Giant Scrambles Time
By ice rivers
- 266 reads
While watching Thursday Night Football on Friday morning at double speed when the team I bet on has the ball and eight times speed when the other team has the ball, I remembered the old days when we didn't control time.
There was one game each week and it was the Giants. You had better be home on Sunday at kickoff if you wanted to see the whole game and you had to watch each play closely because you weren't going to see it again. And the commercials that particularly enraged my Uncle George who claimed that "every time anybody farts on the field I have to watch Jack Koerner try to sell a goddamned Ford,"
Nowadays, while watching the game on a different day than when it was broadcast and entirely skipping through commercials while slowing down only for replays I don't have to listen to Buck and his ilk over explaining the obvious while making the complicated incomprehensible and telling corny human interest stories about violent men making millions of dollars before being injured and forgotten.
I remembered back fifty plus years. Fran Tarkenton scrambling around one game. Fran was the first modern quarterback. Up until Fran, quarterbacks stayed in the pocket of protection provided by their offensive line when they set to pass. Fran "scrambled" which means he would leave the pocket, elude the rush and give himself a run/pass option. Meanwhile, the receivers broke out of their patterns and ran around like children in a backyard just trying to get open and bail out the Scrambler who was making it up as he was going along.
The call that day went something like this "The blitz is on, it's gonna be a big loss, Fran evades two tackles, he's still going backwards, the pressures still on, Smith has got him. no he slipped away, wow look at that block....he's still on his feet.....here's a man open.... way downfield.....Homer Jones...Fran throws..... Hold the phone Homer's got it. Touchdown Giants."
What followed next was the most brilliant of ideas idea, Somebody in the broadcast booth booth figured out that they could replay the whole thing. It was the first video tape replay (the wonder of video tape!)
We always had a bunch of people at my house watching the ball game on Sundays after the 12:45 mass. Not all of them were Giant's fans. Some loved the Browns particularly with the great Jim Brown. Anyways one of my Browns loving friends who was no fan of Fran got up and went to the bathroom immediately after Fran's touchdown pass, muttering to himself about that lucky bastard and the block that saved his ass. When my man returned from the bathroom, they had played the video tape and were about to play it again after the commercial. My friend asked what happened and we fed him a line of shit how the Giants had recovered a fumble on the kickoff and they had possession of the ball again. They replayed the replay and my friend did the commentary...."there he goes again the little bastard...he's not gonna get away with it this time....look at him runnin around......he's gonna need another block....holy shit....he got the exact same block.....Jones is open again.....what the fuck.... he caught it again"at this point the rest of us were laughing our asses off and could barely manage to explain to our Brown's loving bathroom buddy what had happened. Yup, that was the beginning of the control of time.
The miracle of video tape.
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miracle indeed. I remember
miracle indeed. I remember football (soccer) highlighs and that was all you got.
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