NFL 1st Live TV Game

We share a moment of a pivotal time in history and at the same time a crucial milestone instance for professional football, but not many were aware of the importance as items happening around the globe greatly overshadowed them.

I was reading through a pretty amazing book recently in my collection of gridiron history, Joe Horrigan’s NFL Century: The One-Hundred-Year Rise of America's Greatest Sports League. The former Pro Football Hall of Fame Executive takes the reader through a timeline of National Football League history filled with wonderful little insights and stories that helped shape the NFL we know and love today.

One of these stories takes us back to 1939. A pretty incredible year in the world. The German Nazi Army invaded Poland that year, the Wizard of Oz debuted at theaters across the country and New York City was hosting the World’s Fair just to name a few.

Horrigan points to the World’s Fair and it’s putting the latest technology on display as being a key element for the game of Pro Football, even though not too many people were aware of it at the time. At the RCA pavilion, Company President David Sarnoff, used this stage to introduce the future of home entertainment to the masses, television. Just to prove the reality of TV RCA workers had some televisions set up around the pavilion and they put the camera on some willing participants to demonstrate that this was not a hoax or a “man behind the curtain” trick but a real technological breakthrough. They went even a step further a bit later in the World’s Fair. RCA and their Broadcasting partner NBC decided to announce that all of the home games of the Brooklyn Dodgers football franchise at Ebbets Field that fall would be televised.

The first game up was the Dodgers entertaining the Philadelphia Eagles on October 22 by the NBC experimental station W2XBS and the signal would be beamed from the game venue directly to the RCA Pavilion at the World's Fair some 40 miles away.

23 Oct 1939, Mon Daily News (New York, New York) Newspapers.com

The game as reported by the papers as being a pretty good one. Dodgers quarterback Ace Parker was brilliant as he completed pass after pass to a glue-fingered Perry Schwartz. Ce completed only 8 passes on the day but that was quite a throwing exhibition in that era. Pug Manders ran the ball hard scoring a TD while kicker Ralph Kercheval knocked through 3 fairly long field goals to lead the Brooklyn eleven over their Philly visitor 23 to 14 in front of 13051 in paid attendance.

There was barely any fanfare or press releases on this milestone accomplishment. Horrigan points out that the news of free tickets for the game being given to two-thousand orphans from eleven different institutions by Dodgers owner Dan Topping.

Later information was that the broadcast was filled with issues. The cloudy day wreaked havok on the cameras, two ionoscopes, as the picture would grow darker and darker from the light in the stadium ever changing. The equipment was handheld, and the camera operators had trouble following kicks and punts as they tried to brace their chins against a very cold metal railing to steady the picture.

This wasn’t the first televised football game, but it was a bout three week after the initial broadcast of a gridiron contest. On September 30 of that year Fordham opened their season by taking on Waynesburg College. The New York Times had some much larger stories at the time but they did cover the game highlights in their October 1, 1939 edition according to an NCAA.com story. The game was a blowout as Fordham a powerhouse at the time was killing poor Waynesburg. There was one small bit of commentary in the article though that had a much bigger meaning than imagined at the time, “Fordham had the televised game well in hand by halftime.”

We might give better write-ups of televised games now when they are expected to have video than this report of the first game had.

• The World’s Fair that year was themed as the World of Tomorrow and they really were not that far off inthe description. Besides television other pretty neat things were on display and introduced to the world.
• The first fluorescent light and fixture.
• They had a Superman Day ( the comics first released in 1933 by Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster were a huge success)
• 1st World Science Fiction Convention
• Nylon fabric
• A keyboard-operated speech synthesizer
• The View-Master
• Scentovision
• A Streamlined pencil sharpener
• A futuristic car-based city by General Motors
• The first fully constructed computer game

The Worlds Fair realized that they were demonstrating a world for tomorrow but the press, NBC and RCA may have not realized the full potential of football on TV and what a milestone it was.
 

The picture in the banner above is courtesy of Wikiemdia Commons of s terrific 1939 poster advertising the World's Fair.

The inspiration of Joe Horrigan’s writing in his book NFL Century:: The One-Hundred-Year Rise of America's Greatest Sports League. Newspapers.com and the NCAA.com were used for the reference materials.