Heidi Game
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In American football, the Heidi Game (also sometimes called the Heidi Bowl) refers to a famous 1968 American Football League (AFL) game between the New York Jets and the Oakland Raiders, played on November 17 in Oakland, California.
With the Jets leading 32-29 with only 65 seconds left in the game, the Raiders quickly scored 14 points to win, 43-32. Meanwhile, millions of American television viewers were unable to see Oakland's comeback. The NBC television network cut off the live broadcast in favor of a pre-scheduled airing of Heidi, a new made-for-TV version of the classic children's story.
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[edit] The Game
Both teams entered the game with 7-2 records, and were considered two of the best teams in the ten-team AFL. The Raiders were the defending AFL champions from 1967 and the contending Jets had superstar quarterback Joe Namath in his fourth pro season.
The game was televised by NBC Sports with announcers Curt Gowdy and Kyle Rote. It was the lead-in for the network's new TV movie of Heidi, an adaptation of the classic children's story about the Swiss girl. Kickoff was at 4:00 P.M. Eastern time, allowing three hours before the scheduled 7:00 p.m. start time for the movie. Most games in the 1960s took less than 2 hours 45 minutes, due to a high number of running plays which kept the game clock moving.
This Jets-Raiders game was a classic shootout between the top teams in the league, punctuated by hard hits, fights, and penalties. The first half ended with Oakland leading 14-12. In the second half the teams traded scores several times and Jets safety Jim Hudson was ejected from the game in the third quarter. Late in the fourth quarter, New York broke a 29-29 tie when Jim Turner kicked a 26-yard field goal to put the Jets ahead 32-29, with just 65 seconds left in the game. Because of the fights, penalties, and high scoring, the game was running late, approaching the end of its three-hour time slot on the network. The ensuing kickoff was returned by the Raiders to their own 23-yard line, and NBC went to a commercial break just before 7:00 P.M.
[edit] The Incident
Because NBC was contractually obligated to the movie's sponsor, Timex, to broadcast Heidi from 7 p.m. to 9 p.m. that evening, the network had instructed Dick Cline, NBC's Broadcast Operations Supervisor, to cut to Heidi at 7:00 p.m. sharp, whether the football game was over or not.[1] As the game approached its exciting ending, however, NBC's executives changed their minds and decided to air the game to its conclusion and make Heidi wait. Unfortunately, so many football viewers were calling the network pleading with them to not cut from the game—or others asking if Heidi would air on-time—that the NBC executives could not get through. NBC tried to contact the mobile unit in Oakland to call Broadcasting Operations, but Broadcasting Operations countered that they needed direct orders in order to rearrange schedule programming. With the game fed on telephone lines instead of satellites, Cline could not see what happened in the final minute. In an NBC Burbank studio where the TV feed was being controlled, Cline received no late instructions otherwise, and when the network came back from commercials, Heidi started on schedule at 7:00 p.m.
While millions of stunned football fans east of Denver suddenly found themselves watching Jennifer Edwards in Heidi, the Raiders scored two touchdowns in just nine seconds and held on to win, 43-32, in what has been voted by fans as one of the 10 most memorable games in American football history. Daryle Lamonica completed a 20 yard pass to Charlie Smith. Mike D’Amato grabbed Smith's facemask on the play and the 15 yard penalty put the Raiders into Jets territory on the 43 yard line. On the next play Smith caught a pass and ran by D'Amato for a 43-yard touchdown with 42 seconds left, putting Oakland ahead 36-32. On the ensuing kickoff Earl Christy fumbled the ball at the 10 yard line, was swarmed upon, and the ball squirted backwards. The ball landed on the two yard line where Raiders special teamer Preston Ridlehuber recovered it and took it in for a touchdown with 33 seconds left in the game.
