By Alan Robinson

If you’re one of the millions of visitors who’ve flocked to touristy Myrtle Beach, S.C., during the past half century or so, and especially if you’re a music fan, you might have heard the rumor.

Actually it was a rumor that turned into a groundswell of skepticism then, over the years, became a hard-to-believe urban legend.

The world’s greatest rock ’n’ roll band, at the height of its popularity, spent three days in Myrtle Beach during a summertime week alongside 300,000+ tourists. They went deep sea fishing, ate at local restaurants, signed a few autographs and enjoyed more hours of sunshine than most knew during an entire summer back in their native England.

And, oh yes, they played a previously unannounced concert during a major tour to support what became their biggest-selling album ever in the United States.

Impossible, you say? How could the Greatest Rock ‘N’ Roll Band in the World play Myrtle Beach in the 1970s? There was no venue nearly large enough! No hotel that could take on the entourage that accompanies a huge rock ‘n’ roll tour, especially near the height of the tourist season!

Only it did happen.

The Rolling Stones — yes, the Rolling Stones — played a concert before only 2,000 spectators at the Myrtle Beach Convention Center on June 22, 1978, mere weeks after the release of their megasmash “Some Girls” album.

On the 40th anniversary of the show in 2018, the Myrtle Beach Sun Times reprinted its stories from the time, all to prove this urban legend was a fact. All because so many who grew up later along the Grand Strand simply couldn’t fathom it took place.

Only 1,800 tickets were sold for $10 apiece — total ticket sales for a Stones concert totaled only $18,000! — and another 200 or so attended via tickets given away by radio stations, the promoters or by the Stones organization.

Over the years, it’s likely 200,000 or so later proclaimed they attended the smallest U.S. arena show the Stones have ever played (other than for their first two U.S. tours in 1964-65). They’ve played theaters and clubs, but never an arena this tiny.

Amazingly, I was one of those who did — miracle of miracles — but I’ll relate that later.

So how in the world did the Rolling Stones wind up in such a small arena during a very-condensed six-week tour in which they played only 25 cities? (There was no followup European tour, either.) And for a show added at the very last minute, something that simply didn’t happen during a time in which the Stones and Led Zeppelin and Pink Floyd had long since graduated from small halls to major arenas and stadiums? And when tours took months and months of planning to schedule?

Some background: the stadium-weary Stones were determined from the start of the uncommonly short tour to play some smaller-capacity venues. Still, when the tour was announced in May, only six large venues were revealed: Philadelphia, Cleveland, Buffalo, Chicago, New Orleans and Anaheim. It seemed to be big-building business as usual.

But the first big surprise dropped when tickets went on sale — without any previous announcement — a week before what became the tour-opening show June 10 in Lakeland, Fla., or a few days before the tour was to have opened in Philadelphia. All 10,000 tickets for Lakeland sold within hours. Shows in smaller venues in Atlanta (Fox Theater), Passaic, N.J. (Capitol Theater), Washington, D.C. (Warner Theater) and New York (Palladium Theater) were revealed shortly after that. (Even the theaters had larger capacities than Myrtle Beach, by the way.)

Then there was an even bigger surprise. Only six shows into the tour came this shocker of an announcement on local radio stations at 8:15 a.m. on Monday, June 19: Tickets were immediately on sale for a Stones concert three nights later at the Myrtle Beach (S.C.) Convention Center.

By 10 a.m., all 1,800 tickets — sold at $10 each — were gone for the Thursday, June 22 show.

(Even arena employees didn’t know about the show until that morning. To prevent leaks, pre-printed tickets read simply The Main Event.)

Then the finger-pointing began: local residents, many of whom were already at work or headed there, blamed the tourists for snatching them up. The tourists, unlikely to have a local radio station on at such a time, blamed local residents for not giving them a chance to buy.

My personal moment of angst came upon driving into town hours later and hearing (no doubt on legendary local station WKZQ): “Hope you got your tickets for the surprise Rolling Stones show Thursday! They’re all gone! They sold in minutes! Good luck on finding one now!”

My scream, first of wonder and then of horror, no doubt could be heard across Horry County: “No-o-o-o-o-o! This is going to be the worst vacation ever! I’ve been playing the `Some Girls’ album non-stop and they’re going to be here! In Myrtle Beach?And I have no chance to see them?”

Some Girls was a great, great album, too (in my mind, they’ve never come close to topping it since). Following disappointing sales and critical reception for their reggae-influenced Black and Blue album in 1976, the Stones went back to their rock ’n’ roots for Some Girls.

There were Keith Richards riffs aplenty, lyrics loaded with hooks, a Brown Sugar followup of sorts (the song Some Girls), cranked-up Richards and Ronnie Wood amps (this was the first Stones album on which Wood played), radio-friendly singles (Miss You, Beast of Burden, Respectable) and kick-butt rockers (When the Whip Comes Down, Shattered, Lies).

As they say in the business, all killer and no filler. Just like Beggars Banquet and Let it Bleed in the ‘60s.

The Stones knew it, too. Unlike later tours (especially in the 2000s) when they played maybe two songs off a new album in concert because fans wanted to hear the greatest hits, they loaded this tour with all but two songs off Some Girls (in Myrtle Beach, they didn’t play Before They Make Me Run or the song Some Girls).

They also omitted songs that became can’t-leave-it-out concert fixtures in later decades: Gimme Shelter, Midnight Rambler, Sympathy for the Devil and Satisfaction, among others.

As word of the surprise concert quickly spread in Myrtle Beach and beyond, the local media reported scalpers were marking tickets up tenfold. But local authorities were warning of tight security, that scalpers (overly present at earlier shows in New Orleans and Washington, D.C.) risked being arrested and having their tickets confiscated.

As for me, I was already resigned to the fate of not seeing the show when I pulled into the mom-and-pop hotel I’d booked with a good friend and his wife weeks before. Seeing a rock concert during the trip had been the furthest thing from my mind.

Upon handing over a credit card, I said to the middle-aged woman (almost certainly the co-owner) handling the check-in, entirely in jest, “Hey, I heard the Stones are in town Thursday! You don’t know anyone who has tickets do you?”

Her answer wouldn’t have been less surprising if she’d volunteered to sell the Mercedes that was sitting out front for $500.

“Oh, my son went down there and bought two tickets. He wants to sell them for $100,” she said.

Remember, $100 then would be about $525 today, and I hadn’t brought much more cash than that. ATMs? Not yet, Jack.

I told her, “Sold! Sold! Please call him and tell him not to sell to anyone else! I’ll buy them right now!”

Still, I wasn’t optimistic when I went to the room and unpacked. Who knew the last time she’d talked to her son? Maybe he’d already sold them, and for more than $100? And how could I be so incredibly lucky to check into probably the one hotel in Myrtle Beach where this scenario might have happened?

But, a few minutes later, she called the room and said, amazingly, “Come downstairs and get your tickets.”

Do you believe in miracles? Yes! (And it wasn’t until 20 months later that Al Michaels would express those very words at the 1980 Winter Olympics.)

Within a half hour of arriving in Myrtle Beach, I possessed — surely, some angel in heaven smiled upon me — what would prove to be two of the hardest-to-get Rolling Stones tickets in history. (Remember, this was way before the days of professional ticket resellers or agencies or secondary-market tickets. Scalpers were the only way to acquire such tickets.)

I’d seen the Stones three years before in Cleveland Stadium before 80,000-plus, unable to get within 100 yards of the stage. I heard the show fine, but I saw the Stones mostly through the telephoto lens of my camera. Now, incredibly, I would see them up close and personal, one night after they played the Hampton Roads (Va.) Coliseum.

(I didn’t realize untilI arriving at the tiny arena just how up close. The tickets were downstairs, seventh row, in a venue that more resembled a high school auditorium than an arena. One hundred yards? The band was more like 10 feet away.)

The show was added, literally at the last minute, after the tour-opening concert in Lakeland went so well the Stones sought to add another smaller venue in the South. They’d heard good things about Myrtle Beach from Lynyrd Skynyrd (no doubt from Peter Rudge, who during his career managed both the Stones and Skynyrd). And it gave them a mini-vacation to enjoy for three days before they played in Greensboro, N.C., on June 26.

Enjoy, they did. Jagger and then-girl friend/model Jerry Hall enjoyed a quiet Italian dinner a night after the show at Roma’s Italian diner, where Jagger raved about the fettuccine. The band as a whole dined after the concert at a restaurant called The Library. There also was a deep-sea fishing trip (and a barracuda than somehow ended up back in someone’s hotel room).

Hey, it’s only rock ’n’ roll, right? At least a hotel room TV set didn’t wind up in the Atlantic Ocean.

The tour turned out to be one of the band’s shortest in the U.S. but also one of its best-reviewed, and the Stones themselves were pleased with the mix of small, medium and megasized arenas and stadiums. (Exactly a week after playing before 2,000 in Myrtle Beach, they appeared before 82,500 in Cleveland Stadium.)

(Sidenote: The Myrtle Beach Convention Center arena was expanded in 1993-94 to its current capacity of 8,000, and has hosted multiple college basketball tournaments and presidential debates. The arena section that was used for the Stones show is now a storage area, albeit one with quite the history.)

There was extensive cover in area newspapers about the concert, including the Myrtle Beach Sun Times, which devoted multiple pages to the event in its followup Sunday newspaper, and, especially, The Greenville News (above)

Some Girls went on to become the Stones’ biggest-selling studio album in the United States, with certified sales of 6 million (and countless more that weren’t certified). The album got a huge boost with an October appearance by the Stones on Saturday Night Live.

To the lucky few who were there in Myrtle Beach, a 2008 quote by Allen Corbett (the son of promoter Cecil Corbett of Beach Club Promotions) to the Sun Times sums it up best: “It was a busy day, to have them in such a small hall. It was pretty much a blur.”

Mick Jagger was the first to appear onstage, joining warmup act Peter Tosh for the song they’d recorded together, “Don’t Look Back.” It was a brief appearance that wowed a crowd that, until then, probably didn’t believe deep down the Rolling Stones were actually going to play in an arena the size of a high school auditorium.

Oh, but they did. Once the Stones hit the stage for a 90-minute show, there was Ron Wood, performing the first full album he’d recorded with the Stones. Charlie Watts sitting behind a Gretsch drum set for the first time. Bill Wyman fingering his oversized bass. And Mick and Keith being the Glimmer Twins.

And, in the back, is that Stew! Yes, Ian Stewart, the keyboardist/handyman/roadie and co-founder of the band who was exiled to the job of road manager role when group manager Andrew Loog Oldham decided he “didn’t fit the group’s image.” He sat behind a piano, of course. (Stew, by the way, was fittingly inducted into the Rock ’N’ Roll Hall of Fame in 1989 as a member of the Stones.)

And there’s Ian McLagan (the former member of the Faces with Wood) who’s another sideman on keyboards. He’d played on some Some Girls tracks.

Legendary rock photographer Bob Gruen shot the Myrtle Beach show (above) and is selling reprints on his website bobgruen.com. Photo copyrighted by Bob Gruen. @Bob Gruen.

The show kicked off with a Chuck Berry cover, Let It Rock and, by the time the group segued into All Down the Line (from Exile on Main Street; a track the Stones have played on almost every tour since 1972), the crowd was already standing.

Then came a signature Stones song, Honky Tonk Women, and the naughty Star Star (not the actual title, of course, from Goats Head Soup) before the Stones launched full tilt into the Some Girls album.

First up was the high-energy song Lies, followed by Miss You (with Mick on guitar), the speaker-shaking When the Whip Comes Down, Beast of Burden, the Temptations cover Just My Imagination (Running Away with Me), Respectable and Far Away Eyes (with Wood on pedal steel guitar).

Mick ended the seven-song Some Girls set by singing Love in Vain from Let It Bleed. Then came one more from Some Girls, Shattered, and another Chuck Berry cover, Sweet Little Sixteen. They wrapped it up with Tumbling Dice, Happy (with Keith on vocals), Brown Sugar and Jumpin’ Jack Flash. It was a setlist they pretty much stayed with the entire tour, though not always in that order

It was a gas, too. The second greatest concert I’ve ever attended (being one of the few caucasian teens in the 1960s to see the incredible James Brown and his revue, and from the second row in out-of-the way Steubenville, Ohio, has to be No. 1).

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z6lMRXlU-co&list=RDZ6lMRXlU-co&start_radio=1

There are multiple audio clips of songs from the Myrtle Beach show on YouTube

Over the years, it’s been reported that the Myrtle Beach attendance (with many standing in a balcony) was 2,089. But I know for sure it was 2,088.

That second ticket I bought went unused, as incredible as it might seem, so one seat went unoccupied. Seeing 60 or so police officers outside the arena, amid all of the talk of scalpers being hauled off to jail, discouraged me from trying to pawn off my extra ticket that night as my friend and his wife ate dinner elsewhere.

“Miss You?” No, I wasn’t about to Miss This.

Best $100 I ever spent.

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Alan Robinson can be reached at alanrobinson480@gmail.com

Alan Robinson has been a sports writer since first writing a weekly column for his hometown weekly newspaper in Sistersville, W.Va. at age 15. After spending half a year during college as a part-time writer at the Parkersburg (W.Va.) News, he was hired fulltime at The Intelligencer in Wheeling, W.Va., at age 20. He spent nearly four years there before beginning a 35-year career as an Associated Press sports editor in Charleston, W.Va. (seven years) and Pittsburgh (28 years). He later was a Steelers beat writer/NFL columnist for the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review for three seasons, Following retirement, he covered the Pittsburgh Penguins and Arizona Coyotes for a combined eight seasons as an NHL.com correspondent and also wrote for the Canadian Press. He was chosen as The Associated Press worldwide sports writer of the year in 1986 and 2000 and has won multiple Associated Press Sports Editors national writing awards, including those for deadline writing and Story of the Year. Immediately after joining AP in 1975, he was selected by his peers as West Virginia Sports Writer of the Year in two of his first three years on the job there. Among his many assignments, he covered 10 Olympics, 12 Stanley Cup finals, eight NCAA basketball tournaments, five Super Bowls, three U.S. Open golf tournaments and two Ryder Cups. He currently resides in Phoenix, where sports is always on at least one of his seven big-screen TVs.

The crowd, composed almost entirely of those 25 and younger, started showing up well more than a day before the music began.

They came three or four to a car, even more in minivans of various sizes and physical condition. Once the day of the event dawned, they arrived in far greater numbers than expected, attracted by a headliner-filled roster of talent and perfectly sunny, though quite hot, weather.

They came for the music, but also for the camaraderie, to hang out with so many others just like them, so many others who were moved by the music. It was summer, a time to put aside the cares and worries of school and maybe their jobs, to soak up the sun and the sounds that echoed far into the distance from the bowl-like amphitheater, to snuggle with that special someone or maybe, for some, to share a puff or two of (whisper, whisper) marijuana with friends and even strangers.

And the acts were top drawer, made up of groups they’d heard for months on the radio or on their turntables, and now they’d get to see them live and in person without having, in most cases, to travel hundreds and hundreds of miles.

What a day for a daydream, to see and hear and revel in the music that for many was so deeply engrained into their daily lives.

Woodstock was a magical time, wasn’t it?

Only this wasn’t Woodstock, which was held a long four years and 400 miles away. In fact, it wasn’t where anyone would expect, on a 200-acre site not in New York or California but in … northern West Virginia?

Yes, that’s correct, the northern panhandle of West Virginia.

It’s largely forgotten now but, 53 years ago this month, a 1973 rock music festival attracted what might have been the largest crowd ever to a single event in West Virginia. It was called “Music in the Hills,” and it was staged on a large site adjacent to the Waterford Park horse racing track in the very tippy top of West Virginia, less than a mile from both the Ohio and Pennsylvania borders. Pittsburgh was only 50 miles away, Cleveland only one hundred miles, a perfect location to attract a large crowd — other than the fact only two-lane roads ran into and out of the concert site. (Sound familiar, Woodstock?)

How many people came on Sunday, July 8, 1973 to an all-day concert held in a wooded amphitheater in the West Virginia hills? It was almost impossible to calculate the exact number on hand the day of the event since, while 40,000 tickets or more were sold, many people arrived early and were already at the concert site when organizers arrived. Others streamed in through nearby woods and made their way past security to the site, much like they did in Bethel, N.Y., at Woodstock in August 1969.

The early-in-the-day estimate by the promoters was 50,000 but, based on traffic (which streamed in for more than a day in advance but then slowly trickled out for hours starting in early evening), area police revised those figures to 75,000 by Sunday evening. After calculating that 30,000 cars made it to the event, the figure was upped to 80,000 to 100,000 by the next morning.

From the side of the stage, the crowd that day stretched as far as the eye could see

(If the 30,000 estimate was correct and there were three to a car — many cars held more — the 100,000 figure was entirely plausible.) At least 8,000 cars were already on site more than 12 hours before the show began, and traffic was so heavy on the day of the show that some attendees parked their cars in New Cumberland, W.Va., and walked six or seven miles to the site. Traffic on heavily traveled W.Va. Route 2 backed up for three miles in each direction. After the show ended, workers at a nearby Quaker State oil refinery reported Route 2 was clogged for seven hours.

The promoters expected a large crowd — they hired a security force of more than 500 — yet they did not expect this.

“We’ve never see anything like this,” one local law enforcement official said, with a touch of wonderment in his voice.

It was for only a day and not for an entire weekend, but now — more than a half-century later — let’s just call this West Virginia’s Woodstock.

At the time, it was billed as the largest outdoor concert in the United States to that point in the summer of 1973, though a concert at the Watkins Glen racetrack in New York a few months later would easily surpass it, attracting an estimated 600,000.

“We had young people coming into the theater area as early as Saturday afternoon. There were … thousands who camped out in the area Saturday night. The people just kept coming all afternoon long (for a show that started at noon). even as late as 3 p.m. we had people being admitted into the area,” said Jim Lymm, who headed the 500-member security force. Even some FBI agents were on hand, Lynn said.

And the cost of admission (at least for those who purchased tickets)? To see what essentially were four headliners? Exactly $6.50 in advance (or 50 cents more than a one-day ticket to Woodstock) or $8 on the day of the event. Or no more than $2 per act. It really was 1973, wasn’t it?

Crowd estimates were later revised upward after law enforcement officials calculated how many vehicles jammed the area that day

And who did the music fans attending this mini Woodstock see?

HUMBLE PIE: They might not be as remembered today as many groups of the time are, but Humble Pie — a hard-rocking, blues-soul, guitar-heavy band — was a headline act in 1973. (At the time, they held the record for the largest crowd ever at the nearby Civic Arena in Pittsburgh.) The band was headed by former Small Faces guitarist/vocalist Steve Marriott and initially featured Peter Frampton on guitar (he was the warm-up act at Waterford with his band Frampton’s Camel), but he was replaced in 1971 by Clem Clempson. Humble Pie was known for songs such as “I Don’t Need No Doctor,” 30 Days in the Hole,” “Black Coffee,” and “Hot ’N Nasty.” (Coincidentally, Black Ark Arkansas, also on the bill, performed a different song a nearly identical title that day.) Their first album to hit the top 25 on the Billboard charts was a live set recorded at the Fillmore in San Francisco in 1971 and was followed by two hit two albums, “Smokin’” (reached No. 6 in Billboard in 1972) and “Eat It” (reached No. 13 in Billboard in 1973).

J. GEILS BAND: Billed that day as the “Special Guest Star,” Boston-based J. Geils initially was an R&B-based blues rock band that gradually transitioned to a harder rock sound that featured highly energetic live shows; They built upon their early success with extensive touring. (They later transitioned again into a band known for its catchy singles such as “Give It to Me,” “Love Stinks,” “Centerfold,” “Must of Got Lost,” and “Freeze Frame.”)

They also heavily emphasized the harmonica work of a member known as Magic Dick on many tracks. Lead singer Peter Wolf (who was married to actress Faye Dunaway) was the signature sound of the band and later launched a successful solo career that continues to this day. (Like several other bands of the time, such as the Spencer Davis Group and Paul Revere and the Raiders, the group was named after a less prominent member, guitarist J. Geils.) They had three Billboard Top 20 albums: Bloodshot, Love Stinks and Freeze Frame (reached No. 1.)

