marshall, E. G., 16, 61 Marshall, Penny, 45, 61, 71 Martin, Billy, 43, 106 Marvin, Lee, 16, 30–31 Masters, The, 26, 87, 121 Matheson, Richard, 30–31 Matinee Theatre, 15, 25 Matthau, Walter, 44 Mauriello, Tami, 2 Mays, Willie, 33, 39, 45, 81, 100 Mayweather, Floyds, 134 McCarthy, Joe, 43 McDaniel, James, 116

177 McDougald, Gil, 18 McEnroe, John, 122 McEntire, Reba, 74 McGavin, Darren, 31, 40 McGill, Bruce, 61 McGraw, John, 16 McGraw, Tug, 58 McKay, Jim, 36, 38 McNeely, Jerry, 46 “Meal Ticket The” (1964), 31–32 “Meal Ticket, The” (1971), 48 Mean Street, 75 Meet McGraw, 15 Melendez, Bill, 33, 34, 75 “Memory in White,” 31, 151 Men Against Speed, 26 Mendelson, Lee, 33 Meredith, Don, 107 Messier, Mark, 67, 91 Miami Vice, 66 Michael Jordan: Air Time, 83–84 Michael Jordan: An American Hero, 83 Michelle Kwan: Princess on Ice, 138 Michener, James A., 56 Michigan State University, 49, 63 Michigan vs. Ohio State: The Rivalry, 111, 140 Mickey Mantle: A Self-Portrait, 34 Mighty Casey, The (opera), 16 Mighty Casey, The (1960), 30 Mighty Ducks, 90 Mighty Moose and the Quarterback Kid, 42, 52 “Mike Tyson: Fallen Champ,” 88 Miles, Vera, 16 Miller, Kathy, 68 Million Dollar Infield, 57 “Million-Dollar Rookie,” 15 Milner, Martin, 13, 30, 33, 35 Milton Berle Show, The, 10 Minor Leage/Major Games, 77–78 Miracle in Lane Two, 129 Miracle of Kathy Miller, The, 68

178 Miracle on Ice, 55, 127 Miracle on the 17th Green, 87 Mitchell, Thomas, 16 Modine, Matthew, 105 Monday Night Football, 28, 38, 107 Monday Night Mayhem, 107 Monday Night RAW, 69 Monkees, The, 32 “Monkees in the Ring,” 32 Monroe, Earl “The Pearl,” 84, 117 Montgomery, Elizabeth, 59 Moochie of the Little League, 21 Moochie of Pop Warner Football, 21 Moore, Archie, 30, 65 Morales, Esai, 30, 94 Moreno, Rita, 76 Moriarty, Michael, 51 Mother’s Courage: The Mary Thomas Story, A, 66 Movin’ On, 53 M Squad, 20 Muhammad Ali: King of the World, 117 Muhammad Ali: Made in Miami, 118 Muhammad Ali: Through the Eyes of the World, 118 Muhammad Ali: The Whole Story, 89 Muldowney, Shirley, 123 Mulligan, Robert, 22 Munson, Thurman, 106 Munsters, The, 32, 36 Murder at the World Series, 44 Murphy, Jimmy, 20 Murray, Don, 67 MVP: The Secret Lives of Hockey Wives, 128 My Boys, 110 My Sergei, 91 My Sister Hank, 42, 52 “My Son the Catcher,” 35 Nadia, 52 Nagano’98 Olympics: Bud Greenspan’s Stories of Honor and Glory, 96

