Busy Sports News Day . . . and I Missed Most of It

I love umpiring softball, but sometimes it does have its disadvantages. Today was a very sports news day, and I'm just learning about most of it now. Big Brown finished dead last in the Belmont Stakes, forcing horse racing enthusiasts to wait yet another year for a Triple Crown winner. Ana Ivanovic won the women's singles championship at the French Open. In a matter of hours, Rafael Nadal and Roger Federer will face off against each other for the third consecutive year. The most important sports news of the day, though, does not involve an athlete, team, or coach. It, unfortunately, is the news of Jim McKay's death.

For 37 years, McKay spanned the globe to bring us a constant variety of sport on ABC's Wide World of Sports. Though he may be best remembered as the host of WWS broadcasts and twelve Olympic broadcasts (including anchoring the coverage of the 1972 Munich hostage crisis), McKay is--arguably--the most underrated sports broadcaster in television history. Sportscasters, including yours truly, have much to learn from Jim McKay's work. He put the events he covered and their participants at center stage. McKay realized that his job was to present the events he covered to the viewer in the simplest way possible while making them seem as if nothing else in the world were important. Simply put, McKay sold the games and not himself. Too often we see a broadcaster try to become the star of the show while putting the athletics on the back burner. Jim McKay never did this, allowing the athletes and the games they played to shine. In the process, he earned the respect of his peers and colleagues as well as the people that tuned in to watch the programs he anchored.

McKay's life story is too deep for me to cover in this blog. If you can find a copy of his autobiography, The Real McKay: My Wide World of Sports, or catch the HBO documentary about his life and career--Jim McKay: My World in My Words--take a look at them, as they give deep insight not only into his career, but into his personal life and the events that shaped both. Both will give the reader/viewer an even deeper appreciation for how wonderful this man truly was. The world has lost a wonderful broadcaster in Jim McKay, but it lost an even better man in him. May God rest his soul, and may he cover the thrill of victory and the agony of defeat from the broadcast booth in the sky.

Here's a 1970's intro to Wide World of Sports.


This is a clip from 1991 from the 30th anniversary episode of WWS.