BLACK OAK ARKANSAS: Part of the wave of hard-rock southern bands that emerged in the 1970s (including Lynyrd Skynyrd, Molly Hatchet, Blackfoot, the Outlaws and .38 Special), Black Oak (named after their hometown) had a far raunchier sound and stage act than those bands. They were headed by vocalist Jim “Dandy” Mangrum, who often performed bare-chested wearing only skin-tight lyrca-like pants. Based around a three-guitar sound (much like Skynyrd, but much heavier) and the drumming of Tommy “Dork” Aldridge , their set list included songs such as “Hot and Nasty”, “Fever in My Mind,” “Hot Rod,””Getting Kinda Cocky,” “Jim Dandy (to the Rescue)” and “Up,” a nine-minute harder-than-hard rock song that closed their shows and featured a solo by Aldridge (who later played with Ozzy Osbourne, Ted Nugent and Whitesnake). They had an extended career, issuing 23 albums including 10 that charted in Billboard. Towards the end of the Waterford Park show, a helicopter hired by Black Oak dropped thousands of sunglasses bearing the group’s logo onto the crowd.

Jim “Dandy” Mangrum came to the rescue of concert goers that day as Black Oak Arkansas dropped thousands of sunglasses onto the audience

FRAMPTON’S CAMEL: The lowest-billed act on the bill, Peter Frampton would go on as a solo artist to be the biggest star of the four acts that performed that day. After breaking from Humble Pie, he recorded four well-received albums that did not chart heavily. But, interestingly, his two-disc live album from 1976, Frampton Comes Alive, featured tracks from all four of those soft-selling albums yet became a massive hit and the best-selling album of the year. It sold more than 8 million copies, unusual not only for a live album but a double-disc set. The album contained three hit singles: “Show Me The Way,” “Do You Feel Like We Do” (which featured Frampton singing through a talk box) and “Baby, I Love Your Way.” At the time of the 1973 show, Frampton had released two albums: Winds of Change and Frampton’s Camel (which included the studio version of “Do You Feel Like We Do”), neither of which appeared to be particularly well known by the concert crowd.

Peter Frampton was not yet the megastar he would soon become

Given the vast size of the Waterford crowd, there were few incidents: some alcohol-related arrests and a few minor fender benders. An estimated 15 to 20 were treated at nearby hospitals for minor injuries such as sprained ankles, minor cuts and heat exhaustion. (Temperatures that day were around 90.) The day after, two area mayors praised the crowd for being well-behaved, polite and non-threatening, patronizing local merchants who quickly ran out of food and beverages and disbursing without issues (except for the overly long traffic lines).

“I have never seen such a large, well-behaved group of people in my life,” Hancock County (W.Va.) Sheriff Frank Rocchio told the Weirton Daily Times, “We had no trouble and all the motorists, young and old alike, were very courteous.”

“I’m just tickled to death it went as smoothly as it did,” Chester (W.Va.) Mayor Rex Cowey said. “But it sure did give us a lot of headaches … there were quite a few complaints from citizens because of traffic generated by the concert and because of all the litter. This area is not equipped for such an event.”

(A personal aside: I covered the concert for The Intelligencer in Wheeling, W.Va., yet I don’t have any memory of any extended traffic delays getting to the site. I must have used back roads, because I left home only a few hours before the show and easily got there in time.)

Wheeling News-Register, July 9, 1973

The promoters, Ogden Enterprises of Boston (which owned the race track) and Colony Productions of Los Angeles were understandably buoyed by the show’s success and immediately announced plans for additional shows. An Aug. 12 concert at the site was to have featured Edgar Winter and Focus (known for the song Hocus Pocus).

However, local politicians — no doubt encouraged by residents who feared having their lives and emergency services disrupted by additional concert dates — immediately went to court to block further shows. And they succeeded. Days before the Aug. 12 show was to be held, the promoters cancelled it and never again attempted to hold a large-scale concert on the site. (Among those pleased was a Wheeling-based newspaper columnist who opined that the Ohio Valley didn’t need to have any more Woodstocks.)

And, speaking of 1973, it was quite the summer for shows for those living in the Pittsburgh area and surrounding environs, including many of those who attended the Waterford Park show. Looking back now, it’s astounding the number of major star acts who played in the Pittsburgh region that summer:

— Led Zeppelin and the Allman Brothers, both of which played before huge audiences for separate shows at Three Rivers Stadium. Led Zep tickets were priced as low as $4.65 and as high as $6.65. That’s actual dollars, not hundreds of dollars!

— Elvis Presley (two shows at the Civic Arena on June 25-26, priced at $5 to $7.50 (the highest priced ticket in Pittsburgh that summer)

— The Jackson Five

—Pink Floyd (which played the Civic Arena rather than Three Rivers)

— James Brown

— Jethro Tull

— Deep Purple (during the summer of “Smoke on the Water”)

— Stevie Wonder, Aretha Franklin, B.B. King and Ray Charles

— Sonny and Cher

— The Osmonds (a huge attraction at the time)

— Englebert Humperdinck, Roberta Flack, Ella Fitzgerald, Liza Minnelli

— The Beach Boys

— Van Morrison

— Mott the Hoople and Blue Oyster Cult

— Joe Walsh

— Lynn Anderson, Boots Randolph and Danny Davis and the Nashville Brass

Tickets for all shows were less than $10.

A couple of years later, attempting to capitalize on the Waterford Park show’s enormous success, Cleveland-based Agora Productions, led by legendary promoter Henry J. LoConti, teamed with the owner of a large site (known as Aquanaut Park) in nearby Wellsville, Ohio, to hold a copycat show on Labor Day weekend in 1975.

“I got my idea for a rock concert when the rock concert was held July 8, 1973 near Waterford Park,” Aquanaut Park and nightclub owner Samuel Abdalla of Jefferson County (Ohio) said. “There were a lot of problems with parking, the lack of water and restrooms [then] and I figured my concert site is a much better facility.”

Abdalla’s park had already hosted numerous country music shows, but this was its first attempt to put on a large-scale rock concert. The promoters were hopeful of attracting as many as 25,000 to 40,000 fans.

However the Ohio River Jam show on Aug. 30, 1975 proved to be a flop, attracting a rain-soaked crowd of only about 8,000, for numerous reasons:

— It was Labor Day weekend, when many college students had already filtered back to school, thus thinning the ranks of prospective concert goers.

— The site was far more remote than was the Waterford Park amphitheater, which was situated at a busy racetrack with numerous paved parking spots off multiple highways.

— The acts were largely those that had performed at the 1973 Waterford show: J. Geils, Black Oak and Peter Frampton, plus Ambrosia. All the acts toured frequently, with Black Oak having performed a headliner show at the Civic Arena less than a year before, and thus lacked a “Wow, we’ve got to go see this band!” aura.

— Bad timing. Frampton performed a week before he was a headliner on the popular Midnight Special show on NBC-TV, an appearance that might have attracted a much larger concert audience in Wellsville had it been held a few weeks before.

— Bad weather. The site was pelted all day with rain, which intensified late in the show, thus discouraging anyone from making a last-minute decision to attend. The rain, of course, led to mud, and many concert patrons had trouble extracting their vehicles after the show ended.

The rain-soaked 1975 Ohio River Jam concert attracted only a fraction of the crowd of the 1973 Waterford Park show

Aquanaut Park also wanted to host future concerts, but the king-sized Labor Day flop and the subsequent outrage of local residents to having more shows in their neighborhood ended such plans.

Thus, a half-century later, West Virginia’s rock festival history consists of one mega-sized show that, for one day, made it the capital of the rock ’n’ roll world.

Yes, West Virginia indeed had its Woodstock. If you go driving on the roads of Hancock County, W.Va., this summer, you might want to look around and see if there’s anybody who still might be stuck in traffic.

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Alan Robinson can be reached at alanrobinson480@gmail.com.

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Alan Robinson has been a sports writer since first writing a weekly column for his hometown weekly newspaper in Sistersville, W.Va. at age 15. After spending half a year during college as a part-time writer at the Parkersburg (W.Va.) News, he was hired fulltime at The Intelligencer in Wheeling, W.Va., at age 20. He spent nearly four years there before beginning a 35-year career as an Associated Press sports editor in Charleston, W.Va. (seven years) and Pittsburgh (28 years). He later was a Steelers beat writer/NFL columnist for the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review for three seasons, Following retirement, he covered the Pittsburgh Penguins and Arizona Coyotes for a combined eight seasons as an NHL.com correspondent and also wrote for the Canadian Press. He was chosen as The Associated Press worldwide sports writer of the year in 1986 and 2000 and has won multiple Associated Press Sports Editors national writing awards, including those for deadline writing and Story of the Year. Immediately after joining AP in 1975, he was selected by his peers as West Virginia Sports Writer of the Year in two of his first three years on the job there. Among his many assignments, he covered 10 Olympics, 12 Stanley Cup finals, eight NCAA basketball tournaments, five Super Bowls, three U.S. Open golf tournaments and two Ryder Cups. He currently resides in Phoenix, where sports is always on at least one of his seven big-screen TVs.

For nearly a century, the American League was the American League, the National League was the National League. And never the twain shall meet — except during the World Series, of course.

Major League Baseball finally ended the inequity that prevented its biggest stars from never playing a regular season game in half of MLB’s cities (if they never changed teams) by adopting interleague play in 1997.

Finally, the Yankees played the Dodgers, and not just during a World Series. The Cubs played the White Sox. The Reds played the Indians. The Rays played the Marlins (oh well, nothing’s perfect).

Only it was way too late for superstars such as Lou Gehrig, Ty Cobb, Ted Williams, Stan Musial, Sandy Koufax, Willie Mays and Roberto Clemente. The only time any of them visited a ballpark that wasn’t in their league came during the World Series. It was a shame and some might argue, a sham. In no other pro sport could a player spend 20-plus seasons playing at the highest level without playing in every city and every ballpark, without opposing every other team.

Just think: the fans in Brooklyn and Los Angeles never saw Williams, one of the sport’s greatest hitters, swing the bat. The fans in Cleveland and Boston never saw Koufax throw his dynamic fastball and unhittable curve ball, never saw Clemente throw a runner out at third base from the deepest right field corner. Never saw Willie Mays be … well, Willie Mays.

The fans in Pittsburgh never saw Babe Ruth, arguably the sport’s biggest star of all time, hit a home run.

Or did they?

Oh, yes they did.

Confused? Ruth led the Yankees to a four-game sweep of the Pirates in a mismatch of a World Series in 1927 but didn’t homer in either game in Forbes Field, the only time he played there with New York.

But current-day Pirates fans might be stunned to learn that not only did Babe Ruth hit three home runs in Forbes Field, he hit them in one game. The very last game in which he homered. It was one of the most brilliant games of his unparalleled career, yet now — 91 years later — it is largely lost to the dustbins of baseball history and the fading ink of yellowed newspaper pages.

Babe Ruth crosses home plate on his 714th (and final) home run, and his third of the day (Pittsburgh Press archives photo)

Babe Ruth effectively said goodbye to baseball in Forbes Field, a ballpark in which he played only five major league games in his career, by kissing three baseballs goodbye in a single afternoon. And he wasn’t wearing Yankees pinstripes, but the red, blue and gray of the Boston Braves, a team that has relocated twice (to Milwaukee, then Atlanta) since Ruth’s parting shot — or, more accurately, parting shots.

Ruth, of course, began his major league career as a left-handed pitcher with the Boston Red Sox in 1914, once setting a World Series record for consecutive scoreless innings, before famously being dealt to the Yankees before the 1920 season. The deal cost the Red Sox a major star, but brought Boston owner Harry Frazee enough money ($100,000 in cash and a $300,000 loan) to finance a Broadway play. The Yankees acquired a talent they felt was too valuable to play only once every fourth day, so they converted this star pitcher into a full-time outfielder.

Baseball, of course, would never be the same. Ruth ushered the sport into the era of the home run, hitting 54 homers in his second Yankees season in 1921 (more than seven entire MLB teams that season) and 45 or more nine times, led by his record-setting 60 in 1927.

But Ruth, at age 40, was a broken-down shell of a player when he signed with the Boston Braves in 1935, after unceremoniously being released by the Yankees during spring training despite hitting 22 homers and driving in 84 runs in 1934. The already rotund Ruth added 25 pounds by completely ignoring any training during an offseason spent mostly in Europe, couldn’t run or throw and certainly couldn’t play the outfield — remember there was no such thing as a designated hitter.

Still, unable to walk away from baseball, Ruth signed a $20,000 contract with the Braves, ostensibly to be an outfielder, assistant manager and team second vice president. He wanted to manage a major league team, but the Yankees certainly weren’t ready to cast off manager Joe McCarthy (who would manage 11 more seasons) and he viewed the Braves as an opportunity to do exactly that. He turned down the Yankees’ offer to manage their top farm club.

However, upon joining the Braves, he soon realized he was merely a figurehead, with no front-office or dugout duties. He’d been signed by Braves owner Emil Fuchs strictly as a drawing card for what was then the majors’ worst team, and he had no role other than gate attraction.

(Ruth wasn’t the blubbery, grotesque 300-pound mess of a man as portrayed by actor John Goodman in the the 1992 movie The Babe, but he was close. Once the season started, pitchers complained that he was incapable of running down routine fly balls or making routine throws. Several injuries made it even worse.)

Ruth homered and drove in three runs in the Braves’ season opener April 16 against the New York Giants, but hit only two homers — his only RBIs — in his next 21 games. He wanted to retire, but was still hanging on — but only barely, with a .157 batting average — when the Braves arrived in Pittsburgh to start a three-game series on May 23. Ruth was in a 2-for-36 slump (.055), with one of the hits (a homer) coming in his previous game. He’d agreed to stay with the Braves on a three-city road trip because Babe Ruth Days were being recognized in all three.

The newspaper headlines were huge when the Babe hit the ‘Burgh.

“It’s Warm Weather That Babe Ruth Wants; Then He’ll Show Fans How to Hit.”

“Ruth Here, Spikes Rumors He Plans to Quit Playing”

One of the city’s three newspapers also carried Ruth’s syndicated newspaper column.

Say It Ain’t So, Babe … but, as it turned out, it was so (Pittsburgh Sun-Telegraph)

Of the pending retirement rumors, Ruth was quoted in a Sun-Telegraph story written by Chilly Doyle: “Reports that I have decided to quit as an active player after this trip is completed are wrong because I feel I am in better condition at the present time than I have been in the last few years. My legs feel better and I am getting rid of that troublesome cold which has bothered me during the early days of the National League race. … I should have had three home runs [in the series] against the Cubs.”

Ruth was 1-for-8 in the first two games of the series, both Braves losses, to drop his average to .153, although he was twice robbed of potential homers by Pirates right fielder Paul Waner. But something magical, something mythical, something mysterious transformed the King of Swat before the final game of the series — the fifth and last game he’d ever play in Forbes Field.

Remember those Turn Back the Clock promotions MLB teams had a quarter-century ago? Well, Saturday, May 25, 1935 was Turn Back the Clock Day for the great Babe Ruth. And rather than playing left field, which he’d been doing, he was back in right field and his usual No. 3 spot in the batting order against Pirates right-hander Red Lucas for a game that began at the customary 3 p.m. ET start time.

In the first inning, Ruth came up with a man on base and lofted a home run into the right field seats (career home run No. 712). When the next two Braves batters reached, Pirates manager Pie Traynor lifted Lucas for veteran Guy Bush — ironically, the same pitcher who hit Ruth with a pitch in the fourth and final game of the 1932 Cubs-Yankees World Series, when Ruth hit his so-called Called Shot home run.

Batting again in the third, Ruth hit his second home run of the game and No. 713 of his career, also into the right-field seats, off Bush. The second drive created a perceptible murmur among the 10,000 fans, who were watching the supposedly washed-up Ruth perform like the player he’d been 10 years before.

Ruth didn’t homer in the fifth, but he lashed an RBI single off Bush that put the Braves into a 5-4 lead. His three hits were as many as he’d had in his previous 17 games combined.

Ruth batted for the fourth time in the seventh inning, once again against Bush, and it seemed obvious in the stands the fans — including hundreds of youthful newspaper carriers — were rooting for another Ruth home run. Amazingly, they got it.

Ruth not only homered, he hit one of the longest of his career, the very first drive to clear the 86-foot high right field roof in Forbes Field’s 26-year history. (Only nine players ever achieved the feat during Forbes Field’s life span of 1909-1970, with Willie Stargell doing it seven times.) The homer was indeed a Ruthian shot, carrying at least 500 feet.

Until he did so in the final game in which he homered, Ruth hit three homers in a regular season game only once in his career (Pittsburgh Sun-Telegraph)

Among those who watched the 714th and last Ruth home run was artist Paul Warhola, the brother of famed Pittsburgh pop artist Andy Warhol (who occasionally tagged along with his brother to games). Another who did so was Sam Sciullo, a 13-year-old Pittsburgh schoolboy and later a prominent Pittsburgh attorney who represented numerous University of Pittsburgh coaches. (His son, Sam Jr., became a Pitt sports historian and wrote several books about Panthers athletics.)

Ruth then ambled off the field, plopped down on the Pirates’ bench (visiting players had to go through the Pittsburgh dugout to reach their clubhouse), and told Pittsburgh pitcher Mace Brown, “Boy, that last one felt good.” It did for the Pirates, too, as they overcame Ruth’s second career regular season three-homer game to win 11-7 and sweep the series.

Ruth didn’t know it, but he’d never have that feeling again.

When the game ended, the youthful Sciullo didn’t go home, but instead hung around the press gate for an extended period, hoping to catch a glimpse of the famed Babe, and maybe grab an autograph, especially since Ruth had signed the previous two days.

Ruth declined to sign for the dozen or so fans this day, but that didn’t deter Sciullo from walking alongside him as Ruth journeyed from the ballpark to the nearby Schenley Hotel. (The Braves would soon leave for Cincinnati, where they played a Sunday afternoon game the following day.)

“He didn’t say, `Get the hell out of the way.’ He didn’t say anything,” Sciullo told me in 2006. “I was the only one with him and I kept asking, `Please, Babe, give me an autograph.’ He didn’t say one word to me. He looked sad, he really did. After that he played [in only five more games] and he retired.

“That’s probably my claim to fame, that I was the last kid to walk with Babe Ruth in Pittsburgh.”

As it turns out, there really wasn’t plenty of life left in Babe Ruth’s bat (Pittsburgh Press archives)

Ruth went 0-for-9 in those five games and called it quits on June 2, 1935 after hitting .181 with six homers and 12 RBIs in 72 at-bats. Half of his homers and his RBIs came in that one majestic afternoon in Pittsburgh during the one and only regular season series he ever played there.

The pre-series rumors that Ruth would quit during the Braves road trip turned out to be true; he never played another game in Boston. Except for that one remarkable day in Pittsburgh, it was truly a lost season for Ruth, the Braves (38-115, .248) and owner Fuchs, who lost the club in August for financial reasons.

An interesting sidenote: Sciullo’s friend Pete Bucci, who also watched the three-homer Ruth game, caught one of Mark McGwire’s performance-enhanced record 70 home runs during a 1998 game in Three Rivers Stadium.

Sciullo, by the way, later was given an autographed Ruth baseball by one of his friends who worked in the visiting clubhouse. And during Sciullo’s freshman year at Pitt, he roomed in the same house that Ruth’s final home run struck after it cleared the right-fiield roof. That home run ball was retrieved by another Pittsburgh youngster, Henry “Wiggy” DeOrio, who later donated it to the Baseball Hall of Fame. (A ball that, if it came up for auction, no doubt would have been worth several million dollars.)

Ruth later regretted not retiring after the three-homer game, which his wife Claire wanted him to do, rather than playing in two more series. It would have been the perfect way to go out by baseball’s first true slugger, the first man to homer in Yankee Stadium, the first man to homer in the All-Star Game, the first man to clear Forbes’ right-field roof, the first man to reach 30 homers in a season. And 40 homers. And 50 homers. And 60 homers.

Another almost-forgotten footnote to Ruth’s career —in addition to the site of his final home run — was the fact that Ruth actually hit 715 home runs, not 714.

When the first Baseball Encyclopedia was being prepared in 1968, researchers discovered that on July 8, 1918, Ruth hit what should have been a game-ending, two-run home run in the 10th inning of a Red Sox win against the Cleveland Indians.

But, before 1920, when a team batting last won a scoreless game in the ninth or an extra inning, the final score officially was 1-0 (since only one run was needed to win). If a player homered with a man on base, as Ruth did, the batter was given credit only for the hit necessary to win the game; in this case, Ruth was credited for a triple, despite hitting a drive three-quarters of the way up the right field bleachers at Fenway Park.

The man who oversaw the Baseball Encyclopedia project, David Neft, was certain that Ruth’s home run totals would be adjusted to 715 because of the discovery, and the New York Times wrote an article to that effect.

The Special Baseball Rules Committee initially ruled unanimously that game-ending homers before 1920 should indeed be reclassified as home runs. But after the Times article caused a major stir, the committee recast its ballots and voted 3-2 that Ruth’s homer and 36 other such game-ending homers would remain as they were scored at the time. (The last of those homers, also in 1918, was by Frank “Home Run” Baker, who gained his famous nickname by hitting two decisive home runs for the Athletics in the 1911 World Series.)

