Geoff Mason, an Emmy Award-winning sports producer who helped steer ABC Sports’s coverage of the long siege that began before dawn on Sept. 5, 1972, when terrorists took hostages and killed 11 Israeli athletes and officials at the Summer Olympics in Munich, died on Sunday in Naples, Fla. He was 85.
His son, Geoff Jr., said the death, in hospice care, was caused by complications of lung cancer.
Mr. Mason had a decades-long career in sports production, winning 24 Emmy Awards for events he produced for multiple networks. Most notably, he succeeded the innovative Roone Arledge as the executive producer of ABC Sports.
His most memorable moment came as the coordinating producer for ABC Sports on that September morning in 1972, when, for about 16 hours, the network was compelled to pivot from televising athletic events to covering breaking news: the invasion of the Israelis’ apartment building at 31 Connollystrasse by members of the Palestinian militant group Black September.
The terrorists uickly killed two Israelis and took nine others hostage, demanding the release of 234 Palestinians imprisoned in Israel.
“Mase organized everything, to the point where he could get Roone all the information and make decisions,” said Dennis Lewin, a producer who was sitting beside Mr. Mason in the control room. “He was responsible for a whole lot of things.”
In 2024 — when Mr. Mason appeared as a central character in “September 5,” a film that depicted the tension and decision-making in the control room — he told The Hollywood Reporter, “I cannot begin to tell you how fast events were unfolding in that room.”
Broadcasting to tens of millions of viewers, ABC’s cameras captured indelible images that day, like masked terrorists standing on an apartment balcony.
At one point, West German police officers burst into the ABC control room and pointed machine guns at Mr. Mason, the first person they saw.
“They started waving their hands,” he recounted to The Guardian in 2024, and gestured at a monitor that showed, from a tower camera, sharpshooters on the roof of 31 Connollystrasse preparing to rescue the hostages. “Kamera aus!” they demanded, then added, “Please, camera off!”
It was then that Mr. Mason realized that the terrorists, who were in the apartment with their hostages, might be seeing snipers getting into position by watching ABC’s broadcast.
Mr. Mason said he turned off the camera for a few hours (though in his 2003 memoir, “Roone,” Mr. Arledge said that the camera had stayed on but that the feed to Europe was shut off).
After the German authorities had promised the terrorists an escape flight with the hostages to Cairo, the action moved to a military airport. There, a firefight with German police and military personnel broke out during a failed rescue attempt, resulting in the deaths of the nine remaining hostages and five of the terrorists.
Mr. Mason relayed word of the hostages’ deaths into Mr. Arledge’s earpiece. “He said, ‘For sure?’ I said, ‘For sure,’” Mr. Mason recalled to The Hollywood Reporter.
Mr. Arledge then passed the information to Jim McKay, who was anchoring the massacre’s coverage all day and night.
“Official,” Mr. Arledge told him. “All hostages dead.”
A half-century after the massacre, Mr. Mason served as a consultant to “September 5,” directed by Tim Fehlbaum. Mr. Mason (who is portrayed by John Magaro in the film) vetted the script for authenticity; brokered a deal with Robert Iger, the chief executive of the Walt Disney Company, to let the film use ABC’s footage; and brought actors into a control room during a broadcast to give them a sense of the pace and pressure in covering an event.
Geoffrey Sheridan Mason was born on Dec. 30, 1940, in Englewood, N.J., and grew up in Casey Key, Fla. His father, Vernon, developed and managed a resort there and was involved in sailing organizations. His mother, Martha (Sheridan) Mason, ran the home.
Geoffrey began sailing at about the age of 10 and later did so competitively every summer in Marblehead, Mass. In 1962, he joined the crew of the sailing yacht Nefertiti, which lost a regatta for the right to defend America’s Cup that year. He studied sociology at Duke University, graduating with a bachelor’s degree in 1963, and spent the next four years in the Navy.
Mr. Mason started his career as a production assistant at ABC Sports in 1967, rising to associate producer and then director of Olympic planning in advance of the Munich Games. He also produced boxing matches and N.B.A. and college basketball games and helped plan coverage for the 1976 Summer and Winter Olympics.
He left for NBC Sports in 1977 to plan its coverage of the 1980 Summer Olympics in Moscow, but after the United States boycotted the event in protest of the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, NBC showed only highlights nightly. “It was the most depressing experience of my life,” Mr. Mason told The Tampa Tribune in 1984.
He briefly joined ESPN in 1986 to run its America’s Cup coverage before returning to ABC Sports later that year as vice president for Olympic production, ahead of the 1988 Winter Olympics in Calgary, Alberta.
While in Australia for the 1987 America’s Cup, he pushed Steve Bornstein, an ESPN executive, to pay the American yachtsman Dennis Conner $50,000 to put specialized audio and video equipment on his boat, Stars and Stripes 87, the eventual winner.
Mr. Bornstein, in an interview, said that at first he had refused to pay for news access, but that Mr. Mason “went over my head to Bill Grimes” — president of ESPN at the time — “who called me at 3 in the morning and said, ‘Why aren’t you doing this?’ So I spent the money.”
“It made the coverage,” Mr. Bornstein said. “Instead of aerials and helicopter shots, you heard audio directly from the boat, which made what could been inanimate coverage fabulous.”
Two years later, after being promoted to executive producer of ABC Sports, Mr. Mason was in the production truck outside Candlestick Park when a powerful earthquake struck the greater San Francisco Bay Area before Game 3 of the 1989 World Series.
He thought about the Munich control room.
“At a moment that very easily could be panic and chaos,” he told USA Today the day after the earthquake, “everything got suddenly quiet. Everyone went to work.”
For the next 30 years, Mr. Mason held various producing and advisory roles for ESPN and Fox Sports.
In addition to his son, Geoff, from Mr. Mason’s marriage to Judith Boedy, which ended in divorce, he is survived by his wife, Chris (Bowen) Mason, and his brother, David. He lived in Naples.
During the Covid-19 pandemic, Mr. Mason, who was a recovering alcoholic, and Jerry Steinberg, a former Fox Sports executive, organized regular Zoom calls for people in the sports business with substance addictions. Mr. Mason continued to participate in the program until a few weeks ago.
In 2011, almost 30 years after he had entered the Betty Ford Center (now the Hazelden Betty Ford Foundation), an addiction treatment facility in Rancho Mirage, Calif., Mr. Mason gave a eulogy at the funeral for Ms. Ford, the former first lady, who died that year.
A longtime board member of the center, he opened the eulogy simply.
“I’m Geoff,” he said. “I’m an alcoholic.”
Richard Sandomir, an obituaries reporter, has been writing for The Times for more than three decades.
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