Heidi Game
The Heidi Game was a 1968 American Football League game between the Oakland Raiders and the visiting New York Jets. The contest, held on November 17, 1968, was notable for its exciting finish, in which Oakland scored two touchdowns in the final minute to win the game 43–32. However, NBC, the game's television broadcaster, decided to break away from its coverage on the East Coast to broadcast the television film Heidi, which caused many viewers to miss the Raiders' comeback.
In the late 1960s, few professional football games took longer than two and a half hours to play, and the standard three-hour time slot allotted to the Jets and Raiders was thought to be adequate. A high-scoring contest, with a combined 34 points scored in the fourth quarter, together with a number of injuries and penalties for the two bitter AFL rivals, caused the game to run longer than usual. NBC executives had originally ordered that Heidi begin at 7 p.m. EST, but then decided to allow the game to air to its conclusion. However, communicating this revised plan to the technicians running NBC's master control proved impossible – as 7 p.m. approached, NBC's switchboards were jammed by viewers phoning to inquire about the night's schedule, preventing the planned change from being communicated. Heidi began as scheduled, preempting the final moments of the game and the two Oakland touchdowns in the eastern half of the country, to the outrage of viewers.
Response to the pre-emption by viewers and other critics was negative; the family members of several Jets players were unaware of the game's actual conclusion, while NBC received further criticism for its poor timing in displaying the final score of the game during the Heidi movie. NBC's president Julian Goodman formally apologized for the incident. The Jets and Raiders met again on December 29 in New York in the AFL Championship Game, with the Jets winning 27–23. Two weeks later, they defeated the Baltimore Colts of the National Football League in Super Bowl III.
In the aftermath of the incident, NBC installed special "Heidi phones", with a connection to a different telephone exchange from other network phones, to ensure that network personnel could communicate under similar circumstances. The game also had an influence on sports broadcasting practices; the future National Football League would contractually stipulate that all game telecasts be shown to their conclusion in the markets of the visiting team, while other major leagues and events adopted similar mandates. In 1997, the Heidi Game was voted the most memorable regular season game in professional football history.
Background
Jets–Raiders rivalry
The Jets and Raiders were founding members of the American Football League; both teams began to play in 1960, the Jets under the name New York Titans. The two teams had little success in their early years, playing so poorly that both the Titans and Raiders were allowed to draft players from other AFL teams following the 1962 season. In 1967, the Jets, under the guidance of coach Weeb Ewbank and third-year quarterback Joe Namath, posted their first winning record at. Oakland, on the other hand, won the Western Division in 1967 with a mark under coach John Rauch and then the AFL Championship Game over the Houston Oilers, 40–7, but fell to the Green Bay Packers in Super Bowl II. Both teams were seen as likely contenders for the 1968 AFL Championship.The two teams did not play in the same division. However, each AFL team played all other teams in the league each year, allowing the Raiders and Jets to forge a bitter rivalry. In 1963, Oakland general manager Al Davis traded guard Dan Ficca to New York during training camp, without mentioning to Ewbank that Ficca would not be released from his military service for another six weeks. In 1966, with less than a minute to go and the Raiders leading at the new Oakland Coliseum, 28–20, Jets left tackle Winston Hill predicted to Namath in the huddle that the man he was blocking, defensive end Ben Davidson, would rush on the next play, leaving the Raiders exposed to a draw play. Namath called the draw, and handed the ball off to running back Emerson Boozer for 47 yards and a touchdown. After a Jets two-point conversion, the game ended in a 28–28 tie, and an embittered Davidson stated, "I'll get even. They still have to play us next year." They did, twice. In Week 4, the Jets defeated the Raiders at Shea Stadium, 27–14, the Raiders' only regular season loss. In Week 14, each team's 13th game, the teams met again, in Oakland.
Davidson stated about his play in the Oakland victory, "I don't think my tackle broke Namath's cheekbone. Not that I care ... Namath says that he's been beat up worse by girls. He's asking for it again." The Jets loss to the Raiders in 1967 knocked New York out of a tie for first place in their division – the AFL East was won by the Houston Oilers.
In the 1968 season, the Jets, Raiders, San Diego Chargers, and Kansas City Chiefs established themselves as the leading AFL teams. Going into Week 11 of the season, each had lost only two games; the Chiefs, who had not yet had a bye week, had eight wins, the others seven. In an era with no wild card teams, the Raiders needed a victory over the Jets in Week 11 to avoid falling a game and a half behind the Chiefs in the AFL West – finishing second, however good their record, would end their season. The Jets, on the other hand, would clinch at least a tie for the AFL East title with a victory over the Raiders in their only regular season meeting. Depending on the results of other games, the Jets could win the division if they beat the Raiders, gaining the right to host the AFL Championship Game, the winner of which would play the NFL champion in the Super Bowl. The ill-feeling of previous years was resurrected by an immense blown-up photograph, posted at Raider headquarters, of Davidson smashing Namath in the head. The photographed play was said to have broken the quarterback's jaw. Although the poster, which had been placed by Davis, was removed before the game, word of this "intimidation through photography" reached the Jets in New York.
