"What do you mean, Uncle Mike?" you may ask. "Wasn't the game on television?" Yes, it was -- but not in its entirety. And it wasn't zero: Viewers on the Pacific Time Zone saw it live.
The New York Jets were playing the Oakland Raiders. The Raiders had won the American Football League Championship the season before, but lost Super Bowl II to the Green Bay Packers. They were 8-2 coming into this game. The Jets were 7-3. Each team had beaten the other in the previous year's regular season: The Jets' win was the only defeat for the Raiders prior to the Super Bowl, and the Raiders' win stopped the Jets from winning the Eastern Division.
Each team had a notable quarterback: The Raiders had Daryle Lamonica, known as the Mad Bomber; while the Jets had Joe Namath, coming off a season in which he became the 1st pro quarterback to pass for 4,000 yards in a season. The Raiders, especially defensive end Ben Davidson (later an actor) always targeted him for dirty hits: Davidson had broken Namath's jaw in the Raiders' win the season before.
Broadway Joe Namath
With the Playoffs for both the AFL and the NFL expanded for this season, this was seen as a possible Playoff preview -- correctly, as it turned out.
And while the owners of the original 8 AFL teams, a.k.a. "The Foolish Club," were friends and partners, the teams themselves, and the fans thereof, hated each other's guts. As Jets director of public relations Frank Ramos said, "When the Jets played the Raiders, it wasn't a rivalry, it was a war."
The game was scheduled for a 1:00 PM kickoff, Pacific Time -- meaning 2:00 Mountain Time, 3:00 Central Time, and 4:00 Pacific Time. In those days, before TV started insisting on more timeouts to run more commercials, games rarely took a full 3 hours. So it was reasonable to presume that the game would end before 7:00 PM Eastern Time.
It was the 2nd half of an AFL doubleheader on NBC. And the 1st half was a sign of trouble: The San Diego Chargers beat the Buffalo Bills 21-6, but it ran long. The result was not in doubt, but NBC still broke away from it at 4:00 on the dot, and began televising from Oakland.
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The roughly play began at the beginning, when the Jets were penalized for a personal foul on the opening kickoff. But they got close enough for Jim Turner to kick a field goal, then did it again: Jets 6, Raiders 0. Lamonica had back and knee injuries, but, late in the 1st quarter, threw a 22-yard touchdown pass to Warren Wells. The extra point was good, and it was Raiders 7, Jets 6.
Early in the 2nd quarter, Lamonica threw a 48-yard touchdown pass to Billy Cannon, the 1959 Heisman Trophy winner. Raiders 14, Jets 6. But Namath, himself always troubled by knee injuries, drove the Jets as the half wound down. With 5 seconds left, he took a quarterback sneak in from the 1-yard line. Since his backup, Babe Parilli, a veteran quarterback (he'd gotten the New England Patriots, then known as the Boston Patriots, into the 1963 AFL Championship Game), was the kick holder, coach Weeb Ewbank called for a fake kick. Parilli tried for the 2-point conversion (the AFL had it from the start, but the NFL didn't begin using it until 1994), and failed. Halftime score: Raiders 14, Jets 12.
Early in the 3rd quarter, Jet safety Jim Hudson intercepted a Lamonica pass. Namath drove the Jets, and Bill Mathis ran the ball in from the 4. Jets 19, Raiders 14. Unfazed by any of this, Lamonica drove 80 yards, threw a 3-yard touchdown pass to Charlie Smith, and rubbed it in the Jets' faces by successfully throwing a 2-point conversion pass to Hewritt Dixon.
The ball had gotten to the 3 in part because of the previous play: Hudson was called for a blatant facemask violation, a 15-yard penalty, then argued with referee Bob Finley, who threw him out of the game. Hearing the boos from the Raider fans as he walked off the field, he gave them the middle finger. End of the 3rd quarter: Raiders 22, Jets 19.
Early in the 4th quarter, the Raiders were driving again, but Smith fumbled at the Jet 3, and Gerry Philbin recovered. Namath threw 2 passes to Don Maynard: 47 yards, and 50 yards for a touchdown. Jets 26, Raiders 22. Broadway Joe got the Jets close again, and Turner kicked another field goal. Jets 29, Raiders 22. Lamonica drove the Raiders 88 yards, and threw a 22-yard touchdown pass to Fred Biletnikoff.
With under 4 minutes to play -- the AFL had no provision for overtime in regular-season games, the score was tied at 29. Namath drove the Jets again, and Turner was able to kick a 26-yard field goal. With 1:05 left, it was Jets 32, Raiders 29.