Index Naked City, 22–23, 32, 40 Naked Sport, 96–97 Namath, Joe, 39, 45, 49, 83 Nancy Drew Mysteries, 48 Nantz, Jim, 26, 121 NASCAR, 36, 103, 122, 123, 124 NASCAR Angels, 123 NASCAR Driven to Win, 123 NASCAR in Primetime, 123 National Velvet, 29 National Women’s Professional Baseball League Games, 13 Navratilova, Martina, 94, 122 NBC, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 19, 20, 21,22, 25, 26, 29, 31, 33, 36, 39, 48, 49, 51, 57, 60, 62, 65, 66, 69, 74, 83, 85, 87, 91, 93, 98, 108, 111, 131, 135, 137, 138, 140 Nelson, Byron, 26, 86 Nettles, Graig, 58, 106 Net Worth, 90 Never Give Up: The Jimmy V Story, 84 “Never Hit a Pigeon,” 12 New Twilight Zone, 30, 47,60 New York Giants ( baseball), 6, 16, 45 New York Giants (football), 101, 140 New York Islanders, 90 New York Jets, 39–40 New York Knicks, 66, 113 New York Mets, 80, 106, 107 New York Rangers, 14, 31 New York Yankees, 3, 6, 18, 33, 43, 44, 61, 75, 78, 80, 101, 106 Newfield, Jack, 88 Newhart, Bob, 68, 112 Newman, Paul, 19, 21, 24, 25, 122 “Next Champ, The,” 10 Next Great Champ, The, 120 NHL Power Plays: All-Stars of the Game, 91 Nicklaus, Jack, 86, 121 Night Gallery, 48 Nikki, 126

Index Nimoy, Leonard, 20 Nimrod Nation, 115 Nine Innings From Ground Zero, 101 1986 Mets: A Year to Remember, 61 1972 Munich Olympics Revisited, 130 Norton, Ken, 65 Nouri, Michael, 60, 63 Nugent, Frank S., 16 Numero Uno, 56 Oakland A’s, 106 Oakland Raiders, 39–40 Oates, Warren, 30 Obama, Barack, 116, 119 O’Brian, Hugh, 40, 69 O’Connor, Glynnis, 50 October Madness: The World Series, 34 Oh, Sandra, 98 Ohio State University, 111 O. J.: A Study in Black and White, 111 O. J. Simpson: Juice on the Loose, 28, 46 O. J. Simpson Story, The, 81 Oklahoma City Dolls, The, 62 “Old MacDonald Had a Curve,” 14 Olympiad, The, 37, 96 Olympics, 27, 28, 36, 38, 43, 51, 52, 53, 56, 66, 70, 74, 83, 91, 93, 94, 95, 116, 118, 127, 128, 134, 135, 137 Omnibus, 16, 19 Once in a Lifetime: The Extraordinary Story of the New York Cosmos, 132 O’Neal, Ryan, 10, 82 O’Neal, Shaquille, 80 One in a Million: The Ron LeFlore Story, 43 One Special Victory, 84 One Tree Hill, 115 On Hallowed Ground: Streetball Champions of Rucker Park, 112–13 “Opponent, The,” 31 Oprah Winfrey Presents: Mitch Albom’s ‘For One More Day’, 106–7 “Other Mothers,” 86

179 “O’Toole From Moscow,” 15 Our Greatest Hopes, Our Worst Fears: The Tragedy of the Munich Games, 134 Owens, Jesse, 37, 96, 119, 124 Pabst Blue Ribbon, 23 Paige, Leroy “Satchel,” 57, 73, 74 Palance, Jack, 19, 20 Paley, William S., 141 Palmer, Arnold, 26, 86, 87, 121, 135 Palmer, Bud, 26 Paltrow, Bruce, 49 Parks, Michael, 40, 69 Passing Glory, 85 Past the Bleachers, 74 Patrick, Danica, 123 Patterson, Floyd, 88 Pavelich, Marty, 90 PBS, 42, 44, 45, 50, 56, 57, 61, 67, 78, 79, 80, 91, 96, 100, 102, 104, 116, 118, 130, 140 “Pee Wees Take Over, The,” 18 Peppard, George, 21, 66 Pepper, Barry, 122 Percy and Thunder, 88 Perfect Upset: The 1985 Villanova vs. Georgetown NCAA Championship, 114–15 Perkins, Anthony, 20 Perlman, Rhea, 91 Perry, William “Refrigerator,” 66 Pesky, Johnny, 79, 102 Pete Rose on Trial, 105 Petersen, William L., 59 Phenom, 94 Phil Silvers Show, The, 17 Philadelphia Eagles, 66, 82, 139 Philadelphia 76ers, 115 Philco Television Playhouse, 14, 24 Piccolo, Brian, 41 Picture Perfect: The Stories Behind the Greatest Photos in Sports, 101 Piersall, Jimmy, 20

