In a TV schedules thread, there was a listing of a 2-hour NBA broadcast from 1977. Either the game was joined in progress or maybe edited down from an earlier time. What sporting events do you remember that were not shown live and complete, whether they be tape delayed/joined in progress/edited for broadcast? Let's limit it to major sports and events.
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Delayed/incomplete sporting events
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NBA games used to fit into two-hour time slots. There was no JIP or "editing down." Were you alive or old enough to be watching the NBA on TV in 1977? I was, and can tell you that two hours was plenty of time for an average game back them. Like every other team sport, basketball games have become bloated over the years. TV timeouts are part of the problem, as is the leisurely pace with which players approach the dead-ball bits of the game: going to the free throw line, taking free throws, checking into the lineup at the scorer's table, milking recovery time from routine charging fouls, etc.
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Here's the thread I was mentioning https://www.radiodiscussions.com/th...nday-november-25-27-1977.756821/#post-6552549 RandTV was the one who found out a game that started at 5pm didn't start airing on TV until 6pm. So whether they cut down the game or just tape delayed it, it wasn't going out live.
A check of newspaper clippings confirms that the game started at 8 p.m. in New York, so it looks like you're right. No idea what the deal was with that. It will probably remain a mystery unless the station regularly did that (JIP, edited or tape-delayed) to NBA games and someone in your area remembers what was done and why.
That's also one of the many reasons baseball doesn't have a huge amount of younger followers compared to some other sports. Not only is it a slower-paced game, but the average 9 inning MLB game this season took more than 3 full hours to get through. Considering there are 162 games in a season and, well, it's a lot. It's also the reason they've been making rule changes to try and speed up the game. Our local RSN (Bally Sports) tries to fit baseball replays into a 2 hour window and some of the stuff they do is laughable. Basically after a commercial break they have a local host come on camera and say "Due to time constraints, we now move ahead in our coverage of this game" and they cut out 3 full innings and jump ahead so they can fit it in. Also, they don't seem to use descretion when jumping ahead to ensure key parts of the game are kept in..They just chop out entire innings to make it fit in the window of time they've allowed for the rebroadcast. For NBA basketball it's not as bad, as they can usually fit rebroadcasts into the allotted schedule by just cutting out the pre-game banter and jumping right from the end of the 2nd quarter to the beginning of the 3rd, without the 20 minutes of rehashing and banter.
CBS is well know for tape delaying NBA games in the 70s, maybe even the 80s. The Lakers/Celtics success and rivalry helped move games into being shown live.
It will be very interesting to see how much difference the Pitch Clock makes in this coming season, as pitchers and batters won't be able to waste so much time between pitches any more.
I thought CBS only did that during the playoffs, sometimes pushing games that started in prime time to the hours after the local 10 or 11 o'clock news. Was it done for regular season games, too, and what was the point of starting a game at 6 instead of 5?
CBS rarely showed regular-season NBA games on tape delay in the late night slot. One exception was for Magic Johnson's first game in 1979.
This was local but WMC NBC 5 in Memphis used to come in late to Major League Baseball games because nothing would come before rasslin'. They also used to pre-empt the second MLB game whem there was a doubleheader and show syndicated country music shows.
I remember that from my days in eastern Arkansas in the late '70s. Fortunately, KARK Little Rock was on our cable system as well and their wrestling show (taped in Shreveport) ended at noon -- only one hour long compared to the 90-minute live Memphis show.
During it's heyday, "Wide World Of Sports" frequently showed taped and edited events.
As an example, they might tape a 500-mile NASCAR race, which ran three and a half hours, edit it down to 45 minutes (minus commercials) and include it on the following Saturday's edition.
Another example was the World Figure Skating Championship. "Wide World" might devote an entire 90-minute show to coverage of the men's and women's long programs. But only the top five or six finishers (including Americans, regardless of finish) in the men's and women's competitions would be shown, with some activity between the performances edited out to fit it all (plus the commercials) into a 90-minute timeslot.
Even after ABC began showing Indycar's Indianapolis "500" on tape in prime-time (a few hours after the race took place) in 1971, the taped snowing was two hours (including commercials) for a lot of years, expanding to three hours (again, including commercials) by 1985, the last time they showed the race on tape. In those days, the race took about three hours and ten minutes to run; pre-race ceremonies and a few post-race interviews might have brought this up to three and a half hours.
As an example, they might tape a 500-mile NASCAR race, which ran three and a half hours, edit it down to 45 minutes (minus commercials) and include it on the following Saturday's edition.
