Sports programming on ABC is provided on occasion, primarily on weekend afternoons; since 2006, the ABC Sports division has been merged, with all sports telecasts on ABC being produced in association with sister cable network ESPN under the branding ESPN on ABC. While ABC has, in the past, aired notable sporting events such as the NFL's Monday Night Football, and various college football bowl games (including, most prominently for a period, the Bowl Championship Series), general industry trends and changes in rights have prompted reductions in sports broadcasts on broadcast television (the BCS's successor, the College Football Playoff and national championship, air exclusively on ESPN).
ABC is the broadcast television rightsholder of the National Basketball Association (NBA), with its package (under the NBA on ESPN branding) traditionally beginning with its Christmas Day games, followed by a series of Sunday afternoon games through the remainder of the season, weekend playoff games, and all games of the NBA Finals. ABC is the broadcast television rightsholder of the National Hockey League (NHL), with its package (under the NHL on ESPN branding). In this deal, ABC broadcasts up to ten regular season games (mostly afternoon), the NHL All-Star Game and four Stanley Cup Finals. During college football season, ABC typically carries an afternoon doubleheader on Saturdays, along with the primetime Saturday Night Football. ABC also airs coverage of selected bowl games. The Saturday afternoon lineup outside of football season typically features airings of ESPN Films documentaries or other studio programs under the banner ESPN Sports Saturday, while Sunday afternoons usually feature either brokered programming, or encore and burn-off airings of ABC programs.
1950s
Early beginnings as Sports Programs, Inc.
Widely credited as a pioneer in network sports broadcasting, Edgar Scherick created the television program ABC's Wide World of Sports at his company Sports Programs, Inc. which he started in 1956 with $600.00. Scherick had formed this company after leaving CBS when the network would not make him the head of sports programming, choosing instead Bill MacPhail, a former baseball public-relations agent. Before ABC Sports even became a formal division of the network, Scherick and ABC programming chief Tom Moore pulled off multiple programming deals involving the most popular American sporting events.
While Scherick wasn't interested in "For Men Only," he recognized the talent Roone Arledge had. Arledge realized ABC was the organization he was looking to join. The lack of a formal organization would offer him the opportunity to claim real power when the network matured. So, he signed on with Scherick as an assistant producer.
Several months before ABC began broadcasting NCAA college football games, Arledge sent Scherick a remarkable memo, filled with youthful exuberance, and television production concepts which sports broadcasts have adhered to since. Previously, network sporting broadcasts had consisted of simple set-ups and focused on the game itself. The genius of Arledge in this memo was not that he offered another way to broadcast the game to the sports fan. Arledge recognized television had to take the sports fan to the game. In addition, Arledge realized that the broadcasts needed to attract, and hold the attention of women viewers. At age 29 on September 17, 1960, he put his vision into reality with ABC's first NCAA college football broadcast from Birmingham, Alabama, between Alabama Crimson Tide and the Georgia Bulldogs won by Alabama, 21–6. That same year, ABC began broadcasting games of the fledgling American Football League and used the same innovative techniques in their broadcasts. Sports broadcasting has not been the same since.
Earliest coverage of the National Football League In 1948 and 1950, ABC televised the NFL Championship Game. Harry Wismer provided commentary for the game in 1948 game and the game in 1955 joined by Red Grange and Joe Hasel. Since the game was played in Los Angeles, there was no network telecast of the 1951 NFL Championship Game because at that time there was no way to send live television programs from the West Coast to the East Coast and vice versa.
ABC first broadcast regular season NFL games in 1953. At the time, they only broadcast Chicago Bears home games and Chicago Cardinals home games. Beginning in 1954, ABC added Washington Redskins home games. In ABC's final year of their initial go around with the National Football League, they added Los Angeles Rams and San Francisco 49ers games (for the Pacific Time Zone affiliates) to go along with their coverage of the Bears and Cardinals. Wire accounts found in newspaperarchive.com indicated that the Washington-Philadelphia game in Week 2 of the 1953 season, was to have been regionally televised by ABC, but the cables needed for the telecast never arrived. The articles said that NFL Commissioner Bert Bell was "fuming" over the incident.
ABC's relationship with the NFL at this point pretty much ended when CBS began carrying regular season games across its network nationwide in 1956. This came off the heels of the NFL's previous principal network television partner, the DuMont Network suspending its operations. Less than five years later however, ABC became the initial network television partner for the American Football League (AFL). The deal called for ABC to broadcast approximately 37 regular season games, the AFL Championship Game and the AFL All-Star Game. These games were typically broadcast regionally on 15 consecutive Sundays and on Thanksgiving Day. This became the first ever cooperative television plan for professional football, in which the proceeds of the contract were divided equally among member clubs; the National Football League would follow suit in 1961, a move that required Congress to pass the Sports Broadcasting Act of 1961 to accommodate such collective broadcasting contracts.