[edit] Damage Control
The Jets were stunned but the fans watching NBC were furious. At 7:20 p.m., a crawl across the bottom of the screen announced the ending to the game (during a dramatic point in the movie when Heidi's paralyzed cousin Clara fell from her wheelchair and had to summon enough courage to try to walk). So many fans called NBC to complain about missing the fantastic ending (and to make various and sundry threats) that the switchboard ceased to function. When they couldn't get through to NBC, the irate viewers started calling the police, the telephone company, and The New York Times. At 8:30 NBC made a public apology and the next morning the fiasco was recounted on the front page of The New York Times.
Heidi also preempted the Walt Disney's Wonderful World of Color that night. NBC also cut away from the first game of an afternoon doubleheader San Diego at Buffalo with the intent to showcase the entire Jets-Raiders game.
NBC bought advertisements in several major newspapers soon after the incident, proclaiming rave reviews for Heidi, along with a quote from Jets quarterback Joe Namath: "I didn't get a chance to see it, but I heard it was great."
The NBC announcers did not know they were off the air after 7:00 p.m. After the game, they were packing up when the stage manager yelled at Curt Gowdy to "do those two touchdowns again." Gowdy reconstructed the call, which ran on NBC's news programs as well as Monday morning's Today show.
NBC President Julian Goodman issued a statement following the game, calling the incident "a forgivable error committed by humans who were concerned about children expecting to see Heidi at 7:00 PM." He added, "I missed the end of the game as much as anyone else." According to Cline in the book Going Long, Goodman used his direct line phone (as the switchboard was down) to tell Cline, "This is Julian Goodman. Put the game back on now."
[edit] Aftermath
- The reaction to the Heidi Game resulted in the AFL and NFL, and most other sports leagues, demanding that networks televise all games to their conclusion. NFL contracts with the networks now require games to be shown in a team's market area to the conclusion, regardless of the score.
- A subsequent broadcast in 1975 on NBC - a network premier broadcast of Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory - was preempted until the completion of a Washington Redskins-Raiders game.
- Rules changes to keep the game clock running after out of bounds plays were instituted to speed the game.
- At NBC, the network installed a new phone in the control room wired to a separate exchange, becoming known as the Heidi Phone.
- Oakland's win came on the midst of an eight-game winning streak to go 12-2.
- Six weeks after the "Heidi Game", the Jets came from behind to defeat the Raiders in New York in the 1968 AFL Championship Game, 27-23. Two weeks later the Jets upset the Baltimore Colts 16-7 in Super Bowl III.
- In a 1997 poll taken in conjunction with the NFL's 10,000th regular season game, the "Heidi Game" was voted the most memorable regular season game in pro football history by a select group of media. [2]
- Because CBS tends to broadcast doubleheaders, and has four hours of primetime programming on Sundays as opposed to Fox's three, it is not uncommon for CBS's primetime to run as late as 11:30pm ET.
- Fox averts most program pre-emptions during the football season by making the 7pm-8pm Eastern hour a buffer for late-running games, airing expendable repeats of their animated series and new episodes of King of the Hill (which do air as scheduled in the Mountain and Pacific time zones, but usually are pre-empted in the Central and Eastern time zones), or branding the half-hour before The Simpsons as a post-game show called The OT in TV listings.
[edit] AFL Texans-Titans Foreshadow
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According to Ed Gruver's book "The American Football League", ABC started televising the startup AFL and encountered a similar incident before 1963. A regular-season game between the New York Titans and the Dallas Texans was running long because of many missed long passes causing officials to chase balls back to the line of scrimmage.
As 7 p.m. approached, ABC programming chief Edgar Scherick called network president Tom Moore about the long running game. At first, Moore replied to wait ten additional minutes, but seeing officials kick the ball back to the line of scrimmage, Moore cried, "Who could be watching this piece of shit?" On 6:58:30 EST, the game was pulled off the air, to which ABC received thousands of calls on its switchboard. The New York Titans would become the New York Jets and ABC lost the television rights to NBC.