180 Pigs vs. Freaks, 62 Piniella, Lou, 206 Pinstripe Power: The Story of the 1961 New York Yankees, 61 Piper, Rowdy Roddy, 6, 69, 93 Pirtle, Sue, 69 Pistol Pete: The Life and Times of Pete Maravich, 112 Pittsburgh Penguins, 90 Pittsburgh Pirates, 2, 78, 99, 102, 105 Pittsburgh Steelers, 39, 61, 70, 101 “Play Ball,” 35 Player, Gary, 121 Playhouse 90, 29, 24 Playing the Field: Sports and Sex in America, 121–22 Playmakers, 109 Play’s the Thing, The, 13 Pleshette, Suzanne, 48 Plimpton, George, 46 Plimpton: The Great Quarterback Sneak, 46 Plummer, Christopher, 68, 125 Poitier, Sidney, 19, 58 “Pool Hall Blues,” 58 Portman, Natalie, 124 Positively True Adventures of the Alleged Texas Cheerleader-Murdering Mom, The, 82 Power Play, 91 Powers, Jimmy, 5 Pride Against Prejudice: The Larry Doby Story, 102 Pride of the Yankees, The, 77 Prince of Tennis, The, 122 Prine, Andrew, 29 Profile: Legend in Granite, 45–46 Pro Football: Mayhem on a Sunday Afternoon, 34 Promise Kept: The Oksana Baiul Story, A, 92 “Pros and Cons,” 66 ProStars, 98 “Puncher and Judy,” 32 Punky Brewster, 65

Index “Punt, a Pass, and a Prayer, A,” 40 Push, 96 Put Up Your Dukes, 110 Quaid, Randy, 67–68 Quarry, Jerry, 48, 65 Quantum Leap, 57–58 Quarterback Princess, 62 Quiet Victory: The Charlie Wedemeyer Story, 63 Quincy, M. E., 89 Race of the Century, 124 Racing for Time, 52 Rafer Johnson Story, The, 37 Rag Tag Champs, The, 42 Randall, Tony, 62 Randolph, Willie, 106 Rashad, Ahmad, 83 Ray, Aldo, 10, 40 Reagan, Ronald, 15, 19, 35, 105 Real Sports with Bryant Gumbel, 97, 136 Reasoner, Harry, 37 Rebels of Oakland: The A’s, the Raiders, the ’70s, 101 Rebels With a Cause: The Story of the American Football League, 84 Rebound—The Legend of Earl “The Goat” Manigault, 84 Red Barber’s Corner, 7 “Redemption of a Champion,” 65 Redford, Robert, 96 Redgrave, Vanessa, 68 “Red Sanders Story, The,” 25 Red Sneakers, The, 115 Reed, Willis, 117 Reese, Pee Wee, 76, 100 Reflections on Ice: A Diary of Ladies’ Figure Skating, 93 Reiner, Carl, 45 Reiner, Rob, 45, 57 Reinsdorf, Jerry, 79 Remick, Lee, 33 “Requiem for a Heavyweight,” 20

