Roone Arledge

Roone Arledge - Quick Facts

Profile Overview of Roone Arledge

Roone Pinckney Arledge Jr. (July 8, 1931 – December 5, 2002) was an American sports and news broadcasting executive who was president of ABC Sports from 1968 until 1986 and ABC News from 1977 until 1998, and a key part of the company's rise to competition with the two other main television networks, NBC and CBS, in the 1960s, '70s, '80s and '90s. He created many programs still airing today, such as Monday Night Football, ABC World News Tonight, Nightline and 20/20.

This profile of Roone Arledge covers Early Life and Family Background, Personal Life, Career and Rise to Fame, Assistant producer and ABC Sports.

Early Life and Family Background of Roone Arledge

Arledge was born in Forest Hills, Queens, New York City, the son of Gertrude (Stritmater) and Roone Pinckney Arledge, an attorney. Arledge grew up in Merrick and attended Wellington C. Mepham High School on Long Island where he wrestled and played baseball. Although Arledge was not a stand out wrestler, Mepham was the most premier wrestling school in the country at the time.

Upon graduation, he decided that sportswriting was what he wanted to do in life, and applied to Columbia University. There, he discovered that Columbia's journalism program was a graduate program, not an undergraduate one. Even so, Arledge liked what he saw and enrolled in a liberal-arts program. He also served as President of the Omega chapter of the fraternity of Phi Gamma Delta. His classmates included Max Frankel, who would eventually win a Pulitzer Prize in 1973 for his work as editorial page editor of the New York Times; Larry Grossman, who became president of the Public Broadcasting Service in 1976 and later went on to head NBC News; and Richard Wald, another president of NBC News that Arledge would later persuade to come over to ABC News as a senior vice-president. He was the only one of the four who did not work at the Columbia Daily Spectator, the daily student newspaper of Columbia University.

After receiving a bachelor's degree in 1952, Arledge enrolled in graduate studies at Columbia's School of International and Public Affairs. Restless with graduate studies, he went looking for a job where he could use his college degree and obtained an entry-level job at the DuMont Television Network. Military service intervened, and after Arledge's discharge, he learned the network had folded and he had no job to return to.

Personal Life of Roone Arledge

Arledge was married three times. He wed Gigi Shaw in 1994. He is survived by her and his four children from his first marriage, Roone, Elizabeth, Susan Weston and Patricia Loonie. His previous spouses were Joan Heise and Ann Fowler.

Career and Rise to Fame

Contacts he made at DuMont paid off with a stage manager's job at NBC's New York City station, WRCA (later WNBC). One of his assignments there was to help produce a children's puppet show hosted by Shari Lewis. In 1958, the program won a New York City Emmy award.

Even with that success, Arledge wanted to tinker with programming ideas. Using the avant-garde magazine Playboy as his model, Arledge convinced his superiors at WRCA to let him film a pilot of a show he called For Men Only. While his superiors liked the pilot, they told him WRCA could not find a place in the programming schedule for it. But the WRCA weatherman, Pat Hernon, who hosted the pilot episode of For Men Only, began showing the kinescope to people around New York City who might want the program. One of them was a former account executive at the ad agency Dancer Fitzgerald Sample, Edgar J. Scherick, who as far as Hernon knew, was doing something at ABC.

Assistant producer

Scherick had joined the fledgling ABC television network when he persuaded it to purchase Sports Programs, Inc. 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 many programming deals involving the most popular American sporting events.

While Scherick wasn't interested in "For Men Only," he recognized the talent 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. Also, 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 in the fledgling American Football League and used the same innovative techniques in their broadcasts. Sports broadcasting has not been the same since.

ABC Sports

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 in so many words, "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.

Source: adapted from Wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roone_Arledge), text available under CC BY-SA 4.0.