Former ABC sportscaster Dave Diles dies at 78

A familiar face to college football fans of an older generation, Dave Diles has passed away at the age of 78. Diles was a Detroit-area sports anchor and sportswriter in the 1960s and 1970s, but he was best known for his work with ABC Sports. Diles hosted the college football scoreboard show, alongside the likes of Bill Flemming and Chris Schenkel, when they weren’t out in the field calling games. Younger sports fans would probably get a kick out of the old technology used on the scoreboard show, when scores of games were actually rolled by hand (hopefully before the camera panned over the great wall of games).
Diles also worked other ABC events, such as Wide World of Sports and the Indy 500, on which he served as the play-by-play man in 1981 and as a pit reporter on three other occasions.
Diles left his network job in the early 1980s, admittedly because he was irritated that his salary was sometimes half of other sportscasters he helped bring along in the business.