For Better or Werts : TV Worth Watching

TUBE TRIBUTE: Sports TV's Jim McKay

JIM McKAY: MY WORLD IN MY WORDS - Thursday at 7 p.m., Sunday at 11:30 a.m., HBO

The sportscaster's sportscaster who died last week is now honored with an encore of HBO's acclaimed 2003 portrait Jim McKay: My World in My Words, an intimate look at not just a star reporter but a soulful human being. (Also look for it via digital cable's HBO On Demand.)

McKay transcended the nuts-and-bolts of sports broadcasting with intelligence, enthusiasm and sensitivity, cataloguing an astonishing variety of events on ABC's groundbreaking Saturday afternoon magazine series Wide World of Sports through the 1960s and '70s, before cable and ESPN made smaller/obscure sports a ho-hum daily time-filler. His was the voice behind the enduring tagline "the thrill of victory, and the agony of defeat" -- one more grace note from a TV-sports era reported not by adolescent shouters but mature men for whom sports was cast as a part of life, not life itself.

When he died June 7 at the age of 85, after 60 years in the business, McKay (born Jim McManus, and father of CBS sports and news chief Sean McManus) was best remembered by boomer sports fans -- and lionized among the broadcasters he influenced -- for his human response to the shocking events at the 1972 Munich Olympics. The games' Israeli athletes were held hostage and then killed by an earlier generation of terrorists, as the world sat stunned by this early incursion of zero-sum politics into the "gentleman's" competition that was supposed to bring the world together in harmony and fair play. (Of course, even then, sex-change operations and drug cheating had already put a sizable dent in that dream.)

His professional yet personal live announcement of the horror -- "When I was a kid, my father used to say our greatest hopes and our worst fears are seldom realized. Our worst fears have been realized tonight. They have now said that there were 11 hostages. Two were killed in their rooms this, excuse me, yesterday morning. Nine were killed at the airport tonight. They're all gone" -- managed to make us feel one where the games could not.

Where's the next Jim McKay?

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Diane Werts has been glued to the tube since she can remember, growing up in a household where the TV came on first thing in the morning and stayed on till bedtime and beyond. She worked for the USA Film Festival, then for The Dallas Morning News writing about everything from Shakespeare to macrame art to rock music (and has the hearing loss to prove it). She moved to New York's Newsday to edit their glossy TV magazine, then returned to writing about television, specializing in its stranger permutations. She's a past president of the Television Critics Association.

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