Remembering Jim McKay

Each week, SI.com 's Richard Deitsch reports on newsmakers from the world of TV, radio and the Web. This week's column focuses solely on the life and career of Jim McKay , the pioneer sportscaster who passed away Saturday of natural causes at 86.

I never interviewed Jim McKay but in September 2006 I had a long conversation with Sean McManus , the dutiful son who followed his father into sports broadcasting and rose to head CBS News and CBS Sports . Part of the interview focused on his pioneering father, the man who covered 12 Olympics and spanned the globe to introduce us to a variety of rarely seen sports, from the Grand Prix of Monaco to cliff diving in Acapulco to barrel jumping at Grossinger, N.Y.'s falls.

McManus recalled being in the control room at the 1972 Games in Munich when McKay delivered the solemn news that 11 Israeli athletes had been killed by terrorists. Those words ("When I was a kid, my father used to say our greatest hopes and our worst fears are seldom realized," McKay told ABC viewers. "Our worst fears have been realized tonight....They're all gone.") are among the most famous in broadcasting history.

"None of us understood just how widespread and how important the reporting job he was doing was," recalled McManus , who was 17 at the time. "We were in this little studio in Munich , right outside the Olympic Village. I was probably 15 yards from my father, hanging in the back of the control room watching Roone Arledge give orders to my father, Howard Cosell and Peter Jennings . I watched all the different production decisions being made, as well as the incredible swing of emotions when we thought the athletes had been saved and then realizing they had all been killed at the airport outside of Munich .

"The stakes were, obviously, so much higher and the subject material was life and death as opposed to a sporting event. It wasn't until all of us got back to America and my father and I saw on our front porch probably 1,000 letters or telegrams from people. They were literally stacked up on the porch. I think I realized then that this really had been a huge national gathering. People were hanging on his every word from half a world away. The other thing that people can't appreciate now is that the word 'terrorist' was not a word that any of us were familiar with. A terrorist act happening on live television was completely and totally foreign to any American citizen.

"The impact [of Munich ] has been much greater in the ensuing years. To this day, probably 95 percent of the people who come up to my father do not mention all the Kentucky Derbies he did or the great sporting events he did. What they mention is Munich . It had such a visceral effect on so many people emotionally that it stuck with the people who were viewing that day for a lifetime."

The one thing I really wanted to know from McManus was what his father was like when he finally got off the air. He had gone for a morning swim when he received a call from the studio that gunshots had been fired in the Olympic Village. He quickly threw on clothes over his swim trunks and stayed on the air for 16 consecutive hours.

"He was completely and totally drained in every way," McManus said. "Something had happened that would affect him and stay with him for the rest of his life. Mentally, physically and emotionally, he was just completely exhausted."

�€� The New York Times obituary, nicely crafted by Frank Litsky and Richard Sandomir

�€� Same with McKay's hometown paper, The Baltimore Sun