Geoff Mason obituary: television producer

“I remember thinking, good lord, we’re supposed to be watching Mark Spitz go for seven gold medals and Olga Korbut, the new face of Russian gymnastics,” he told Time magazine. “And I’m now watching people crawl across a roof getting ready to stage a military assault on terrorists.”

There were ethical pitfalls in providing the first rolling television news coverage of a significant international terrorist attack. The crisis posed novel questions for Mason and the others inside the booth as they sought to provide up-to-the-minute information while lives were at stake. One was: “What are we going to do if we happen to be in a position of potentially watching someone be killed live on TV?” he recalled to The Guardian.

“What we decided was, since we didn’t have any good live camera positions, any coverage we had would likely be on film or tape so that we’d be able to judge at some point subsequent to whatever happened, whether or not it was appropriate for feeding out on television.”

There were also internal politics to handle. The ABC news department in New York tried to seize control of the broadcast from the sports team but was rebuffed by a senior executive in Munich, Roone Arledge. The coverage would later win an Emmy award for outstanding achievement in sports show programming.

The on-site crew were undeniably resourceful under Mason’s co-ordination. The village was sealed off to media but Howard Cosell, ABC’s star commentator and a man with a flair for self-promotion, was determined to gain access. Mason’s suggestion that Cosell don a tracksuit and pose as an athlete was doomed to failure: he was 54 and not in peak condition. But Cosell talked his way past the guards by pretending to be a shoe salesman for the Puma brand. As the stand-off dragged on, ABC fashioned a fake credential so another employee could enter the village and swap rolls of film with a cameraman inside. Mason hauled a couple of bulky cameras into the street so they could take shots of the building.

The cameras picked up police crawling along the roof. These were valuable images for viewers — and for the terrorists. Police officers burst into the control room, pointed machineguns at Mason and ordered, “Kamera aus! ” [camera off].

“What none of us had thought about until this moment was, oh my God, if they are in that apartment, those hostages and their captors, if they are indeed watching the Olympic broadcast cable system … they would be seeing everything that we were seeing,” Mason told The Guardian. He switched off the cameras for a few hours then turned them back on.

After tense negotiations the remaining hostages and terrorists — from a group named Black September who demanded the release of prisoners in Israel and West Germany — were transported to an airfield. There, the nine hostages and a policeman died after a failed police ambush. At 3.24am local time, the ABC anchor Jim McKay informed viewers: “They’re all gone.” Mason returned to his hotel room, poured himself a drink and wept.

Geoffrey Sheridan Mason was born in Englewood, New Jersey, in 1940, to Vernon and Martha (née Sheridan). He largely grew up in Florida, where his father managed a resort, and spent much of his youth sailing and competing in races in Massachusetts. In 1962 he was part of a crew that narrowly missed out on taking part in the America’s Cup. He graduated from Duke University in North Carolina with a bachelor’s degree in sociology in 1963 and served in the United States navy as a planning officer in southern California before joining ABC Sports, initially as a runner for golf coverage. His first Olympic assignment came in 1968 at the Winter Games in Grenoble, France.

A marriage to Judith Boedy ended in divorce. He remarried, to Chris Bowen, who survives him along with a brother, David, and a son from his previous marriage, Geoff Jr, a former television news producer.

In a stressful role that required constant decision making and a talent for visual storytelling as well as technical and logistic ability, Mason was renowned for his measured demeanour and spoke with a precision honed from decades of issuing clear instructions under pressure.

From the mid-Seventies he spent five years working for American networks in Paris. Among his other prestigious assignments were football World Cups, the Super Bowl, the Tour de France, Franz Klammer’s winning ski run in the 1976 Winter Olympics and the epic 1980 Wimbledon final between Björn Borg and John McEnroe. Eager to innovate, Mason’s broadcasts of America’s Cup sailing competitions featured mast-mounted mini-cameras. He was in an outside-broadcast truck when another sporting contest abruptly morphed into a big breaking news story: the 1989 baseball World Series disrupted by an earthquake that killed dozens of people in the San Francisco area.

Mason became an alcoholic in his twenties and was, he said decades later, “one of the most successful blackout drinkers I’ve heard about … I won an Emmy in the early Eighties for producing 30 hours of coverage at Wimbledon in London for NBC. I have zero recollection of being in London for that show. Zero.”

In 1983 he checked himself into the Betty Ford Centre, a treatment facility in California opened by the former first lady. During his recovery he struck up a friendship with Ford. He joined the clinic’s board of directors and gave a eulogy at her funeral in 2011.

Involved in 24 Emmy award-winning productions, he was inducted into the American sports broadcasting hall of fame in 2010. Mason ran his own production company after going freelance and received fresh attention in 2024 when September 5, a German thriller about the massacre from the perspective of the ABC crew, was released to wide acclaim. Mason acted as a consultant for the film, which was nominated for an Academy Award for best original screenplay, and was a main character depicted on screen by the American actor John Magaro.

Mason played a lead role in a seminal moment for broadcasting but regretted that his career-making triumph stemmed from a tragedy. “We felt angry about what was happening but we didn’t have time to dwell on it,” he said in a 2024 interview. “The anger will never leave me, the sadness I will always feel.”

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