Time was running out. Smith took Turner's kickoff from the end zone to the Raider 22. Lamonica threw to Smith for an apparent touchdown, but it was called back due to a penalty. Lamonica kept trying, and got the Raiders closer. For the 2nd time in the game, the Jets were hit with a dumb facemask penalty, getting the Raiders into Jet territory. It was at this point that NBC made their big decision, which I'll get to in a moment.
On the next play, Lamonica threw to Smith again. He caught the ball, and ran 43 yards for a touchdown. George Blanda -- like Parilli, an aging quarterback given new life by the AFL in the early 1960s, in his case with the Houston Oilers -- kicked the extra point. Raiders 36, Jets 32.
The Mad Bomber, Daryle Lamonica
There were 42 seconds left. But Earl Christy fumbled the kickoff. Preston Ridlehuber recovered for the Raiders, and took it into the end one. Raiders 43, Jets 32. That was the final score.
If that was the extent of the proceedings, and if they had concluded before 7:00 Eastern, the game might be worthy of mention on major anniversaries, like today's 50th, but that's about it. But that wasn't the extend of what happened, and it didn't conclude before 7. And this game still gets talked about, frequently.
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As for the broadcast: NBC assigned its lead pro football broadcast team: Curt Gowdy, who had done everything in sports, and for whom the Basketball Hall of Fame's award for broadcasters is named; and Al DeRogatis, a member of the College Football Hall of Fame as a defensive tackle with Duke, and a 2-time Pro Bowler with the New York Giants, who'd gotten started broadcasting their games.
NBC planned to follow the broadcast of this game -- at least, in the 3 easternmost time zones -- with a film version of Johanna Spyri's 1881 novel Heidi. It tells the tale of an orphaned girl in Spyri's native Switzerland, and the lives she touches. It had already been filmed 6 times, most notably in 1937 with Shirley Temple in the title role. There have been additional versions since 1968.
The version NBC was showing was new, made for TV, and aired in place of, but well within the style of, their usual Sunday night fare: The anthology series then known as Walt Disney's Wonderful World of Color. (A bit of a boast, given that only about half the homes in America had color TV sets at that point.) The show has been on the air continuously since 1954, and, for most of its history, including currently on the Disney Channel, it's been known as The Wonderful World of Disney.
In the 1968 TV-movie, Heidi was played by Jennifer Edwards, the 11-year-old daughter of film producer and director Blake Edwards, and stepdaughter of Blake's wife, who also knew a thing or two about children's fare: Julie Andrews. (Jennifer has since left acting for screenwriting.) The film also starred Maximilian Schell, Michael Redgrave and Jean Simmons.
As if there wasn't enough going wrong,
this DVD cover didn't even get Jean Simmons' name right.
NBC had been hyping the movie like crazy -- the way they would if it were a holiday broadcast, say, if it had aired 5 nights later on Thanksgiving, or on Christmas Eve. They took out big print ads for it, including a full-page ad in The New York Times, which, then as now was a prohibitively expensive move. They had to air it precisely at 7:00, so that it would end at 9:00, and kids who had to go to school the next day could then get a good night's sleep (at least, in theory).
Something I learned just as I was doing the research for this post, the day before (November 16): It wasn't just a judgment call. NBC had an actual contract with a single sponsor, Timex watches. The contract stated that Heidi had to start at exactly 7:00, and could not be delayed, or joined in progress, for any reason. The fact that the sponsor was a timekeeper became retroactively ironic.
It's also worth nothing that this was 1968. The VCR was a few years away from being invented. There was no DVR service. If you missed a show, you had to wait until it was repeated -- if it was repeated.
And there were only 6 VHF channels in New York: CBS on 2, NBC on 4, ABC on 7, and the "independent" stations on 5, 9 and 11. (Channel 13 was there, but PBS was still in its infancy, and most people weren't thinking about it yet.) So, with few choices, when one got highlighted, you became convinced that this was something special, and you should watch it. It was around this time that the kind of TV production previously known as a "spectacular" began to be called a "special."
So with all the promotion of this "family entertainment," there was a considerable buzz about Heidi. In the history of American TV to this point, pretty much the only broadcasts that had ever gotten this much hype were the final episode of The Fugitive on ABC the year before, the 1955 NBC broadcast of the Broadway musical version of Peter Pan with Mary Martin in the lead role, and the appearances on CBS'The Ed Sullivan Show by Elvis Presley in 1957 and The Beatles in 1964. Even the 1960 Kennedy-Nixon debates and space launches didn't get hyped this much.