Index “Requiem for a Lightweight,” 90 Resurrection Blvd., 118 Retton, Mary Lou, 96, 131, 138 “Return of Gentleman Jim, The,” 19 Reverse of the Curse of the Bambino, The, 101 Reynolds, Burt, 48, 61, 70, 74 Rhames, Ving, 88, 109, 110 Rice, Jerry, 83 Richards, Bob, 28 Richards, Dr. Renée, 68 Richardson, Micheal Ray, 113 Richardson, Willie, 39 Rickey, Branch, 75, 97 Rickles, Don, 10 Rigby, Cathy, 71, 138 Riggs, Bobby, 121 “Right Hand of God,” 58 “Ring of Honor,” 65–66 Ring of Passion, 47 “Ringside Padre,” 20 “Ring With the Velvet Ropes, The,” 58 Rise and Walk: The Dennis Byrd Story, 81 Ritter, John, 57 Rizzuto, Phil, 18, 43 Robards, Jason, 77 Robert Montgomery Presents, 19, 25 Roberto: The Roberto Clemente Story, 78 Robertson, Cliff, 31 Robertson, Oscar, 117 Robinson, Eddie, 62, 111 Robinson, Frank, 115 Robinson, Jackie, 11, 42, 57, 73–74, 75, 76, 86, 100, 102, 105, 113 Robinson, Sugar Ray, 32, 65, 89 Rock, Chris, 113 Rodeo Girl, 69 Rodman, Dennis, 80, 84 Rodman, Howard, 13, 35 Rogers, Wayne, 55 Roller Derby, 5, 23, 53, 95, 132–33 Roller Girls, The, 53 Roller Jam, 95 Romero, George A., 28, 46

181 Ronnie & Julie, 92 Rookie of the Year (1955), 16 Rookie of the Year (1970), 42 Rooney, Art, 62 Rooney, Mickey, 25, 26, 29, 30 Rose, Pete, 58, 74, 83, 98, 105–6 Roseborough, Johnny, 35 Rose Bowl, 4, 17, 39, 43, 52 Rosenbloom, “Slapsie” Maxie, 18–19, 31 Ross, Katharine, 69 Route 66, 13, 31, 33, 35 Roy, George, 76–77, 78, 101, 102, 111, 112, 114, 116, 124, 132 Roy Rogers Show, The, 20 Rozelle, Pete, 97 Rudolph, Wilma, 51 Ruffian, 131 Rumble in the Jungle, 47, 117 Run for the Dream: The Gail Devers Story, 94 “Running for Honor,” 58 Runyon, Damon, 18–19, 64 Russell, Bill, 113,153 Ruth, Babe, 43, 56, 57, 74, 78, 97, 99, 101, 104 Saint, Eva Marie, 14 Salem, Kario, 88 Salmi, Albert, 20 Salt Lake 2002: Stories of Olympic Glory, 130 San Diego Chargers, 116 San Diego Padres, 44 Sandomir, Richard, 93, 101, 119 Sands, Diana, 45 San Francisco Giants, 35, 45 Sarazan, Gene, 27 Sarnoff, David, 141 Saturday Night’s Main Event, 89 “Saturday Story,” 25 Sayers, Gale, 41 “Say Hey [The Willie Mays Song],” 100

182 Schaap, Dick, 39, 97 Schenkel, Chris, 14, 39 Scherick, Edgar J., 38 Schlitz Playhouse of Stars, 16, 19–20, 21, 26 Schmeling, Max, 47, 118–19 Schreiber, Liev, 76, 78, 84, 96, 199, 101, 102, 111, 113, 116, 117, 121 Schulberg, Budd, 19, 31 Schulman, Arnold, 20 Schwarzenegger, Arnold, 96 Science of Lance Armstrong, The, 129 Scott, George C., 88 Scourby, Alexander, 45 Screen Director’s Playhouse, 16 “Screwball, The,” 13 Scully, Vin, 35 Seabiscuit: An American Legend, 130 Seabiscuit: The Making of a Legend, 130 Season on the Brink, A, 115 Seasons of Change: The African-American Athlete, 101–2 Seattle Supersonics, 114 Seaver, Tom, 58 Second Serve, 68 See How She Runs, 51 Seinfeld, 80 Semi-Tough, 61 Serling, Rod, 14, 15, 19, 20, 30–31, 48 “Shadow of a Hero,” 35 “Shadow of the Champ,” 22 Shaw, David, 14, 24 Shaw, Irwin, 24, 55 Shell’s Wonderful World of Golf, 26, 27 Shining Season, A, 51–52 Shirts & Skins: The Sociology of Basketball, 113–14 Shirts/Skins, 49 Shot Heard ‘Round the World, 100 Showtime, 75, 81, 84, 85, 92, 93, 95, 102, 103, 104, 105, 112, 116, 118, 130, 136 Silent Victory: The Kitty O’Neil Story, 52

