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Obituary

Arledge dead of cancer at 71

TV pioneer created ABC's Wide World of Sports, Monday Night Football, Nightline."

Compiled from Times wires
© St. Petersburg Times
published December 6, 2002

NEW YORK -- Roone Arledge, a pioneering television executive at ABC News and Sports responsible for creating shows from Monday Night Football to Nightline, died Thursday. He was 71.

Mr. Arledge died at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center, spokesman Jeffrey Schneider said. The cause was complications from cancer, ABC News reported.

"Roone changed the face of television sports coverage with Wide World of Sports in the early 1960s and the production of the Olympic Games," longtime broadcaster Jim McKay said.

Although he retired in 1998, Mr. Arledge's far-reaching influence still can be seen on TV: when a slow-motion replay is shown at a sporting event, when Peter Jennings reads the news or when a sportscaster criticizes a player.

Mr. Arledge was single-handedly credited with bringing modern production techniques to sports coverage, then building ABC News into a power during the 1980s. For a decade, he was president of the sports and news divisions at ABC.

He changed the viewing habits of American sports fans by bringing Monday Night Football to the air in 1970. It still is a staple of ABC's prime-time schedule.

"Few -- if any -- individuals outside the NFL family had as large an impact on the popularity and public acceptance of pro football (as) Roone Arledge," NFL commissioner Paul Tagliabue said.

The 36-time Emmy winner was cited as one of the 100 most important Americans of the 20th century by Life magazine in 1990.

"Roone Arledge revolutionized television, and with it the way people see and understand the world," ABC News president David Westin said in a statement.

Roone Pinckney Arledge was born July 8, 1931, and raised on Long Island. The Columbia University graduate joined ABC Sports as a producer in 1960 after a five-year stint at NBC.

Appealing to his bosses to bring show business to sports, the 29-year-old was given control of ABC's college football broadcasts. Through the 1960s, he introduced innovations taken for granted today: slow-motion and freeze-frame views, instant replays, handheld cameras and the placement of microphones to bring the sound of the game into living rooms.

In addition to all the technical innovations, McKay said Mr. Arledge also would be remembered for "putting the focus on the human being involved in sports."

In 1961, Mr. Arledge created ABC's Wide World of Sports, one of the most popular sports series ever, and coined its tag line "the thrill of victory and the agony of defeat."

Mr. Arledge, who became president of ABC Sports in 1968, supervised coverage of 10 Olympics from 1964-88. He expanded Olympics broadcasts beyond the competition by including personal profiles of athletes, a style echoed today by his protege, Dick Ebersol, who runs NBC Sports.

"Today we lost the most creative force in the history of American television. Roone Arledge invented television sports and then reinvented television news," Ebersol said.

Mr. Arledge was the first to demand that networks, not sports leagues, approve announcers -- a philosophy that led to his hiring of Howard Cosell, an abrasive New Yorker who became probably the most famous sportscaster ever.

Monday Night Football became a cultural event after Mr. Arledge added Cosell to the booth with Frank Gifford and Don Meredith.

When Sports Illustrated in 1994 selected the 40 individuals with the greatest impact on sports during the previous 40 years, Mr. Arledge was third behind Muhammad Ali and Michael Jordan.

The reaction was harsh, though, when he was selected in 1977 to resuscitate ABC's struggling news division -- while still running sports.

ABC created, after disappointing starts, 20/20 and Prime Time Live under his watch. He lured David Brinkley to ABC and installed him on This Week, reviving the Sunday political talk genre.

When terrorists seized American hostages in Iran in 1979, Mr. Arledge seized an 11:30 p.m. time slot from ABC's affiliates for young correspondent Ted Koppel to deliver nightly updates. He never gave it back, and the updates evolved into Nightline.

He is survived by his wife, Gigi Shaw Arledge, and four children from a previous marriage.

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