Another example was the World Figure Skating Championship. "Wide World" might devote an entire 90-minute show to coverage of the men's and women's long programs. But only the top five or six finishers (including Americans, regardless of finish) in the men's and women's competitions would be shown, with some activity between the performances edited out to fit it all (plus the commercials) into a 90-minute timeslot.
Even after ABC began showing Indycar's Indianapolis "500" on tape in prime-time (a few hours after the race took place) in 1971, the taped snowing was two hours (including commercials) for a lot of years, expanding to three hours (again, including commercials) by 1985, the last time they showed the race on tape. In those days, the race took about three hours and ten minutes to run; pre-race ceremonies and a few post-race interviews might have brought this up to three and a half hours.
Found an interesting nugget about "Hockey Night in Canada", the long running Saturday night game on the CBC: until 1968, regular season games were always started in progress. Apparently the NHL worried that airing the full game would hurt attendance, not sure why they decided in 1968 to start doing so.
Might be coincidence, but 1967-68 was the season the NHL doubled in size by adding six expansion teams. Only thing is, none of them were in Canada, which kind of ruins a possible reason for changing the policy: making sure the fans who couldn't get tickets to their new team's game would still see all of it.
It may have been the NHL, it may have been the two Canadian-based teams at the time (the Montreal Canadiens and the Toronto Maple Leafs), or the sponsor (I think Imperial Oil of Canada, the Canadian division of Esso, was the sponsor at the time). Maybe Imperial Oil only decided to buy two hours of airtime for each regular season game.
I doubt it was the CBC that insisted on this, although until the late 1960's, CBC Radio aired Saturday night NHL games since the 1930's. Perhaps by the time they started being televised, CBC Radio may have been broadcasting the games in full. Maybe CBC wanted to.protect the radio broadcast.
Additionally, when "Hockey Night In Canada" came to TV, the TV coverage began at 9 P.M. EST, but I think the games started at 8:35 EST, so the move of the TV coverage to 8:30 EST probably coincided with the game times being pushed up to 8:05.
But if the Canadiens and Leafs were worried about locally televising regular season games in full, could the CBC-TV network have shown the games in full on most of the network with CBMT-6 (English) and CBFT-2 (French) Montreal, along with CBLT Toronto, running some other half-hour programs and joined hockey in progress at 8:30?
FYI: By the mid 1960's, the four U.S.-based NHL teams at the time were all televising Saturday night away games back to their home markets. As an example, a Saturday night game between the Toronto Maple Leafs and the Chicago Blackhawks in Toronto starting at 8:05 EST (or 7:05 Chicago time) might have been joined in progress on CBC at 8:30 EST, but shown in it's entirety on WGN-9 Chicago starting at 7 Central (8 Eastern).
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To elaborate further on the subject of incomplete hockey telecasts, here in Boston, Bruins fans had to put up with partial games during the early years of television, then edited and delayed telecasts for three seasons in the middle 1960's.
Both the old WNAC-7 and WBZ-4 carried games (WNAC during the 1948/49 season; WBZ during the 1949/50 season), but usually, only the third period was shown.
After the very early 1950's (1950 or 1951?), the Bruins vanished from local TV because attendance at the old Boston Garden had dramatically fallen (but then again, so did all live sports attendance in cities that had TV stations. People wanted to stay home and watch the new medium).
The "Black 'N Gold" wouldn't be locally televised again until the 1963/64 season, although from 1956/57 through 1959/60, several Bruins games appeared on CBS as part of a package of Saturday afternoon NHL games. Those games were shown in full, and there was no blackout in Boston of home games that CBS carried.
Midway through the 1963/64 season, WMUR-9 in Manchester, New Hampshire (whose analog signal covered much of the Boston area) began carrying games. They were Saturday games taped and edited down to an hour for broadcast on Sundays.
The commentator was the late Fred Cusick. Although he had done Bruins games on radio for a couple of years in the fifties (and also did play-by-play of "The NHL On CBS" during the four years the network carried the league from 1956/57 through 1959/60) his association with the team truly began that season. Except for the 1967/68 and 1968/69 seasons, Cusick would call Bruins games on either radio or TV until his 1997 retirement.
For the next two years, the old WHDH-5 carried Bruins games, again mainly Saturday games taped and edited down to an hour for Sunday broadcast.
