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TV Titan Roone Arledge Dies
Roone Arledge wasn't a household name. But the show's he masterminded were.
Arledge, the television executive responsible for creating Monday Night Football, Nightline and the ABC's Wide World of Sports' mantra "the thrill of victory and agony of defeat," died Thursday at New York's Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center. He was 71.
ABC says Arledge succumbed to complications from cancer.
"Roone Arledge revolutionized television and with it the way people see and understand the world," said ABC News boss David Westin, who replaced Arledge as the division's president in 1997. "He was our leader and our friend, and we will miss his passion and his will to make us all better than we were."
Veteran broadcaster Jim McKay credited Arledge with "putting the focus on the human being involved in sports."
As president of ABC sports and later, for 10 years, simultaneously president of the network's news division, Arledge profoundly influenced both the look and content of both milieus, injecting journalism into sports and entertainment pizzazz into news reporting. He pioneered the use of slo-mo replay and heart-warming profiles of Olympic athletes. He made Howard Cosell famous, Ted Koppel important and Diane Sawyer rich. He won 35 Emmys. In 1990, Life magazine named him one of 100 most important Americans of the 20th century. In 1994, Sports Illustrated placed him third behind only Muhammad Ali and Michael Jordan on a list of the 40 most influential sports figures of the previous 40 years.
Arledge grew up in Long Island and graduated from Columbia College. He worked for five years at NBC before becoming an ABC sports producer in 1960.
In his early days at the Alphabet net, Arledge reshaped NCAA football broadcasts through modern production techniques, bringing the game up-close and personal to the viewer. He was the first producer to demand that networks, rather than the sports leagues, approve announcers, which led to opinionated voices like Cosell's occupying the booth. In 1961, he created ABC's Wide World of Sports and in 1970, Monday Night Football.
The first Olympic Games he supervised was in 1964, the last in 1988, the most memorable, Munich 1972, in which terrorist killed Israeli athletes. Arledge became president of the sports division in 1968.
Nine years later, he was the controversial appointee to head up the net's then struggling news division.
"People in news were outraged that I hadn't been a reporter or worked my way up. The newspaper articles were brutal," he later recalled.
But in typical fashion he perservered and pioneered, launching 20/20 and PrimeTime Live. He revived the Sunday morning political chat show This Week by hiring seasoned newsman David Brinkley. In 1979, when the hostage crisis in Iran began, he thrust a news program anchored by the up-and-coming Koppel into the 11.30 p.m. slot usually given to affiliates. The half-hour evolved into Nightline. He put Peter Jennings in the World News Tonight anchor desk. He gave Sawyer a lot of money to become one of his news stars.
Arledge was bumped up to chairman in 1997, when the network's news ratings were slipping and budget cuts were rife, and he retired the following year. But the look and feel--and many of the faces--he brought to sports and news remain his on-air legacy today.
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