In 1994, Sports Illustrated named Roone Arledge, longtime executive producer of ABC Sports, the third most important person in the sports world since SI’s inception in 1954. Muhammad Ali and Michael Jordan beat him out. Arledge, who died Thursday at age 71, should have been at the top of list. Without Arledge to boost sports into television’s spotlight, MJ would’ve been another Elgin Baylor, a great talent on display only on tape delay after midnight. And without ABC and Arledge’s most notorious and courageous hire, Howard Cosell, to relentlessly promote him, Ali would never overcome the hatred directed at him for opting out of military service to become the most popular athlete on the planet.
One Web site doesn’t have enough bandwidth to properly do justice to all of Arledge’s innovations and accomplishments, both in sports and later at ABC News, where he created Nightline, among other feats. (Click here and here to read obits that spell them out.) So maybe it’s best to look at how some of his schemes, however brilliant at the time, have made TV sports painful to watch and news almost impossible to finance.