Creating the Major League Baseball Game of the Week In , Scherick broached a Saturday Game of the Week, sports television's first network series. At the time, ABC was labeled a "nothing network" that had fewer outlets than CBS or NBC. ABC also needed paid programming or "anything for bills" as Scherick put it. At first, ABC hesitated at the idea of a nationally televised regular season baseball program. ABC wondered how exactly the Game of the Week would reach television in the first place and who would notice if it did? Also, Major League Baseball barred the Game of the Week from airing within 50 miles of any ballpark. Major League Baseball according to Scherick, insisted on protecting local coverage and didn't care about national appeal. ABC, though, did care about the national appeal and claimed that "most of America was still up for grabs."
In April 1953, Edgar Scherick set out to sell teams rights but instead, only got the Philadelphia Athletics, Cleveland Indians, and Chicago White Sox to sign on. These were not "national" broadcast contracts since they were assembled through negotiations with individual teams to telecast games from their home parks. It was until the Sports Broadcasting Act of 1961, that antitrust laws barred "pooled rights" television contracts negotiated with a central league broadcasting authority.
In , ABC earned an 11.4 rating for their Game of the Week telecasts. Blacked-out cities had 32% of households. In the rest of the United States, 3 in 4 television sets in use watched Dizzy Dean and Buddy Blattner (or backup announcers Bill McColgan and Bob Finnegan) call the games for ABC. CBS took over the Saturday Game in 1955 (the rights were actually set up through the Falstaff Brewing Corporation) retaining Dean/Blattner and McColgan/Finnegan as the announcing crews (as well as Gene Kirby, who produced the Dean/Blattner games and alternated with them on play-by-play) and adding Sunday coverage in . As Edgar Scherick said, "In '53, no one wanted us. Now teams begged for "Game"'s cash."
In , ABC broadcast the best-of-three playoff series (to decide the National League pennant) between the Milwaukee Braves and Los Angeles Dodgers. The cigarette company L&M was in charge of all of the telecasts. George Kell and Bob DeLaney were the announcers.
1960s
Becoming ABC Sports and the birth of Wide World of Sports In February 1960, Scherick sold Sports Programs to ABC for $500,000 in ABC stock, where it became ABC Sports, the sports division of the network. With the acquisition, Scherick was appointed head of the ABC Sports division, then Vice President in charge of Network Sales.
Despite the production values he brought to NCAA college football, Scherick wanted low-budget (as in inexpensive broadcasting rights) sports programming that could attract and retain an audience. He hit upon the idea of broadcasting track and field events sponsored by the Amateur Athletic Union. While Americans were not exactly fans of track and field events, Scherick figured Americans understood games.
So in January 1961, Scherick called Arledge into his office, and asked him to attend the annual AAU board of governors meeting. While he was shaking hands, Scherick said, if the mood seemed right, might he cut a deal to broadcast AAU events on ABC? It seemed a tall assignment, but as Scherick said years later, "Roone was a gentile and I was not." Arledge came back with a deal for ABC to broadcast all AAU events for $50,000 a year.
Next, Scherick and Arledge divided up their NCAA college football sponsor list. They then telephoned their sponsors and said, "Advertise on our new sports show coming up in April, or forget about buying commercials on NCAA college football this fall." The two persuaded enough sponsors to advertise, though it took them to the last day of a deadline imposed by ABC programming to do it.
Wide World of Sports suited Scherick's plans exactly. By exploiting the speed of jet transportation and flexibility of videotape, Scherick was able to undercut NBC and CBS's advantages in broadcasting live sporting events. In that era, with communications nowhere near as universal as they are today, ABC was able to safely record events on videotape for later broadcast without worrying about an audience finding out the results.
Arledge, his colleague Chuck Howard, and Jim McKay (who left CBS for this opportunity) made up the show on a week-by-week basis the first year it was broadcast. Arledge had a genius for the dramatic story line that unfolded in the course of a game or event. McKay's honest curiosity and reporter's bluntness gave the show an emotional appeal which attracted viewers who might not otherwise watch a sporting event.
But more importantly from Arledge's perspective, Wide World of Sports allowed him to demonstrate his ability as an administrator as well as producer. Arledge did not gain a formal title as president of ABC Sports until 1968, even though Scherick left his position to assume a position of vice president for programming at ABC in 1964.
During its initial season in the spring and summer of 1961, Wide World of Sports was initially broadcast from 5 p.m. to 7 p.m. Eastern Time on Saturdays. Beginning in 1962, it was pushed to 5 to 6:30 pm, and later to 4:30 to 6 pm. Eastern Time to allow ABC affiliates in the Eastern and Central Time Zones to carry local early-evening newscasts.
Broadcasting the American Football League and MLB (again)