In the 1965/66 season, there were a few exceptions. Due to pro football commitments from the network (the station was a CBS affiliate then), it wasn't possible to show even one hour of edited games on most Sundays during the fall. So the station instead taped some Sunday night games (almost always home contests) and showed the action in full (but with intermissions cut out) at 11:30 P.M. that night.
And in February, 1966, the station carried a live away game from New York on a Saturday afternoon. It was the first time ever that a locally televised regular season Bruins away game had ever been broadcast back to Boston (although a few away games in the late fifties were shown in Boston as part of the CBS package) and the first Bruins game ever broadcast in color.
Finally in the 1966/67 season, Boston Bruins fans finally got to see live games in full over TV on a regular basis when WKBG-56 launched and carried most of the away games after the station went on the air in December, 1966.
WKBG only had the Bruins for that one season. WSBK-38 took over the Bruins telecasts in the fall of 1967 and the rest is history.
Both the old WNAC-7 and WBZ-4 carried games (WNAC during the 1948/49 season; WBZ during the 1949/50 season), but usually, only the third period was shown.
After the very early 1950's (1950 or 1951?), the Bruins vanished from local TV because attendance at the old Boston Garden had dramatically fallen (but then again, so did all live sports attendance in cities that had TV stations. People wanted to stay home and watch the new medium).
The "Black 'N Gold" wouldn't be locally televised again until the 1963/64 season, although from 1956/57 through 1959/60, several Bruins games appeared on CBS as part of a package of Saturday afternoon NHL games. Those games were shown in full, and there was no blackout in Boston of home games that CBS carried.
Midway through the 1963/64 season, WMUR-9 in Manchester, New Hampshire (whose analog signal covered much of the Boston area) began carrying games. They were Saturday games taped and edited down to an hour for broadcast on Sundays.
The commentator was the late Fred Cusick. Although he had done Bruins games on radio for a couple of years in the fifties (and also did play-by-play of "The NHL On CBS" during the four years the network carried the league from 1956/57 through 1959/60) his association with the team truly began that season. Except for the 1967/68 and 1968/69 seasons, Cusick would call Bruins games on either radio or TV until his 1997 retirement.
For the next two years, the old WHDH-5 carried Bruins games, again mainly Saturday games taped and edited down to an hour for Sunday broadcast.
In the 1965/66 season, there were a few exceptions. Due to pro football commitments from the network (the station was a CBS affiliate then), it wasn't possible to show even one hour of edited games on most Sundays during the fall. So the station instead taped some Sunday night games (almost always home contests) and showed the action in full (but with intermissions cut out) at 11:30 P.M. that night.
And in February, 1966, the station carried a live away game from New York on a Saturday afternoon. It was the first time ever that a locally televised regular season Bruins away game had ever been broadcast back to Boston (although a few away games in the late fifties were shown in Boston as part of the CBS package) and the first Bruins game ever broadcast in color.
Finally in the 1966/67 season, Boston Bruins fans finally got to see live games in full over TV on a regular basis when WKBG-56 launched and carried most of the away games after the station went on the air in December, 1966.
WKBG only had the Bruins for that one season. WSBK-38 took over the Bruins telecasts in the fall of 1967 and the rest is history.
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It's my understanding that Vancouver desperately wanted a team in the 1967 expansion, but the league insisted on putting new teams only in Los Angeles, Philadelphia, San Francisco/Oakland, Minneapolis/St. Paul, St. Louis, and Pittsburgh as I think they were the six largest U.S. television markets at the time without an NHL club.
The 1967 expansion and the determination of the six cities that would get the new teams were made because the league believed that without an expansion to six major U S. TV markets, they would never get a substantial TV deal with an American network.
Since we're here ... there is something to be said for airing certain events on a delay and allowing the editors to take out boring stretches. Motorsports is a prime candidate for this. Most motorsports have boring stretches, such as cleanup after a wreck.
It also allows the networks to insert commercials in stretches where little is happening, instead of trying to predict the future as they do now.
There are already a number of outlets that show outtakes from the Indy and NASCAR races. I really doubt viewers would want to sit through a flood of commercials which are replacing "boring" racing segments.
As for "boring" cleanup segments, those are sometimes the most interesting periods. You get to see replays of wreck causes and the repair work being done. Most don't last a long time (perhaps two beer runs) - just long enough to replenish the chip/dip bowl and perhaps a bio break.
When I worked at the Purdue network flagship, 2 hours was exactly the time allotted. If it ran over, the next program was JIPed.
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