Scores On This Historic Day: November 17, 1968, The Heidi Bowl

Time was running out, and the AFL had no provision for overtime in regular-season games. Lamonica got the Raiders down the field, partly thanks to a facemask violation by the Jets. It was at this point that NBC made their big decision, which I'll get to in a moment. Lamonica threw a pass to running back Charlie Smith, who caught the ball, and ran 43 yards for a touchdown. Raiders 36, Jets 32.

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 had been 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 the 50th, which was 2 years ago, but that's about it. But that wasn't the extent 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 University, 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, Julie Andrews, star of Mary Poppins (so she also knew a thing or two about children's fare) and The Sound of Music (so she also knew a thing or two about feel-good movies set in the Alps). Jennifer has since left acting for screenwriting. The film also starred Maximilian Schell, Michael Redgrave and Jean Simmons.

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 or Christmas Day. 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).

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 Eastern Standard Time, 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. (As far as I know, this version of Heidi was never shown on network TV again, although it is probably available on cable movie channels.)

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.

(The Beatles' 1st appearance on Ed Sullivan, February 9, 1964, was the most-watched TV show ever to that point. The last episode of The Fugitive, August 29, 1967, broke that record. It held the record until November 21, 1980, when Dallas revealed who shot J.R. Ewing. That record stood until February 28, 1983, the last episode of M*A*S*H, which still holds the record for most-watched episode of a regular series. A few Super Bowls have been watched by more Americans.)

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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. (The 1962 AFL Championship Game had gone to a 2nd overtime, but that was on ABC.) 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 Eastern. 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 had already been 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 the RCA Building, at 30 Rockefeller Plaza in Midtown Manhattan. 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 Connal's call, or Cline's call.

They reached Goodman at his home in Manhattan. The 1968 version of a conference call was set up with NBC Television president Don Durgin, whose call it really was. Durgin was convinced: He 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.

Despite being NBC employees, Gowdy and DeRogatis 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.

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.

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.

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."

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? Not really. In spite of the in-process merger with the NFL, the AFL was still a minor league in the eyes of many people, including NBC executives. 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.

The opposing coaches, New York's Weeb Ewbank and Oakland's John Rauch, called all those clock-stopping pass plays, and used up all their timeouts. The pass-happy nature of the AFL helped it to win over fans who thought it a more exciting version of the conservative NFL, and to survive its tumultuous early years, the early 1960s. This time, it worked against their TV viewers.

If NBC had stuck with the game, 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.

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.

Also, 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. 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 had any procedure telling them what the right thing to do in this situation was, because they'd never faced this situation before.

But 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 at 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.

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November 17, 1968 was, of course, a Sunday. Among the other AFL games played that day:

* As I said earlier, the San Diego Chargers beat the Buffalo Bills, 21-6 at War Memorial Stadium in Buffalo.

* The expansion Cincinnati Bengals beat the Miami Dolphins, 38-21 at the Orange Bowl in Miami.

* The Kansas City Chiefs beat the Boston Patriots, 31-17 at Kansas City Municipal Stadium.

* The Houston Oilers beat the Denver Broncos, 38-17 at the Astrodome in Houston.

In the NFL:

* The New York Giants beat their arch-rivals, the Philadelphia Eagles, 7-6 at Yankee Stadium.

* The Baltimore Colts beat the football version of the St. Louis Cardinals, 27-0 at Memorial Stadium in Baltimore.

* The Dallas Cowboys beat the Washington Redskins, 44-24 at District of Columbia Stadium in Washington. (It was renamed Robert F. Kennedy Memorial Stadium the following June. And it would take the 1971 arrival of head coach George Allen in Washington to make this an arch-rivalry.)

* The Cleveland Browns beat the Pittsburgh Steelers, 45-24 at Pitt Stadium in Pittsburgh.

* The Minnesota Vikings beat the Detroit Lions, 13-6 at Tiger Stadium in Detroit.

* The Atlanta Falcons beat the Chicago Bears, 16-13 at Wrigley Field in Chicago.

* The Green Bay Packers beat the New Orleans Saints, 29-7 at Milwaukee County Stadium.

* And the San Francisco 49ers and the Los Angeles Rams, arch-rivals, played to a 20-20 tie at Kezar Stadium in San Francisco.

There were 3 pro basketball games played that day. The Boston Celtics beat the Phoenix Suns, 130-98 at the Arizona Veterans Memorial Coliseum. The Los Angeles Lakers beat the Seattle SuperSonics, 105-94 at The Forum outside Los Angeles in Inglewood, California. And, in the ABA, the New York Nets lost to the Indiana Pacers, 114-91 at the Long Island Arena in Commack.

There were 5 games played in the NHL:

* The New York Rangers beat the Montreal Canadiens, 3-2 at the still-new Madison Square Garden. Ron Stewart's goal with 7:15 remaining in regulation gave the Broadway Blueshirts the win over the defending Stanley Cup Champions.

* The Boston Bruins beat the Oakland Seals, 6-3 at the Boston Garden.

* The Philadelphia Flyers beat the Los Angeles Kings, 3-1 at The Spectrum in Philadelphia.

* The Toronto Maple Leafs and the Chicago Black Hawks played to a tie, 1-1 at the Chicago Stadium.

* The St. Louis Blues and the Minnesota North Stars played to a tie, 3-3 at the St. Louis Arena.

* And the Detroit Red Wings and the Pittsburgh Penguins were not scheduled.