8/7/2023 0 Comments Espn agony of defeat ski jump![]() Sports programming was nothing like the unfettered access we are afforded today. On Saturdays, we sat down to the snowy Wide World of Sports before the weekly battles erupted over whether to watch The Lawrence Welk Show, Have Gun Will Travel, or the NBC’s Saturday Night at the Movies while eating Mom’s spaghetti, Sloppy Joes, or breakfast at suppertime. Seems Lawrence Welk won most Saturday nights and why polka music and champagne bubbles make me ill. Too much science, right? Right! No matter how much we tried to fine-tune the Rototenna, it was always snowing on Channel 13. Why do I say half? The closest ABC affiliate was still in distant Asheville, NC, some one hundred thirty miles away as the cow patty flies, and the VHF signal just wasn’t strong enough and subject to shifts in the ionosphere. Our RCA TV only received two and a half channels. When Wild World of Sports premiered, 1961 was still BAC, before air conditioning, and BC, before cable. The 1978 Introduction to The Wide World of Sports. “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.” ![]() Here is Jim McKay’s rousing 1978 Wide World of Sports intro preceded by Charles Fox’s ringing brass… In case you have forgotten…or are too young to know. ABC added a crashing motorcycle later but it just didn’t catch on like Vinko. He even continued to compete…just not well. He was the nameless guy on a fuzzy black and white screen who wiped out on an attempted ski jump in 1961 and was immortalized on film by ABC and now on YouTube.īogataj was the epitome of the “ Agony of Defeat”, the posterchild for failure, and remained so for three decades after his broken ankle and concussion had healed. With limited TV in Italy, Bogataj didn’t know he was a television star…even if it was for “ the Agony of Defeat.”. The skier’s name was Vinko Bogataj but no one knew at the time. He barely kept on ticking and experienced “ The Agony of Defeat.” What about YA Tittle? After a crunching tackle in a 1964 game with Pittsburg left him with a concussion and a cracked sternum, he suited up for every remaining game of the 2-10-2 season but retired at its end. We just celebrated the fiftieth anniversary of his failure this past April. Where did that come from? The black hole of the internet of course.Īll I know? Timex watches and an Italian ski jumper “ takes a licking, but keeps on ticking” and the Italian ski jumper is probably happy Wide World of Sports was canceled. Somehow they are connected by something other than the black and white I watched them in but I’ve yet to figure out what that connection is. Later there was the black and white picture I discovered of YA Tittle battered and bleeding on the turf in Pittsburg. I’m on my twelfth Jim McKay narrated ABC’s The Wide World of Sports intro and I’ve lost count of John Cameron Swayze’s Timex commercials. My mind…I don’t seem to be able to escape the pull of my own mind. ![]() A conversation with my brother and a simple act of research has caught me in the event horizon of the black hole that is the internet…or my mind. ![]()
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