Jim McKay, the premier ABC sports broadcaster who covered 10 Olympic Games for ABC over a 24 year span and and also appeared on the series "Wide World of Sports" for its first 25 years died Saturday at his country estate in Monkton, Maryland. Jim Mckay was 86 years old.

He died of natural causes, said LeslieAnne Wade, a spokeswoman for CBS Sports, where McKay’s son, Sean McManus, is the president.

McKay was an optimist who left a feeling of trust. In a business in which hype was the norm, he became a calm, low-key storyteller, leaving analysis and brickbats to such co-workers as Dick Button, Peggy Fleming, Donna de Varona and Bill Hartack.

McKa loved ABC sports and would have loved to see the Belmont Winner Big Brown today but he missed that opportunity as he passed before Big Brown won the Belmont Stakes to become a Triple Crown Winner.

Emotion occasionally slipped through objectivity. After an American athlete had won a gold medal in the 1984 Los Angeles Olympics, McKay said: "If I said I was an objective reporter, I’d be lying through my teeth. I think when an American wins, you’re excited. And why not?"

No matter. As Peter Alfano wrote in The New York Times during those Olympics, television allowed McKay "to play Uncle Sam for two weeks."

McKay’s sincerity came through. Bob Costas of NBC Sports, a younger-generation sports broadcaster, once said: "Jim McKay had a very important quality. You never felt what he expressed wasn’t genuine. You never felt his reaction was, What’s called for here is a tear. You never had a sense that he professed to be moved, and when they went to a commercial he blew his nose."

His professionalism and sensitivity melded in 1972. During the Munich Olympics, as he left the hotel sauna and was about to go into the swimming pool on his only day off, he received word that Arab terrorists had invaded the Israeli living quarters in the Olympic Village. He hurried to the studio, and for 16 consecutive hours he anchored ABC’s extraordinary news coverage, with field reporting from Peter Jennings, Howard Cosell and others.

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