22 Facts About Roone Arledge

1.

Roone Arledge served as President of the Omega Chapter of the fraternity of Phi Gamma Delta.

2.

Roone Arledge's classmates included Max Frankel, who would eventually win a Pulitzer Prize in 1973 for his work as editorial page editor of the New York Times; Larry Grossman, who became president of the Public Broadcasting Service in 1976 and later went on to head NBC News; and Richard Wald, another president of NBC News that Arledge would later persuade to come over to ABC News as a senior vice-president.

3.

Roone Arledge was the only one of the four who did not work at the Columbia Daily Spectator, the daily student newspaper of Columbia University.

4.

Roone Arledge is survived by her and his four children from his first marriage, Roone, Elizabeth, Susan Weston and Patricia Loonie.

5.

Roone Arledge realized ABC was the organization he was looking to join.

6.

Several months before ABC began broadcasting NCAA college football games, Roone Arledge sent Scherick a remarkable memo, filled with youthful exuberance, and television production concepts which sports broadcasts have adhered to since.

7.

Roone Arledge recognized television had to take the sports fan to the game.

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8.

Roone Arledge hit upon the idea of broadcasting track and field events sponsored by the Amateur Athletic Union.

9.

Roone Arledge had a genius for the dramatic storyline that unfolded in the course of a game or event.

10.

Roone Arledge did not gain a formal title as president of ABC Sports until 1968, even though Scherick left his position to assume a position of vice president for programming at ABC in 1964.

11.

Roone Arledge presided as producer over the 1975 flop, Saturday Night Live with Howard Cosell, which director Don Mischer blamed on Arledge's inexperience with the variety show genre and indifference to the work required.

12.

Roone Arledge took over as President of ABC News during a time that had been characterized by blunders such as the disastrous pairing of Barbara Walters with Harry Reasoner at the desk of the network's evening news.

13.

Previous to that time, the only news experience Roone Arledge had was providing ABC's coverage of the tragedies during the '72 Olympics in Munich.

14.

Shortly thereafter, Roone Arledge reformatted the network's evening newscast with many of the splashy graphics he had developed at Wide World of Sports, and created World News Tonight.

15.

In 1981, Roone Arledge brought David Brinkley to ABC from NBC, and created the Sunday-morning affairs program This Week for Brinkley.

16.

In 1986, Roone Arledge stepped down as president of ABC Sports.

17.

Roone Arledge died on December 5,2002, in New York City, New York, at the age of 71, following a battle with prostate cancer.

18.

Roone Arledge, who has been both a champion and defender of Rivera, has said he thought the story needed more work.

19.

Roone Arledge was selected by Life magazine as one of the "100 Most Important Americans of the 20th Century".

20.

Roone Arledge was the winner of 37 Emmy Awards and in 1990 was inducted into the Television Academy Hall of Fame.

21.

The Roone Arledge auditorium located in student center Alfred Lerner Hall of Columbia University, Arledge's Alma Mater, is named in his honor.

22.

In 1997, Roone Arledge won the Walter Cronkite Award for Excellence in Journalism.