The committee’s revised reasoning was it had “no right to change, retroactively, a playing rule in effect” in 1918, just as it didn’t change the scoring of early era balls that bounced into the stands and were scored at the time as homers rather than book-rule doubles.

Still, many in the sport believed the rule was left intact because Ruth’s 714 homers represented the most hallowed record and best-known number in the sports world and should not be altered, if only to prevent considerable confusion.

Regardless of whether it was No. 714 or No. 715, Ruth’s final home run came in now-demolished Forbes Field. It’s probably the second most famous in the park’s history, topped only by Bill Mazeroski’s World Series-ending home run in Game 7 in 1960.

Even if it wasn’t his final farewell, what a way for Babe Ruth to say goodbye.

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Alan Robinson can be reached at alanrobinson480@gmail.com

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Alan Robinson has been a sports writer since first writing a weekly column for his hometown weekly newspaper in Sistersville, W.Va. at age 15. After spending half a year during college as a part-time writer at the Parkersburg (W.Va.) News, he was hired fulltime at The Intelligencer in Wheeling, W.Va., at age 20. He spent nearly four years there before beginning a 35-year career as an Associated Press sports editor in Charleston, W.Va. (seven years) and Pittsburgh (28 years). He later was a Steelers beat writer/NFL columnist for the Pittsburgh Tribune Review for three seasons, Following retirement, he covered the Pittsburgh Penguins and Arizona Coyotes for a combined eight seasons as an NHL.com correspondent and also wrote for the Canadian Press. He was chosen as The Associated Press worldwide sports writer of the year in 1986 and 2000 and has won multiple Associated Press Sports Editors national writing awards, including those for deadline writing and Story of the Year. Immediately after joining AP in 1975, he was selected by his peers as West Virginia Sports Writer of the Year in two of his first three years on the job there. Among his many assignments, he covered 10 Olympics, 12 Stanley Cup finals, eight NCAA basketball tournaments, five Super Bowls, three U.S. Open golf tournaments and two Ryder Cups. He currently resides in Phoenix, where sports is always on at least one of his seven big-screen TVs.

Paul Skenes is already proving to be a generational pitcher for the Pittsburgh Pirates, perhaps the best in their 140-season history. He’s won a Cy Young Award, and is a threat to throw a no-hitter every time he steps on the mound.

Regardless of how many games Skenes starts, how many he wins, how many no-hitters he throws or how many years he pitches, he’ll never pitch the best game in Pirates history.

Harvey Haddix already has, and it’ll never be matched.

Sixty-seven years ago, Haddix pitched not only the best game in Pirates history, but the best game in major league history. No pitcher has begun to match it and, in these days of pitch counts and constant worries about pitchers’ elbow injuries, it’s almost certain no one ever will.

It was a perfect game plus three.

On May 26, 1959, while pitching in Milwaukee’s County Stadium against the Braves, Haddix pitched nine perfect innings. Twenty seven batters up, twenty seven batters down. The best game in Pirates history.

But Haddix wasn’t done, and for one simple reason: The Pirates hadn’t manufactured even one run against Braves starter Lew Burdette (a Nitro, W.Va. native, by the way, who won three games against the favored New York Yankees in the 1957 World Series).

Haddix, throwing two pitches and only two pitches — a tailing fastball and a devastating slider — then pitched a perfect 10th inning. And a perfect 11th inning. And a perfect 12th inning.

Thirty-six batters faced, thirty-six batters retired. It was a monumental achievement; no other pitcher in major league history has pitched more than nine perfect innings.

Comparing Haddix’s perfecto to any other performance in major league history is like comparing Secretariat’s 1973 Belmont Stakes to every other horse race: There is no comparison.

The Pittsburgh Sun-Telegraph’s headline was … well, perfect

“We watched history that night,” said former Pirates reliever ElRoy Face (who died at age 97 in May 2026). “We watched the greatest game ever pitched.”

The trouble was Haddix had to keep pitching … and pitching … and pitching.

The Pirates didn’t score despite getting 12 hits off Burdette, a wily veteran pitcher who worked with runners on base the whole game yet never allowed one to cross home plate. If he was using his famed spitball that night, it certainly was working.

Haddix, of course, was pitching not only a perfect game, but the most perfect perfect game of all time.

The great Bob Prince called it, as narrated by Cubs announcer Pat Hughes (Courtesy of Pat’s excellent website, baseballvoices.com)

“It was a ‘perfect’ perfect game,” former Pirates outfielder Bob Skinner (who also died in May 2026, at age 94) once told me. “He was pitching with a cold and the flu and was sick all day. He was really feeling bad. I didn’t even know if he’d pitch that day.”

Pitch? Harvey Haddix, who was all of 5-foot-9 and 165 pounds, pitched like no pitcher before or since. How great was the little left-hander’s performance? So great that now, nearly seven decades later, no pitcher has yet to rival it.

“Every batter it was zip, zip, two strikes,” Haddix said. “I’ve had a lot better stuff than I had that night, but I never had control like that. … If you throw strikes, you can be effective.”

Skinner, watching from left field, said, “He had unbelievable control. He was behind only one batter the entire game. It was just phenomenal.”

Skinner, by the way, was certain he’d given the Pirates a 1-0 lead when he hit a long drive to right field in the seventh inning, but a sudden gust of wind knocked it down, allowing Hank Aaron to catch it.

“He [Aaron] had given up on it, it was gone. … Any other inning of the game, it was a home run,” Skinner said.

Finally, in the 13th inning, the law of averages (and, you could say, the law of fielding averages) caught up to Harvey Haddix. Pirates third baseman Don Hoak threw wildly on Felix Mantilla’s ground ball, an error that gave the Braves their first base runner. And ended Haddix’s perfect game.

However, the longest no-hitter in baseball history was still intact. Braves manager Fred Haney then had Eddie Mathews, one of the majors’ top sluggers, bunt the runner up. Pirates manager Danny Murtaugh (the only Pittsburgh manager to win two World Series, by the way) countered by having Haddix intentionally walk the great Aaron to set up a possible double play.

But Braves first baseman Joe Adcock, who tormented Haddix at least once before in his career, then lofted a line drive over the right-field wall for an apparent three-run home run. Now, the no-hitter was gone and, incredibly, so was the game.

But the confusion that ended what already was a very long night was only beginning.

Aaron, for some reason, stopped running and cut across the diamond between second and third base into the Braves’ dugout before he and Adcock scored; he may have thought Adcock’s drive bounced over the wall for a double, Adcock then cut behind him on the bases and was subsequently ruled out by home plate umpire Vinnie Smith for passing up a runner.

Murtaugh then argued — and he had a legitimate argument — that Aaron left the basepaths before Mantilla scored and that all three runners should have been declared out. The umpires conferred, but allowed the Mantilla run.

Somehow, the official scorer ruled the final score was 2-0 and credited Adcock with a double. However, a few hours later, National League president Warren Giles correctly changed the score to 1-0, ruling that neither Aaron nor Adcock scored. Aaron’s early exit cost Adcock a home run and two RBIs.

Afterward, Haddix was stunned to learn that he’d pitched a perfect (well, almost perfect) game. He knew Adcock’s hit was the first of the game but he thought he’d walked a batter somewhere along the way.

“I didn’t keep up with the stats, and I didn’t know that nobody else had pitched a game like that,” Haddix told me in 1984, the the 25th anniversary of The Greatest Game Ever Pitched.

Harvey Haddix threw one bad pitch in 12 1/3 innings (Pittsburgh Pirates photo)

The fact that Adcock broke up the no-hitter wasn’t lost upon Haddix. When Haddix arrived (rather late) to the majors at age 26 with the St. Louis Cardinals late in 1952, he quickly became one of the majors’ top pitchers. He went 20-9 with a 3.06 ERA in his first full season in 1953, then was 18-13 a season later, giving him 40 wins in his first two seasons plus one month (in 1952) in the majors. He was chosen for the All-Star Game each season.

But in 1954, a line drive off Adcock’s bat struck Haddix in the knee and, according to Haddix, “I was never the same pitcher after that. I just wasn’t right.” The line drive damaged a nerve, causing Haddix to alter his delivery for the rest of his career.

Haddix was right enough to win 136 games in the majors but never again won more than 13 games in a season. He went 11-10 in 1960, when he and Vernon Law each won two games in the 1960 World Series against the more than heavily favored New York Yankees.

In fact, Haddix’s biggest win in a Pirates uniform came in Game 5 of that Series when he and Face combined to shut down the Yankees in Yankee Stadium in a 5-2 victory that gave Pittsburgh a 3-2 series lead. (Law and Face had combined the day before to win Game 4 by 3-2.)

If Haddix hadn’t won that game, the Series almost certainly would have ended with the Pirates losing Game 6 in Pittsburgh to Whitey Ford, which they did by 12-0.

Haddix also got the win in Game 7, taking over for an ineffective Bob Friend in the ninth inning of the Pirates’ historic 10-9 victory, becoming the pitcher of record when Bill Mazeroski homered in the ninth inning. (The second biggest hit in Pirates history, but we’ll discuss that at a later date.)

So how impressive were Haddix’s 12 perfect innings? Consider this: only four no-hitters lasted beyond nine innings, none longer than 10 innings. (Including the Pirates’ Francisco Cordova-Ricardo Rincon 10-inning no-hitter against the Marlins in 1997.) Jim Maloney pitched two 10-inning no-hitters for the Reds in 1965, but only one counted since he lost the other on a home run in the 11th. No other perfect game lasted beyond nine innings.

Topps issued a 1961 baseball card commemorating Haddix’s feat

There were a number of interesting subplots to Haddix’s unforgettable game, that night and beyond:

— He indeed woke up sick in Pittsburgh at 7 a.m. ET on the day of the game, but had to get up (for a game that didn’t start until 9 p.m. ET), because the Pirates flew to Milwaukee that morning. (Something no team would do today because teams are required to fly the night before a game, unless there are extremely unusual circumstances.)

— The game was heard on radio only in Pittsburgh. The Pirates televised only 35 games a season back then and chose (before the season began) to televise the next night’s game but not, as it turned out, the Haddix game.

— The Pirates pushed back Haddix’s next start a day so he could make it in Pittsburgh. He gave up a hit to Don Blasingame, the first St. Louis batter he faced that night, but went to to beat the Cardinals 3-0. (Haddix went 12-12 with a 3.13 ERA that season.)

— Haddix’s wife, Marcia, was at their home in Springfield, Ohio, and was able to tune in the game on the radio only in the ninth inning, and only by getting into her car and driving to the top of a hill to pick up KDKA radio.

— When Pirates shortstop Dick Groat was traded to the Phillies late in his career, teammate Bob Buhl, a Milwaukee pitcher in 1959, told him the Braves stole signs all night long from the center field bullpen yet still couldn’t get to Haddix.

— Pirates right fielder Roberto Clemente, one year away from becoming a major star, was injured that night and didn’t play.

—Call this quite the coincidence: The same day of Haddix’s perfect game, the Athletics traded pitcher Ralph Terry to the Yankees. Terry, of course, gave up Mazeroski’s homer in 1960, making Haddix the winning pitcher in Game 7.

—Despite pitching into the 13th inning, Haddix threw only 108 pitches that night (or 113, I’ve seen both counts). Regardless, Haddix said that after that night, no day went by without someone asking about the perfect game.

“It was a masterpiece,” Mazeroski said following Haddix’s death of emphysema in 1994. “He had control, with a little physical ability and a lot of smarts. You don’t find them like Harvey any more.”

—After he got back to the Pirates’ hotel, Haddix’s room phone kept ringing, preventing him from getting any sleep, so he and roommate R.G. Smith went to a restaurant about 5 a.m. local time and ordered breakfast. While there, they heard patrons talking about Haddix’s feat, but never let on Haddix was there.

— At the time, Pittsburgh had three daily newspapers, one morning and two afternoon. The evening Sun-Telegraph had an incredible amount of Haddix coverage, including a game story, multiple opinion columns and first-person stories written by announcer Bob Prince, Mrs. Haddix and Mazeroski. (The Sun-Telegraph merged with the morning Post-Gazette a year later and thus missed out on the Pirates’ 1960 world championship.)

— Among the 19,194 in attendance was future baseball commissioner Bud Selig, then a 24-year-old Braves fan.

— Haddix turned down an invitation to appear on the Ed Sullivan Show because he didn’t want to upstage his teammates.

— Prince was renowned for giving out animal-related nicknames: the Tiger (Hoak), the Cobra (Dave Parker), Dog (Skinner), Quail (Bill Virdon). But he didn’t give Haddix his “Kitten” nickname; he gained that because ace pitcher Harry Breechen was known as the Cat in St. Louis, so Haddix became the Kitten when he, too, began having success.

— The Pirates acquired Haddix from the Cincinnati Reds in a seven-player trade only three months before the perfect game. The trade was initially unpopular in Pittsburgh because the Pirates traded away star slugger Frank Thomas, but it gave them three key pieces to their 1960 team: Haddix, Hoak and catcher Smoky Burgess.

—Haddix won two World Series rings with the Pirates, in 1960 and again in 1979, as Chuck Tanner’s pitching coach. He spent 41 years in baseball, 26 in the majors as a player or coach. (Despite not reaching the majors until the advanced age of 26 due to World War II, two years of service time and three years he spent managing the family farm so as not to be drafted.)

—There have been 24 perfect games in major league history (no pitcher has thrown more than one), but Haddix’s game isn’t counted. In 1991, baseball’s Committee for Statistical Accuracy stripped official recognition of Haddix’s feat because of the 13th inning.

It doesn’t matter. Harvey Haddix still pitched the greatest game in baseball history, one that would take otherworldly circumstances to match. No one will ever be this perfect for so many innings again.

On a personal note, when I first started covering the Pirates late in the 1982 season, Haddix was one of the first players or coaches I got to know off the field. In spring training 1983, Haddix and Skinner gave me insight and knowledge that I relied upon for the rest of my career.

Haddix was the consummate pro and someone I was proud to know on a personal level. He was unassuming, unpretentious and possessed exactly zero ego. He cared deeply about his family, his teammates and, especially after he became a coach, the players he was instructing.

To me, Harvey Haddix was the perfect man to pitch what was, even with its slight imperfections, the most perfect game ever.

The final score wasn’t even settled until a few hours later (officially, it was 1-0)

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Alan Robinson can be reached at alanrobinson480@gmail.com

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Alan Robinson has been a sports writer since first writing a weekly column for his hometown weekly newspaper in Sistersville, W.Va. at age 15. After spending half a year during college as a part-time writer at the Parkersburg (W.Va.) News, he was hired fulltime at The Intelligencer in Wheeling, W.Va., at age 20. He spent nearly four years there before beginning a 35-year career as an Associated Press sports editor in Charleston, W.Va. (seven years) and Pittsburgh (28 years). He later was a Steelers beat writer/NFL columnist for the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review for three seasons, Following retirement, he covered the Pittsburgh Penguins and Arizona Coyotes for a combined eight seasons as an NHL.com correspondent and also wrote for the Canadian Press. He was chosen as The Associated Press worldwide sports writer of the year in 1986 and 2000 and has won multiple Associated Press Sports Editors national writing awards, including those for deadline writing and Story of the Year. Immediately after joining AP in 1975, he was selected by his peers as West Virginia Sports Writer of the Year in two of his first three years on the job there. Among his many assignments, he covered 10 Olympics, 12 Stanley Cup finals, eight NCAA basketball tournaments, five Super Bowls, three U.S. Open golf tournaments and two Ryder Cups. He currently resides in Phoenix, where sports is always on at least one of his seven big-screen TVs.

It’s Friday night, the weekend is here. You’re finally done with work, settled into your La-Z-Boy, popped open a cold one and are ready to watch your favorite Home Team baseball game.

You punch up your team’s local channel, expecting to see your familiar stadium and hear your favorite announcers and you see … a fishing show?

Welcome to the new, welcome-to-2026 world not of “Where’s Waldo,” but “Where’s My Baseball Game?”

(By the way, the game you can’t find is streaming on Apple TV, which shows a major league doubleheader every Friday night.)

On your Twitter (X) feed, other fans are complaining about being blacked out from Home Team’s game. To many, it’s almost an inherent right to be able to watch every game, every night, blackout free.

“Where’s my Game!!!!!!!!!”

Oh, how Baseball on TV has changed over the last half-century, and it’s mostly the result of one man who died a few days ago: former Atlanta Braves owner Ted Turner.

Turner was a media entrepreneur, an America’s Cup racing champion, the largest land owner in the United States, a major league club owner in multiple sports and much more but, through his innovations and imagination, his impact on television sports is almost incalculable.

Ted Turner and satellites were a match made in TV heaven (Photo:Turner Enterprises)

These days, every single major league game is televised every season. Every game. It’s a far cry from the 1960s and 1970s, or within the lifetime of many fans living today, when televised games were few and often far apart. Some teams as late as the 1960s televised almost no games at all, determined to preserve their home gates, unwilling to give away their product for free.

“It’s dangerous for baseball to lose control of its business to a television sponsor,” club owner Bill Veeck once argued in Sport magazine. “No business man can afford to give away his product.”

So many businessmen didn’t. Exactly 60 years ago, in 1966, six of the National League’s 10 teams (including the Pittsburgh Pirates) televised no home games at all. And four teams (including the Braves) televised no more than 18 of their 81 away games.

Turner, a revolutionary in many ways and in many sports, changed that, even if it didn’t happen overnight. (Well, in a sense it did happen overnight; Turner devised the first national around-the-clock, 24 hours-a-day TV station.)

The Atlanta-based Turner, at age 24, inherited a billboard advertising company from his late father in 1963 and built it into a media conglomerate that included a money-losing UHF TV station (one that televised between the channels 14 and 83, which some TV sets at the time didn’t even receive) known then as WTCG, Channel 17, some radio stations and another TV station in Charlotte. He also bought MLB’s Atlanta Braves, the NBA’s Atlanta Hawks and NHL’s Atlanta Flames, mostly to provide programming for his TV station.

Attending a television industry trade show in Alabama in 1975, Turner struck upon the idea of uplinking his TV station onto a brand new satellite (Satcom-II) and offer his UHF station to cable companies nationally. At the time, only one other channel being beamed to satellite: Home Box Office (HBO), a pay-TV subscription service that was on the air from late afternoon to early morning.

“I read about the satellite, the communications satellite, [and] I said, “Wait a minute. This is an antenna 22,000 miles up in space that can cover the whole North American continent and we can go point multi-point to every cable operator in the country and if we put compelling enough programming on that satellite and give the industry something that people will be willing to pay for, then we can get cable operators to start in the major metropolitan areas and we can wire the whole country and have a national medium and eventually we’ll get the 80% penetration and then we compete with CBS, NBC, and ABC and make billions?” Turner said at a 2001 industry symposium.

But in 1976, TV industry executives almost broke down laughing, asking, “Who in their right mind is going to tune in a station that shows nothing but Andy Griffith Show reruns, ancient movies and one of the worst teams in Major League Baseball? And, by the way, who in the hell is Ted Turner?”

As it turns out, millions and millions did watch. Turner’s idea was brilliant. (As was his idea four years later to create the world’s first 24-hours-a-day cable news channel.)

For the first time, baseball fans located anywhere could watch a game on about half the days of every season (WTCG carried 77 games in 1977, the Braves’ first season on satellite) instead of only single game a week, the weekly Saturday afternoon game on NBC. And fans in major league cities could watch the Braves when they weren’t tuning into the few-and-far between local team’s telecasts.

Baseball! Three or four nights a week! What a revelation!

(From 1962-68, for example, the Dodgers televised only nine games a season; the nine they played in San Francisco. It was a total turnaround from their final 10 seasons in Brooklyn, when all of their home games were televised.)

Incredibly, once WTCG uplinked to Satcom-II in December 1976, the Braves, Hawks and Flames were the first nationally televised pro sports franchises. Turner initially hoped 250 cable companies would eventually pick up WTCG; within six months, he’d already signed up 456 cable companies in 27 states covering nearly 900,000 customers. (My cable company at the time in Charleston, W.Va., was one of their first 10 to sign up. And, suddenly, there was baseball, three or four nights a week! It was a revelation!)

The cost for cable companies to add WTCG? Ten cents per month per customer, all of which went to the satellite uplink company in Oklahoma. Turner didn’t profit from the subscribers, but from substantially increasing his advertising rates.

Before going on satellite, WTCG was carried on 100 cable systems in the south with about 450,000 subscribers.

