Hbo Sports Gets Off Deck To Endure

Now in its 25th year, HBO can look back on a history in sports that is both ludicrous and revolutionary, both zany and sublime.

“Sports has been our bulwark at times, and it’s also been our greatest embarrassment,” said Seth Abraham, president and CEO of Time Warner Sports.

In 1978, sports almost became nonexistent at HBO.

Less than a week after he joined HBO as director of sports operations in October of that year, Abraham was called to a high-level meeting at the swanky Dorset Hotel in New York.

“Nobody believes this story,” Abraham said. “But I’m called to this executive board meeting, and they voted 6-1 to eliminate the sports department entirely.”

After one week, there goes Abraham’s job, right? Not quite. The one dissenting vote was cast by Michael Fuchs, then chairman and CEO of HBO.

“He basically told them to give me one more shot,” Abraham said.

With that shot, Abraham helped make HBO an industry leader in its coverage of boxing, and it has become the preeminent maker of sports documentaries in TV. “Inside The NFL,” born on Sept. 10, 1977, is cable television’s longest-running sports series, and the magazine-style show “Real Sports With Bryant Gumbel” enters its second season to critical acclaim.

“We like to do what we can do best, like boxing,” said HBO Sports senior vice president Lou DiBella, who is in charge of programming. “That defines our thought process, I think.”

It wasn’t always that way.

On Nov. 8, 1972, HBO sent its very first broadcast, a New York Rangers-Vancouver Canucks hockey game, to 365 homes, most of them in Wilkes-Barre, Pa. Marty Glickman was both announcer and director of HBO Sports.

Less than three months later, on Jan. 22, 1973, HBO broadcast its first fight, featuring George Foreman and Joe Frazier from Kingston, Jamaica. By that time, several thousand homes were on line, including most of central Florida.

“We were a wonderful little experiment,” said HBO Sports senior vice president and executive producer Ross Greenburg, who joined the network as a production assistant eight months before Abraham’s arrival. “By the time I got here, we were in all 50 states.”

HBO also had acquired rights to Wimbledon for $15,000, becoming the first cable station to televise the early rounds of a network-owned event; put satellites into use for regular programming for the first time in TV; carried the last American Basketball Association game ever played, and spent two seasons as the cable home of the New York Yankees.

Those were the highs.

During the ‘70s, HBO was doing as many as 300 sports shows a year, and many were downright ridiculous.

“How about this? You marry rodeo with a country western concert? How ridiculous is that? We did it,” Abraham said. “How about shark tagging in the caribbean? We got two teams of divers trying to see who could tag the most sharks. We did that.”

And couldn’t find any sharks.

“Then, I had to talk my boss out of this one: a military carnival,” Abraham recalled. “He wanted to televise war games as a sport with announcers and a running tally of the score.”

Now you can see why top brass decided to make a movie network out of HBO and almost declared the sports department a casualty of war.

Among HBO Sports’ upcoming projects are this month’s “Sports on the Silver Screen,” a montage of classic sports moments in the movies; a historical look at the ABA; and a study of Joe DiMaggio as the Greta Garbo of sports, coming in either September of October.