The ep33 TV And Sport

This is Jimmy Powers coming your way with another Grantland Rice story. There, this is Jimmy Powers coming your way once again with another installment from Granny Rice's best-seller, The Tumal and the Shouting.

Today we open the book to the chapter entitled, TV and Sport, and I'll pick up Granny's narration in first person. Back in the middle 1940s, a cloud no larger than a small man's hand suddenly appeared above the fields of sport.

It was known as television or TV. Within a few short years, this cloud was a raging storm, spearheaded by a wrecking cyclone. It struck two of the country's most popular sports, baseball and football, with a devastating crash.

In baseball, it practically wrecked the minor leagues, or many of them. In the big leagues, it cut attendance by nearly 500,000 a year. In football, only Notre Dame could sell out in the face of TV's power.

It was the old story of trying to sell something and give away the same product for nothing. You can't sell what you can get for nothing. As television sets increased, football and baseball attendances started dropping.

Under the new NCAA agreement, only one big college game each week could be televised. This meant about twenty-six teams could be shown, making it impossible to show the top game each Saturday, a factor which drove millions back to radio.

College football faced an impossible job in trying to satisfy a sports public that looked on Notre Dame versus anybody, a Michigan versus Ohio State, an Oklahoma versus Texas, a Georgia Tech versus Alabama televised contest as the game they wanted to see.

of which would kill the attendants at the local college contest level. I can recall years when I had to work desperately to get a pair of tickets for such ivy brawls as Harvard vs Yale or Yale vs Princeton with sellouts the rule.