A local Atlanta TV station on satellite? Who would ever watch that? (Photo: Atlanta Journal-Constitution)

The Braves’ telecasts were such a success (Turner soon began calling them America’s Team) that within four years, the number of games jumped from 77 to 147 per season. And the games were often rebroadcast overnight (“Braves Replay”) for fans who couldn’t watch live.

The Braves weren’t the first team to televise so many games; almost every Cubs game was televised starting in 1968, and the Mets showed as many as 138 games per season beginning in their inaugural season in 1962. (Before that, the Yankees, Dodgers, Giants and White Sox all televised heavily immediately after World War II as brand-new stations going on the air sought programming to entice consumers to buy televisions.)

But the Cubs, Mets (and Yankees, too) were large-market teams which, in the 1960s and early 1970s, were shown on independent stations that didn’t have to bump network TV broadcasts to show baseball. That wasn’t an option in many cities that didn’t yet have independents to augment their three network (ABC, CBS, NBC) stations. (Pittsburgh, for example, didn’t have an independent station until WPGH, Channel 53, went on the air in early 1969.)

Turner’s idea to uplink WTCG (later, WTBS) to satellite was imaginative in multiple ways. First, the Braves proved that televising so many games not only didn’t hurt home attendance but, in fact, increased it by advertising their product on a near daily basis. And, second, as more satellites were launched, it became much cheaper for TV stations nationwide that showed pro and college sports to rent several hours of satellite time to transmit games back to their studios than it did to rent expensive AT&T telephone lines, as was required before.

Satellite sports arrived at exactly the right time for club owners, too, who were quickly learning that $5-a-seat tickets and $2 beers didn’t pay for club payrolls that began rising dramatically after major league players gained free agency via an arbitrator’s decision in 1976. (Salaries for some star players quadrupled or more in only a couple of seasons.)

As a result, other baseball-heavy stations, including WGN, Chicago and WOR (later WWOR), New York soon went on satellite, too. WGN also began showing some White Sox games.

Regional sports channels that emulated the forerunner MSG Network in New York also went on the air in cities such as Pittsburgh, Chicago, Baltimore-Washington, Houston and Philadelphia; rather than being basic cable stations (like WTBS), they copied the HBO model by charging monthly. They offered far more games than the over-the-air TV stations did before them, thus providing more revenue to club owners.

The regional sports channel idea proved so successful that it remained in place in many cities for 40 years or more — at least until recently. But as millions of TV viewers increasingly “cut the cord” by ditching cable or satellite TV (DirecTV or Dish Network) for streaming, regional sports channels began going out of business in many cities the last few years.

As a result, Major League Baseball itself now produces and distributes the telecasts for nearly half of all MLB teams, including the Brewers, Cardinals, Twins, Mariners, Nationals, Padres, Reds, Rockies, Diamondbacks and Tigers, all of which were previously shown on regional sports channels.

There are some holdovers, of course; the Dodgers still benefit from the largest local TV contract in pro sports, an $8.3 billion deal with Spectrum (previously Time Warner) that runs through 2038. (That $8 billion in revenue represents four times the $2 billion sale price of the club itself in 2012, one that was regarded at the time as a vast overpayment.)

So, back to 2026, maybe you, Mr. Number One Dodger Fan, miss a game because it’s on Apple or Peacock (as some Sunday night games) are, and you don’t want to shell out for those services just to watch maybe one or two games all season. Considera yourself fortunate you weren’t living in Los Angeles in 1967, when 153 of the 162 Dodgers games weren’t televised (though a couple were probably on the Game of the Week.)

While there have never been more platforms showing MLB games (Apple, NBC, Peacock, Fox, FS1, TBS — it’s still around! — ESPN and the MLB Network) baseball — and all pro sports — have never been more accessible. Literally, you can watch virtually every game every season in MLB, the NFL and the NBA. Every game.

And here’s a hint: if you’re an MLB fan, the biggest bargain in pro sports is MLB.tv, which can be purchased separately through the league or through the ESPN app for $149 a season. (About the cost of taking a family to one game.) Every game is shown all season, with one caveat.

For example, I live in the home market of the Arizona Diamondbacks, and a separate $99 a season subscription (In addition to the $149 for MLB.tv) is required to watch their games live. Why? Because the Diamondbacks own the TV rights in their local market, just as SportsNet Pittsburgh owns the Pirates’ rights there.

However, if you don’t mind time-shifting — like back in the day when you’d record something on your VCR and watch it later — even those in-market games are available on MLB.tv about 90 minutes after the game ends. You can even set up your account to not reveal the score of games until you watch them. That applies to every game, every day, regardless of which outlet telecast the game live.

Sure beats being able to see only nine games a season, doesn’t it?

And, by the way, if HBO was the first service to go on satellite and WTCG (later WTBS) was the second, what was the third? It was Pat Robertson’s CBN. Within four years, or by 1981, there were more than 20 stations beaming programming nationally via satellite, including Cinemax, Showtime, WGN, WOR, ESPN, Nickelodeon, the USA Network, MTV, the Weather Channel, Lifetime and, of course, CNN. Nationally, cable TV companies scrambled to add capacity in order to sell these channels to their subscribers.

(By the way, the first two cities to have interactive cable TV, where you could order movies, play games or even take part in interactive TV shows with hosts were … Columbus and Pittsburgh in 1982, thanks to QUBE cable offered by Warner!)

And some of us back in West Virginia in the early 1960s thought it was beyond belief when we went from having one station available via TV antenna to five when cable TV debuted.

Five channels for $5 a month seemed almost too good to be true in 1962

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Alan Robinson can be reached at alanrobinson480@gmail.com

Alan Robinson has been a sports writer since first writing a weekly column for his hometown weekly newspaper in Sistersville, W.Va. at age 15. After spending half a year during college as a part-time writer at the Parkersburg (W.Va.) News, he was hired fulltime at The Intelligencer in Wheeling, W.Va., at age 20. He spent nearly four years there before beginning a 35-year career as an Associated Press sports editor in Charleston, W.Va. (seven years) and Pittsburgh (28 years). He later was a Steelers beat writer/NFL columnist for the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review for three seasons, Following retirement, he covered the Pittsburgh Penguins and Arizona Coyotes for a combined eight seasons as an NHL.com correspondent and also wrote for the Canadian Press. He was chosen as The Associated Press worldwide sports writer of the year in 1986 and 2000 and has won multiple Associated Press Sports Editors national writing awards, including those for deadline writing and Story of the Year. Immediately after joining AP in 1975, he was selected by his peers as West Virginia Sports Writer of the Year in two of his first three years on the job there. Among his many assignments, he covered 10 Olympics, 12 Stanley Cup finals, eight NCAA basketball tournaments, five Super Bowls, three U.S. Open golf tournaments and two Ryder Cups. He currently resides in Phoenix, where sports is always on at least one of his seven big-screen TVs.

Might be hard to fathom in this era of $700 million baseball contracts (Shohei Otani) and $72 million-a-season basketball contracts (Devin Booker), but pro athletes once made little more than the average wage earner.

They didn’t work out at Driveline or in the fully equipped gym next to the indoor basketball court in their $15 million mansions in the offseason, they held down second jobs. They sold cars or class rings, worked at banks, managed hardware departments at Sears or sold suits at a tailor.

They needed the money. Badly.

You know why? Mostly because they didn’t have a strong players union. A United Auto Workers union member made more money and enjoyed better benefits than the pro athletes they watched on TV during their days off.

Here’s what it was like when the owners made all the rules, and the players had no choice but to go along or seek another occupation.

When the NBA Lakers departed Minneapolis for Los Angeles in 1960 — joining the MLB Dodgers, who had moved there two years earlier — they were greeted by enthusiastic fans, mostly good weather and the aura of being in tinsel town. Merely by incorporating “Los Angeles” into their name, they quickly became one of the league’s biggest draws.

But they were also confronted by maybe the worst schedule any professional sports team has ever played, partly because they were the only NBA team west of St. Louis. Not that it mattered all that much to NBA schedule makers, who operated with basically no rules or restrictions or considerations for players’ health and safety.

You know why? You guessed it, because the players didn’t have a strong union. And it wasn’t just that the travel was bad, so were the salaries, the arenas they played in, even their food. (Celtics coach Red Auerbach was renowned for conveniently forgetting to reimburse players for taxis and meals.)

These days, NBA teams often rest players if possible if they play two games in two nights, especially if travel is involved.

But the 1960-61 Lakers, with old star Elgin Baylor and new star Jerry West in the lineup, played an exhausting EIGHT games in EIGHT days in six cities from Nov. 22-29. The grueling schedule began with three consecutive games against the Cincinnati Royals - one in Cincinnati and two in neutral site cities New York and St. Louis (It was common for NBA teams to schedule doubleheaders involving four teams to boost attendance).

Then they played the Pistons in Detroit (a 141-128 overtime win) and the next night went back to St. Louis (where they had just played the Royals two nights before) to play the Hawks. Then they flew to Los Angeles (finally), where they played the Philadelphia Warriors on consecutive nights, only to fly back to the East Coast to play Philadelphia for a third consecutive night — in New York! (Their second neutral site game there within a week.)

After one day off (their first since Nov. 21), they played a fourth consecutive game against the Warriors, in Philadelphia (there were only nine NBA teams at the time), the start of four more games in five nights and five in seven. All on top of the eight-games-in-eight-days grind they just endured.

Even the worst agent in your company’s incompetent business travel office couldn’t concoct a travel schedule as awful as the 1960-61 Lakers’: 8 games in 8 nights in 6 cities

Are you kidding me? Where was the players’ union?

That’s what Elgin Baylor and Jerry West were asking. And, in baseball, so were Yogi Berra, Mickey Mantle and Roberto Clemente. (Yogi Berra, a Hall of Famer, was the guy who sold hardware at Sears). And Jimmy Brown and Johnny Unitas in the NFL.

(It’s one reason why Jim Brown, perhaps the greatest running back ever, retired at age 29; he could make far more money acting in Hollywood.)

In the early 1960s, there wasn’t much of a union in the NBA, the NFL or the NHL. And there was no union at all in baseball where, in 1967, the minimum salary was $6,000 … or just barely above the $5,700 that the average American wage earner made.

But it was NBA players who especially had it bad, traveling constantly from cold-weather city to cold-weather city during a 79-game regular season that followed as many as 20 exhibition games. All this during a time when NBA teams almost always flew commercial airlines and not charters.

As a result, teams often flew the morning after a game, then played again that same night. (So much for a leisurely breakfast and a shootaround.) If flights got cancelled on the East Coast or Midwest, they might have to take a train, sometimes not arriving until less than 90 minutes before a game to play in uniforms still wet from the night before.

Oh, and the average NBA salary was $15,000 at the time. No wonder that, as soon as that NBA season ended, West and Baylor played in an independent tournament in Charleston, W.Va., to supplement their income.

And you want to know why pro athletes wanted stronger players’ unions.

It wasn’t much better in the other pro sports, either.

In the late 1950s, players from 11 of the 12 NFL teams submitted demands that some owners felt were outrageous. They wanted a minimum salary of $5,000 (an average family income for workers in all occupations at the time was $4,800). They wanted their salary paid if they were hurt. And, tired of having to buy their own gear, they sought clean jocks and socks.

All the labor unrest in pro sports began when NFL players demanded clean socks and jock straps

The NFL didn’t even bother to respond. The players’ demands were mostly met only after the U.S. Supreme Court ruled the NFL, unlike Major League Baseball, was a business required to follow antitrust laws.

Not that labor progress moved very quickly. In 1975, for example, the Pittsburgh Steelers were forced to play SEVEN preseason games — or half as many games as they’d play during the 14-game regular season. And starters weren’t held out, either, they were expected to play if healthy.

Back in Los Angeles, the Dodgers and other MLB teams didn’t have it much better than the Lakers. If any player got injured or sick during the offseason in his first three seasons on the job, he was basically on his own. MLB players at the time didn’t get health insurance until after their fourth full season.

The star players had it a littler better than the average baseball wage earners, but not by much.

In 1960, the New York Yankees offered Mickey Mantle — the game’s preeminent star — a contract for $60,000 — $15,000 less than he’d made two years before. He’d hit 31 home runs in 1959, but the Yankees cited Mantle’s .278 batting average and a missed World Series as reasons for the cut (he settled for $65,000 following a week-long holdout).

In his famous and revealing book Ball Four, former major league pitcher Jim Bouton disclosed how teams in the 1960s would fight to the death to avoid giving a player even a $500 raise. And teams were permitted to cut a player’s salary by as much as 25 percent, and they did so, even with star players.

When the great Roberto Clemente requested a $3,000 raise in 1960, Pittsburgh Pirates general manger Joe L. Brown nearly broke out laughing at the audacity of his request. A raise after he hit only .296? Surely No. 21 was joking.

Stan Musial, one of the great hitters of all time, was so unwilling to get into a contract squabble with the St. Louis Cardinals after batting only .255 in 1959 that he voluntarily chose to cut his contract 25 percent.

“Stated simply, the players had no rights,” former Major League Baseball Players Association chief Marvin Miller wrote in his book “A Whole Different Ballgame.” “[Former pitcher] Jim Bunning said that playing fields and locker rooms were often lousy, even dangerous, the travel schedule brutal, the season much too long. The players didn’t receive a raise when the schedule was increased from 154 games to 162 games (in 1961).”

Marvin Miller was the greatest players union chief of all time, but it even took him 10 years to obtain free agency for MLB players

At the time Miller took over the union in 1966, the minimum salary was a scant $6,000 and the average salary was $19,000. And, just like the NBA, there were scant few charter flights.

But while Miller is often considered to be the greatest players union chief in any sport in history, even he found changes came gradually in a sport that had been dominated by owners for a century.

Nearly a decade after Miller took over in 1966, baseball players still had no freedom of movement, a result of the infamous reserve clause that bound players for life to the team that originally signed them. A player unhappy with his current club couldn’t play out his contract and sign elsewhere; his team simply renewed the previous contract. The reserve clause eliminated competition for players and thus kept salaries artificially low.

Longtime outfielder Curt Flood fought the reserve clause in 1970, contending he was a free agent because he hadn’t played the season after the Cardinals traded him to the Phillies. But he lost his case— Flood vs. (Bowie) Kuhn (the baseball commissioner) — in the Supreme Court in 1972.

As a result, when rookie pitcher Mark “The Bird” Fidrych became the majors’ breakout star in 1976, filling Tiger Stadium nightly and delighting millions with his quirky personality — he’d talk to the baseball while on the mound — the Detroit Tigers were almost embarrassed when he started the All-Star Game.

Why? Because fans learned the Tigers were paying Fidrych only the minimum of $17,500 — far less than those Detroit auto union workers made. (And less money than they made from one sellout crowd.) To avoid bad publicity, they gave Fidrych a bonus before the season ended as a “good will gesture.”

And you wondered why MLB players wanted a stronger union.

Change in baseball finally came after Miller craftily negotiated with owners to allow neutral arbitrators to settle player-related disputes. One of those arbitrators, Peter Seitz, ruled in the 1976 case of pitchers Andy Messersmith and Dave McNally that players became free agents after playing one season for their teams without a negotiated contract.

(The year before, Seitz also ruled the Oakland A’s violated pitcher Jim “Catfish” Hunter’s contract by not paying a negotiated annuity, thus making him a free agent as well.)

Major league baseball players thus obtained free agency without ever negotiating it directly with owners. The owners, not surprisingly, fired Seitz.

But many of the same owners who had fought for decades to avoid paying equitable salaries proceeded to almost fall over themselves trying to outbid each other for star players once they hit the open market. The effect on salaries, not surprisingly, was staggering.

Home run king Henry Aaron was baseball’s highest-paid player in 1976 at $240,000; a year later, Mike Schmidt of the Phillies more than doubled that to $560,000. Within five years of Seitz’s rulings, Dave Winfield of the Yankees was making $1.4 million, or six times what Aaron had made.

In the NBA, it was a player — the great Oscar Robertson, the triple-double king — who was the catalyst for labor change, rather than a non-player union chief like Miller or arbitrator like Seitz.

In 1970, the year before he and Kareem Abdul-Jabbar led the Milwaukee Bucks to the NBA title, Robertson sued the NBA as head of the players’ union, seeking free agency and better players’ rights for the NBA draft.

The case took six years to settle, thus delaying the NBA-ABA merger until 1976, but the “Oscar Robertson Rule” ultimately permitted free agency and modified the draft. (By then, Robertson had retired as a player.)

Robertson, now 87, told the Boston Globe only this week that it’s incredible what has happened to the NBA in the 50 years since the ruling.

“For a franchise in basketball [the Lakers] to cost $10 billion dollars? Another [the Celtics] to cost $6 [billion]. And ballplayers making $65 [million] to $75 million a year? I think it’s remarkable,” Robertson told the paper.

NFL players, for multiple reasons, were more successful early on than their NBA or MLB counterparts in negotiating changes that brought about better working conditions and higher salaries. But they were the last to secure free agency.

First, the AFL formed in 1960 and began competing with the 12 NFL franchises for players, naturally driving up wages. (Joe Namath’s rookie contract with the New York Jets in 1965 was so astounding at the time, a book called “The $400,000 Quarterback” was written about it.)

Joe Namath’s $400,000 contract in 1965 was almost unfathomable in pro sports at the time

Second, then NFL negotiated its first national TV contract in 1962 (a two-year deal with CBS for $4.7 million per season). Third, a 1968 players’ strike during training camp helped secure the first collective bargaining agreement, one in which the owners made concessions on pensions and benefits.

But NFL players didn’t get free agency until well after MLB and NBA players did. In 1975, U.S. District Judge Earl R. Larson threw out the (Pete) Rozelle Rule that required teams to compensate another team for signing a free agency, a rule that all but eliminated players switching teams. Despite the ruling, player movement remained impeded by a rule in which 37 members of each team’s 43-man roster could not become unrestricted free agents.

It wasn’t until 1993 that the NFLPA negotiated an agreement that players with at least four years of service time could sign with any team after their contract expired. By then, the NFL’s ever-increasing popularity and the accompanying bump-up in national TV contracts had also driven up player salaries.

So while very few NFL players were making even $100,000 per season in the late 1960s (Namath was an exception),

Dak Prescott made approximately $60 million with the Cowboys last season.

And now you know why athletes demanded stronger players’ unions.

Oh, by the way, there might not be a 2027 Major League Baseball season. Why? Because owners, tired of losing negotiation after negotiation, to the players’ union, seem more committed then ever to adopting some sort of salary cap, which the NFL, NHL and NBA already have.

Even when there is more money in baseball that anyone could have possibly fathomed a few decades ago (the Dodgers’ local TV contract is worth $8 billion), there’s not always labor peace in pro sports.

Blame it all on NFL players back in the day demanding clean socks and jock straps.

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Alan Robinson can be reached at alanrobinson480@gmail.com

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Alan Robinson has been a sports writer since first writing a weekly column for his hometown weekly newspaper in Sistersville, W.Va. at age 15. After spending half a year during college as a part-time writer at the Parkersburg (W.Va.) News, he was hired fulltime at The Intelligencer in Wheeling, W.Va., at age 20. He spent nearly four years there before beginning a 35-year career as an Associated Press sports editor in Charleston, W.Va. (seven years) and Pittsburgh (28 years). He later was a Steelers beat writer/NFL columnist for the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review for three seasons, Following retirement, he covered the Pittsburgh Penguins and Arizona Coyotes for a combined eight seasons as an NHL.com correspondent and also wrote for the Canadian Press. He was chosen as The Associated Press worldwide sports writer of the year in 1986 and 2000 and has won multiple Associated Press Sports Editors national writing awards, including those for deadline writing and Story of the Year. Immediately after joining AP in 1975, he was selected by his peers as West Virginia Sports Writer of the Year in two of his first three years on the job there. Among his many assignments, he covered 10 Olympics, 12 Stanley Cup finals, eight NCAA basketball tournaments, five Super Bowls, three U.S. Open golf tournaments and two Ryder Cups. He currently resides in Phoenix, where sports is always on at least one of his seven big-screen TVs.

Bet you didn’t know that Jerry West, the greatest athlete in West Virginia history and still an icon in the state 66 years after he left it, honeymooned in tiny Sistersville, W.Va.

No doubt that’s one aspect of the life of the incomparable West that isn’t included in the new Prime Video documentary “Jerry West, The Logo” that debuted on April 16.

But it is one of the long-forgotten subplots to West’s post-college and pre-NBA life that illustrates West’s popularity in a state that he never called home again after 1960, yet always considered him as one of its own.

So popular there’s probably some 8-year-old in Southern California who, enamored with the Los Angeles Lakers and just now learning about their heritage of great players, probably thinks the “West” in West Virginia is because of Jerry.