Namath, interviewed by reporters, stated that he liked the Raiders the least of any AFL team. In 2000, New York Times sportswriter Dave Anderson wrote of the Jets' preparations for the Oakland game:
The Raiders declined to allow New York reporters to watch practices, a courtesy Ewbank extended to Oakland pressmen. Raiders assistant coach John Madden was responsible for the exchange of game films with upcoming opponents; he sent the films to the Jets through Chicago so they would arrive a day or two late, reasoning that Davis, not he, would be blamed for the delay. Ewbank blamed Davis for heavily watering the Coliseum field to slow the Jets' speedy receivers, a tactic the Oakland co-owner credited to Madden.
Telecast preparation
NBC's preparations for the November 17 game at Oakland were routine. The game was to be televised to most of the country beginning at 4 p.m. EST, with Curt Gowdy and Al DeRogatis announcing. NBC anticipated a good game that viewers would likely watch all the way through, and then leave the television tuned to that network for the evening, "a perfect lead in for the network's special presentation of Heidi, the Johanna Spyri children's classic, which was scheduled to air after the game at 7 p.m. ". The television film was preempting Walt Disney's Wonderful World of Color, the program normally shown by NBC on Sunday at that time. As the game started at 1 p.m. Pacific Standard Time, the western half of the country would have to wait after the game for 7 p.m. local time before seeing Heidi. Under television rules at the time, the Jets–Raiders game was blacked out within 90 miles of Oakland even though it was a sellout, leaving KRON-TV and other NBC affiliates in nearby markets unable to show the game.Heidi was heavily promoted by NBC in television commercials and newspaper advertisements. The network hoped to gain a large audience, especially among families. Individual commercials for the film could not be purchased by advertisers; instead, the entire two-hour block was sold by NBC to watch manufacturer Timex, which would air the film and have its own commercials run during the broadcast. The New York Times touted Heidi as the best TV program of the day. Under the terms of the contract between Timex and NBC, Heidi had to air promptly at 7 p.m. Eastern and could not be delayed or joined in progress for any reason. Dom Cosentino, in his 2014 article on the Heidi Game, points out the irony that Timex, a watch company, was the sponsor; the game would become infamous for its telecast, cut short because of time.
Steven Travers, in his history of the Raiders, noted:
The nerve center for NBC was known as Broadcast Operations Control. Dick Cline, the network BOC supervisor for sports telecasts, prepared the series of network orders which would result in the game running as scheduled, followed by Heidi. Cline had no reason to believe that the game would run over three hours; no professional football game presented by NBC ever had. Nonetheless, other NBC executives stressed that Heidi must start as scheduled. NBC president Julian Goodman told his executives before the weekend that the well-sponsored, well-promoted film must start on time. NBC Sports executive producer Don "Scotty" Connal took care to tell the game producer, Don Ellis, that Heidi must start at 7:00 in the East, over Ellis's objection that he had been trained never to leave a game in progress. Connal told Ellis that NBC had sold the time and was obligated to switch to the film.
NBC ran three BOCs, in Burbank, California, Chicago, and New York City, with the last the largest. Cline was stationed at the New York BOC for the game. In the era before satellite transmission, programming was transmitted by coaxial cable line, with the cooperation of the telephone company. For this game, the Burbank BOC was to receive the feed from Oakland, insert commercials and network announcements, and send the modified feed via telephone wire to a switching station west of Chicago near the Mississippi River. An engineer was stationed there to activate the Oakland feed into the entire network when the game began, to cut it on instruction and then to return to his base. He had been told to expect at 6:58:20 Eastern Time a network announcement for Heidi, after which he was to cut the feed from Burbank, and the Heidi feed from New York would begin. This placed Burbank in effective control of whether the engineer would cut the feed, since he would act upon hearing the announcement.
Connal, Cline's boss, was available in case of trouble, watching from his home in Connecticut. His superior, NBC Sports vice president Chet Simmons, who alternated weekends with Connal as on-call in the event of difficulties, was also watching from his Manhattan home. NBC president Goodman and NBC Sports head Carl Lindemann also turned on the game in their New York area homes. The Buffalo Bills–San Diego Chargers game, shown as the first of a network doubleheader, was running long in its 2½-hour time slot, and NBC unhesitatingly cut its ending to go to the Jets and Raiders.