Before There Was 4K

In the early days of radio, as I've written elsewhere, real-time broadcasts of baseball games didn't always originate from the ballpark. To save travel and transmission costs, they were sometimes re-created in the studio from telegraphed wire service reports. “The sportscaster, armed with sound effects, would glance at slips of paper to find out what was happening in the distant game. He then would pretend to describe that action, pitch by pitch. Ronald Reagan used to practice this deception at a station in Iowa.” And Larry Gellman and I had to improvise a re-creation of a basketball game in 1968.

But even before radio, there was plenty of sporting action, and sometimes it could be made available for viewing at a distance. Here are some examples.

• On the Fourth of July, 1910, more than 20,000 fans crowded into a temporary wooden amphitheater on the east side of Reno, Nevada, to watch the first “Fight of the Century.”

It was the heavyweight boxing match between champion Jack Johnson, who was Black, and former titleholder Jim Jeffries, “the Great White Hope.” Johnson would win by knocking Jeffries down three times in the 15th round.

Folks who weren't in Nevada wanted to see it. While waiting a few days for a transcontinental train to bring the still photos back East, one newspaper actually re-created the scene “from an expert's telegraphic description” using the 1910 version of Photoshop.

Later, the movies came to the rescue. Motion-picture cameras had been present, and The Johnson-Jeffries Fight was released later that year. However, former President Theodore Roosevelt objected to the gambling associated with prize fights. Also, racists didn't want a white man to be shown losing to a Black. The film was quickly banned in some states and cities.

• On the last day of March, 1985, more than 19,000 fans crowded into Madison Square Garden for the very first “Wrestlemania.” (The 39th is taking place this weekend.)

Folks who weren't in New York wanted to see the exhibition. I was one of more than a million spectators watching on closed-circuit television.

Although I live in the Pittsburgh area, I happened to be in South Florida that weekend, and a friend got a pair of tickets to the Miami Beach Convention Center.

A projection screen had been set up on the stage, as I've photoshopped here. Compared to a movie screen, it looked rather small from our seats in the rear balcony. Oh, well.

Shortly before one o'clock, the lights dimmed, the color bars disappeared, and we leaned forward in anticipation.

On the hour, the program began with important-sounding music and flickering white dots — an animated star field. But then seconds later ...

... we discovered that the producers had employed a fairly new invention, Digital Video Effects, to squeeze Manhattan scenes into a smaller rectangle (only half the area) and insert it within the star field. We all groaned. You mean the picture is going to be that tiny?

But no, titles soon filled the full screen, and we watched Wrestlemania's nine matches. We were too far away to recognize most faces, but the announcers decribed the action. And the wrestlers' images were live and larger than life-size. What more could you want?

Meanwhile back in Pittsburgh, another closed-circuit presentation was scheduled for the Civic Arena. Each of 11,443 fans paid $8 to $10 at the gate. But when one o'clock rolled around, there was nothing to see, only a scrambled picture. Apparently there was a technical problem in decoding the satellite feed from New York. After an hour and half of fruitless troubleshooting, the lights came up and an announcement was made that refunds would be available at the Arena at noon the next day, or by mail.

Burghers were not happy. Angry fans pelted the screen with garbage, then knocked it over and threw folding chairs to the floor. Pittsburgh police cited three people for disorderly conduct, criminal mischief, and defiant trespass. Eventually local ABC affiliate WTAE-TV came to the rescue, agreeing to broadcast the event on Channel 4 in its entirety two weeks later.

• Later, I would travel to Wrestlemanias 6 through 13 to work on the TV crew. We ran cables from the arena to our production truck's Input/Output panel, plus other cables from the production truck to an adjacent uplink truck. The uplink transmitted our signal directly from the arena parking lot to a satellite, which relayed it to cable systems across the nation.

I still have a Wrestlemania 13 souvenir T-shirt in my closet.

On that evening in 1997, both trucks were parked outside the Rosemont Horizon near Chicago. As nearly as I can recall, in Central Time:

2:00 We began transmitting my graphic with instructions to the cable systems.

5:30 We transmitted a warmup show.

8:40 The live event concluded. In the arena, the crew began disassembling the cameras. In the production truck, we rewound the tapes.

9:00 We began playing the tapes for cable systems that had sold a second showing.

9:15 In the parking lot, we disconnected various cables so they could be stowed in the trucks, after which most of the crew would be dismissed to return to the hotel.

9:25 Someone — not I — helpfully but mistakenly unhooked the cables between the two trucks. Cable viewers lost their picture.

9:26 Panic ensued as a phone call informed us of the outage. Scrambling ensued as the cables were reconnected.

9:55 It happened again. We had to post engineers to guard the I/O connection panels.