(On the left, The Logo=Jerry West. On the right, Jerry West)

The Prime Video special focuses mostly on West, the NBA player, and West, the NBA coach and executive, for obvious reason. West is not only among a handful of ultra-great NBA players; as the architect of nine NBA championship teams, he’s arguably the greatest executive in league history.

Indeed, he’s called The Logo because the faceless NBA logo was designed after the only man enshrined three times in the Naismith Basketball Hall of Fame: As a player, as a contributor (for his executive work) and as a member of the 1960 Olympic gold medal basketball team.

The documentary by “blackish” creator Kenya Barris also provides insight into West’s handscrabble background in Cabin Creek, W.Va., one of six children of an abusive father and the brother of a man killed in the Korean War. Those difficult days shaped West’s personality as a man who hated to lose — he dreaded losing more than he enjoyed winning — and one who could never seem to find true happiness despite all of his successes and accomplishments. Indeed, he fought with depression much of his adult life.

“I grew up living below the poverty line,” West said. “I just felt so inferior to everyone.”

Remarkable for a men who was so superior on the basketball court to nearly everyone.

Jerry West was The Logo

But, because one needs to be in his 70s today to remember Jerry West as a Mountaineer who wore No. 44 with an unrivaled pride, perhaps this documentary will teach younger West Virginians about the player WVU coach Fred Schaus once predicted would never be rivaled. And, more than six decades later, certainly hasn’t been.

Great, great athletes have emerged from West Virginia since West played for WVU from 1957-60 — think Randy Moss. And great coaches — think Nick Saban. But there has been no athlete since like Jerry West and that’s not an opinion, it’s a fact.

West was so good, he took a roster filled with players who all grew up within a few hours of Morgantown, W.Va., to the NCAA championship game in 1959, where the Mountaineers (29-5) lost to California 71-70.

The following year, he carried them to the Eastern Regional semifinals, where the Mountaineers (26-5) were again eliminated in a one-point loss, to New York University in overtime. (Note the close losses: a pattern was developing.)

Those teams always seemed to follow the same script in big games: fall behind by 10-12 points to teams with more height and athleticism, only to have West rally them down the stretch. (Despite playing only three varsity seasons, the man with the picture-book jump shot remains West Virginia’s career scoring leader with 2,309 points.)

West played when there was limited college basketball on TV (network coverage of the NCAA championship game didn’t begin until 1969), but all of West Virginia’s tournament games were televised in 1960 — because of West. (As we chronicled recently, WTRF-TV in Wheeling, W.Va., acquired the first-ever TV rights to the Southern Conference tournament and also showed the Mountaineers’ two NCAA games. Such coverage was unheard of at the time.)

Even after West’s career in Morgantown ended, West Virginians still wanted to know everything and anything about him. A prime example: when he was chosen for an East-West all-star game in Madison Square Garden, a five-station radio network was hastily assembled and WVU announcer Jack Fleming called the game from courtside.

West’s WVU career ended with a lengthy standing ovation in Charlotte, N.C., following the March 12 consolation game of the NCAA East Regional, and the days afterward illustrate his enormous popularity:

March 24, 1960: The town of East Bank (where he played high school basketball) is renamed West Bank for the day, but West is in New York to appear on the “Today” show on NBC.

March 26: West plays in the East-West game. He stars, naturally.

April 1-3: West leads the University All-Stars to victory in the three-day U.S. Olympic trials in Denver, receiving a two-minute standing ovation after scoring 39 points in the finals. He is one of seven NCAA players chosen for the Olympic team. (In an interesting side note, the NCAA champion Ohio State Buckeyes play as a team in the eight-team tournament; finishing fifth after losing to the NAIA all-stars in the first round.)

April 9: Hours before he’s married, West scores 41 points to lead a team composed of former WVU teammates to a 105-94 win over the Atlantic Coast Conference all-stars in the St. Albans Sportsman’s independent tournament in his native Kanawha County.

April 10: It’s front page news across the state when West weds his college sweetheart, WVU junior Martha Jane Kane, in a ceremony in Morgantown. Teammate Willie Akers is his best man.

April 11: West is chosen No. 2 by the Minneapolis Lakers in the NBA Draft; the Cincinnati Royals used a territorial pick to take Oscar Robertson of Cincinnati first.

April 13-16: West “honeymoons” in Sistersville, W.Va. (population 2,200) while playing in the Tri-State Tournament, the oldest independent tournament in the state. Reserved seats sold out weeks in advance of West scoring 145 points in his four games. Amazingly, the same West-led team that beat the ACC all-stars the week before lose to a team composed mostly of former West Virginia Conference (NAIA) players 99-89 in the finals on “Jerry West Day” in Sistersville. West scored 40 points after scoring 39 in the afternoon semifinals. Local newspapers and the two major wire services file lengthy stories on the tournament, and West Virginia Gov. Cecil Underwood attends the finals.

Several NBA players, including Cincinnati Royals star Wayne Embry played in the tournament the year before, but Sistersville required Amateur Athletic Union sanctioning for West to play.

“We’d rather have Jerry West here than 75 professional players,” said Roy C. Heinlein, the tournament director, who added temporary seats to boost the gym’s capacity to 1,000.

West also received the keys to city of Sistersville, which — despite being tiny — had more millionaires per capita than any city in the United States at the time.

One 8-year-old West fanatic who attends every game of the tournament decides that writing about sports might be a fun way to make a living.

April 24: Celtics coach Red Auerbach is the guest speaker for a a banquet in Morgantown honoring West and his teammates.

April 27: The Lakers, buoyed by adding West to a lineup that already includes Elgin Baylor, announce they’ll move to Los Angeles for the 1960-61 NBA season. Attempting to emulate the Dodgers’ move from Brooklyn two years before, they become the first NBA team west of St. Louis. (Later that summer, they hire West’s coach, Schaus, as their coach.)

Like Schaus said, there was never anyone like Jerry West in West Virginia.

West’s 29.1 points per game scoring average remains the NBA’s fifth best all-time, yet —despite his nickname of Mr. Clutch — he remained haunted by his eight losses in the NBA Finals (against one victory). He was the architect of the Lakers’ dynasty teams of Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, Magic Johnson, Kobe Bryant and Shaquille O’Neal, but his nine NBA titles as an executive — to him — didn’t compensate mentally for his losses as a player.

Still, he had such a magic touch as a general manager — no pun intended — that West has often been called the best executive in NBA history. He added Shaq, made one of the greatest trades ever to acquire Bryant after the 1996 draft and also played a key role in multiple Golden State Warriors’ championships. The only player chosen as the NBA Finals MVP on a losing team, West also came through in the clutch as a coach (Lakers 1976-79) and an executive, too.

(Just as Oakland Athletics general manager Billy Beane is portrayed in `Moneyball’ as being too wound up to watch games in person, a tortured West often drove around Los Angeles in his car rather than watch Lakers’ games.)

“The game of basketball brought me so much, but the good times were far outweighed by the bad times,” West says in the movie, in an interview filmed before his death.

In its review, the Wall Street Journal called “Jerry West: the Logo” “a complicated movie about a very complicated man” who died at age 86 in 2024.

In West Virginia, they prefer to remember the good times. They never wanted to see him leave — hence the state’s near-inability to let go of him once his WVU career ended — but once he did, they still considered him a West Virginian, not a Californian.

He wasn’t Mr. Clutch. He wasn’t Zeke from Cabin Creek. He wasn’t the Cabin Creek Comet. He was simply Jerry West, the greatest. And he still is today.

(WVU Sports)

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Alan Robinson can be reached at alanrobinson480@gmail.com

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Alan Robinson has been a sports writer since first writing a weekly column for his hometown weekly newspaper in Sistersville, W.Va. at age 15. After spending half a year during college as a part-time writer at the Parkersburg (W.Va.) News, he was hired fulltime at The Intelligencer in Wheeling, W.Va., at age 20. He spent nearly four years there before beginning a 35-year career as an Associated Press sports editor in Charleston, W.Va. (seven years) and Pittsburgh (28 years). He later was a Steelers beat writer/NFL columnist for the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review for three seasons, Following retirement, he covered the Pittsburgh Penguins and Arizona Coyotes for a combined eight seasons as an NHL.com correspondent and also wrote for the Canadian Press. He was chosen as The Associated Press worldwide sports writer of the year in 1986 and 2000 and has won multiple Associated Press Sports Editors national writing awards, including those for deadline writing and Story of the Year. Immediately after joining AP in 1975, he was selected by his peers as West Virginia Sports Writer of the Year in two of his first three years on the job there. Among his many assignments, he covered 10 Olympics, 12 Stanley Cup finals, eight NCAA basketball tournament, five Super Bowls, three U.S. Opens and two Ryder Cups., He currently resides in Phoenix, where sports is always on at least one of his seven big-screen TVs.

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His state university was in the NCAA men’s basketball Final Four, and he was desperate for tickets. He was warned repeatedly the games were long-since sold out, but nonetheless placed a phone call to the host university’s athletic department, one already besieged with ticket pleas from its own fans.

Within a few minutes, remarkably, he ended up two tickets … right on the playing floor, just a few feet away from where Jerry West, Oscar Robertson and Darrell Imhoff would soon be playing. There was just one catch.

He had to televise the games to sit there.

So he did. Only three days before the game was played, he hastily agreed to show it on TV. Then he showed another one a night later. And, incredibly, two years later, after a few more phone calls, he owned the national television rights to the NCAA championship game.

Yes, the very same Final Four that CBS and TBS are paying $1.02 BILLION dollars for this year. His contract eliminated about eight of those zeroes.

This is the improbable story of a TV news/sports director whose very love of basketball allowed his station, located in what currently is the nation’s 163rd largest media market, to acquire the rights to one of the prized properties in sports.

Except that, back in 1959, the NCAA almost couldn’t give those rights away.

George Diab was the man, and — whether he’s remembered or not — his name belongs on the very short list of the announcers who’ve called the NCAA title game on a network of stations. Yes, right alongside Ian Eagle, Jim Nantz, Bill Flemming, Curt Gowdy, Dick Enberg (more on him in a moment), Brent Musberger and Gary Bender.

Diab’s passion for basketball, in great part, helped transform his station — WTRF-TV, an NBC affiliate at the time in Wheeling, W.Va. (population 53,000 in 1960) — into one of the pre-eminent carriers of college basketball in the country. So much so, WTRF obtained the primary TV rights to the 1961 NCAA championship game despite the fact home state West Virginia University didn’t make the tournament that year.

An impossible tale? Oh, it was that and more. Remember, Diab initially set out only to obtain tickets to an NCAA tournament game.

That 1959 Final Four field (it still wasn’t called that yet, by the way) was a dandy, too: Cincinnati and Robertson (soon to be the No. 1 pick in the NBA draft), West Virginia and West (soon to be the No. 2 pick), California and Imhoff (soon to be the No. 3 pick) and host school Louisville. Obtaining one of the 18,498 tickets in Freedom Hall was difficult enough with the home school in the field, but adding in the top two players in the sport — West and Robertson — made it next to impossible.

And for 99 percent of the country, seeing the games in person was the only way to watch them.

Incredible as it might seem today, there was no such thing as March Madness in the 1950s and most of the 1960s. The NCAA tournament field was limited to 24 teams and, while there was plenty of national print media and radio coverage, there was no national TV until 1969. Once teams began advancing, driving up fan interest in their home markets, the NCAA did sell rights to local stations on a per game basis, often only a couple of days in advance. Sometimes, only a few hours.

That’s how WTRF obtained the rights — “for a pretty penny,” as one Wheeling newspaper phrased it — to all of West Virginia’s 1959 tournament games, including the 71-70 championship game loss to California, the first of West’s many heartwrenching end-of-season disappointments.

The telecasts, which WTRF shared with multiple other stations in the state, drew huge audiences; some Wheeling hotels sold out for the semifinals and finals because fans from outlying parts of the state drove in to watch on TV.

This enthusiasm for postseason basketball drove Diab and WTRF to add more telecasts the following season in 1960, including all three of West Virginia’s Southern Conference tournament games for the first time — all for a fee of (get this) $500 per game. The conference had not previously permitted tournament games to be televised out of fear it would adversely affect attendance. WTRF also farmed out the telecasts to a Huntington, W.Va., station.

Southern Conference commissioner Lloyd Jordan agreed to the telecasts, he said, because “a great many people in West Virginia … can’t get to the tournament.” Only 800 tickets were distributed by WVU.

WTRF also televised West Virginia’s two NCAA tournament games, including a one-point loss to New York University in the Eastern Regional semifinals. It passed on carrying West’s final college game, against St. Joseph’s, because it was a regional consolation game.

Even after WVU was eliminated, WTRF wasn’t done televising college basketball that season. The Northern Panhandle station carried Ohio State’s 75-55 national championship game victory against defending champion California from San Francisco, even though the game didn’t start until 11:45 p.m. EST on a Saturday night.

WTRF’s signal penetrated deep into eastern Ohio, capturing a large swath of Buckeye fans who couldn’t watch on a Columbus station.

Buckeyes star John Havlicek grew up just across the Ohio River from Wheeling in Bridgeport, Ohio, another reason Channel 7 covered the game.

WTRF’s decision to carry a game that didn’t start until a time when nearly everyone was normally in bed drew praise from New Philadelphia (Ohio) Daily Times sports editor Don Wagner:

“A public thank you to WTRF is herewith expressed for covering the Century’s Greatest Cage Game. It is hard to understand why Ohioans had to rely on an out-of-state station to get the dream game and finals of the NCAA. We still wonder where the Ohio TV and even radio boys were. Without much debate, we think WTRF had one of its biggest audiences in history starting at midnight. In contrast, priority was given by [Ohio stations] to cob-webbed movies. … It was only the first NCAA title for Ohio State in 90 years.”

George Diab spent much of his career in Wilmington, N.C., after he left Wheeling, and the sports medicine center at University of North Carolina-Wilmington is named for him

By carrying five WVU basketball games in less than two weeks’ time, and the Ohio State game, WTRF did something few stations did in that era — pre-empt network TV programming.

Almost all American TV stations were affiliated with one of the three networks (CBS, NBC or ABC) and it was rare to not carry a network program because — with no competition from the cable stations that were still nearly two decades away — nearly all these programs drew large audiences. There were only a handful of public broadcasting stations, almost all in big cities, and a smattering of independents.

Network TV programming’s dominance in the early 1960s is the major reason why college basketball failed to gain a national television foothold for almost 30 years. College basketball was deemed a niche sport incapable of attracting an audience remotely as large as a network variety show.

However, WTRF’s success in drawing college basketball audiences in 1959 and 1960 led it to go all out in 1961: the Year the Little Guy Owned Final Four TV.

The station aired a regular season West Virginia game against North Carolina State as well as an Ohio State road game against Iowa, both with Diab and sports anchor Jennings Martin at the microphone.

Jennings Martin, WTRF’s sports anchor, joined Diab on many of the telecasts

Once tournament play began, WTRF showed both West Virginia games in the Southern Conference tournament (won by George Washington, which went 9-17 during the season) and all four of No. 1-ranked Ohio State’s four NCAA tournament games, including its 70-65 overtime upset loss to Cincinnati in the championship game.

But only after a bidding war.

According to The Intelligencer in Wheeling, “WTRF was notified from the NCAA executive offices in Kansas City at 4:40 p.m. yesterday [March 14, 1961] that its bid to televise … the games had been approved. WTRF won out in competitive bidding against two Columbus stations and a sports network in the midwest. Diab will handle the play-by-play account of Ohio State’s games.”

The midwestern sports network was almost certainly The Sports Network, which created the first-ever national network for the NCAA championship game two years later in 1963.

At the same time WTRF won the rights to Ohio State games, WKRC in Cincinnati won the rights to carry all Bearcats tournament games, with Darryl Parks announcing. If Ohio State and Cincinnati made it to the title game (which they did), the two stations would split the TV rights, though WTRF also had other stations carrying its telecast.

WTRF farmed out the games to a Columbus station (WTVN) after a bidding war, with that station bringing in then-Indiana U. announcer Enberg to call the first of his Final Four broadcasts on its airways. An Indianapolis station also carried the championship game from Kansas City, where the sellout crowd of 10,700 was down 8,000 from the year before because of Municipal Auditorium’s limited capacity.

But, according to veteran Cleveland Plain Dealer sports writer Chuck Heaton, it was the WTRF-Diab team that drew most of the Ohio-West Virginia audience.

Heaton wrote: “KYW TV [in Cleveland] officials smartly moved in on a regional deal to pick up the post-season play of Ohio State University. … Bill Zimmerman of that Columbus station said a regional hookup of 10 stations made it possible to grab the prize. Besides Columbus and Cleveland, the group included Toledo, Indianapolis, Dayton, Wheeling, Charleston (W.Va.), Parkersburg (W.Va.), Zanesville and Lexington (Ky.)

“George Diab, sports director of a Wheeling station, was tapped for the play by play and George Walsh of Louisville is handling color of the games. They are doing a first-rate job, too.”

Interestingly, ABC carried 10 college games that season on Saturday afternoons, and had the option to carry the NCAA tournament games. But it declined because it would have been forced to pre-empt its Saturday night boxing shows.

A year later, 1962 proved to be the last time local TV stations banded together to acquire the NCAA tournament rights, and WTRF was again one of a handful of stations nationally carrying the games.

The Wheeling station aired West Virginia regular season games against Wake Forest and North Carolina State, all three of WVU’s Southern Conference tournament games and its NCAA loss to Villanova, all with Diab and Jennings Martin on the call.

All four of Ohio State’s tournament games once again were carried as the Buckeyes reached their third consecutive NCAA championship game (once again to lose to Cincinnati, which won two straight titles and appeared in a third title game in 1963 after Oscar Robertson graduated.) Diab announced all the games.

Fifteen stations carried the 1962 Final Four from Louisville, though four North Carolina stations peeled off after Wake Forest lost to Ohio State in the semifinals. KTTV in Los Angeles also aired the championship game.

Diab was again at the mike for a majority of the stations.

ABC also broadcast the championship game that season, but on a delayed basis a day later as part of its Wide World of Sports series (with Gowdy announcing). It was a precursor of what was to come; the networks were about to discover championship college basketball.

Interestingly, there had been a tournament on network TV for years: the National Invitation Tournament (NIT) from New York, which always attracted a strong field because only 25 teams qualified for the NCAAs. NIT games were shown on successive Saturday afternoons, usually on CBS.

The NCAA tournament began to get larger audiences in 1963 when The Sports Network syndicate carried the championship game, paying an average of $23,000 per game — a little out of WTRF’s price range. That arrangement lasted until 1968.

The championship game finally aired lived on network TV in 1969 after NBC paid $547,000 for the rights to the Purdue-UCLA finale — a rights fee jump of more than a half million dollars in one year. The game aired on a Saturday afternoon so that NBC did not have to pre-empt regular network entertainment programming.

The 1967-68 and 1968-69 seasons marked the time when college basketball truly segued from a regional sport with intense local following to a national sport with an intense coast-to-coast following.

First, Elvin Hayes-led Houston upset top-ranked and Lew Alcindor-led UCLA 71-69 in a battle of the unbeatens Game of the Century on Jan. 20, 1968 before a crowd of 52,693 in the Houston Astrodome. It was the first made-for-TV college basketball game, and it was a huge success.

Yes, the crowd really was 52,693, though most of the spectators sat far away. No courtside seats were utilized, so the playing court (brought in from Los Angeles) sat by itself on an empty island in the middle of the Astrodome, with fans at a distance in the regular stadium seats.

Still, not only was it the most highly attended college game ever to that time, it was the first to be broadcast nationally in prime time; the 120-station TVS Network paid $27,000 for the rights. (Some stations, such as KDKA in Pittsburgh, chose to air the game on a tape-delayed basis.) WTRF didn’t carry it, but did show the West Virginia-Penn State game earlier in the day.

TVS founder Eddie Einhorn was the first entrepreneur to sign college conferences to regular season game TV packages, and the UCLA-Houston game was his tour de force. Sponsors actually called Einhorn during the game to book ads, which Einhorn hurriedly wrote out on paper and handed to announcer Enberg to read.

“They tuned in for the upset and they got it,” Einhorn wrote in the book `How March Became Madness.’ “That’s why the game is so memorable. Had UCLA won, it would have been just another case of the Bruins beating everybody they played. But Houston winning it made it a huge story.”