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Dick Cline was NBC's supervisor for sports telecasts. Except for the 1958 NFL Championship Game, which went to overtime, NBC had never broadcast a pro football game that had taken over 3 hours to complete. So he had no reason to believe this one would, either. Don Ellis was the telecast's on-site producer. Scotty Connal was the executive producer. Julian Goodman was the president of NBC, and he told Connal that, no matter what, Heidi must start at 7:00. Connal told this to Cline and Ellis, and overruled their objections.
But, between them, Namath and Lamonica threw 31 incomplete passes, each one stopping the game clock. Both teams used all their allotted timeouts -- each team got 3 in each half, for a total of 12. And there were 63 points scored with 4 minutes left on the clock. That's a lot of stoppages of the game clock.
The 4th quarter did not begin until 6:20. At 6:45, Connal, watching at his house in Old Greenwich, Connecticut, called Cline at NBC headquarters at 30 Rockefeller Plaza in New York. They agreed that the game would not end before 7:00. They also agreed that NBC should run the game broadcast until its conclusion, but that wasn't their call.
They reached Goodman at his home in New York. The 1968 version of a conference call was set up with NBC Television president Don Durgin, whose call it really was. Durgin told them to delay the movie.
Something else began to happen at 6:45. We hear the legends about the football fans angry that the game was cut off. But most of the calls coming to the NBC switchboard at 30 Rock were from parents wondering if the movie would start on time. The switchboard blew a fuse. (Kids, you might want to ask your parents was a fuse is. And a switchboard.) Goodman couldn't get word to Cline to let the broadcast of the game continue. And so, not knowing that he had the O.K. to extend the game, Cline gave the order: Cut the game and switch to the movie.
And so, with 1:01 on the clock, viewers saw Smith pick Turner's kickoff up in the end zone, and get to the Raider 22-yard line. As he did so, the Burbank control room played the tune NBC used as its closing theme for AFL broadcasts. At exactly 7:00, the broadcast of Heidi began.
The people involved in the game -- players, coaches, officials, and fans -- didn't know this. Thinking that the Jets had won, Lucy Ewbank picked up the phone, called the visitors' locker room at the Oakland Coliseum, and congratulated her husband Weeb on the victory. He had to tell her what had happened in Oakland, and she had to tell him what had happened in New York.
Gowdy and DeRogatis, despite being NBC employees didn't know about it, either. No one told them, so they kept calling the game as if the whole country was still seeing it. Unlike the network, the announcers "played to the whistle." Which came at 7:07 PM. All the fuss that followed, over 7 minutes.
To make matters worse, viewers had missed not one but two Raider touchdowns in the last minute of play, pushing the margin of victory above the 7 1/2-point spread, messing up a lot of bets. At 7:08, NBC put a crawl across the screen: "SPORTS BULLETIN: RAIDERS DEFEAT JETS 43-32." This happened just as Heidi's paralyzed cousin Clara started to walk again.
In his nationally syndicated newspaper column, humorist Art Buchwald wrote, "Men who wouldn't get out of their chars in an earthquake rushed to the phone to scream obscenities." Associated Press sportswriter Jack Clary wrote, "The football fans were indignant when they saw what they had missed. The Heidi audience was peeved at having an ambulatory football score intrude on one of the story's more touching moments. Short of pre-empting Heidi for a skin flick, NBC could not have managed to alienate more viewers that evening." They were damned if they did, and damned if they didn't, and caught hell from both sides.
At 8:30 that night, Goodman apologized in a press conference. The next night, on The Huntley-Brinkley Report, NBC showed the remaining 7 minutes.
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The aftermath: The Jets and Raiders each won their Divisions. It was the Eastern Division winner's turn to host the AFL Championship Game, and on December 29, 1968, a frigid crowd sold out Shea Stadium to watch the Jets win, and advance to Super Bowl III, where they pulled the biggest upset in pro football history by beating the Baltimore Colts.
On December 8, NBC aired, as part of the Disney anthology, a live-action version of Pinocchio, starring Peter Noone, the lead singer of Herman's Hermits. Newspaper ads said that the preceding football game would be shown in its entirety. It came in under 3 hours, and there was no problem. On December 15, NBC aired a game between the Raiders and the Chargers. It ran over, and, with no contractual issue, it was shown to its completion. At 7:08 PM, The New Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, also part of the Disney anthology, began, and was shown to completion.
When the final details of the AFL-NFL merger were set, the contract included showing any game that ran over its allotted 3 hours to its conclusion. This -- professional football -- did more to break the hold of sponsors over network TV than anything else: Sponsors could still object to what a network was broadcasting, but their word was no longer law; and any sponsor demanding control over time slots faced the simple answer of, "Sorry, but we have a contract."