[edit] Recent references
- A clip was played during NBC's 75th Anniversary Special in 2002 highlighted the Heidi game as a NBC blooper by replaying the NBC apology by David Brinkley along with a portion of the game and movie.
- A late 1990s ESPN commercial promoted the cable network by depicting a disappointed Jets fan stunned at not seeing the game in its entirety.
- On the 35th anniversary of the game in 2003, the NFL Network broadcast the 1968 Heidi movie along with interviews and the two Raiders touchdowns viewers missed. Instead of directly competing against a Monday Night Football game between the Pittsburgh Steelers and the San Francisco 49ers, the network had a continuous on-screen scrolling graphic showing football statistics from 1968.
- The TV special Most Outrageous Live TV Moments 2 showed clips from the Heidi Game incident. Shown was footage of the game being cut to the Heidi Movie, followed by an apology by David Brinkley who then showed highlights of the touchdown that would've been seen live by football fans if NBC hadn't cut the game off to show the Heidi movie (in the east).
- ESPN parodied the Heidi Game during their presentation of "The Match-up of the Millennium" in which using old NFL Film clips to pit the greatest team of the NFL's History against each other. (such as 1960s Packers, 1970s Steelers, 1980s 49ers, 1990s Cowboys). During the end of the game between the 80's 49ers versus 60's Packers, The 80's 49ers with the score tied drove down the field for a chip-shot FG which would win them the game. Just as the ball is being kicked the "feed" is lost and a shot is shown with the title Heidi and a speaker announces it like is the beginning of a TV movie. The shot is quickly taken off and shows the 80's 49ers distraught after they missed the chip-shot FG.
- During Cartoon Network's former tradition of "The Big Game", during a "game" between Wile E. Coyote and the Roadrunner, the "score" had gotten ridiculously one-sided (Coyote's "score" was in negative points), that Cartoon Network "cut" to the beginning of Heidi, to which commentator John Madden interrupted and they mentioned that it was a joke.
- The game was included as part of a question in the show Who Wants To Be A Millionaire?, and the contestant went on to answer the question incorrectly after asking the audience.
[edit] Similar events
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On September 26, 1981, the regular Game of the Week, between the Detroit Tigers and the Milwaukee Brewers, had ended, and the NBC affiliate in Buffalo, NY, WGRZ, picked up the backup game at the Astrodome between the Houston Astros and the Los Angeles Dodgers in which Nolan Ryan was pitching his lone National League no-hitter. However, the coverage suddenly ended just as the ninth inning started, when the local station cut away to regular programming. WGRZ felt duty-bound to present a naval training film--Life Aboard an Aircraft Carrier. (Baseball Hall of Shame 2 (1986), by Nash and Zullo; pp. 108-09)
In 1982 the handball world championships were played in West Germany. The final stood between USSR and Yugoslavia and went into double overtime. In Denmark the game was aired by Danmarks Radio (DR), then the only tv-channel in Denmark. During the overtime the game was cut off to send the sceduled news. The announcer promised that the last minute of the game would be shown in the end of the 30 minutes newsprogramme. A couple of minutes into the news the phone on the newsreaders desk rang (They did not use earpieces then). He answered it: "Yes......right now.....yes", hung up and told the viewers that the handball transmission would now resume. The chief executive of DR television had been watching the game in his home and was so displeased with the cutoff that he called the studio and gave a direct order to resume the handball transmission.
Up until the mid 1980s, Hockey Night in Canada also used to switch from the end of late running games to show the start of The National. Dave Hodge once threw a pencil in the air after he had to announce CBC's decision to not show the end of an overtime game, and was subsequently fired.
Another NHL hockey game on the CBC was abruply cut off on CBUT Vancouver at 7:58 p.m. PDT during the 2nd overtime of a playoff game involving two American teams, as the provincial polls were about to close, even though the election was a predicted landslide. The CBC had the ability to warn its viewers in BC that they would switch to election coverage at around 8 p.m. (through text scrolls, overtime intermission news breaks), yet failed to do so and thereby surprised viewers with the sudden cutoff.
