Jim McKay, Pioneer Sports Broadcaster, Dies at 86
Jim McKay, the genial ABC sports broadcaster who covered 10 Olympic Games for the network over 24 years and was the voice of the celebrated sports anthology series “Wide World of Sports” for its first 25, died Saturday at his country estate in Monkton, Md. He was 86.
He died of natural causes, said LeslieAnne Wade, a spokeswoman for CBS Sports, where Mr. McKay’s son, Sean McManus, is the president.
Mr. McManus said his father, who hosted and commented on Triple Crown races for ABC, might have had only one regret: missing Big Brown’s chance on Saturday to be the first winner of the Triple Crown since 1978.
Mr. McKay was an optimist who left a feeling of trust. In a business in which hype was the norm, he became a calm, low-key storyteller, leaving analysis and brickbats to such co-workers as Dick Button, Peggy Fleming, Donna de Varona and Bill Hartack.
Emotion occasionally slipped through objectivity. After an American athlete had won a gold medal in the 1984 Los Angeles Olympics, Mr. McKay said: “If I said I was an objective reporter, I’d be lying through my teeth. I think when an American wins, you’re excited. And why not?”
No matter. As Peter Alfano wrote in The New York Times during those Olympics, television allowed Mr. McKay “to play Uncle Sam for two weeks.”
Mr. McKay’s sincerity came through. Bob Costas of NBC Sports, a younger-generation sports broadcaster, once said: “Jim McKay had a very important quality. You never felt what he expressed wasn’t genuine. You never felt his reaction was, What’s called for here is a tear. You never had a sense that he professed to be moved, and when they went to a commercial he blew his nose.”
His professionalism and sensitivity melded in 1972. During the Munich Olympics, as he left the hotel sauna and was about to go into the swimming pool on his only day off, he received word that Arab terrorists had invaded the Israeli living quarters in the Olympic Village. He hurried to the studio, and for 16 consecutive hours he anchored ABC’s extraordinary news coverage, with field reporting from Peter Jennings, Howard Cosell and others.
The episode ended with the murder of 11 Israeli athletes, coaches and trainers. When that word reached Mr. McKay, he looked into the camera, and said, “They’re all gone.”
When ABC finally signed off, Mr. McKay, physically and emotionally spent, returned to his hotel room. Only then did he realize he had been wearing a wet swimsuit beneath his trousers.
The next day, Mr. McKay received this cable from an old CBS colleague: “Dear Jim, today you honored yourself, your network and your industry. Walter Cronkite.”
Mr. McKay’s work at Munich won him an Emmy Award for news coverage and the George Polk Memorial Award. Through the years, he won 13 Emmys.
Mr. McKay’s surname was really McManus, which he used on his passport and for hotel reservations. He was born in Philadelphia and moved to Baltimore at age 13. In 1943, he received a bachelor’s degree from Loyola College in Baltimore. He served in the Navy from 1943 to 1946, including a period in which he captained a minesweeper escorting convoys from Trinidad to Brazil.
In 1946 and 1947, he was a police reporter for The Baltimore Evening Sun before being shifted to the newspaper’s new television station as a broadcaster, writer and producer. In 1950, when he moved to New York to host a new CBS daily 90-minute variety show, “The Real McKay,” he changed his television name and became the real McKay.
The next decade brought television stints at WCBS-TV and the CBS network as a weatherman, a public affairs moderator, a game show host and a sports broadcaster. He covered the Masters golf tournament and did play-by-play of Ivy League football games.
Mr. McKay’s first Olympics came in 1960, before the color-television growth and before satellites could transmit images instantly around the world. CBS had videotapes flown daily from the Rome Olympics to New York’s Idlewild Airport (now known as John F. Kennedy International), where a remote broadcast unit put the videotape on the air while Mr. McKay narrated from a studio at Grand Central Terminal.
In 1961, Roone Arledge, the executive producer of ABC Sports, induced Mr. McKay to move to ABC to host the new “Wide World of Sports,” which became the most-honored and longest-running anthology series. Week after week, he truly spanned the globe, more than five million miles in all, to cover boxing (including 19 Muhammad Ali fights), skiing, soccer, gymnastics, track and field, figure skating, soccer, rodeo, horse racing, cycling, demolition derby, Eiffel Tower climbs and more.
In the early years of the series, a promoter demanded $100,000 for the rights to cliff diving in Acapulco. Mr. McKay moved in and offered the divers $10 each. They accepted.
In recent years, Mr. McKay owned racehorses and lived in a 19th century farmhouse in the horse country of Monkton, north of Baltimore. His most recent work including working as a commentator, with Mr. Costas, for NBC’s coverage of the 2002 Winter Olympics from Salt Lake City, and writing and narrating a documentary about himself for HBO.
He is survived by his wife of 59 years, the former Margaret Dempsey, a former columnist for The Baltimore Evening Sun; his son, Sean, the president of CBS News and Sports; a daughter, Mary Guba, of Sparks, Md.; and three grandchildren.
“Because of the profession I’m in, not a day goes by when someone doesn’t stop me and say, ‘I admire your father’ or ‘I loved his work,’ ” Mr. McManus said. “That tells you a lot about the kind of man he was.”
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