In 1974, the NFL, sick of having so many tie games, introduced regular-season overtime. Suddenly, games running over began to happen more often. This would increase following the 1978 liberalizing of passing rules, including the elimination of bump-and-run coverage.
On November 23, 1975, NBC broadcast a game between the Raiders and the Washington Redskins, at Robert F. Kennedy Stadium in Washington. Strange things seem to follow the Raiders around. Some helpful to them (Ghost to the Post, the Holy Roller), some not (the Immaculate Reception, the Tuck Rule Game).
NBC was had also heavily promoted their Sunday night movie: The 1971 Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory. But the game went to overtime, and lasted until 7:42 PM -- the latest any game had yet gone. The Raiders won, 26-23.
No problem, right? NBC just went right to the movie -- joining it in progress! 42 minutes in! (31 minutes, not counting commercials.) Again, the switchboard was flooded, though, this time, it was only angry parents, not angry football fans.
Many has been the time that CBS has had an NFL broadcast, or even a golf tournament, run long, delaying the news broadcast 60 Minutes -- which, in another irony, has a stopwatch as its logo.
Interviewed for the 20th Anniversary of the Heidi Bowl in 1988, Dick Cline said, "I wonder if this Heidi things will ever die." It hasn't. In 1997, it was voted one of the 10 most memorable games in pro football history. In 2005, TV Guide listed it 6th on its list of the 100 Most Unexpected TV Moments. Interviewed at the time, the film's star, Jennifer Edwards, said, "My gravestone is gonna say, 'She was a great moment in sports.'"
A recent photo of Jennifer Edwards
Weeb Ewbank died on November 17, 1998 -- on the 30th Anniversary of the game. He was 91. His gravestone, in Oxford, Ohio, has no epitaph, just his name, his dates of birth and death, and those of his wife, who followed him in 2012.
Today, CBS starts its late games at 4:05 PM Eastern, and Fox starts its games at 4:25. They're now expected to run past 7:00, and Fox even has its studio show run all the way until 8:00.
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Should NBC be blamed for the call they made? Or, rather, for failing to make the other call?
Top 5 Reasons You Can't Blame NBC for Switching From Football to Heidi
First, a couple of reasons that didn't make the cut: The Best of the Rest.
The Perception of the AFL. In spite of the in-process merger with the NFL, it was still a minor league in the eyes of many people, including NBC executives. It was the New York Jets against the Oakland Raiders. If it had been the NFL teams in those markets, the New York Giants playing the San Francisco 49ers, they might have stuck with the game.
No less than Curt Gowdy said that the reaction to the switch away from the game proved that the AFL was now seen as being on an equal footing with the NFL -- and this was 2 months before Super Bowl III, which Gowdy and DeRogatis also broadcast for NBC, along with another ex-Giant, Kyle Rote.
(For the record: The Giants did play the 49ers in the 1968 season, on October 20, and the 49ers won, 26-10 at Yankee Stadium. On November 17, the day of the Heidi Bowl, the Giants and the 49ers both played their arch-rivals at home: The G-Men beat the Eagles 7-6 at Yankee Stadium, and the Niners tied the Los Angeles Rams 20-20 at Kezar Stadium.)
The West Coast. When games are played on the Pacific Coast, they are started at around 1:00 PM local time -- which is 4:00 PM in New York, where the NFL offices and the network offices were (and remain). If the Jets -- or any AFL team other than the Raiders or the San Diego Chargers -- had been the home team, even the Denver Broncos in Mountain Time, the game would have ended well before 7:00 Eastern Time, and the issue never would have come up.
Now, the Top 5:
5. Weeb Ewbank and John Rauch. The opposing coaches called all those clock-stopping pass plays, and used up all their timeouts. The pass-happy nature of the AFL helped it to survive its tumultous early years, the early 1960s. This time, it worked against their TV viewers.
Before Super Bowl III, when Joe Namath made his guarantee, he also said, "There are four or five quarterbacks in the AFL that are better than Morrall." (Earl Morrall, starting at quarterback of the opposing Colts, in the wake of the injury to Johnny Unitas.) He included himself and Daryle Lamonica of the Raiders -- and, also, Len Dawson of the Kansas City Chiefs and Jack Kemp of the Buffalo Bills.
All those passes, all that scoring, and all those timeouts insured that the game would still be going at 7:00 Eastern.
