The Heidi Game story from an NBC log clerk November 17, 2023

Today is not just my 42nd birthday, but the 55th anniversary of the infamous Heidi Game, an AFL game between the New York Jets and Oakland Raiders. My fellow WCWP Hall of Famer John LiBretto, inducted in 2017, was a log clerk for NBC at the time, and permitted me to share what he remembered from that night via our e-mail conversation on Tuesday.

This is John’s story:

A little background: I was a Log Clerk, which was my entry job at NBC (I had started in June of 1968). Basically logged all programming and commercials etc. for the local station (WNBC) and for the network.

I worked in a room with two TV monitors just next to BOC (Broadcast Operations Control), the area that was responsible for all programming output to the network and WNBC. Next door was Master Control, and just in front was the Control Room that switched between all the control studios, rolled the station breaks etc. etc. Busy place.

On any given weekend that had live sports, the Operations Dept issued Conditions that outlined what was to happen during various points in the broadcast day (i.e. handoffs between games and regionalization of games during the football season, and the end of sports into the prime-time schedule at 7PM on a Sunday night). Remember, while the NFL and AFL had announced their merger to take effect in 1970, they were still separate leagues in 1968. The AFL did not have the high ratings of the NFL, nor the clout over the network (in fact, it was said that NBC saved the AFL, and helped facilitate the merger).

There were times that the network would allow a game to run slightly past 7PM, and either slide the network accordingly (rare), or do a Join-in-Progress (also rare). The show on this particular Sunday, Heidi, was a very expensive adaptation of the story (music by John Williams, by the way), and the conditions specifically stated that, no matter what, the show would air to east and central time zones at 7PM. The big 4PM game was, of course, Jets at Oakland Raiders. The commercial control was in Burbank (NBC’s west coast headquarters), so the game was coming back to the east via the video/audio lines from NBC Burbank to Paducah, KY, where it was switched, by AT&T, into the main network via something called the Round Robin (the network signal left NY and traveled in a big circle, city to city, and eventually came back to NY…a big circle that allowed news feeds and regional commercials to be switched into the network as needed (not to mention regional football games).

A lot of set-up information for what transpired next.

As we got closer to 7PM, it was pretty clear the game was not going to end on time. Curt Gowdy had already promoted that Heidi would be coming up in the east and central time zones at 7PM; the game would continue out west. The powers that be (Julian Goodman, President of NBC) realized that this was probably not a great idea after all, and tried to call BOC to order a change (i.e. let the game finish, and slide the east and central feed of Heidi). By this time, the calls were coming into NBC New York from viewers and overwhelming the switchboard, so Goodman couldn’t get through in time.

Here’s the sequence as it aired on the East Coast:

6:58:40 Network Identification (NI) a :06 seconded, either a promo, or just “This is the NBC Television Network.”

6:58:46  Network goes to black for local station break

Somewhere in here, BOC got word from Goodman to delay Heidi and go back to the game…mind you, only 1:14 to accomplish this. That NI I mentioned was also a set cue for the AT&T facility in Paducah to reverse the eastbound feed from Burbank to the normal feed of the network outbound to the west coast. So, that already meant the game was never coming back to the East Coast.

7:00:00 NBC Color Peacock (The Following is a Special Color Presentation on NBC)

7:00:12 A little bit of the Heidi opening, followed by hash (yes, they switched to the incoming feed from California, which unfortunately had nothing on it). Hash is what happens when there is no usable signal on the incoming line (looks like grey fuzz on the screen).

Looked worse than it seems in the writing of it!

Finally, realizing there was nowhere left to go, BOC switched back to the studio airing Heidi and just let it play. The screaming in BOC was quite something, but they actually did everything correctly; had they NOT aired Heidi according to the conditions without Goodman’s authorization, they probably would have all been fired. As it turned out, two of us became quite busy Sports directors!

It’s a miracle Goodman got through at all; the switchboard completely melted down from the volume of calls. The surprise was so did the switchboards in Chicago, Cleveland and Washington. That’s how NBC discovered that the AFL had become a pretty hot property.

I remember all this because I had to log every single second of what went on the air that evening. Eventually, a flash caster was aired over Heidi giving the final score (Oakland scored twice in a matter of a few seconds and won the game [43-32], which further pissed off the New York market).

John LiBretto, via 11/14/23 e-mail

As a postscript to John’s story, here is David Brinkley‘s report and Curt Gowdy’s re-creation of the end of the game on the following night’s Huntley-Brinkley Report:

The Jets would get their revenge on Oakland six weeks later in the AFL Championship Game, beating the Raiders 27-23 at Shea Stadium. Of course, two weeks after that, the Jets upset the NFL Champion Baltimore Colts in Super Bowl III.