(Sidenote: Houston vaulted past UCLA into No. 1 in the AP and UPI polls after the upset, which occurred in part because Alcindor was severely hampered by an eye injury. When the teams were rematched in the Final Four semifinals in Los Angeles two months later, UCLA demolished then-unbeaten Houston 101-69 in the greatest revenge butt-kicking of my lifetime. The game wasn’t even as close as the 32-point score differential indicated. Hayes was limited to 10 points while four of UCLA’s five starters scored at least 17 points. Never again was Elvin Hayes judged superior to the future Kareem Abdul-Jabbar.)

The championship game finally aired lived on network TV a year later in 1969 after NBC paid $547,000 for the rights to the Purdue-UCLA finale — a rights fee jump of more than a half million dollars in one year. The game aired on a Saturday afternoon so that NBC did not have to pre-empt regular network entertainment programming.

The first nationally televised nighttime NCAA title game was in 1973 (with Gowdy again at the mike for NBC), when UCLA star Bill Walton missed only one of 22 shots while scoring 44 points in an 87-69 rout of Memphis. The game drew an estimated audience of 39 million, which no doubt made TV executives wonder why they hadn’t televised the finals in prime time years before.

Since that game, the Final Four has stayed with a format of two games on Saturday beginning in late afternoon in the Eastern time zone, and the primetime final on Monday.

Another huge leap in interest occurred in 1975, when the field was expanded to 32 teams, thus allowing conference runnersup to qualify for the first time. The change was made in part because two of the top three teams in the country in 1974, North Carolina State and Maryland played an epic ACC championship game with the knowledge the loser wouldn’t make the NCAA tournament. NC State won 103-100 in overtime in one of the greatest college games ever and went on to win the NCAA title, ending UCLA’s run of seven straight championships.

Within 10 years, the field doubled from 32 teams to 64.

And whatever became of George Diab, a pioneer — mostly, an unrecognized one — in college basketball telecasting?

Diab later was promoted to assistant general manager and vice president of WTRF before moving on in the late 1960s to an executive’s job with Rollins Broadcasting in Atlanta. A few years later, he became the president of Clay Broadcasting and the vice president of Clay Communications in Wilmington, N.C., where he spent the rest of his exceptional career. The sports medicine center at the University of North Carolina-Wilmington was later named the “George Diab Sports Medicine Center” in his honor. He was inducted into the North Carolina and West Virginia broadcasting halls of fame before dying in 2015 at age 91.

And WTRF? It has continued to carry the NCAA tournament yearly almost without fail; presciently, it switched its affiliation from NBC to CBS in 1980 (five days after the NCAA tournament ended), or only two years before CBS wrestled the NCAA rights away from NBC in 1982. WTRF thus was without the tournament for only one year.

Station executives probably don’t realize it, but WTRF likely could proclaim it has carried the NCAA tournament longer (except for that one-season gap) than any station in the country.

Maybe Diab’s play-by-play broadcasting was limited mostly to this small market TV station in northern West Virginia. But he realized in the early days of the TV era what a behemoth college basketball could become, and he pushed it onto TV screens in multiple states, big cities and small. Today, despite his relative anonymity on the national stage, we realize was a visionary WTRF’s George Diab truly was.

For a few years, the Road to the Final Four ran through a small-city TV transmitter in Wheeling, W.Va., all because of him.

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Alan Robinson can be reached at alanrobinson480@gmail.com

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Alan Robinson has been a sports writer since first writing a weekly column for his hometown weekly newspaper in Sistersville, W.Va. at age 15. After spending half a year during college as a part-time writer at the Parkersburg (W.Va.) News, he was hired fulltime at The Intelligencer in Wheeling, W.Va., at age 20. He spent nearly four years there before beginning a 35-year career as an Associated Press sports editor in Charleston, W.Va. (seven years) and Pittsburgh (28 years). He later was a Steelers beat writer/NFL columnist for the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review for three seasons, Following retirement, he covered the Pittsburgh Penguins and Arizona Coyotes for a combined eight seasons as an NHL.com correspondent and also wrote for the Canadian Press. He was chosen as The Associated Press worldwide sports writer of the year in 1986 and 2000 and has won multiple Associated Press Sports Editors national writing awards, including those for deadline writing and Story of the Year. Immediately after joining AP in 1975, he was selected by his peers as West Virginia Sports Writer of the Year in two of his first three years on the job there. Among his many assignments, he covered 10 Olympics, 12 Stanley Cup finals, eight NCAA basketball tournaments, five Super Bowls, three U.S. Open golf tournaments and two Ryder Cups. He currently resides in Phoenix, where sports is always on at least one of his seven big-screen TVs.

Kobe Bryant’s final high school game was, if you can believe it, 30 years ago this month. And his send-off to the incredible career that followed was nothing like you’d imagine from a high school basketball superstar.

In fact, by the time he was finishing up his first season for the Los Angeles Lakers a year later, he’d found the NBA to be easier than the windup to his high school career.

In March 1996, Bryant was the nation’s most-sought recruit while playing at Philadelphia-area Lower Merion High School. There was considerable speculation he’d follow the route taken by Kevin Garnett the year before and become only the second high school player drafted by the NBA since 1975.

Even if, after that final high school games, there were numerous questions raised if he’d be successful if he did so.

There were numerous positives. At 6-foot-6, he was long, lean, quick and fast, blessed with exceptional jumping ability and a reliable jump shot, but he wasn’t a commanding physical presence.

Especially not when compared to Billy Owens, another Pennsylvania high school superstar who, eight years before Bryant, also was the nation’s most heavily recruited player.

Owens was a man among men in high school at 6-foot-9, leading Carlisle of the Harrisburg-Hershey area to four consecutive PIAA Quad-A basketball championships. And his final high school game was nothing like Bryant’s would prove to be.

Owens vowed to put on a show in his high school finale, and he certainly did. Arguably the most dominant Pennsylvania high school player since Wilt Chamberlain, Owens scored 53 — FIFTY-THREE - points in finishing off Carlisle’s 33-0 season with an 80-54 rout of Pittsburgh Central Catholic in the 1988 Quad-A final in Hershey. Owens came within a point of scoring as many points as the entire Central Catholic team did, and finished the season with a 34 points per game average.

However, there was no speculation afterward that he would jump to the NBA. He signed with Syracuse, whose coach, Jim Boeheim, attended his final two high school games, and went on to average 18 points in three college seasons. He was a first-team All-American after averaging 23.3 points as a junior in 1990-91.

Bryant averaged 30.8 points and 12 rebounds as a high school senior and ended his career with a Southeastern Pennsylvania record 2,883 points. But his Lower Merion team didn’t roll through the tournaments like Owens’ Carlisle team did; not only did he not win a state championship in his first three seasons, he didn’t make a single title game.

Bryant almost didn’t make it to the Quad-A final as a senior, either. Lower Merion had to rally to beat Chester 77-69 in overtime in the Eastern Regional final before more than 9,000 fans at the Palestra in Philadelphia, with Bryant delivering 39 points.

Bryant then headed off to the ancient Hersheypark Arena to play his last high school game, the same building where, 34 years to the month before, Chamberlain scored his remarkable 100 points against the New York Knicks.

No doubt some of the seats in that tomb-like concrete building, which was the largest monolithic building of its kind in the United States when constructed in 1936 (the original roof tiles weren’t replaced until 2013), were still in place for Bryant’s game.

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Much like Carlisle eight years previously, Lower Merion’s title game was against a Catholic high school from western Pennsylvania, Erie Cathedral Prep. But Prep was a far more dangerous opponent than Central Catholic had been in 1988, despite needing to rally for a 47-44 win against rival Erie McDowell in the Western Regional title game two nights before.

Cathedral Prep was very familiar with Hershey, too. The Ramblers were playing in their third title game in four seasons, winning in 1993 (beating Hazleton 44-30) and losing in 1994 (to Chester, 69-65).

Cathedral Prep coach Marcel Arribi, coincidentally, was a former assistant coach at LaSalle University, just like Bryant’s father, Joe Bryant, a former NBA and Italian league pro. Arribi knew he had no defender who could begin to match up skill-wise with Bryant.

At practice the day before the title game, Arribi warned his players that Bryant would be, by far, the best player they’d ever faced and they might end up watching him in the NBA months later. As he told his players, “Many are saying he’s going to jump immediately to the pros.”

But he also didn’t want them to be intimidated.

Cathedral Prep couldn’t match up physically against Lower Merion, but the Ramblers were disciplined, hard-working, and reliable executors of whatever plan Arribi designed. And this plan was a dandy; he was determined not to allow Bryant to beat his team by himself, as Owens had done to Central Catholic.

• Kobe’s last high school game

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=npyUwyq3J9Y

Arribi drew up a matchup zone in which Bryant would be defended by two players any time he touched the ball, with a third defender in the vicinity, if possible. Arribi wanted to frustrate Bryant with constant pressure, hoping it would force him to rush his shots and frustrate a player accustomed to having his way. The hope was he’d start playing one-on-five, determined to show why he was so talented, so highly recruited, so dominant.

That’s exactly what happened in the first half.

Bryant committed multiple turnovers, didn’t score for more than 10 minutes to start the game and was held to eight points as Cathedral Prep took a 21-15 halftime lead. By contrast, Owens had scored 15 points himself not long after the national anthem had been sung eight years before.

It also helped that the PIAA unboxed a brand new, never-before-used basketball for the game, one that hadn’t been lightly broken in as many game balls often are. Bryant complained afterward that the ball was so slick, it never felt comfortable in his gifted hands.

But it’s difficult to hold down a player as skilled as Bryant for four quarters in a high school game, and he began to find his game as Lower Merion outscored Prep 22-10 to take a 37-31 lead.

It was the first time the massive, well-coordinated Cathedral Prep student section, arguably the largest to attend a PIAA title game, appeared to be a bit nervous even as it stood out in the crowd of 8,242.

But those same orange-and-white-clad students erupted with the vocal din of a stack of Marshall amps when the Ramblers went on a 10-2 run to take a 41-39 lead with 3:30 to play.

Could they really do it? Could a western Pennsylvania high school better known for its football actually knock off a Philadelphia-area power led by one of the greatest high school players in state history?

The title was there for the Ramblers’ taking, but they couldn’t finish the job. Bryant and Lower Merion closed the game with a 9-2 run, with Bryant feeding Omar Hatcher for the decisive basket of a 48-43 victory with 19 seconds remaining.

Bryant’s final-game stats line wasn’t memorable at all: 6-of-13 shooting, five of six from the foul line and 17 points, plus eight rebounds. But it was good enough for a title.

“I could’ve scored any time I wanted, but we’re a team,” Bryant said afterward. “My teammates were open, and I was trying to give them the ball.”

Arribi’s plan couldn’t have worked much better, yet his Ramblers still had to settle for second place.

Bryant wasn’t saying so at the time, but he’d already decided privately to skip college and go pro. He ended up being drafted by Charlotte with the 13th pick but, determined to get Bryant, Lakers general manager Jerry West swung a trade to bring the Gatorade and Naismith high school player of the year to Los Angeles.

Still, not everybody who’d seen his high school finale was convinced he was ready for the NBA.

After Bryant played one week later in the McDonald’s All-American game in Pittsburgh, Indiana Pacers executive Billy Knight told the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, that “None [of the players in the game] are ready for the NBA.”

NBA superscout Marty Blake said Bryant was “badly misinformed” if he thought he could move directly into pro ball, and predicted he might struggle for years.

And in Carlisle, a newspaper columnist no doubt influenced by Owens’ high school sendoff wrote, “{He] showed he could use some work in the minor leagues. … He may have the physical skills to play professional ball, but he’s still a kid just out of high school. He still needs to mature and would still need time getting used to having huge amounts of money.

“Hopefully [if Bryant does turn pro immediately, nobody will follow [by asking years later], `Whatever happened to him?’ “

Hey, we’ve all been wrong. I covered Bryant’s game at courtside and came away thinking he’d be a longterm project if he went directly to the NBA. He certainly didn’t remind me of Moses Malone, the first player to make the preps-to-pros transition.

Guess who was right? None other than Marcel Arribi, who predicted about a month after the title game that Bryant was destined for stardom.

“He’s got the offensive skills to play at that level,” said Arribi, showing his college coach-level ability to assess talent. “From the kid’s vantage point, he runs the risk of getting hurt [in college].

“We had two guys on him at all times. It isn’t that way in the NBA. It’s one-on-one and up and down, and you’ve got people setting screens for you. He’s got a lot to learn, but it won’t be five-against-one like it was for him in most high school games.

“[And] who would’ve thought Michael Jordan would be as good as he’s become when he came out of North Carolina?”

Bryant wasn’t a superstar right away, averaging fewer than eight points per game as a rookie but, by the end of the 1996-97 season, was scoring consistently in double digits. At age 19, he pumped his average up to nearly 16 points in his second NBA season, starred in the All-Star Game and was runnerup for the league’s sixth man of the year.

By the time he ended his 20-season career, Bryant scored 33,643 points, won five NBA titles with Los Angeles and was an 18-time All-Star as one of the greatest players in history. Bryant, of course, sadly passed away at age 41 in a helicopter crash on Jan. 26, 2020.

But, no doubt when they watched Bryant play in all those All-Star Games and NBA Finals, Erie Cathedral Prep players such as Brian Szewcykowski, R.J. Fiorelli, Julian Banks, Doug Lecker, Bob Vahey, Keith Nies and John Trocki probably said to themselves, “Yeah, but he didn’t dominate us.”

And Owens? While he was arguably the best Pennsylvania high school player since Chamberlain at Overbrook High in the 1950s, he wasn’t the NBA impact player Bryant was. He averaged 11.7 points in a 10-season NBA career that ended in 2001, with a career high of 16.5 points with Golden State in his second season.

Cathedral Prep, as a footnote, had to wait another quarter century before finally winning another title (in Five-A) in 2021.

The 1995-96 Ramblers consoled themselves through the years with the knowledge that while Black Mamba may have dominated the Clippers and the 76ers and the Warriors and the Bulls, but he did not dominate them. Not at all.

“This team has more courage than probably any I’ve had,” Arribi said. “They came a minute shy of doing the unbelievable.”

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Alan Robinson can be reached at alanrobinson480@gmail.com

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Alan Robinson has been a sports writer since first writing a weekly column for his hometown weekly newspaper in Sistersville, W.Va. at age 15. After spending half a year during college as a part-time writer at the Parkersburg (W.Va.) News, he was hired fulltime at The Intelligencer in Wheeling, W.Va., at age 20. He spent nearly four years there before beginning a 35-year career as an Associated Press sports editor in Charleston, W.Va. (seven years) and Pittsburgh (28 years). He later was a Steelers beat writer/NFL columnist for the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review for three seasons, Following retirement, he covered the Pittsburgh Penguins and Arizona Coyotes for a combined eight seasons as an NHL.com correspondent and also wrote for the Canadian Press. He was chosen as The Associated Press worldwide sports writer of the year in 1986 and 2000 and has won multiple Associated Press Sports Editors national writing awards, including those for deadline writing and Story of the Year. Immediately after joining AP in 1975, he was selected by his peers as West Virginia Sports Writer of the Year in two of his first three years on the job there. Among his many assignments, he covered 10 Olympics, 12 Stanley Cup finals, eight NCAA basketball tournaments, two Ryder Cups and five Super Bowls, He currently resides in Phoenix, where sports is always on at least one of his seven big-screen TVs.

Bam Adebayo’s out-of-nowhere 83 points for the Miami Heat against the Washington Wizards on March 10 represent the second highest scoring game in NBA history.

His breakout game — one already being debated for its authenticity given the astounding number of free throws he attempted — also illustrates just how amazing Wilt Chamberlain’s record 100-point game on March 2, 1962 really was.

Think about it — it the 64 years since Chamberlain’s incredible performance, no other NBA player has come within 17 points of his record. Adebayo would have had to play about three-quarters of another 12-minute quarter, and kept scoring at his same pace, just to tie The Dipper. Adebayo’s previous career high was 41 points, not even half as many as his 83.

That’s why, to me, as someone who’s watched and covered sports for six-plus decades, Wilt Chamberlain’s 100 points represent the most remarkable single-game (or single-day) performance in sports history.

You can also make a legitimate argument that only a handful of others in sports history even rival it.

Consider this: until March 10, no TWO players in NBA history combined for more points than Chamberlain scored for the Philadelphia Warriors against the New York Knicks that chilly, 20-degree night in Hershey, Pa. (Adebayo and teammate Simone Fontecchio combined for 101.)

Until Adebayo spent most of his remarkable night shooting free throws, the only other 80-point game in NBA history was Kobe Bryant’s 81 points on Jan. 22, 2006. (Interesting side note: Kobe Bryant played his final high school game in the same arena where Wilt scored his 100.)

Then again, Wilt Chamberlain’s 1961-62 season was the most otherworldly in sports history, so maybe his 100-point game wasn’t all that surprising. (His very coach, Frank McGuire, even predicted it a few weeks before.) In fact, it was so remarkable, so astounding that 100 had always been seen as an unreachable fantasy number in the NBA.

At least until Wilt Chamberlain arrived in 1959 after playing for the University of Kansas and the Harlem Globetrotters.

Chamberlain was the NBA’s leading scorer and MVP as a rookie in 1960 and, by his third season, had upped his average to a record 50.4 points (and 25.8 rebounds), or 13+ points per game more than any other player in NBA history (Michael Jordan, 37.09 in 1986-87).

Wilt still owns five of the six highest scoring averages in league history. He had 45 games of 50 points or more that 1961-62 season; Jordan, by contrast had “only” 31 such games in his entire career. From Dec. 16-29, 1961, Chamberlain had seven consecutive 50-point games. The same week he scored 100, he scored at least 61 points in four consecutive games.

But in a season filled with career games, Wilt’s 100-point night truly was The Dipper’s all-time greatest. He shot much better than Adebayo did, making 36 of 63 shots (57 percent) and 28 of 32 free throws (87.5 percent); Adebayo was 20 of 43 from the floor (46.5 percent), despite also being a center, and 36 of a remarkable 43 from the foul line (83.7 percent).

All those free throws, by the way, certainly didn’t impress Los Angeles Times columnist Mirjam Swanson, who wrote afterwards, “The way it went down was highly questionable. Nothing romantic or real about it … flopping and foul-baiting for unethical hoops, but those are basketball misdemeanors. Adebayo’s big night was felonious.”

Chamberlain’s record night was fabulous, an unstoppable night by the game’s most unstoppable player against an opponent that did everything to stop him. (Such as stalling throughout the fourth quarter and intentionally fouling other players to keep the ball away from Chamberlain.)

And the player mostly responsible for guarding Wilt that night was no stiff; Knicks center Darrell Imhoff was the No. 3 pick in the 1960 NBA draft behind Oscar Robertson and Jerry West, whose teams were defeated by Imhoff’s national championship California team in the 1959 Final Four.

On his record night in Hershey (where the Warriors played a handful of games in hopes of building a regional audience), Chamberlain had 41 points at the half — nothing remarkable for him. Then it got interesting; with 10:25 still remaining, he matched his own league record of 73. From then on, it was a race to 100 as public address announcer Dave Zinkoff constantly updated the 4,124 fans of Wilt’s total.

What’s astounding to me, after all these years, is that some people still don’t believe Wilt scored 100 because there is no video record of the game. I once had a 20-minute debate with former Steelers linebacker Larry Foote about the legitimacy of Wilt’s game; he kept arguing it couldn’t have happened because there’s no video tape of the game.

(If that’s the case, then almost every MLB or NFL or NBA game before the 1970s isn’t legitimate, either, because there’s no video tape from those games, either. There’s also no photographic evidence that George Washington was president, but I’m guessing he really was.)

What many don’t understand today is that, other than NFL games, very few games in any sport — the MLB, NBA, college football or college basketball — were broadcast in 1962, especially on a local basis. Only 23 NBA games were televised nationally all season on NBC. Wilt’s Philadelphia Warriors were one of the multiple NBA teams at the time who had no local TV coverage.

There are multiple reasons why, most relating to technology. One, most cities had only three TV stations [NBC, CBS and ABC] that weren’t about to preempt a highly rated network TV show for a niche sports broadcast. Two, cable TV networks that specialized in sports were nearly two decades away. And, three, broadcast costs for a local, non-network broadcast were astronomical. TV production trucks were non-existent, so cameras and crews had to be rented in the host city, and the only way to send the broadcast back to the originating station was to rent expensive phone lines from AT&T.

But while this mostly meaningless, late-season Knicks-Warriors game wasn’t televised or filmed, there was media coverage. Philadelphia radio station WCAU carried the game live with Bill Campbell announcing, and two Philadelphia newspapers covered it. Best of all, Paul Vathis was there, a Pulitzer Prize-winning photographer from The Associated Press whose photos that night remain among the most famous in sports history.

