The Wider World of Sports

It was 20 years ago today … that I began writing for SportsTravel. To commemorate the occasion, I contemplated writing about how much the world of sports has changed in the last 20 years. But as the eyes of the global sports world focus on the United States (as well as our neighbors to the north and south) beginning this week, I want to go back even further – 50–60 years – and pay tribute to a show that was way ahead of its time: ABC’s “Wide World of Sports.”

If you grew up in the United States in the 1960s and 1970s, sports broadcasting was generally limited to domestic American sports, except for every four years when the Olympics would tantalize our appetites with rarely seen sports, foreign venues and athletes with whom we were unfamiliar. The one exception to that limited focus was on Saturday afternoon when ABC would air “Wide World of Sports” — a singular platform that recognized lesser-known sports (at least in America) from all over the world and forever embedded in our minds the phrase: “The thrill of victory and the agony of defeat.” Among the offerings that captured my youthful imagination each year were the cliff diving competition from Acapulco, the World Wrist Wrestling (as it was then known) Championships from Petaluma, California, and the Lumberjack World Championships (logrolling was my favorite discipline). What is striking, though, is that WWOS was also the only game in town for even higher-profile sports such as figure skating, swimming, diving, wrestling, skiing, motor sports, cycling and even soccer.

The 1970 FIFA World Cup for instance — which was held in Mexico and therefore was in our same time zone — was shown with English commentary only in segments on WWOS. Prominent overseas tennis and golf tournaments, such as Wimbledon and The Open Championship, were first shown in the 1960s as snippets on WWOS before NBC began its more expansive coverage with Breakfast at Wimbledon in the ’70s. Heavyweight boxing championships featuring the planet’s most famous and marketable athlete, Muhammad Ali, would only be broadcast on delay on “Wide World of Sports.” Those segments, where Ali would be in studio with Howard Cosell as they analyzed the fight, are the stuff of legend to the generation that saw them.

Motor sports also reflected this mentality, as American fans of auto racing seemed content with our strictly indigenous creations of IndyCar Racing and NASCAR. Formula One, which is now a staple of the American media landscape, would generally appear on television once a year — a delayed package of the Monaco Grand Prix on “Wide World of Sports.” It served as America’s annual check-in on the former Grace Kelly, then Princess Grace of Monaco. Even when Mario Andretti became only the second American to win the Formula One World Drivers Championship in 1978 at the Grand Prix of Italy, his victory was shown to American viewers as a highlight package one week later on WWOS. None of these sports and competitions would ever have been seen by an American audience at the time without that show.

A Different Era of Television

To be fair, geography and technology contributed to the limited supply of international competition that we Americans were offered. Nevertheless, while some portion of the American television audience, including this columnist as a young boy, would eagerly await these exotic offerings, most Americans seemed satisfied with our domestic sporting competitions as we crowned “world champions” in our major domestic sports: NFL in football, MLB in baseball and the NBA in basketball. Hockey at least used less grandiose parlance by crowning a “Stanley Cup Champion.”

From that humble yet visionary beginning, and of course with rapidly expanding technology, today we have a full slate of offerings from all parts of the world on various media platforms, including streaming services of the former big three TV networks (ABC, CBS and NBC) in the form of ESPN+, Paramount+, and Peacock, plus FS1. Then add in other, more niche streaming services like Flo Sports, BallerTV, DAZN, UFC Fight Pass, Victory+ and Fubo, and occasional offerings from Amazon Prime, Apple TV, Netflix and YouTube, and there are few sports and few parts of the world that are inaccessible to the American sports fan.

It is not just the broadcasters who have embraced sports globalism; athletes have done so as well. Hockey and basketball always had some degree of international engagement because they were included as Olympic sports as early as 1936 (the ice hockey gold medal that year went to Great Britain — stocked with an ample number of Canadians). But until the American basketball Dream Team of 1992, it was amateur American athletes competing in these sports in international competition. NBA Commissioner David Stern was one of the first major American sports league executives to encourage a more global reach of his league. It is worth noting that the last eight NBA MVP awards have gone to foreign-born players.

Baseball was a bit slower to the global mark, but after players such as Bryce Harper and Mike Trout strongly supported the World Baseball Classic, we saw something this year that other countries get to see frequently but we do not: the best players playing on a national team competing in our national sport in a competitive international competition. For the first time, the 2026 version of the World Baseball Classic even saw both of the reigning Cy Young Award winners, Paul Skenes and Tarik Skubal, put aside concerns about risking injury by taking part. The American team was captained by Aaron Judge, who brought his heart and soul to the role. It was a sign of how far we have come when I attended one of the USA games in Houston and Judge, as well as other players who are generally archrivals to the hometown Astros, were cheered vociferously by the Houston crowd. It also helps the global profile of baseball that the best player in the world, and perhaps the best player ever, is Japanese. And now the reigning champion of the World Baseball Classic is Venezuela, meaning that teams from three different continents have won the championship. Baseball’s return to the Olympics in 2028 is due in no small part to this engagement with the rest of the world.

Finally, that most indigenous (and wealthy!) of American sports leagues, the NFL, has also created outreach with nine games in seven foreign countries in 2026, and flag football, both men and women, being added to the Olympic program in 2028.

New Fan Bases Emerge

Visitors who came to the United States for the 1984 and 1996 Olympic Summer Games and the 1994 FIFA World Cup (each happening while “Wide World of Sports” was still on the air) largely encountered a population whose knowledge of sports throughout the world was limited to WWOS, as well as the quadrennial Olympic coverage. Visitors who will arrive in the United States this week for the FIFA World Cup will encounter a much more globally engaged and knowledgeable fan base — one that has been able to watch soccer (as we call it) throughout the world regularly, be it the German Bundesliga, LaLiga in Spain, the Dutch Eredivisie, or the Premier League (not to mention our own men’s and women’s domestic leagues that grew from our hosting international events). Our national television audience will be able to see every single match rather than just a highlight package on a Saturday afternoon as we did in a bygone era.

Yet, as I appreciate the smorgasbord of global sports I am able to consume each week, and the excitement of one of the world’s largest sporting events being in our time zone, I offer a salute to the visionaries who created and produced “Wide World of Sports” until its death in 1997. Whether the stage was grand or obscure, the victories were always thrilling and the defeats agonizing. And now even more so in real time.

Bob Latham is a partner at the law firm Jackson Walker, L.L.P., and a World Rugby board member. A compilation of his best columns titled “Winners & Losers: Rants, Riffs and Reflections on the World of Sports,” is available for purchase at amazon.com.