Many readers won’t believe this, but there was once a time – long, long ago – when football wasn’t the top dog on fall Sundays. Let’s go back – way back – to November 17th, 1968, the day when Shirley Temple in her role as Heidi sacked the Jets and Raiders.
In that faraway land of 1968, the Jets and Raiders played in the old American Football League. Unlike subsequent start-up leagues like the USFL and the WWE-backed XFL, the AFL, by 1968, was a serious rival to the NFL. It rode a solid TV contract with NBC to respectability and was within a couple of years of merging with the more established league.
Jets-Raiders Game Was a Marquee Match-Up
The Jets-Raiders match-up that day was eagerly anticipated. The Raiders were a tough team at the top of the league while the Jets were an emerging power that featured a brash young quarterback out of Alabama named Joe Namath: a team that would go on the following season to beat the NFL’s Baltimore Colts in Super Bowl III.
The game itself turned out to be a monumental struggle: Two heavyweights trading their best shots. With less than 2 minutes remaining and the score knotted at 29, Namath moved the Jets into field goal range. Jim Turner connected on a 26-yarder and the Jets led 32-29.
From Oakland to the Swiss Alps in One Commercial Break
Following the score, NBC went to a commercial break (some things don’t change). When the break was over, though, the network returned to regularly scheduled programming. Instead of hulking football players prowling the gridiron, viewers everywhere but on the west coast saw Heidi cavorting in the Swiss meadows.
That was enough to cause NBC switchboards to light up. But when the network announced the final score 20 minutes into the movie, the torrent of calls turned into a deluge. The NBC switchboard broke down under the pressure and angry viewers began phoning police and other emergency numbers, tying up those lines for hours.
Why all the fuss? Well, while Heidi tended her goats, the Raiders drove to a touchdown with 42 seconds remaining. The Jets’ Earl Christy followed that by fumbling the ensuing kickoff. After a mad scramble, the Raiders fell on it in the end zone for another major: Two touchdowns in 9 seconds and the Raiders were 43-32 winners.
Why Did NBC Do It?
Many factors led to NBC leaving football for the network’s regularly scheduled movie. For one thing, NBC had allotted 3 hours, but with 19 penalties being called, the game easily exceeded that. The network also claimed a contractual obligation required them to go to the movie at 7 p.m. Eastern Time. Network executives later claimed that the overwhelming number of calls to the NBC switchboard prevented them from ordering technicians to stay with the game.
Whatever the reason, NBC’s decision to cut out of the game ended up being front page news, even on the New York Times. It prompted NBC to issue an apology along with the explanation that they didn’t want to disappoint children who were waiting to watch Heidi.
Tempest in a teapot, perhaps. But the “Heidi Game” as it’s come to be known, proved to be a watershed moment in sports broadcasting. It led the NFL to insert language into its TV contracts guaranteeing that games would be shown in their entirety to local markets.
Symbolically, though, it meant so much more. From that point on, football has ruled supreme on Sundays with all other programming bowing down before it. The people spoke and, by God, they wanted football.
