ABC
By EMILIE DEUTSCH
Published: June 15, 2008
In the summer of 1991, ABC Sports packed a 423-foot cargo ship with 15
mobile units, 40 cameras, 20 miles of cable, 50 videotape machines, 5
satellite dishes and enough food to feed 350 people for three weeks, and
shipped it to Havana to cover the most important sporting event to take
place in Cuba — the Pan American Games.
Skip to next paragraph
Related
Jim McKay, Pioneer Sports Broadcaster, Dies at 86 (June 8, 2008)
McKay Remembered as a Storyteller (June 11, 2008)
Sports of The Times: Ebersol Learned Journalism From McKay (June 15, 2008)
Because of the trade embargo, ABC had received special permission from
the United States government to do business with the Cubans under the
condition that absolutely nothing — not a videotape, not a monitor, not
a stopwatch — be left behind.
What does remain from that special sporting event is an interview
conducted by the ABC Sports commentator Jim McKay with Fidel Castro,
Cuba's president at the time.
When the camera crew arrived for the interview at the former
presidential palace at 5 p.m., the Cubans insisted on inspecting every
bag and taking apart anything they could figure out how to open, to make
sure that no explosives or guns had been packed among the gear. A
phalanx of Cuban security guards took the equipment into the interview
area piece by piece, slowing the setup to a crawl.
Castro's aides peeked into the room at 8:30 to see if all was ready, and
when it clearly was not, he was escorted back to his office until the
setup was complete.
At 10 p.m., Castro strode into the room, a charismatic presence in green
fatigues and his trademark scraggly gray beard hanging five inches below
his chin. He reached out to shake McKay's hand, and although he was the
more imposing figure, taller by almost a foot, it was clear that he was
honored to be in the presence of the well-known American sportscaster,
whom he had followed through the years on the anthology series "Wide
World of Sports."
The two sat and faced each other, Castro's interpreter sitting just
off-camera. It was a striking tableau — two men in their 60s, one a
sports journalist in coat and tie, the other a Communist dictator in
uniform, raised in different cultures but both educated by Jesuits and
able to find a common ground in sport.
For four hours, McKay interviewed Castro in a wide-ranging discussion
that included the downfall of the Soviet Union, Castro's take on the
eight American presidents who had been in office during his reign
through 1991 and the advantages of wood bats over aluminum. In his
comfortable, conversational way, McKay guided the discussion skillfully,
using his simple, poignant questions to transform the blustery Castro
into a regular person.
"I would like to know more about you as a man, and I'm sure the American
people would, too," McKay said. "How would you describe yourself as a
person?"
At another point when McKay had asked about the influences in his life,
and Castro responded by discussing Jesus Christ and the political
theorists José Martí and Karl Marx, McKay interjected: "But those are
all famous political and religious figures. Is there anyone you knew
personally who had a great influence on you?" (Che Guevara was the answer.)
Castro had been an excellent athlete, and was named Cuba's national high
school athlete of the year in his youth. It was rumored that he had been
offered $5,000 to play professional baseball in the United States. When
McKay noted that George H. W. Bush, the American president at the time,
had also been quite the ballplayer, Castro responded, "I would have
preferred him as an important professional athlete because as a
president, he has not shown to be very friendly toward us!"
McKay queried Castro about his feelings when John F. Kennedy, the
president with whom he had sparred over the Bay of Pigs and the Cuban
Missile Crisis, was assassinated.
"What I felt when I heard that news is someone who has an adversary,
someone who respects his adversary and all of a sudden, someone else
kills his adversary," Castro said. "A boxer in the ring for example, and
the adversary is shot to death in the middle of the boxing match. I
believe Kennedy was the most brilliant of all. The most brilliant. I
believe he was a brilliant man with a great charisma."
As the interview concluded at 2 a.m., and Castro's staff rolled a cart
of sandwiches and bottles of American liquors as well as Cuban rum into
the room, the dictator and the sportscaster bent over a baseball and
Castro showed McKay the grip of his famous curve. All around them, the
camera crew was taking down the lights and people were milling about
sipping rum and eating Cuban sandwiches. But McKay and Castro remained
locked in conversation about the Jesuits, and wood bats, great athletes
and the impending Pan Am Games.
Then Castro bid the group farewell, shook hands and disappeared.
In his final question, McKay asked Castro, "Can you see in your lifetime
and mine any way that the U.S. and Cuba can assume normal relations?"
Castro responded, "Everything will depend, my friend, on the amount of
years we both live."
On Tuesday, they laid Jim McKay to rest in a private burial ground on
his farm in Maryland. The great storyteller and humanizer did not live
to see a thaw in United States-Cuba relations, but he left behind an
enduring legacy of making the most celebrated and famous people, whether
athletes or dictators, familiar to the rest of us.
Emilie Deutsch directed and produced Jim McKay's interview with Fidel
Castro in 1991. She is currently the vice president for original
programming at CBS College Sports.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/15/sports/15mckay.html?_r=1&partner=rssnyt&emc=rss&oref=slogin
No comments:
Post a Comment