Index Silliphant, Stirling, 48, 62, 106 Silver Odyssey: 25 Years of Astros Baseball, A, 61 Silver, Ron, 109, 121 Silvers, Phil, 17, 33, 60 Simpson, O. J., 28, 46, 48, 56, 63, 81, 109, 110, 111 Simpsons, The, 90 Sinatra, Frank, 38 Singer, Marc, 46, 60 60 Minutes, 97, 132 61*, 104, 122 Sizemore, Tom, 105 Skatebirds, The, 129–30 Skating Rink, The, 42 Skelton, Red, 9–10 Skowran, Moose, 35 SkyWalker: The David Thompson Story, 114 Snead, Sam, 26, 36, 86 Snider, Duke, 100, 101 Snow in August, 105 Snyder, Jimmy “The Greek,” 139 Something for Joey, 46 Sonny Liston: The Mysterious Life and Death of a Champion, 88–89 Sophisticated Gents, The, 62 Sorvino, Paul, 75, 85 Soul, David, 70 Soul of the Game, 74 Spassky, Boris, 50 Special Gift, A, 42 Special Olympics, 53 Spencer, Brian “Spinner,” 90 Spike TV, 93, 95, 124, 133–34 Spitz, Mark, 131, 137, 140 SportsCentury, 97 Sporting Chance, 82 Sports in America, 56 Sports Night, 98 Sports on the Silver Screen, 96 Sports Pages, The, 112 Springsteen, Bruce, 100

Index Stallone, Sylvester, 13, 65, 120 Stanley Cup, 39, 67, 91 Stapleton, Jean, 43 Starr, First Baseman, 33 Steinbrenner, George, 75, 80, 82, 106 “Steel,” 30 Stern, Steven, 61, 76, 101, 102, 112, 116, 124 Steven Spielberg’s Amazing Stories, 59 Stewart, James, 16, 33 St. Louis Browns, 2, 59 Stockers, The, 70 Stockwell, Dean, 57 Stoney Burke, 29–30 Stormin’ Home, 70 Straightaway, 29 Strangers on a Train, 69 Strauss, Peter, 52 Strawberry, Darryl, 79, 98 Streak, The, 126 Streep, Meryl, 127 Strikeforce on NBC, 136 Strongest Man in the World, The, 27 Studio One, 13, 15, 25 Sugar Ray Robinson: The Bright Lights and Dark Shadows of a Champion, 89 Sukarchuk, Larry, 90 Sullivan, John L., 22 Summerall, Pat, 39 Sumners, Rosalynn, 128 “Sunday Punch, The,” 19 Super Bowl, 39, 43, 46 103, 111, 140 Superdome, 46 Susskind, David, 14 Sutherland, Kiefer, 124 Swan Song, 70 Swayze, Patrick, 62 Sydney 2000: Stories of Gold from Down Under, 130, 130 Sylvester, Harold, 85 Tack Reynolds, 40 Tag Team, 93