In 1986, a somewhat similar incident occurred during CBS' college football telecast of the game between USC and Notre Dame, from the L.A. Memorial Coliseum. Notre Dame had the ball at the USC 9-yard-line and lined up to attempt a field goal with two seconds left, trailing 37-35, when Notre Dame called a time-out. CBS then cut away to a commercial break, but the teams returned to the field, and Irish kicker John Carney kicked the field goal to win the game, 38-37 as time expired. By the time the network returned to the game, the kick had already taken place and the Irish were celebrating the win.
In 1989, an incident similar to the above took place during Super Bowl XXIII. The American Forces Network was handling the live feed to the United States military in Europe. San Francisco had just reached the Cincinnati 10-yard line, where they called timeout. AFN was not allowed to show American television commercials, so it cut away from the Super Bowl feed to show two AFN-produced advertisements. After those commercials, AFN then cut back to a still-shot of the stadium, but after a few seconds cut away for a third commercial. Immediately after that commercial ended AFN cut back to the game, only to show San Francisco celebrating the game-winning touchdown. The following year all personnel involved in broadcasting the Super Bowl were carefully briefed on the "proper operating procedures."
In 1990, TNT broadcast the Italy-Ireland quarterfinal match of the 1990 World Cup and cut away to commercials with about 8 minutes left in the first half. During the commercial break Salvatore Schillaci scored the only goal of the match. As a result, in 1994 ABC and ESPN agreed to show all matches of the World Cup without commercial breaks, thus forcing ads to be placed in a box at the top of the screen during play.
In 1995, the start of the Brickyard 400 was delayed by rain. When it appeared the race might be postponed until the following day ABC went off the air at 4:00 p.m. A few minutes later, the rain stopped and the race was held after all, with no television coverage. Angry fans filled the switchboards of numerous ABC affiliates. ABC compromised by showing the race in its entirety the following afternoon.
In 2004, during the coverage of a cricket test match in Australia where Shane Warne was on the verge of becoming the sport's highest ever wicket-taker, instead of staying with the cricket, the Nine Network instead cut to a game show, The Price Is Right.
In 2005, the British network ITV covered Formula One's San Marino GP in Imola, Italy. As Michael Schumacher harried race leader Fernando Alonso with three laps to run, ITV switched to a 3-minute ad-break. The action returned on the final lap, where Alonso won the race. After the race, the network was bombarded with complaints.
In 2006, pan-European sports channel Eurosport joined the Champ Car race in Milwaukee in progress (with 2/3 of the race already being over) and cut to commercials with 2 minutes left on the clock (it had been turned into a timed event). When they returned, the celebrating crew of race winner Sébastien Bourdais could be seen.
Also, on July 30, 2006, ABC went off the air while the Firestone Indy 400 in Brooklyn, Michigan was delayed by rain. The race (which featured Danica Patrick's tantrum), was not shown on television in the Eastern, Central and Mountain time zones. Open-wheel fans were furious and flooded Walt Disney's offices and messageboards.
[edit] See also
[edit] Footnotes
- ^ In an interview, Cline defended his actions, saying, "I was saved by the set of conditions [distributed to network executives each week]," he says. "I had it in print. In fact, the vice president of my division told me that if I had taken it on my own and stayed with the game, I would have been fired."[1]
[edit] References
- The Greatest Game You Never Saw. Retrieved on June 14, 2006.
- NFL.com: "Flashback 1968: The 'Heidi Game'". Retrieved on June 14, 2006.
- Total Football: The Official Encyclopedia of the National Football League. HarperCollins. ISBN 0-06-270174-6.
- Nash, Bruce; Allan Zullo. The Football Hall of Shame. Pocket Books. ISBN 0-671-74551-4.
- Gruver, Ed. "The American Football League A Year-by-Year History 1960-1969. McFarland. ISBN 0-7864-0399-3. P.123, 203-205
[edit] External links
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