Vathis attended the Friday night game in a non-working role, taking his son to watch from courtside. But when the fourth quarter arrived with Wilt already at the 69-point mark, Vathis told his son, “Wilt might get 80,” so he returned to his car, hastily retrieved his camera and set up along the baseline.

Wilt not only got 80, he got 90. And then he got 100 on a Dipper dunk photographed by Vathis with less than a minute to play. Then, in the dressing room afterward, Warriors publicist Harvey Pollack hastily wrote “100” on a piece of note paper, Wilt held it up and Vathis snapped probably the best-known photo of his career.

(It’s a shot even more well known than the photo of presidents Dwight Eisenhower and John F. Kennedy together that won Vathis the Pulitzer.)

A recording of the game was preserved, too, even if it’s radio only, a riveting broadcast by Campbell in which he dramatically counts down the points.

“He made it! He made it! … A Dipper Dunk!” Campbell proclaimed when Wilt hit 100. “The fans are all over the floor. They stopped the game. People are running out on the court. One hundred points for Wilt Chamberlain! People are crowding around him, the Warrior players are all over him. … Forty-six seconds are left. The most amazing scoring performance of all time. One hundred points by the Big Dipper!”

For years afterward, Chamberlain thought those final 46 seconds weren’t played but, in fact they were, as Campbell’s broadcast attests. Chamberlain actually had one more chance to score but didn’t; thankfully so, too, because 100 is such an iconic number, much more so than 102.

(Interesting footnote: The actual final score was 169-150, based on Campbell’s play by play, but, somehow in all the hoopla and on-court hysteria as the game ended, the final score was recorded as 169-147, and it’s never been changed.)

Despite his unrivaled scoring, much was made during and after Chamberlain’s career about his persistent inability to wrest the NBA title away from Bill Russell’s Boston Celtics, who won eight championships in a row from 1959-66. But it takes a team to win a title and not just one exceptional player (ask Dan Marino or Charles Barkley or Ted Williams or Barry Bonds). And when Chamberlain’s Warriors finally acquired enough talent to rival Boston in the 1966-67 season, they dominated the NBA with a 68-13 record (they started 46-4) and easily won the Finals.

Again, in 1971-72, when Chamberlain played alongside Jerry West in Los Angeles, the Lakers won a record 33 games in a row en route to the NBA championship.

If Russell and Chamberlain switched teams in the early 1960s, you don’t think it would be Wilt — not Russell — who would be regarded as the biggest winner in NBA history? (Here’s a footnote: Chamberlain regarded his personal-record 55-rebound game as the best of his career. The opposing center? Bill Russell.)

Chamberlain still owns more than 60 NBA records, and is the only player to have led the league in scoring, rebounding and assists. He was an incredibly talented, multi-dimensional, freakish athletic talent who won three Big Eight track championships in the high jump and also placed in the triple jump and the shot put at Kansas.

During off seasons in the NBA, he was a professional volleyball player (some argue the best player in the country). He also was ready to sign to box Muhammad Ali in 1971 for the world heavyweight boxing championship (despite never having an amateur or professional fight) until Chamberlain’s father reportedly talked him out of it. (The match had already been announced on ABC TV, where, when the 7-foot-1 Chamberlain walked onto the stage, Ali famously yelled, “Timber!”)

Maybe it’s because Chamberlain felled so many records.

To me, Chamberlain is the greatest basketball player of all time if only because he was so dominating in so many ways. Michael Jordan and Russell won more championships, but Chamberlain proved he could match them when given comparable teammates. (Statistical aside: Chamberlain averaged exactly 28.7 points and 28.7 rebounds in 140-plus career games against Russell, including those in which Chamberlain had transitioned from the most dominating scorer in history into more of a pass-first player.)

Chamberlain could also bench press 500 pounds and is widely regarded as the strongest NBA player of all time.

For now, I’m just glad Bam Adebayo’s moment in history reminds other generations of the dominance of The Dipper. Wilt Chamberlain was like no other athlete ever, and there will never be another one like him.

If Wilt’s 100-point game was the greatest single-game performance in sports history, what were some of the others?

To me, No. 2 belongs to former Pittsburgh Pirates pitcher Harvey Haddix, if for the same reason Wilt’s game resonates: Nobody has ever come close to matching it.

On May 26, 1959, pitching on the road against the Milwaukee Braves, the left-handed Haddix pitched “nine perfect, no-hit, no-run innings!” (as the great Bob Prince called it). Then he pitched a 10th. And an 11th. And a 12th. 36 batters up, 36 batters down.

How amazing was that? Nobody else in baseball history ever pitched more than nine perfect innings.

Haddix lost his perfect game in the 13th inning on an error and lost the game on a home run-turned-double by Joe Adcock, who was inadvertently passed on the basepaths.

I don’t care that Major League Baseball doesn’t officially recognize Haddix’s game as a “perfect game.” Or that he ended up losing. It was the greatest game ever pitched, and I can guarantee you it will never be matched.

Others on my short list:

— Shohei Otani of the Los Angeles Dodgers going 6-for-6 with three home runs, two doubles, two stolen bases and 10 RBIs against the Marlins on Sept. 19, 2024, all while becoming the first member of MLB’s 50-50 club.

— Mario Lemieux of the Pittsburgh Penguins, who could be on this list multiple times. On Dec. 31, 1988, he became the only player to score a goal all five ways possible (even strength, power play, short-handed, penalty shot and empty net) against the New Jersey Devils. On April 25, 1989, Lemieux had five goals (four in the first period) and three assists is a 10-7 playoff game victory against the Philadelphia Flyers. And on Dec. 27, 2000, after being retired for nearly four years, he had a goal and two assists in a 5-0 win against the Toronto Maple Leafs.

— Norman “Wild Man” Willey, of the Philadelphia Eagles, who had what arguably was the most incredible game in NFL history on Oct. 26, 1952 — an unofficial SEVENTEEN sacks against the New York Giants. (Sacks weren’t an official stat at the time, the “official” NFL record is seven by Derrick Thomas of the Kansas City Chiefs in 1990.) Pro Football Weekly calls it “the record that history forgot.” According to former Eagles coach Jim Trimble, “I almost felt sorry for Charlie [Connerly, the Giants quarterback]. I remember vividly Charlie having a heck of a time just getting up.” Willey was a former Marshall College player who grew up in Wetzel County, W.Va.

— Rulon Gardner, a United States wrestler who had never won even a state high school or college championship. In the Olympic Greco-Roman heavyweight finals in Sydney on Sept. 27, 2000, Gardner defeated the supposedly unbeatable Alexander Karelin of Russia 1-0 for the gold medal. Karelin had won the previous three Olympic gold medals during a 13-year unbeaten streak; the loss left him with a lifetime record of 887-2. Many consider it the second greatest upset in Olympic history, surpassed only by the 1980 United States hockey team’s win against the Soviet Union.

— Usain Bolt set the world 100-meter dash record of 9.58 seconds in the world championships in Berlin on August 16, 2009. Despite slowing down at the end because he was so far ahead, and glancing both left and right, he broke his own record of 9.69 set the year before in the Olympics. It was another bolt of lightning from the greatest sprinter of all time.

— Bob Beamon of the United States, whose Olympic long jump of 29 feet, 2 1-4 inches on Oct. 18, 1968 broke the existing world record by nearly TWO FEET (21 3/4 inches). The jump was so incredible that spectators, the media and ABC-TV (which televised those Games) almost couldn’t believe it happened. Beamon himself collapsed to his knees and nearly went into shock upon being told of the record. “It was the outer limits,” Beamon said.

Kind of like Wilt Chamberlain on March 2, 1962, a night we’ll almost certainly never see repeated again. On a scale of one to 100, it was definitely 100.

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Alan Robinson can be reached at alanrobinson480@gmail.com

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Alan Robinson has been a sports writer since first writing a weekly column for his hometown weekly newspaper in Sistersville, W.Va. at age 15. After spending half a year during college as a part-time writer at the Parkersburg (W.Va.) News, he was hired fulltime at The Intelligencer in Wheeling, W.Va., at age 20. He spent nearly four years there before beginning a 35-year career as an Associated Press sports editor in Charleston, W.Va. (seven years) and Pittsburgh (28 years). He later was a Steelers beat writer/NFL columnist for the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review for three seasons, Following retirement, he covered the Pittsburgh Penguins and Arizona Coyotes for a combined eight seasons as an NHL.com correspondent and also wrote for the Canadian Press. He was chosen as The Associated Press worldwide sports writer of the year in 1986 and 2000 and has won multiple Associated Press Sports Editors national writing awards, including those for deadline writing and Story of the Year. Shortly after joining AP in 1975, he was selected by his peers as West Virginia Sports Writer of the Year in two of his first three years on the job there. Among his many assignments, he covered 10 Olympics, 12 Stanley Cup finals, eight NCAA basketball tournaments, five Super Bowls, the World Series, six National League championship series, three U.S. Opens and two Ryder Cups. He currently resides in Phoenix, where sports is always on at least one of his seven big-screen TVs.

By Alan Robinson

Call him Konnor, the Kan’t-Miss Kid.

For the first time in 40 years, or since a player named Barry Bonds was quickly rising through Pittsburgh’s farm system, a Pirates position player is baseball’s Next Big Thing.

Konnor Griffin, a 19-year-old from Mississippi (he turns 20 in April), is the proverbial five-tool player, one who can do it all: Hit for power and average, run, throw, field. No wonder the Pirates’ sixth sense tells them he’s their future — their immediate future, too, not their distant future.

He’s played only 122 games in the minors, none above Double-A, yet he did nothing but impress in his first season in pro ball last summer. He hit .333 with 21 homers in 484 at-bats with 65 stolen bases at three different minor league levels.

He’s also been the talk of spring training. After he crashed two long homers in an exhibition game against the Red Sox last week, Boston manager Alex Cora exclaimed, “He’s a good one.”

Longtime baseball writer Ken Rosenthal of The Athletic wrote “[this spring] might be remembered as the dawning of baseball’s next superstar.”

Another writer opined, rather breathlessly, “We’ve never seen anything like him.”

Well, actually, the Pirates have (see Barry Bonds, circa 1986).

With that in mind, here are three words of caution to those already writing Griffin’s name into Pittsburgh’s opening day lineup, or preparing to cast All-Star Game ballots for him, or projecting what year he’ll be inducted into the Baseball Hall of Fame:

Robert Sherwood Bailey.

In 1961, or exactly 65 years ago, Bailey, an infielder from Long Beach, Calif., also was the Next Big Thing. A two-sport star like Griffin, he was as close to a can’t-miss prospect as there was at the time, a player who would have gone No. 1 in the major league draft had there been one at the time. (The draft started in 1965, partly because teams became fed up with paying oversized bonuses to players like Bailey.)

The Pirates were so determined to sign Bailey, they even dispatched owner John W. Galbreath to California to meet him. Pittsburgh and the Milwaukee Braves went down to the wire (the Dodgers dropped out earlier because he was too expensive), but the Pirates finally won out by signing Bailey at 12:01 a.m. PDT on June 16, 1961, mere hours after he graduated from high school.

The cost to sign the so-called “Babe Ruth of Long Beach,” a player so popular locally that Little Leaguers modeled their swing after his? Anywhere from $125,000 to $175,000, with the actual money apparently close to the higher figure. It was an astronomical amount, nearly 25 times the major league minimum salary of $7,500 at the time. (The Pirates’ total payroll that season was about $520,000.)

(A side note: The same day the Pirates locked up Bailey, the Braves signed Bill Robinson, an outfielder from suburban Pittsburgh for $17,000 — or about 1/10th Bailey’s bonus. Robinson later landed with the Pirates and starred on their 1979 “We Are Fam-a-lee” World Series-winning team.)

Griffin cost the Pirates $6,532,000 to sign as the No. 9 pick last year but, remember, the current minimum salary is $780,000. (He didn’t go No. 1 because of concerns about his signing bonus and his ability to handle elite power pitchers given his long stride at the plate.)

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The Pirates’ pursuit of Bailey was headline news in Pittsburgh for weeks, and they were so eager to see him in person that he flew in and worked out at Forbes Field the day after signing. Two days after that, he played for them in an exhibition game in Washington, D.C. (he struck out on three pitches). The next day, he flew to Asheville, N.C., to play for their South Atlantic League team.

Bailey struggled for most of that season. But in 1962, at age 19, he lived up to the hype, batting .299 with 28 home runs and 108 RBIs and fielding well at third base as the International League Rookie of the Year for the Triple-A Columbus Jets. He made his MLB debut in September, hitting a triple off 20-game winner Jack Sanford of the Giants in his second big league game.

By now, Pirates general manager Joe L. Brown was convinced Bailey was ready. That offseason, he traded popular Don Hoak (the 1960 NL MVP runner-up) to the Philadelphia Phillies and effectively handed the third base job at Bob Bailey at age 20.

Brown built two World Series-winning teams in Pittsburgh and had a major hand in a third, but this wasn’t his best winter of decision making. In one of the worst trades in franchise history, Brown also dealt star shortstop Dick Groat (supposedly over the hill at age 32) to the Cardinals for a below-.500 starting pitcher Don Cardwell, who never quite delivered on his promise despite once throwing a no-hitter. (He even had a losing record for the World Series-winning 1969 Mets.)

Groat, the 1960 NL MVP, was both angered and energized by the trade and went on to hit .319 with 201 hits and an NL-leading 43 doubles in 1963. In 1964, he anchored the infield for the World Series-winning Cardinals by hitting .292 (.328 against Pittsburgh).

Still, in spring 1963, there was consider anticipation for Bailey’s first full season in the majors. Pittsburgh TV station WIIC (now WPXI) even devoted a half-hour early season special to Bailey, unusual at the time because the station didn’t even own the Pirates’ TV rights (KDKA did).

Perhaps not surprisingly, with Bailey at third and Dick Schofield at short (rather than Groat), the Pirates tumbled all the way to eighth place in 1963. Bailey looked overmatched much of the time, hitting .228 with 12 homers and 45 RBIs in 154 games.

To the power-hitting Bailey, spacious Forbes Field must have looked more like Yellowstone Park with its 365-foot left field line (one guarded by a 25-foot scoreboard), the 406-foot power alley and impossible-to-reach 457 feet to center field. (So few balls were hit there at the time, the Pirates even parked their batting cage on the field.) He also made 32 errors on Forbes Field’s rock-hard infield.

“Maybe we expected too much of Bailey,” manager Danny Murtaugh said.

Maybe the Pirates ignored their own history, too.

In 1950, the Pirates shocked the baseball world by making California high school pitcher Paul Pettit the first $100,000 bonus baby. But Pettit quickly developed arm problems, pitched in only 12 games in the majors (winning one) and was out of baseball by 1953. It was a monumental waste of money.

Bailey had a better season at age 21, raising his average to .304 by early August 1964. But he slumped the rest of the season, and while his average ended at .281, his power still wasn’t there (11 homers, 51 RBIs.)

It wasn’t there again in 1965, when he hit .256 with 11 homers and 49 RBIs. By then, it was obvious he wasn’t going to be the next Ralph Kiner. Or even the next Don Hoak.

By 1966, Bailey was no longer the Pirates’ prized bonus baby; he was seen simply as an underperforming player known as Beetles Bailey. For the first time in the majors, he wasn’t an everyday player; he split time at third with Jose Pagan, with Bailey getting 380 at-bats (246 fewer than in 1965) to Pagan’s 368.

Bailey’s ’66 stats were nearly identical to those of ’65 despite the substantially reduced playing time (.279, 13 homers, 46 RBIs). Regardless, the Pirates gave up on Bailey at age 24 and traded him to his hometown Los Angeles Dodgers for shortstop Maury Wills.

(Dodgers fans were stunned that winter as Cy Young-winning pitcher Sandy Koufax retired at age 30 due to an arthritic elbow and Wills, the team’s second most-popular player, was traded away days later.)

The Pirates made a great move by dealing for Wills, one of the majors’ most productive players in the 1960s. He hit .302 with 29 stolen bases in 1967 (and anchored the Sunday night sportscast on WTAE-TV) and .278 with 52 stolen bases on an improved 1968 team.

Wills, however, was supposed to be the player who put the Pirates over the top after they nearly won the NL pennant in 1966. Despite his strong numbers, the Pirates dropped into sixth place in 1967 and, a year later, even after another good season, they didn’t protect Wills in the expansion draft, allowing him to go to the Montreal Expos for nothing.

Where, of course, he ended up as a teammate of … Bob Bailey.

Bailey had eagerly joined his hometown Dodgers but he disappointed them, too, by hitting exactly .227 in both 1967 and 1968. As in Pittsburgh, he struggled hitting the ball out of a home ballpark with a spacious left field.

“The old Dodger Stadium wasn’t any place for a guy who had [only] some power,” Bailey told SABR.org writer Norm King in 2016.

But Bailey, to his credit, also wasn’t a Paul Pettit.

After the Dodgers traded him to the expansion Expos, he enjoyed his best major league seasons. He hit .287 with 28 homers and 84 RBIs in 1970, .279 with 26 homers and 86 RBIs in 1973 and .280 with 20 homers and 73 RBIs in 1974. He ended up playing until age 35 with Boston in 1978.

(Interestingly, the Pirates drafted Robert Bailey again in 1989; Bailey’s son, infielder Rob Bailey, went in the third round but never made it to the majors.)

Which brings us back to the Kan’t Miss Kid.

Obviously, no matter how much hype a player receives, how many teams scout him, how many writers rave about him, how many opposing players are impressed by him, a prospect is just a prospect until proven otherwise.

Bob Bailey, for the most part, proved the hype was undeserved, at least during his Pittsburgh days. The Pirates could have saved $150,000+ by scouting their own backyard and signing Bill Robinson.

Personally, I haven’t seen Konnor Griffin play. I can’t compare him to the Barry Bonds I saw in 1986, the Dave Parker I saw in 1973, the Willie Stargell I saw in the early 1960s.

And while I don’t necessarily see any red flags of “Warning, warning, warning” with him, I do see yellow flags waving “Caution, caution, caution.”

Griffin has a big swing, and that can translate into lots of strikeouts; he had 122 in 484 minor-league at-bats last season. And that was without seeing three different pitchers who can each throw 95 mph-plus in his final three at-bats each game, as he will in the majors.

According to Baseball America, only five position players have made it to the majors as a teenager in the past 21 years: Justin Upton, Mike Trout, Bryce Harper, Jurickson Profar and Juan Soto.

Also, Griffin looks to be extremely mature physically at age 19, which, while seeming to be a major plus, could be something to watch in the future.

Pirates first baseman Ryan Hearn recognized that maturity, telling Rosenthal that, “I don’t see a 19-year-old. He is a grown man. The way his body is, the way he moves …”

However, there’ve been plenty of studies that show athletes who reach physical maturity ahead of their peers often level off faster than those who develop later. (Some recent evidence: Mike Trout, who was far better as a player — and far healthier — in his early 20s than he’s been in his early 30s.)

(Another example, in the early 1990s, Berwick, Pa., High quarterback Ron Powlus was the top QB prospect in decades yet went on to have a relatively average career at Notre Dame despite being hyped early on as a likely Heisman Trophy winner. Statistically, he was much better as a college freshman than he was a senior. To me, it was partly because Powlus peaked physically in his teens and never developed much beyond that.)

By contrast, look at pictures of Willie Mays at age 19, he looks like he’s 19, a player who is far less mature than he was in his early 30s. Mays was an athlete who progressed physically until well into his 30s, which, of course, helped him play until age 42.

An Indiana University study in 2013 concluded that elite track athletes who mature quickly reap the benefits of that maturation early, then begin to be passed by athletes who mature later.

Whether Griffin falls into this class, we’ll only find out in the years to come. But for at least six years, he’ll be playing half of his games in PNC Park, which has one of the majors’ most spacious left fields (Coors Field in Denver is slightly longer, but PNC Park also isn’t a mile above sea level). And we already know how a deep left field affected can’t-miss Bob Bailey.

Again, I have no eyes-on knowledge about Griffin who, from all accounts, is a grounded, well-liked, mature and polite young athlete. He signs autographs, he gives interviews, he blends in well in the clubhouse. He’s the type of player fans root for, and hard.

But whether he and Paul Skenes are the stars who lift the Pirates out of a stretch of 10 consecutive losing seasons (and 30 losing seasons in the past 33 years), only Father Time will tell us. And time isn’t always on the side of star prospects once the clock starts ticking.

For now, Cooperstown can wait for Kan’t-Miss Konnor.

