Jim McKay Dies At 86

"Television, as we recognize it, was born in the early afternoon of Nov. 22, 1963, when Walter Cronkite stared at an off-camera clock, removed his eyeglasses, and announced the death of John F. Kennedy even as a lump was starting to form in his throat. In a horrific flash, the planet had shrunk to the black-and-white boundaries of a Philco or a Zenith.

Televised sports took nine more years to find a similar moment, an instant of surpassing tragedy serendipitously paired with a voice and a face with the poise and the dignity to tell the awful story precisely the way it needed to be told.

Howard Cosell badly wanted to be that voice, that face, in the hours after eight Palestinian terrorists seized 11 Israeli athletes from their Olympic Village residence at 31 Connollystrasse, in the midst of an otherwise peaceful Munich Games. Cosell lobbied Roone Arledge, who all but invented ABC Sports, to let him anchor the coverage.

But Arledge knew Cosell couldn't be that man, knew he couldn't allow that out-sized personality loose on this kind of story. The man he had in mind had just walked out of the sauna of his downtown hotel on his only day off of the Olympiad, was just about to take a swim, when Arledge summoned him.

And for the next 16 hours, Jim McKay invented sports broadcasting as we know it. He was calm. He was reassuring. He asked the right questions, allowed his ears — and the world's — to listen to the answers. And as a last valedictory, when the grimmest news conceivable was slipped into his earpiece, he offered a three-word summation that remains as eloquent today as it was on the terrible night it was uttered:

"They're all gone."

McKay died yesterday at age 86 after a professional lifetime that, to quote his famous opening to Wide World of Sports, "spanned the globe to bring the constant variety of sports." His loves were horse racing and golf, and he was a minority owner of the Baltimore Orioles. His legacy includes a son, Sean McManus, who as president of CBS Sports oversees the one sports operation that most closely echoes all the qualities McKay brought to a career that began in 1947.

"He brought a reporter's eye, a literate touch and, above all, a personal humanity to every assignment," Bob Costas, one of McKay's professional heirs, said in a statement yesterday. "He had a combination of qualities seldom seen in the history of the medium, not just sports."

And those are qualities that have become undervalued, if not forgotten entirely, in much of the loud-louder-loudest culture of personality that sweeps the TV landscape now. The mistake is believing that is entirely a product of the times; nobody was louder than Cosell, and in 2008 there is little doubt that Cosell would have shouted his way into that assignment in Munich."

Jim McKay had it all and then some. Can't turn back the clock to when knowledgeable gentlemen had the mike, so fondest of memories will have to do.

Thanks, Jim.