MacPhail worked his way up in the front office of several minor league teams. He was traveling road secretary for the New York Yankees[2] in 1946 and then worked for eight years for three minor league teams before becoming director of publicity for the Kansas City Athletics in 1955. CBS hired him the following year.[1]
Broadcasting career
MacPhail was a former president of CBS Sports, where he worked from 1956 to 1973. Afterwards he was associated with Bob Wold, a satellite sports pioneer, and then brought to CNN by Reese Schonfeld to create the CNN Sports department in 1980 upon its launch, which he ran until retiring from CNN in 1995. While at CBS Sports, MacPhail is credited with implementing instant replay[1] for the first time in sports — during the Army-Navy Game of 1963.
At one point, during the 1960s and '70s, CBS Sports, under MacPhail, owned the rights to all major sports events—pro football, basketball, the Triple Crown, the Masters tournament and other major golf events, except Major League Baseball. MacPhail attempted to acquire the baseball rights, then owned by NBC, from Baseball Commissioner Bowie Kuhn. Kuhn seemed very interested, but the higher up at CBS declined—they did not want to start bidding wars for sports rights. When Roone Arledge was appointed head of ABC Sports, he thought differently and thus the bidding wars began.