183 “Take Me Out to the Ball Game” (1976), 34 “Take Me Out to the Ball Game” (1984), 45 “Take Me Up to the Ball Game,” 60 “Talkin’ Baseball” (song), 100 Tall Hopes, 85 Taylor, Don, 25 Taylor, Elizabeth, 29 Teammates: A Portrait of a Friendship, The, 101–2 Ted Williams: A Baseball Life, 78–79 Tennis Channel, The, 136 “Ten O’Clock Tiger,” 31 Terrible Joe Moran, 65 Terry Fox Story, The, 68 Texaco Star Theatre, 10 Texas Rangers, 106 Thank You, Jackie Robinson, 42 That Championship Season, 85 Thiesmann, Joe, 73 This Is a Game, Ladies, 139 Thomas, Isaiah, 66 Thompson, David, 114 Thomson, Bobby, 3, 101 “3,” 116, 130 Three on an Island, 32 :03 From Gold, 116 Three Stooges, 9 Thrilla in Manila, 47, 51 Thunder Alley, 94 Tiger at 30, 131 Tiger Town, 59 Tiger Woods Story, The, 87 Tilden, Bill, 56 Tillis, Mel, 70 Tillman, Pat, 98 “T.K.O.” (drama), 13 “T.K.O.” (episode), 65 TNT, 68, 74, 88, 89, 95, 107, 112,113 Today Show, The, 43 Tonya & Nancy: The Inside Story, 91–92

184 Top of the Hill, 55 Top Views in Sports, 4 Torn, Rip, 85 Toronto Maple Leafs, 90, 127 Touched by an Angel, 47 Tragedy to Triumph: The Maryland Terrapin Odyssey, 114 Trapped in a Purple Haze, 127 Trevino, Lee, 86, 87 Triumph and Tragedy: The Ray Mancini Story, 119 Triumph of the Heart: The Ricky Bell Story, A, 80 Trouble With Baseball, The, 79 True Story of Seabiscuit, The, 130 Tunney, Gene, 64 Turturro, John, 106, 107 TV’s Reader’s Digest, 16 Twentieth Century-Fox Hour, 26 21 Hours in Munich, 53 Twilight Zone, The, 30 Two-A-Days, 110 “Two-Hundred-Mile-an-Hour Fast Ball, The,” 60 Tyson, 88 Tyson, Cicely, 51 Tyson, Mike, 88 UCLA Dynasty, The, 116 Ueker, Bob, 60 Ultimate Fighter, The, 133 Ultimate Muscle: The Kinnikuman Legacy, 126 Undefeated, 119 Underwood, Blair, 75 Unforgivable Blackness: The Rise and Fall of Jack Johnson, 119 Unitas, 83 Unitas, Johnny, 83 United States Steel Hour, 15, 21 University of Michigan, 101 University of Tennessee, 86 Urich, Robert, 61, 63, 87

Index Valentine, Bobby, 106 Valenzuela, Fernando, 58 Valvano, Jim, 84 Van Brocklin, Norm, 52 Vance, Courtney B., 88, 118 Vancouver Canucks, 51 Van Dyke, Dick, 18, 32 Van Peebles, Mario, 80 Van Peebles, Melvin, 62 Vega$, 47 Ventura, Jesse, 35, 93 Venturi, Ken, 121 Victory & Valor: Special Olympics World Games, 96 “Viva, Paco!,” 20 Wacky Races, 40 Wagner, Honus, 105 Wait ’Til Next Year: The Saga of the Chicago Cubs, 102 Wait ’Til This Year, 102 Walcott, Jersey Joe, 12, 24 Wallace, Mike, 17, 34, 37 Wallach, Eli, 22 Walton, Bill, 113, 114 Warden, Jack, 22, 30, 33, 35, 41, 44, 68 Washington, Denzel, 48, 51, 78 Washington Redskins, 96 Waters, Ethel, 12, 19 Watson, Tom, 87 Waterston, Sam, 64 Waverly Wonders, The, 49 Way It Was, The, 42–43 Wayne, John, 16, 44 Wayne, Patrick, 16, 33, 53 Way Out Games, 84 Weapons of Mass Distraction, 81–82 Webb, Jack, 50 Wedemeyer, Charlie, 63 Weissmuller, Johnny, 137 Wepner, Chuck, 88 Westinghouse Desilu Playhouse, 10, 18, 23

