If Al Michaels was the voice of the Miracle on Ice, Jim McKay — ABC’s only studio presence on the evening of Friday, February 22, 1980 — was surely its face. I was too young to remember the McKay of Munich; in my adolescence of ‘80 I hung on his every word.
We lost McKay last weekend, and so we lost a towering figure of broadcast excellence, a broadcast personality perhaps more associated with the Olympics than any athlete. But most painfully for fans of American hockey, we lost a vital touchstone to one of the greatest moments of our lives, and certainly sports’ greatest moment.
Those in my age cohort will remember well the extraordinary role McKay had to play that remarkable February Friday. ABC made the decision to tape-delay the U.S.-Russia medal round semifinal, which faced off at 5:00 p.m. , and so by broadcast time that night McKay was in on one of the best-kept secrets in the history of television news; virtually the rest of his nation of 230 million was clueless. Perhaps like the rest of his countrymen two hours later — ABC didn’t broadcast the game in its entirety — in the upset’s immediate aftermath McKay simply didn’t know how to process the significance of the world-altering American triumph, and so he could manage those opening couple of setup minutes with his well-practiced professionalism.
Still, looking back, McKay’s prime-time composure seems nearly as miraculous as the feat of Herbie’s charges that day.
Because he was a pro’s pro who undoubtedly sensed the culminating effect of the American team’s feats to that moment, McKay played it straight as he came on the air at 8:00. He graced a studio set that to today’s around-the-clock-and-channels, sports-devouring eyes would seem spartan. Actually, it wasn’t so much a set as a grand stage for one: just McKay, the dean of American broadcast sports journalism, in his ABC Sports blazer. It was a very newsy shot for a very newsy occasion.
Looking back on that extraordinary moment — I have a VHS copy of it, and badly am in need of a digital one — one can see and hear the standard McKay setup for a significant moment: an eloquent and efficient chronicling of the Americans’ unbelievable underdog ascent into Lake Placid’s hockey medals qualification round. But with the benefit of hindsight, you can also detect a glimmer in his eye. That glimmer was joined by the slightest upturn in the crease of his mouth as he concluded his intro with, “You definitely want to stick around for this one.”
Were truer words ever uttered on television?
What a wonderful moment in time to be free of the Internet, I think now.
I remember McKay principally for that evening but also for his less dramatic duties hosting ABC’s ‘Wide World of Sports’ on Saturday afternoons. McKay seemed to celebrate the totality of athletic excellence in his broadcast career, which is perhaps why he cherished working the Olympics — in their less vulgar incarnation, obviously. He played it straight then, too, although I seem to remember that when it came to American excellence in sport his narrations bore a subtle but unmistakable pride. We could use more of that today, I think.
In reading memorials of his career this week I was struck by the breadth of events he covered. He was ABC’s go-to guy for special events, for decades. He was a seminal media figure at horse racing’s Triple Crown races, and with ‘Wide World of Sports’ he’d anchor one of the most successful sports programs in television history.
Televised sports in America in the ’60s, ’70s, and early ’80s was far different from what we know today. It was almost singularly male in the composition of its competitors, and it was also at times kitsch-ish in its made-for-TV moments: If it was sporting Americana taking place — the Indy 500 or Evel Knievel attempting to rocket-jump the Grand Canyon — McKay was there to cover it. In reflecting on this it strikes me as Hollywood-script-perfect for McKay to have been there as he was that fabulous Friday night, isolated in that studio shot.
“Here were these college kids beating the Soviets and going on to the Olympic Gold Medal,” McKay said in an interview in 2003. “To me, that’s the greatest upset of all time in any sport that I can think of.”
Maybe it’s the effects of nostalgia’s dominating spirit, but what I remember about February 23 and 24, 1980, was McKay’s voice interrupting what by then had become marginalized competing Olympic sports, for his narrating over scene after scene of thousands of delirious Americans draped in Old Glory, painting a small New York town in our nation’s colors.
On February 22, 1980, and for the remainder of that unforgettable weekend, we Americans, beleaguered in so many respects as we then were, needed a shepherd of first composure and then appropriate and eloquent ecstasy for an event that forever changed our lives. Jim McKay was that and much more.
It was, truly, a winter Friday night of miraculous innocence. Gone, now, like the broadcast hero who ushered it into our lives, forever.
