JACKSON — It doesn’t bother me in the least to admit that when I heard Saturday morning that legendary ABC Sports broadcaster Jim McKay had died at the age of 86, tears came to my eyes.
I did not know McKay, but like most Americans of my generation, he was a shiny thread in the fabric of my childhood memories from his days as the host of ABC’s “Wide World of Sports” — a TV window to places a kid growing up in the red clay hills of Mississippi had never been to see people participate in activities like cliff-diving at Acapulco, log rolling in Wisconsin and the exploits of daredevil Evel Knievel on his motorcycle.
But upon hearing of McKay’s passing, it was not those memories that immediately rushed back to me.
What I remembered was McKay’s finest hours as a journalist when it fell to him to inform U.S. viewers of the deaths of 11 Israeli athletes at the 1972 Olympics in Munich, West Germany, on Sept. 5, 1972.
That was the day that the world learned a new word — terrorist — and that most Americans got a first grasp of the true depths of religious intolerance in the Middle East and how the basic Arab-Israeli conflict might shape the future of the region.
At Munich, Palestinian terrorists from the Black September organization stormed the dormitory housing the Israeli delegation at the 1972 Olympics and took 11 of its members hostage.
Armed with Russian-made assault rifles, the terrorists captured the Israeli athletes, coaches and a referee. Two were killed early in the standoff. The Palestinians demanded the release of 234 prisoners from Israeli jails.
Israel declined any negotiation. West Germany negotiated on a limited basis, but at the end of the conflict the terrorist group had killed all the Israeli hostages and one German police officer. Five of the eight terrorists were killed by police officers during a failed rescue attempt.
It was McKay — haggard with a 5 o’clock shadow after 16 straight on-air hours covering the hostage standoff — who broke the news to ABC viewers:
“When I was a kid, my father used to say our greatest hopes and our worst fears are seldom realized,” he said. “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.”
McKay won two Emmys for his calm, reassuring coverage of the crisis, one for sports and one for news. McKay’s journalism during the Munich Massacre defined his broadcast career.
But the terrorist attack on the Israeli team at the Munich Olympics did more than cement Jim McKay’s iconic presence in broadcasting.
The Munich Massacre also defined the success of acts of global terrorism in terms of acts that can garner a mass media audience. McKay’s heroic 16 hours of coverage of the Olympic hostage crisis was a primer of sorts for the stunning acts of both global and domestic terrorism — acts such as the 9-11 attacks and the Oklahoma City bombings — that capture national or global media attention.
In that instant, sports stopped being about sports and the Olympics became yet another political venue — a place to kill.
On the 25th anniversary of the 1972 Munich Olympics, McKay told The New York Times:
“It was the loss of whatever innocence there was in the world.”
That realization, that truth, made McKay’s old introduction to “Wide World” all the more quaint and memorable:
“Spanning the globe to bring you the constant variety of sport … the thrill of victory … and the agony of defeat … the human drama of athletic competition … This is ABC’s Wide World of Sports!”
McKay was first and foremost a great journalist — whose beat just happened to be in sports.
