The Draw Play

Heidi is a children’s novel written in the 1880’s about a little orphaned 5-year-old girl who goes on fun adventures in the Alps and in Germany and inspires the people around her. It is maybe the best-known piece of Swiss literature to exist and is beloved the world over. I can’t imagine author Johanna Spyri would ever understand that her seminal work of children’s fiction would one day decide how sporting events are broadcast in America.

Impossible to fathom today, but in 1968, the Jets and the Raiders are the two best teams in the AFL. [pause for laughter]. On November 17th, the two meet in Oakland for a much-anticipated matchup. It’s a great game. The two powerhouses trade blows with each other and keep the score tied late.

With just about a minute left, the Jets manage to break the tie between the two with a field goal to go up by three points. They kick off to the Raiders. They just have to hold off Oakland for one minute. They are not successful. The Raiders manage a huge TD after a Jets penalty and a 43 yard score. The Raiders are now ahead with 42 seconds left, and they have to defend the Jets.

The Jets fumbled the kickoff (I guess some things never change) and the Raiders scored again, ending the game 43-32. It was a wild finish to one of the best games of the year. But nobody outside the stadium saw it happen. At least nobody in Eastern or Central time.

The game ran a little bit long and at 7 o’clock sharp, NBC was scheduled to premiere a made-for-TV adaptation of the Swiss classic. It was a big deal, they’d been promoting it all night. And sure enough, right after the Jets kicked off post-field goal, the broadcast switched to Heidi.

As you can imagine, it was a shitshow from there. The phone lines at NBC were blowing fuses with people calling in. You have to remember that calling into the stations to complain was basically Twitter for 1960’s people. It probably even had the same amount of racism. NBC was unable to change back to the game, and everyone on the eastern side of the country missed a classic comeback.

The embarrassing part of the gaffe was that NBC saw it coming. The executives in charge of the sports broadcast could tell the game was going on too long and would likely go over the 7pm line. They called the president to warn him. Viewers even noticed that was going to happen, and many people were calling in to demand the game stay on, while others demanded Heidi not get delayed. The switchboards were blowing fuses and clogging the lines before the broadcast had even switched. This quagmire is partially why the communication between NBC broadcasting teams and headquarters was so jammed. The game had been given permission by the president to play out in full, but the failure to reach the director of broadcasting in time forced a decision. He chose Heidi.

The comedy of errors resulted in policy decisions to always allow sporting events to complete before switching off, a policy that was adapted by everyone else and is still in practice to this day. NBC even installed a direct phone line between offices and headquarters to prevent important calls from being clogged up on the switchboard by the public, kind of like the first Twitter DMs.

Heidi ended up being the most-watched television film of all time until Brian’s Song in 1971. Leave it to a football movie to beat it. You have to wonder how many of those viewers were just confused and angry football fans.

The Jets and Raiders would meet once more a month later to determine who would go to Super Bowl III. The Jets would claim their vengeance on Oakland and go on to make history. Maybe the lesson is that embarrassing Jets moments must always be broadcast in full, lest they unleash their true power on the league. The world has properly held them back since.