Alan Abrahamson • E-mail

A few months before the Salt Lake City Olympics, I had the privilege not only of spending an afternoon at the Monkton, Md., farmhouse that Jim and Margaret McKay shared, a rambling old place full of warmth and love and memories in Maryland's horse country, but of listening to one of the master storytellers of our time, perhaps of any time, do what he does best, tell stories.

One time, Jim said, he had been sent to Switzerland to cover a skiing event. After it was over, he and a young production assistant went to Zurich to stay the night. The next morning, they took a taxi to the airport. As they headed down a main boulevard, Jim kept turning his head. The assistant finally said, what's going on?

"I said, 'I'm just looking down the side streets.' And then I thought, that's what we do. We don't just look down the main boulevards."

Inside the farmhouse, it was suddenly still and very quiet, the shafts of light arcing through the windows. Jim paused. He closed his eyes. Here he was in his 80s, yet he was seeing that part of himself he always saw, the young reporter he had been at the Baltimore Evening Sun, long before he got into television and TV made him famous and he, with the incomparable grace he displayed under extraordinary pressure at the 1972 Munich Olympics, moved television and sportscasting forward. In his mind's eye, as I would write about this moment in a story published six years ago in the Los Angeles Times, Jim still saw himself as that cub reporter making all of $35 a week, $28.50 after taxes.

"We look down the side streets," Jim finally said. "And we see."

Jim McKay died Saturday. He was 86. He was one of the greatest we shall see, any of us, all of us. He not only could himself see. He made it so the rest of us could see.

Jim was not only a great journalist. He was also a teacher, always willing to lend a hand to anyone who expressed an interest in learning about how to do what we do better, genuinely flattered to be asked.

More, McKay was a gentleman. He conducted himself with modesty. The respect he showed others was genuine. They call that class.

As President Bush said in a statement issued Saturday by the White House, "He was a talented and eloquent newsman and storyteller whose special gift was his ability to make the viewers at home genuinely care about more than just who won or lost."

With him goes a piece of the cultural history of our times.

Jim served as host of "Wide World of Sports" on ABC for more than 40 years, starting in 1961.

He is, of course, best remembered for his coverage of the kidnapping and murders of 11 Israeli athletes and coaches at the 1972 Munich Olympics. A little-known fact: He was stuck wearing a pair of wet bathing trunks under his pants. He had gone swimming the morning of Sept. 5, 1972, and dashed to the ABC studios when he got word of what happened — never taking time to change.

Two of the Israelis were murdered within the Olympic Village. The other nine were held captive for hours, then driven to a military airport near Munich. A firefight ensued.

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A report flashed over the news-service wires that the hostages had been freed. ABC never could secure confirmation and so did not run that report, one of the supreme exercises in journalistic restraint in service of the mission to report the truth.

The hostages, as we all know now, had not been freed. The opposite turned out to be true. This is how McKay reported it:

"We've just gotten the final word. When I was a kid, my father used to say our greatest hopes and worst fears are seldom realized. Our worst fears have been realized tonight.

"They have now said that there were 11 hostages. Two were killed in their rooms this morning -- excuse me, yesterday morning. Nine were killed at the airport tonight.

"They're all gone."

Now Jim is gone, too. We are all better people for having been touched by him, in person or in our living rooms on the television screen. There will never be another quite like him. Godspeed.

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