Native Dancer (14 page)

Television was rapidly replacing radio as the modern version of the village storyteller. For a majority of the public, there
simply was no comparison between listening to a program or major event and actually seeing it. “Television brought the outside
world into the home in a way that had never existed before,” recalled Leonard Koppett, a
Herald Tribune
sportswriter in the early 1950s. “People in the twenties had been completely knocked out by the phenomenon of radio, and
that was just a voice box. They still got most of their information from newspapers, and few of them actually saw anything
they read about. Everyone knew about Man O’ War, but who had seen him run? Then along came TV, and no matter how scratchy
the picture was, the connection experience was astounding. People went, ‘Hey, this event is happening right now, it’s important,
and I’m looking at it I don’t know how this is happening, but it’s fantastic.’ ”

Observing the public’s fascination with the visual medium,
Herald Tribune
critic John Crosby presciently wrote that “the revolution in the entertainment world is only dimly understood [now].” For
that matter, the revolution in basic human perceptions was only dimly understood. “Before TV, the printed word was the way
you learned something,” Koppett said. “When TV came along, it became the printed word in combination with a visual image.
It was a wholly different internalizing process.”

Berle’s popularity was the first example of TV’s ability to bond onair personalities with individuals in a sweeping audience.
The awesome power of that connection was soon demonstrated in other ways. After Senator Kefauver and his anticrime panel grilled
mobsters on live TV in 1951, the obscure Kefauver became a presidential candidate in 1952. Coverage of that year’s political
conventions drew vast audiences and turned news anchors such as CBS’s Walter Cronkite into household names. In September 1952,
when it was reported that wealthy California businessmen were giving money to Republican vice presidential candidate Richard
Nixon to help cover his personal expenses, Nixon went on national TV—on a Tuesday night, after Berle’s show—and tried to clear
his name in front of millions of viewers.

Sports also boomed in the early TV days. Boxing was a perfect fit, with dramatic, action-packed bouts taking place in tight,
camerafriendly confines.
The Gillette Cavalcade of Sports
, a weekly series of Friday night bouts, drew large audiences after debuting in 1948 on NBC, and soon as many as six boxing
programs were on every week, featuring Rocky Marciano, Sugar Ray Robinson, Archie Moore, and numerous lesser lights who became
well known strictly because of TV. Boxing had a brief fling as the nation’s sports obsession. Harness racing soared in 1949
and 1950 when NBC aired a show from New York’s Roosevelt Raceway several nights a week. Bowling shows were also popular, leading
to the opening of hundreds of new bowling alleys across the country. “The ability of TV to determine the popularity of sports
was instantly evident,” Koppett said.

Major league baseball and college and pro football were also programming mainstays, but they experienced notable drops in
attendance at televised games. Sales of tickets for televised boxing cards also fell sharply. Suddenly, sports decision-makers
were dubious about the marriage of TV and sports. Was the exposure gained from televising an event worth the apparent damage
inflicted on ticket sales?

Opinion was divided. Tim Mara, owner of pro football’s New York Giants, said, “There isn’t the slightest doubt that TV murders
you.” Branch Rickey, baseball’s famed builder of pennant-winners, wrote an essay titled “TV Can Kill Baseball.” Grantland
Rice labeled TV “a raging storm spear-headed by a wrecking cyclone.” On the other side, more farsighted leaders such as Ned
Irish, vice president of New York’s Madison Square Garden, correctly sensed that exposing a sport to TV’s vast audience was
worth any short-term loss in revenue.

Alfred Vanderbilt agreed with Irish, becoming an immediate and outspoken advocate of the new medium. “He embraced TV,” Clyde
Roche recalled. “He thought the best thing to happen for racing was to build a big public audience for the sport at the highest
level. He liked traditional things, but he also was very open to new ideas. It was a conflict in his personality.”

His daughter Heidi recalled, “Dad was a proponent of TV. We watched it all the time. It was really important to the way he
was with us. There was a set in the living room and another upstairs in the bedroom. We watched the cowboy shows and
Howdy Doody
with Dad. I’d sit on his lap when he watched the news in the morning. We watched
Omnibus
and
Kukla, Fran and Ollie
. And we always watched the races, of course.”