Index West Point Story, 20, 25 Whatever Happened to Micheal Ray?, 113 “What If I’m Gay?,” 67 When Billie Beat Bobby, 121 When It Was a Game, 76–77 Where’s Huddles?, 41 Whitaker, Jack, 27, 39 White, Chalky, 2 White Shadow, The, 49 Whitmore, James, 19 Whole New Ballgame, A, 76–77 Whose Curse Is Worse? Red Sox and Cubs on Trial, 107 “Who’s on First?”(skit), 13 Wide Country, The, 29 Wide World of Sports, 9 Wildfire, 130 Wild Ride to Super Bowl I, The, 111 Willard, Jess, 64 Williams III, Clarence, 42 Williams, Billy Dee, 41, 88 Williams, Serena, 80, 86, 122, 123 Williams, Ted, 17, 38–39, 58, 78–79, 102 Williams, Treat, 64 Williams, Venus, 86, 122 Williamson, Mykalti, 74 Willie Mays and the Say-Hey Kid, 45 Willing to Kill: The Texas Cheerleader Story, 82 Wills, Maury, 59 Wilma, 51 Wilson, Flip, 30, 47 Winfield, Paul, 43, 62, 88 “Winner by Decision,” 19 Winner Never Quits, A, 59 Winning Season, The, 105 Winning Tradition, A, 43 Winters, Jonathan, 30 Wismer, Harry, 23

185 Witt, Katarina, 128, 138 Wolper, David L., 28, 34, 37, 46, 86–87 WonderWorks, 67 Woodard, Alfre, 66 Woods, Tiger, 87, 121, 123, 132, 133, 139 Woodward, Joanne, 24, 25, 51 Workin’ for Peanuts, 59 World Championship Golf, 26 World Series, 6, 11,40, 43, 44, 75, 77, 105, 107 World Wide Wrestling, 53–54 “Wrestling Match,The,” 9 Wrestling With Destiny: The Life and Times of Daniel Igali, 126 Wright, Mickey, 86 Wuhl, Robert, 91, 98 WWE (World Wrestling Entertainment), 14, 93, 125 WWF (World Wrestling Federation), 14, 35, 93 WWF Prime-Time Wrestling, 69 WWW Superstars of Wrestling, 69 Wynn, Ed, 9, 63 Yamaguchi, Kristi, 128, 138 Yankee Stadium, 2, 118, 120 Yogi Berra: Deja Vu All Over Again, 79 You Are There, 17, 22 Young, Alan, 15 Young, Gig, 19 Young, Loretta, 16, 22 You’re in the Super Bowl, Charlie Brown, 83 You’ve Got a Friend, 129 Zaharias, George, 50, 52 Zale, Tony, 2, 43 Zen of Bobby V, The, 106 “0 for 37,” 14 Zimbalist, Stephanie, 55

About the Author ALVIN H. MARILL has spent his career in broadcasting, direct marketing, the recording industry, and publishing. He is the author of more than two-dozen books dealing with stage, screen, and television, including the encyclopedic Movies Made for Television, long considered the definitive compilation of the genre. His recent Praeger volume Big Pictures on the Small Screen was released in 2007. Among his other works are More Theatre: Stage to Screen to Television, The Complete Films of Edward G. Robinson, Robert Mitchum on the Screen, Samuel Goldwyn Presents, and career studies of Sidney Poitier, The Three Stooges, and Tommy Lee Jones. Marill has been executive editor for CBS Entertainment, general editor of The 500 Best American Films to Buy, Rent or Videotape, television editor for Films in Review, and contributing editor of Leonard Maltin’s annual Movie and Video Guide. He is a charter member of the Television Movie Hall of Fame.