Television and Touchdowns

“Turkey Day”—Thanksgiving Day, 1948.  West Seattle High School played Wenatchee High School to a 6-6 tie in the annual championship high school football game in Memorial Stadium.  In those days before pro sports in Seattle, this game was a very big deal (which may give you an idea of how small a deal Seattle was at the time.)  This time, though, it became even bigger:  it was televised.

The 1948 Turkey Day Game (from Seattle Post-Intelligencer)

Although it had to scramble and improvise, and the set-owning public in the area was miniscule, tiny KRSC TV was under pressure from the FCC to live up to the terms of its license, and it made its debut with this game.  Rain turned the field soggy and muddy and shorted out the occasional cable.  The camera sat high in the stands, with a second to show close-ups of the players in the huddle, and the image was … uncertain.  But it was the first live commercial broadcast in the Pacific Northwest.

As I write this, the nation is preparing for Super Bowl XLIX and the city is in a frenzy over the Seattle Seahawks’ second consecutive appearance in it. Advertisers are shelling out as much as $30 million per minute for showcase ads that, themselves, have become a fixture of American popular culture.  Sports bars with big-screen televisions are gearing up for an onslaught of patrons on the nation’s biggest unofficial holiday, and millions of people are planning Super Bowl parties in their homes.

So at the moment, it’s pretty hard to remember that, not so long ago, football—especially professional football—was a pretty minor element in the American sports universe.  Football was primarily a college sport, and it attracted regional audiences around those campuses.  It was (ostensibly, at least) played by amateurs.  And it suffered from one major defect.

It was pretty boring.

Football’s genetic roots in rugby were still pretty evident in the early 1950s.  The forward pass was allowed, but seldom used.  The prevailing offensive strategy was “five yards and a cloud of dust”. Masses of nondescript young men wearing monochromatic woolen jerseys, identifiable only by numbers on their backs, surged forward until they could go no further, other masses then surged the other way, and somebody might finally kick a field goal.  The “hash marks” were located only 20 yards from the sidelines so that if a play were run to either side, the ball would be placed on one of them, limiting the possible direction of the next play.  And if you missed any of the action, there was no going back; you simply missed it. Although free substitutions were allowed after 1950, players often played both offense and defense, and there was no predictable time for a pause to allow an essential element of television:  commercials.

If you lived in one of the many cities without an NFL team, your best option might be thousands of miles away (in Seattle, many were fans of the San Francisco 49ers.)  And that didn’t provide much entertainment, because until 1956, no national network televised regular season games.

BUT … there was huge potential, and the networks recognized it.  This was a sport with swirling, violent and yet strangely graceful action to it, especially when West Coast coaches started using the forward pass more.   The 1958 NFL Championship game between the Baltimore Colts and the New York Giants, one of the first televised live nationwide, turned out to be an all-time classic, the first championship game determined by sudden-death overtime (some critics still call it “the Greatest Game Ever Played.”)  The formation of the rival American Football League in 1960 spread the pro game into neglected cities in the South and further into the West, and the competition between the two leagues led to rule changes that sped up the game.  The hash marks moved in to the center, increasing the flexibility of the field of play. Videotape had emerged in the late 1950s, and in 1963 a CBS director named Tony Verna figured out how to rewind it and replay it immediately so that action could be reviewed and even studied in slow-motion by armchair referees. The advent of color television in the 1960s meant that uniforms became designer showcases with bright colors and graphic logos.

And the money flowed.  Joe Namath signed with the New York Jets for $400,000 in 1965 (a figure that would insult even an undrafted rookie today) and used his notoriety and brilliance to become a pop culture icon.  The first Super Bowl in 1968 was a bit shaky, but it quickly grew into the behemoth it is today.  Football became prime-time entertainment with Monday Night Football in 1970 and spread to Thursdays and Sunday nights as well. 

It’s hard to believe that, when this all started in 1948, the most popular sport on television was …

boxing. 

It’s one of the most stunning transformations in American culture ever. 

Oh, yeah.  Go Seahawks!