4. The Timex Contract. If NBC had cut away, Timex could have sued them. From that point onward, it would have been in the hands of the legal system. A judge could have thrown the suit out. The verdict could have depended on who had the superior lawyers, NBC or Timex. A jury of football fans... well, who knows which side they'd have taken, as they might still have been mad at NBC.
It's also possible that the jury could have upheld the contract, and ruled Timex the winner... and awarded damages of $1.00, as the delay only damaged the Timex executives' egos, not their brand's image. The bad publicity they might have gotten from going to court over 7 lousy little minutes might have hurt them more than a 7-minute delay in the start of a movie's broadcast.
3. The Callers. If all those parents worried about whether Heidi would start on time at 7:00 had simply let NBC make their own decision, the Rockefeller Center switchboard wouldn't have been blown, the message could have gone out to keep going with the game, and the movie would have ended at 9:07, and we wouldn't be talking about this these last 50 years.
2. No Precedent. This had never happened to any of the Big Three networks before. With a playoff game, there was the possibility of overtime, and the network had to compensate for that.
One example: In 1960, it was the Eastern Division Champion's turn to host the NFL Championship Game. That turned out to be the Philadelphia Eagles, who then played at Franklin Field, which had no lights, and, still hosting home games for the University of Pennsylvania as it has since 1922, still doesn't have lights.
Since the game was scheduled for the day after Christmas (a Monday: At the time, the NFL wouldn't play on Christmas if it fell on a Sunday), and sunset would be at 4:42 PM, and the 1st overtime title game was just 2 years earlier and fresh in everyone's memory, the NFL moved the game, and the NBC broadcast thereof, back from the intended start time of 1:00 to 12:00 noon. The Eagles beat the Green Bay Packers 17-13, no overtime was necessary, and the game ended with plenty of daylight remaining.
But the 1968 Jets at Raiders game was a regular-season game. If regulation ended in a tie, then a tie it would stay. There was no regular-season overtime until the 1974 season. No network -- not NBC with the AFL, not NBC with the NFL before 1964, not CBS since with the NFL, and not ABC in the early days of the AFL -- had any procedure telling them what the right thing to do in this situation was, because they'd never faced this situation before.
Maybe NBC should have made the decision, and an announcement about it, sooner: The network could have told Curt Gowdy in the break between the 3rd and 4th quarters that they would stay with the game beyond 7:00, and he could have said, "Ladies and gentlemen, and children waiting for the start of the broadcast of Heidi: We will show that film in its entirety, after the conclusion of this game. It may have to wait for a few minutes after 7:00 PM New York time. Please be patient with us." Maybe that would have been sufficient, for everybody but the Timex executives.
But, you know what? That would've been wrong. No, NBC did the right thing by switching to the movie. The reason was the best possible reason:
1. The Children. NBC had promised children that Heidi would air at 7:00 Eastern Time. They had to keep their word. Think about it: Football fans have proven that they'll watch any kind of football at any time. NBC going to Heidi may have pissed a lot of them off, but nobody boycotted NBC after this. Nobody picketed outside Rockefeller Center and demanded that anybody be fired as a result. Nobody refused to watch NBC football broadcasts ever again. Because football fans are addicts, and televised football is their fix.
In contrast, if NBC had stuck with the game until its 7:07 conclusion, and then begun Heidi, the movie would have ended after 9:00, and some parents would have turned off the TV before it ended, and told their kids it was time to go to bed.
Yes, some parents were petty enough to send their kids to bed with 7 minutes left in a movie. Trust me on this one. When I was a boy, my mother was mean. "How mean was she?" I'll tell ya how mean she was: I didn't see Reggie Jackson's 3rd home run in Game 6 of the 1977 World Series, because it happened after 10:00 on a Tuesday night, and she presumed that, at 7-3, the Yankees already had the game won. She was right about that. She didn't understand the cultural significance of Reggie's 3rd homer, and couldn't have predicted it anyway. She made me go to bed. I didn't see it until the next night's 6:00 edition of WABC-Channel 7's Eyewitness News.
The Heidi Bowl happened a little over a year before I was born. If I had been born 10 years earlier, and was 8 going on 9... well, actually, being a sports nut, I probably would have preferred to see the end of the game. But if I had wanted to see Heidi in its entirety, I would have been out of luck. Mom would have sent me to bed at 9:00 sharp. There was school the next day.
Football fans forgave NBC, especially after they showed Super Bowl III, which the Jets won, 2 months later. Had a million children been sent to bed before the end of Heidi, some of them would have hated NBC for a long time to come. As Namath himself would have said, "I guarantee it." Some would now be writing letters to AARP The Magazine about how they got gypped half a century ago.
VERDICT: Not Guilty.