Vanderbilt advanced the marriage of racing and TV in several ways. When his friend CBS president Bill Paley was looking for
an announcer for a broadcast of the 1947 Belmont, Vanderbilt volunteered. He coolly handled forty minutes of interviews and
chitchat before ex-

plaining to viewers that he had to go “because I have a horse in the next race.” John Crosby reviewed him favorably. “When
you were on TV,” Alfred Vanderbilt III said, “all of your friends saw you and they’d call you up and say, ‘Hey, Alfred, I
saw you on TV.’ What a great novelty. He was still young enough to enjoy it.”

Sam Renick, a jockey who had ridden for Vanderbilt, became racing’s first identifiable TV analyst after Vanderbilt suggested
that, with his talkative nature, he was suited to broadcasting. When Pimlico needed a sponsor to get on the air in the late
forties, Vanderbilt reeled in help from his late father-in-law’s company, Bromo-Seltzer. “He understood very quickly what
TV was about, how powerful it was, and that it was a way to show people how exciting racing was,” Alfred Vanderbilt III said.

Despite Vanderbilt’s position, racing proceeded cautiously in TV’s early years, tiptoeing through the tracks of the learning
curve set by other sports. Most track operators remained skeptical, refusing to show their feature races to afternoon audiences.
“You can’t sell a product and give it away at the same time,” insisted Bill Corum, a former New York sportswriter who became
president of Churchill Downs.

“The track owners and operators believed if we put the races on, people would stay home. We couldn’t convince them otherwise,”
said Tommy Roberts, a longtime TV racing broadcaster and executive. “The only ones who saw the possibilities at the time were
Vanderbilt and old Sunny Jim Fitzsimmons. Fitz said, ‘This is the greatest thing, what a window into our world. People can
see the fine clothes and celebrities and horses and color.’ He was right. But the rest of the racing fraternity couldn’t see
it.”

There were other problems as well. Even though racing’s popularity was soaring, the Kefauver investigation into organized
crime was a fresh memory, and many sponsors were reluctant to have their names and products associated with any endeavor involving
gambling. “We couldn’t give racing away, to be honest,” CBS’s John Derr said. “Couldn’t give away golf or tennis, either.
Wrestling was no problem. Boxing was no problem. But we couldn’t find anyone to sponsor racing even when Bing Crosby was involved.”

Racing’s TV exposure was limited to occasional local broadcasts through the early fifties. The first TV show ever aired in
Baltimore was the opening of Pimlico’s fall meeting in 1947, with newspapermen calling the races and models putting on a fashion
show on the clubhouse roof to keep viewers tuned in between races. Two races a day were broadcast through the meeting, but
the impact was minimal with the city’s TV audience limited to four hundred or five hundred sets in bars. In 1948, CBS televised
the Belmont and Preakness live in New York, Philadelphia, and Baltimore, and NBC broadcast races from local tracks several
times a week in New York, with Clem McCarthy and Fred Caposella calling them.

“Citation ran at Garden State Park one time, and CBS sent Ted Husing down to do the race on TV,” Tommy Roberts recalled. “Ted
was a legendary radio announcer, but he had never called a horse race. The producer said, ‘Look, Citation will go to the front
and all you have to do is look for those silks and say, “He’s in front, Citation is in front… he’s still in front.”’ That
race was shown only on local TV in Philadelphia.”

When racing’s attendance continued to soar in these early years, unlike the attendance for sports seen more often on TV, Corum
and other racing officials were hailed for their prudent handling of the TV “raging storm.” Racing was booming, with Joe Palmer
and his colleagues—newspaper columnists such as Red Smith and Rice, and radio race-callers such as Bryan Field and McCarthy—telling
the stories, painting the images, and creating the legends. As had been the case for decades, the general public’s only chance
to eyeball top horses came in the brief newsreels shown in movie theaters before the feature.

“Movietone newsreels were where you got images of events,” recalled Tim Capps, the racing executive and author. “They showed
the races a lot. The newsreels were how my father learned what Whirlaway and Count Fleet looked like. That was the only way
people saw racing. If you didn’t grow up in an area with a track, you didn’t see a horse race unless you saw the Movietone
newsreels. Then TV came along and transformed the world of people who watched sports.”

