Television has been the central medium in sports since the end of the 1950s. It has established football as the most lucrative of all sports, helped refashion basketball in the 1980s and has been the financial backbone for almost all the major sports. With the emergence of cable channels like ESPN, the number of sports benefiting from television coverage has increased, and the bidding wars for major-league sports have become still more intense. By 1996 sports consumed about 40 hours of every week on the four major networks, in addition to the 24-hours-a-day sports broadcasting on several cable channels. Building on this nexus of sport and television, newspapers, talk radio, magazines and catalogs have raised sports to the level of virtual obsession.

The establishment of sports television as a major commercial and cultural force in the United States is usually dated to December 28, 1958, when a national NBC audience watched the Baltimore Colts come back to tie the New York Giants in the championship game of the NFL, and then, under the leadership of Johnny Unitas, win in suddendeath overtime. Played in New York City (and so watched by key figures in advertising and broadcasting), the game brought millions of new fans to the game of football.

Pete Rozelle, commissioner of football in the 1960s and 1970s, built on this newfound strength. Negotiating with the networks on behalf of the league he managed to secure large contracts (most notably the CBS bid of $14.1 million in 1964), revenues from which were divided evenly among the teams, securing the financial health of even teams in smaller markets. Congress complied, passing the Sports Antitrust Broadcast Act, permitting professional leagues to pool revenues and to sell their television rights as a single entity.

The power of television was further demonstrated in 1970 during a mid-season game between the New York Jets and the Oakland Raiders. With the Giants leading, 32–29 and with 65 seconds playing time remaining, NBC cut away from the game to show a children’s special, Heidi. Meanwhile, in the game, the Raiders scored two touchdowns and won 43–32. Ten thousand enraged football fans called NBC in New York, blowing a fuse on its switchboard. Since then, no network game has been pre-empted, and even sponsors of CBS’ 60 Minutes, which follows football on Sunday, do not mind being delayed by overtime games.

Roone Arledge added Monday Night Football to the ABC prime-time schedule in 1970. With Howard Cossell, the most controversial sports commentator of his day, Don Meredith and former star Frank Gifford, the show was an instant success. Even after the addition of the tongue-tied O.J. Simpson, the dumping of Cossell and other personnel changes, the show has remained strong, cementing a national audience for otherwise local fixtures (though the hiring of comedian Dennis Miller as a commentator for the 2000 season suggests a less confident outlook at ABC).

The relationship between football and television has been a symbiotic one. The networks were seen as crucial in the establishment of football; now football is seen by television executives as fundamental to their network’s financial health. Thus, Rupert Murdoch established FOX as a network to contend with in 1993 by bidding $1.6 billion to win the right to televise NFL games for four years ($500 million more than CBS had paid for the preceding four years), in addition stealing away CBS’ best commentary team, John Madden and Pat Somerall. Although CBS had lost money on its previous contract, it came back with an astonishing bid of $4 billion over eight years to wrest control of AFC games from NBC. Owing to such network contracts (the total of which amount to $18 billion), the value of the average football franchise has now reached over $200 million.

Other sports have also been successful in using television, though, unlike in football, focusing on players has often been crucial. Basketball was in the financial doldrums until the mid-1980s when CBS made a deliberate move to concentrate all its efforts on games featuring marquee players on major teams, such as Magic Johnson and Kareem AbdulJabbar for the Los Angeles Lakers, Larry Bird for the Boston Celtics and Julius Erving for the Philadelphia 76ers. This plan paid off with the ascendancy of the Chicago Bulls’ Michael Jordan, considered the best player ever to play the game. The downside has been witnessed in Jordan’s second retirement, followed by declining basketball TV ratings as the sport waits for its next crop of stars to emerge.

Golf similarly has benefited from the sudden arrival of Tiger Woods. Prior to Woods’ emergence, networks expected major golf championships to be watched in approximately 20 million homes. In 1997, when Woods captured the Masters, about 30 million homes tuned in. The $100 million investment the networks made in professional golf began to produce a much better return.

The impact of TV has been seen in the way the games themselves are performed.

Almost every team sport now has additional timeouts to allow for commercials (soccer has found it more difficult to gain large television revenues because it doesn’t have such commercial breaks). The result is longer games. One hour of football or basketball takes 3 hours to play. In addition, television officials believe that to draw viewers they must avoid having ties, so most sports now institute sudden-death overtimes.

Often the success of a sport is determined not by the number of people who participate in the game, but by the number who will watch on television. Tennis “arrived” with Billie Jean King’s 1973 “battle of the sexes” against Bobby Riggs; the success of women’s soccer was acknowledged when the 1999 World Cup pulled down a better rating than that year’s NBA playoff. This has been frustrating for enthusiasts of new sports, especially since the major sports of football, baseball and basketball have been able (largely through exemptions to antitrust legislation) to establish virtual monopolistic control over the networks. With the arrival of cable and the overall threat to the existence of the networks, this vaunted position for the major leagues is no longer guaranteed. All kinds of games are now seen on television, not merely those shown on ABC’s Wide World of Sports.

Journalists at newspapers have tended to be boosters for their cities and the teams they cover. A surface indignation about racism, sexism, commercialism and other excesses in different sports (like the failure of players to be good “role models”) is often undermined by the clamor for good performances from their cities’ teams. Some change may be expected as more women journalists and commentators are read in print and seen on television, from the pre-game shows to the commentary boxes. Issues have arisen, however, as a result of revelations concerning the parentage of Alexandra Stevenson, a rising tennis star whose mother, the sports journalist Samantha Stevenson, contested restrictions placed on women journalists’ access to sportsmen at the end of the 1970s.

The fact that her interviews with Julius Erving led to the conception of their daughter has resulted in some women journalists feeling let down, and some sports officials maintaining that their opposition to such contacts had been justified.

The long-time standard in sports journalism has been Sports Illustrated, but each sport has its own magazines, some independent, others run by national and regional sports federations. In addition to such magazines, each sports enthusiast can expect the arrival in the mail of a plethora of catalogs promoting sporting goods. This saturation has carried over into talk radio and television sports news programs, during which the performance of local teams, their coaches and owners are dissected. Such programming is now so common that a sitcom, Sports Nïght (ABC), has been loosely based on them.