You Can't Keep Him Down On The Farm

Jim McKay became the face of the Olympic Games in 1972 at Munich. This isn't the most pleasant of truths, but the massacre of the 11 Israeli athletes, coaches and referees in those Games made McKay's career. He had announced the Olympics before, and he would cover several more thereafter. He had been the host of ABC's Wide World of Sports since the days of black and white. But it was on that tragic day, Sept. 5, 1972, that he became the very image and voice of the Games—Mr. Olympics.

Something in his tone and demeanor spoke to people's hearts during those long hours when everyone waited for word of the hostages' fate. Was it the sound of solace in his voice? His reassuring manner? The sense that he could be trusted in a moment of crisis? Probably all of these. The fact is that when McKay's shoulders fell and he announced plaintively, "They're all gone," the mantle had been conferred on him. He's an enthusiastic man, a bright-eyed optimist who forever sees a medal being won, not lost. Yet it was the tragedy that let him be seen as he'd never been seen before.

Looking back, it's easy to forget that Chris Schenkel, then one of ABC's most lustrous stars, was the host of the Munich Games coverage. McKay took over only for the massacre story and the closing ceremonies; he didn't become the full-time anchorman until 1976 at the Winter Games. When the terrorists struck that Tuesday morning in '72, McKay had just come out of the sauna at his hotel and was getting ready to take a swim. It was supposed to have been his only day off during the Olympics. ABC Sports president Roone Arledge could have chosen Schenkel or Howard Cosell to report the story, but he summoned McKay. "There's a steadiness there. Jim has a depth and a sense of the moment," Arledge says. "He has a descriptive ability and can stay on the air for a long time. He would have made a wonderful anchorman at a convention or in an election. In that sense he's very much like [Walter] Cronkite."

For 16 hours McKay was our eyes and ears, sitting before a wall of monitors in a windowless building some 100 yards from the Olympic Village, where the terrorists were. For most of that time he was isolated from the horror surrounding him. The scenes from the outside that appeared on the monitors had for McKay all the immediacy of the 11 o'clock news. But then someone in the television center needed to take some equipment outside. When the center's two large warehouse doors swung open, people in the studio could finally see out. It looked like such a nice day, McKay recalls. From his perch, he watched the sunlight stream in. He could see a brilliant patch of green grass, framed by the doorway, and just beyond, some big weapons carriers with West German troops riding atop them. "Watching the monitors, there was no time I ever thought that what was happening in front of me wasn't real," McKay says, "but when those double doors opened and I saw these weapons carriers and policemen, it was as though I became a spectator."

His concentration was so great that, he says, "When I got back to my room and got undressed, it was the first time I realized I still had my damp bathing suit on under my pants." McKay was joined in the studio by Schenkel and, later, by Lou Cioffi and Peter Jennings of ABC News. McKay was the only one of the four who wore an earplug, which enabled him to hear sketchy reports of the climactic fire fight at Fürstenfeldbruck Air Base. The earplug also allowed him to eavesdrop on a live press conference being conducted by a spokesman for the Munich Olympic organizing committee. As it turned out, the conference was being held to announce the tragic outcome of the German authorities' bungled attempt at Fürstenfeldbruck to rescue the Israelis from their captors, but the spokesman was speaking in German, and McKay couldn't understand him. Marvin Bader, ABC's chief of logistics, was at the press conference and was in touch with the network's control room via an open phone line, but he, too, couldn't be sure what was being said. It was painfully frustrating.

"All I could think of was that the parents of David Berger [a U.S.-born Israeli weightlifter] were sitting at home in Shaker Heights, Ohio, and I was going to have to tell them whether their son was alive or dead," McKay recalls. There was an unreliable report making the rounds that Berger and some of his teammates had gotten away unscathed. McKay, prizing accuracy above speed, chose not to mention it. It turned out, of course, that Berger was dead. They all were dead. And when the information had been confirmed to McKay's satisfaction, he didn't blather. He just shook his head and imparted the news.

McKay didn't at first appreciate the impact of his performance. Nor did he realize how Munich might serve to advance his career. The next day he stopped by ABC's broadcast center to pick up his mail and found a cable in his box. It was dated Sept. 5. DEAR JIM, it Said, TODAY YOU HONORED YOURSELF, YOUR NETWORK AND YOUR INDUSTRY. WALTER CRONKITE. McKay was stunned. Perhaps Cronkite, no stranger to arduous vigils, had seen a piece of himself in McKay. Eight months later McKay won two of his 10 Emmy Awards (see box, page 297), one for news and one for sports. He's unique—the only sportscaster to have won an Emmy for news.

But it wasn't McKay's journalistic skill that made him Mr. Olympics. It was his sensitivity. The day after the massacre, knowing that he would be assigned to the closing ceremonies a few days later, McKay began searching all over Munich for a poem by A.E. Housman entitled To an Athlete Dying Young. McKay had remembered it from English class at St. Joseph's Prep in Philadelphia, where he was born and lived until age 14. Nowhere in Munich could a copy of the poem in the original English be found. Finally, McKay had the wife of ABC producer Doug Wilson dictate it to him from back home. Rarely has a television sports commentary been so fitting and uplifting.

The time you won your town the race
We cheered you through the marketplace;

Man and boy stood cheering by
And home we brought you shoulder-high.