Indeed, TV was growing so quickly and becoming so prevalent that it was impossible to resist. Many racetrack operators were
less worried than they admitted in public, believing they could handle more TV exposure without experiencing a precipitous
drop in attendance because, as Red Smith wrote, “until someone builds a set with a built-in mutuel window, every new fan created
by TV will eventually show up at the track.”

After refraining from allowing any broadcast of the Kentucky Derby through 1948, fearful of harming attendance, Churchill
Downs allowed a delayed local broadcast in 1949. The next year, Field called the race into a CBS microphone, took a film of
the race to the airport, and boarded a private plane for Dayton, Ohio, the city nearest Louisville with coaxial cable. (Louisville
didn’t get it until 1951.) The plane was equipped with a special device for developing film, and that night, four hours after
the race, CBS viewers saw a tape of Middleground’s victory. DuMont used the same complicated process to show racing from Hialeah
that year; the first six races at the South Florida track were filmed in the afternoon, and the films were flown to New York
and broadcast that night.

The first live national telecast of a race came on November 16, 1951, months after the job of laying the coaxial cable from
coast to coast had been completed. CBS televised the Pimlico Special from Baltimore, with Dave Woods, Vanderbilt’s longtime
racing publicist, calling the race and urging viewers to participate in a Red Cross blood drive for U.S. soldiers fighting
in Korea. The size of the viewing audience for the twenty-five-minute sponsor-free broadcast wasn’t estimated, but the obscure
$15,000 race, won by a colt named Bryan G., was surely seen by more eyes than any previous race in American history.

Months later, Churchill Downs reluctantly consented to the live national broadcast of the 1952 Derby. Corum predicted the
show would command the “largest TV audience ever to view an on-the-spot event,” but, ever dubious, he was careful to mute
his enthusiasm in announcing the one-year deal he described as “experimental.” Said Corum, “We’re going to study the effect
on the size of the crowd, betting and such before committing ourselves to any future contracts.”

CBS went all out. Judson Bailey, the executive director of CBS-

TV sports, flew to Louisville to oversee a forty-man broadcast team. A pipe-smoking former baseball writer for the Associated
Press, Bailey told reporters the broadcast would cost “well into six figures,” making it the “most expensive half hour in
TV’s brief history.” Four cameras would be used—one in the paddock, one in the infield, and two on top of the grandstand—and
Field would call the race from a new press box above the finish line. An original “feed” of words and pictures would travel
over the coaxial cable to WCBS in New York, where edits would be made, commercials would be inserted, and a finished product
would be sent out. Viewers would see events one-hundredth of a second after they occurred.

The announcer, Bryan Field, like Palmer, was familiar to racing fans, trusted to bring order and context to unseen events.
He had started out as a general sportswriter for the
New York Times
, then became a racing expert in the late 1920s, not only writing adeptly but also developing a flair for calling races in
a faux British accent. By the late 1930s, he was writing for the
Times
and calling races as a radio broadcaster and track announcer in New York, and as if that weren’t enough, he took on the job
of director of public relations at Delaware Park, a track in Stanton, Delaware, in 1939. Soon he was running the track as
its vice president and general manager, commuting back and forth every day from New York. He eventually had to quit his newspaper
job as Delaware Park flourished and his prominence as a racecaller increased with TV’s rise.

Hours before Field took the microphone to call the 1952 Derby, President Truman gave the nation a televised White House tour
before millions of viewers watching on three networks. A trio of newsmen followed him from room to room and asked questions
as he chatted about paintings, china, and the history of the famous house. The president was so relaxed he sat at a piano
and played a portion of Mozart’s Ninth Sonata, leading Jack Gould, a
New York Times
critic, to label him “a born TV star.”

Minutes after Truman went off the air, it was time for the Derby. The first fifteen minutes of the forty-five-minute show
were broadcast on a “sustaining” basis—without a sponsor—and Gillette, the razor company, sponsored the race and its aftermath.
Sam Renick handled the scene-setting, advertising pitches, and prerace interviews. Pete French, a Louisville broadcaster,
interviewed several celebrities. Field called Hill Gail’s victory with one minor gaffe, initially claiming that a colt named
Pintor had nosed out Master Fiddle for third when, in fact, Blue Man had run third.