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Alan Robinson (who saw Dave Parker hit his first home run in 1973 and Barry Bonds hit his first Pittsburgh homer in 1986) can be reached at alanrobinson480@gmail.com. He can be found on Twitter @AlanRobinson480

Alan Robinson has been a sports writer since first writing a weekly column for his hometown weekly newspaper in Sistersville, W.Va. at age 15. After spending half a year during college as a part-time writer at the Parkersburg (W.Va.) News, he was hired fulltime at The Intelligencer in Wheeling, W.Va., at age 20. He spent nearly four years there before beginning a 35-year career as an Associated Press sports editor in Charleston, W.Va. (seven years) and Pittsburgh (28 years). He later was a Steelers beat writer/NFL columnist for the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review for three seasons, Following retirement, he covered the Pittsburgh Penguins and Arizona Coyotes for a combined eight seasons as an NHL.com correspondent and also wrote for the Canadian Press. He was chosen as The Associated Press worldwide sports writer of the year in 1986 and 2000 and has won multiple Associated Press Sports Editors national writing awards, including those for deadline writing and Story of the Year. Shortly after joining AP in 1975, he was selected by his peers as West Virginia Sports Writer of the Year in two of his first three years on the job there. Among his many assignments, he covered 10 Olympics, 12 Stanley Cup finals, eight NCAA basketball tournaments, five Super Bowls, the World Series, six National League championship series, three U.S. Opens and two Ryder Cups. He currently resides in Phoenix, where sports is always on at least one of his seven big-screen TVs.

The anniversary of the Day the Music Died —the 1959 Iowa plane crash that killed rock ’n’ roll stars Buddy Holly, Ritchie Valens and JP Richardson, the “Big Bopper” —was observed only last week, but February isn’t always a month of tragedy in the music world.

You can argue that February 9, 1964 — or 62 years ago Monday — should be known as the Day the Music was Reborn.

The Beatles made their first appearance on the Ed Sullivan TV show on CBS TV. Nothing about music or American culture has been the same since. Nothing.

Certainly, Elvis Presley already was the King, but the Beatles were something entirely different. They were a tightly knit group that played their own instruments and (largely) wrote their own material, which was virtually unheard of at the time. Buddy Holly and the Crickets originated the two guitar-bass-drums rock group, but the Beatles took it to a new level. The week before they debuted in the Hot 100, there were three records by rock groups on the charts (“Louie, Louie,” “Surfin’ Bird” and “Hey Little Cobra.” ) By early April, there were 18.

The Beatles became the first group capable of selling out arenas (and, in 1965, an entire stadium) by themselves. For the next six-plus years, they had the No. 1 single in Billboard an average of once every six weeks and the No. 1 album an average of once every three weeks. Beatlemania launched the British Invasion and influenced culture like no performers before or since (and virtually wiped out the crew cut for American male teens). And they sold more records than any group ever.

Yeah! Yeah! Yeah!

Here are some myths and mysteries about that groundbreaking Beatles performance on the Ed Sullivan Show (8 p.m. Eastern every Sunday night on CBS!) and their first visit to America (hopefully, some of which you may not know):

1. The Beatles had never been seen before on US television. FALSE. They appeared in extended segments on NBC and CBS (in fact, a CBS evening news report was originally scheduled on Nov. 22, 1963, but was pre-empted by the JFK assassination and shown later). Jack Paar also featured them on the Tonight Show several weeks before the Sullivan show.

2. Former Vice President Richard Nixon saw one of the news segments and barred his daughters from listening to “that noise.” Again, FALSE. In fact, Tricia and Julie Nixon were among the lucky 728 spectators in what’s now known as the Ed Sullivan Theater that night, invited by Randy Paar (Jack’s daughter).

Only 728 lucky fans held one of these tickets on Feb. 9, 1964

3. An estimated 73-80 million people watched, the largest TV audience ever to that date. TRUE! Amazingly, more than 40 percent of the people living in the US at the time watched a group virtually no one had heard of six weeks before. And almost the same number tuned in to Sullivan the following week to see them again. They were nothing like American teens had ever heard or seen before.

4. The Beatles had never performed before in the United States. FALSE — with an asterisk. Paul McCartney, John Lennon and Ringo Starr traveled to the US for the first time that weekend. But five months before, George Harrison visited his sister, Louise, in Illinois and played with a group called the Four Vests in a VFW club in El Dorado, Ill. on Sept. 16, 1963 (his sister asked if George could sit in). They played mostly Hank Williams tunes. He also did his first American interview. There are several historical markers in the area marking the occasion.

5. John Lennon’s Rickenbacker 325 was so battered and bruised by more than 1,000 shows/concerts the previous three years, a company executive was horrified when he watched the show. TRUE! Rickenbacker, elated that Lennon and Harrison used their guitars, gifted Lennon with a new 325 he began using the following week and continued playing the rest of his career.

6. The Beatles’ Sullivan performance immediately elevated their first single on Capitol, “I Want to Hold Your Hand,” to No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100. FALSE. “I Want to Hold Your Hand” actually hit No. 1 the week before on Feb. 1, and stayed there for seven weeks, to be replaced by “She Loves You.”

7. Ed Sullivan booked the Beatles after personally watching them being mobbed by fans at London’s Heathrow Airport on October. 31, 1963. This appears to be a longstanding FALSEHOOD perpetuated by Sullivan himself. Sullivan had just been in London in September and rarely left New York when his new TV shows were airing weekly. Also, he wrote a popular twice-weekly newspaper column in New York, and he never mentioned being in London at that time or seeing the Beatles. (He wrote a news/gossip column. Of course he would have mentioned such a sighting.) In reality, the Beatles’ manager, Brian Epstein, booked the appearances himself while visiting New York in early November.

8. That night, The Beatles became an unrivaled cultural phenomenon that continues to this day. TRUE. That very first U.S. TV appearance was so impactful, performers such as Billy Joel, Ann and Nancy Wilson of Heart, Tom Petty and Bruce Springsteen said it inspired them to begin their careers that very night. And record companies scrambled to sign other British acts: the Dave Clark Five, the Kinks, Freddie and the Dreamers, Gerry and the Pacemakers, the Animals, the Who, the Zombies, Herman’s Hermits (who still perform!) and, oh yes, a group called the Rolling Stones. No wonder stereo was becoming so popular … one speaker couldn’t hold all this sound.

9. The Monkees also appeared on the Sullivan show that night. TRUE (can you believe it) - sort of. The made-for-TV Monkees didn’t debut until September 1966, but singer Davy Jones performed that night with the cast of the Broadway show “Oliver!” singing “I’d Do Anything.”

10. The Beatles weren’t heard on American radio until Washington, D.C. station WWDC answered a listener’s request by playing an advance copy of “I Want to Hold Your Hand” on Dec. 17, 1963. FALSE. WWDC has maintained this myth for decades, but it’s absolutely untrue. “Please Please Me” by “The Beattles” (sic) on Vee Jay Records reached the top 40 on Chicago station WLS on March 8 and 15, 1963 (DJ Dick Biondi claims to be the first to play it) before dropping off. Stations in San Bernardino, Calif., Miami, Houston and San Francisco also played “Please, Please Me” that spring. So did station WFRX in Illinois when Harrison visited. (Also, “I Want to Hold Your Hand” was already charting on two Buffalo radio stations in late December, when WWDC claims to have debuted it.)

The Beatles (or as they were incorrectly spelled on this early release, “The Beattles”) were first heard on American radio on WLS in Chicago in late Feb./March 1963 - nearly a year before they appeared on Sullivan! Dick Biondi was the first DJ to foresee the Beatles’ stardom. (WLS Radio)

11. That live Feb. 9 Sunday night show was their first on an American stage. Technically, FALSE. Earlier in the day, they taped three songs that were shown on the Sullivan show on Feb. 23, 1964, the third of their three straight Sunday night appearances. Their Feb. 16 appearance was shown live from Miami.

12. They never appeared on a Sullivan show after February 1964. FALSE. They played six songs on the Sept. 12, 1965 show, an appearance taped on Aug. 14, 1965, the day before they launched a U.S. concert tour.

13. Their very first American concert was the following night in Carnegie Hall, a show booked before they signed to perform on Sullivan. FALSE. They appeared at Carnegie Hall three nights later on February 12, 1964 for two 35-minute shows (the second starting at 11:15 p.m. on a Wednesday night). But their first concert was the night before that, Tuesday, Feb. 11, at the Washington, D.C. Coliseum (that show can be seen on YouTube), or two nights after the Sullivan show.

14. Capitol Records refused to release any Beatles records in the US until late 1963, despite the fact they already had million-sellers in England. TRUE! Capitol already had the Beach Boys, which they felt was plenty good enough for the teen market, and they declined to release any Beatles records despite owning the rights to them through their EMI affiliate. As a result, when the Beatles owned the top five spots in the Billboard Top 100 in April 1964, they were on four different record labels with songs previously released in England.

15. The Empire State Building was the first sight the Beatles wanted to visit in America. FALSE. They wanted to see the famous Apollo Theater in Harlem, the home of so many of the Black American artists they admired. They drove by it on Feb. 8 (minus George, who was ill) and ate barbeque with Ronnie Spector of the Ronettes at Sherman’s Barbeque.

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Alan Robinson may be reached at alanrobinson480@gmail.com

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Alan Robinson has been a sports writer since first writing a weekly column for his hometown weekly newspaper in Sistersville, W.Va. at age 15. After spending half a year during college as a part-time writer at the Parkersburg (W.Va.) News, he was hired fulltime at The Intelligencer in Wheeling, W.Va., at age 20. He spent nearly four years there before beginning a 35-year career as an Associated Press sports editor in Charleston, W.Va. (seven years) and Pittsburgh (28 years). He later was a Steelers beat writer/NFL columnist for the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review for three seasons, Following retirement, he covered the Pittsburgh Penguins and Arizona Coyotes for a combined eight seasons as an NHL.com correspondent and also wrote for the Canadian Press. He was chosen as The Associated Press worldwide sports writer of the year in 1986 and 2000 and has won multiple Associated Press Sports Editors national writing awards, including those for deadline writing and Story of the Year. Immediately after joining AP in 1975, he was selected by his peers as West Virginia Sports Writer of the Year in two of his first three years on the job there. Among his many assignments, he covered 10 Olympics, 12 Stanley Cup finals, eight NCAA basketball tournaments, two Ryder Cups and five Super Bowls, He currently resides in Phoenix, where sports is always on at least one of his seven big-screen TVs.

So you’re watching the snow and the skiers flying in Milan/Cortina or eagerly awaiting “Quad God” Ilia Malinin’s free skate at the figure skating rink. Or you’re still mesmerized by Usain Bolt’s insane domination of the sprints at three different summer Olympics.

And you can’t stop thinking, “Man, I’d love to go to an Olympics!”

As someone who worked 10 Olympics (six winter, four summer), all I can say is, “Good luck! Bring money! And be careful what you wish for!” Attending an Olympics can be a rewarding, once-in-a-lifetime experience, but it will require patience, lots of planning, some improvisational skill and, yes, some very deep pockets.

But if you’re really, really determined to make it happen, to see the Olympics up close and in real life at least once in your life, and not just on your 4K OLED TV, your best bet will be the 2028 Summer Olympics in Los Angeles. U.S. citizens won’t need a passport or international airline reservations; you might even be able to drive there. And there will be available housing in hotel-laden southern California even after all the Olympic officials and athletes and media are accommodated.

The 2030 winter Olympics (French Alps) and 2032 summer Olympics (Brisbane) are international, so the next U.S.-based Games after LA won’t be until the 2034 Winter Olympics in Salt Lake City.

These Winter Olympics are only ramping up now in Italy, but you’d better not procrastinate if you want guaranteed seats to the Los Angeles Games. Registration for the ticket draw has already begun and tickets will go on sale in April — yes, more than two years before events actually take place.

https://la28.org/en/ticketing.html

Can you attend those Olympics even if you don’t buy tickets this year? Or next year? Of course. But that’s where things get tricky and will require relying upon secondary seat resellers or scalpers. Or simply walking around outside a venue with two fingers held up, representing “I need two!”

While you’re making up your mind, I’ll give you two Olympic perspectives; one I’ve lived and the other I’ve observed.

The Olympics as a Journalist

See the Olympic credentials below? Trust me, you don’t leave home without them. For two-plus weeks, they’ll be around your neck at all hours except when you’re sleeping; you can’t go anywhere near the Olympic zone without one. They’re your official hall pass to the Olympics, but obtaining one requires a process that begins more than a year out from the Games.

Your news organization (having selected you to work the Olympics) will submit a formal application with your name and those of your colleagues to the International Olympic Committee, along with your photo and background information. If you’re working for a known commodity (the New York Times, TV rights holder NBC, ESPN, etc.) the credentialing will be routine. But if you’re trying to obtain a credential as the sole representative of an online blog with 40 subscribers, you’ll likely be out of luck; all the major media outlets from around the world will be attending, and they’ll be prioritized. (Sorry, Miami Slalom Skiing Weekly, you’ll need to cover from TV back home.)

You’ll be told well in advance by your employer what you’ll be covering, in order to give you plenty of preparation time. For sports that don’t get much media coverage outside of Olympic years (weightlifting, ski jumping, handball, etc.), you might be assigned to cover the Olympic trials in that sport to get face time with the athletes in advance of the actual Games. (Trust me, if an athlete you’re assigned to cover somehow becomes a surprise medalist, having a prior relationship can be invaluable.)

If you work for a newspaper, you’ll also arrange interviews in advance with all the athletes from your outlet’s circulation area that you’ll be covering in person. (Unfortunately, the number of U.S. papers covering the Olympics in person is declining precipitously as readers shift their attention to on-line news sites, TikTok videos, YouTube and SnapChat.)

Your employer will book your flights and arrange your accommodations, often in the Media Village. These can range from the wonderful (a wooden ski lodge in Hamar, Norway with fireplaces, private rooms and a lounge; a private apartment in Beijing with cable TV, spacious bedroom and private bath) to the third-world (a concrete tenement with dreadful metal beds and a tiny bathroom with an open shower in Turin, Italy). If you’re lucky (and this often depends on the events you’re covering), you might even end up with the biggest prize of all: A private hotel room across the street from your venue (Yay, Sydney!)

Once you land in the Olympic city, you’ll find the Olympic Family check-in zone, where your identification will be checked and you’ll be whisked off to the Main Press Center (the MPC, you’ll get to know it well), where you’ll obtain that coveted Olympic pass and, most likely, meet up with your bosses.

The MPC contains large open working spaces for writers, press conference rooms, individual work rooms for major news organizations (AP, Agence France-Presse, Reuters, New York Times, etc.) and, in the past, darkrooms for photographers. Broadcasters from around the world will be based in a separate Main Broadcast Center.

Each event venue will also have its own media work area, especially since some events take place multiple hours/miles away from the main press center in the hub city. (At some Olympics, I never saw the Main Press Center again until checking out at the end of the Games.)

If you’re working an Olympics, that’s what you’ll be doing most days: working..

Whenever I’d return home from an Olympics, neighbors/friends would often ask: Did you see the ice skating finals? The track finals? The Opening Ceremonies? The ski jumping? And my answer was invariably the same: No, no, no and no. And what did I see? Generally: 1) My venue; 2) Olympic transportation and 3) My bed

Most Olympics, I was assigned to cover a specific sport, and that’s what I covered every day; on non-event days, there were feature stories to write and news conferences to attend. I rarely had enough free hours to drop in on another sport (though I acknowledge using my all-access media pass to attend the infamous Nancy Kerrigan-Tonya Harding skating showdown in Norway in 1994, the last sporting event with a higher TV rating in the U.S. than the Super Bowl.)

I remember one exhausted newspaper colleague whose editor back home in the States had no concept whatsoever of how far apart Olympic events can be. He was assigned to cover an Alpine skiing event in the morning (which required a two-hour bus ride each way from the Main Press Center) and a hockey game in the evening (which required two additional 90-minute bus rides). His work day started at 6 a.m., entailed writing multiple stories amid all that traveling and ended at 2 a.m. —and not that was not untypical.

There are injuries among “journos,” too. There was so much ice at the Lillehammer Games in 1994, several HUNDRED media members fell and broke bones.

Olympic speed skating gold medalist Bonnie Blair said: “I heard there were more broken bones by non-athletes in Lillehammer than at any other Olympic Games because people were wiping out on the ice. It really was a Winter Olympics.”

My longest day came in Sydney in 2000. I needed three plane rides and 27 hours to get there, arriving at 8:30 a.m. — too early to check into my hotel room. I spent the ensuing 16 hours riding on buses and trains for five hours, checking in at the MPC, meeting with colleagues and writing multiple stories off a nighttime event in a suburban city 45 minutes away from Sydney before finally getting to bed at 12:30 a.m. Yawn!

One upside for journalists is the Olympics are about the last major sporting event where the primary media get excellent seats.

For example, I was 10 rows off the ice when the Penguins’ Sidney Crosby scored his Golden Goal for Canada in the 2010 Winter Games against the U.S. in Vancouver. And I was seated immediately behind Australian Prime Minister John Howard and former U.S. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger when American Rulon Gardner staged his Miracle on the Mat heavyweight wrestling upset of supposedly unbeatable Russian giant Alexander Karelin in Sydney in 2000.

And transportation? There were media buses to every event and every venue, utilizing traffic lanes blocked off entirely for Olympic traffic.

Once an event ends, those working for primary media outlets can get quickie interviews in what’s called the Mixed Zone — a roped-off area leading to the dressing rooms— before athletes are whisked off to drug testing. The main news conference with coaches and athletes take place after testing and are translated into English and French and the host country’s language.

One of the mixed zone interviews I most remember was in Nagano, Japan, in 1998, when former Penguins star Jaromir Jagr was overjoyed at winning the gold medal for the Czech Republic against Russia. Remember, Jagr wore No. 68 to honor his grandfather, who was among those opposing the Soviet takeover of Czechoslovakia in 1968.

However, one-on-one interviews otherwise are rare since even off-day availabilities are staged primarily in a news conference setting.

The Olympics are considered a dream assignment for journalists, but the workload is heavy, the travel can be wearisome and the lack of access to gain inside information can be daunting. And dinner sometimes is a slice of pizza from a concession stand.

(A time-worn tale is an elderly journalist, weary at the end of a long Olympics, was approached by a spectator and offered $500 for his credential. The writer paused momentarily before replying, “Sure, but you’ll owe me a main story and a sidebar filed within 90 minutes, and here’s where to send!”)

Oh, and you want an Olympics horror travel story? Sometimes it can be considerably harder to leave the Games than it was to get there.

Take Salt Lake City in 2002, for example, a mid-sized American airport overwhelmed by an estimated 70,000 journalists, Olympians, officials, dignitaries and fans all trying to get away on the Monday after the Games.

Because there were so few check-in lines (this wasn’t O’Hare or Atlanta Hartsfield, remember), we were warned to get to the airport at least FIVE hours before our flights. For many, it wasn’t nearly time enough.

I boarded an Olympic bus six hours before my flight with a colleague from Los Angeles who didn’t think it would be as bad as advertised; his flight left in two hours! As our bus approached Salt Lake International, we could see the line to the main terminal was staggeringly long, winding its way out the front doors, down a street, around a corner and stretching a good four blocks beyond that. It was incomprehensible how long the line was.

But as drove around the main terminal, I spotted the international terminal far, far off in the distance. And I had an idea once we were dropped off.

Toting multiple bags between us, colleague Ken and I trudged the mile or so to the international terminal. Amazingly, only one person — not thousands, but ONE PERSON — was ahead of us. We cleared security in 30 seconds, checked our bags and headed off to the domestic terminal, in total shock of how easily we pulled that off. Ken made his flight to LA with a half hour to spare, armed with a story he told at parties for years to come. But not before we ran into another co-worker who, crying and disconsolate. told us she’d arrived 5 1/2 hours in advance, still missed her flight and was told she couldn’t fly out until a day later.

That day, I felt like a gold medalist.

OLYMPICS AS A SPECTATOR

Unfortunately for you, the fan, you probably won’t have a company travel agent to book your flights, arrange your hotel or secure your all-event pass to the Olympics (such a pass doesn’t exist, by the way). Then again, you won’t have to do a TV standup on a mountaintop six hours after an event has ended or file a main story and a sidebar and a set-up piece on the next day’s events to an editor back in the U.S. who wanted your copy an hour ago.

There are two ways to approach attending an Olympics: 1) The diligent, disciplined way or 2) The backpacker’s, throw-all-caution to the wind way. I’m not recommending one or the other.

The organized approach is to set a budget and determine in advance what events you absolutely must see. (And be careful not to try to cram too much into one day; travel between venues at an Olympics can take hours on a bus.) Line up your tickets after they go on sale in April so you’re absolutely assured of having them in two years.

Remember: the more elite an event is, the more it will cost. Just like buying a Dodgers ticket for a World Series game will cost hundreds more than for an April game against the Reds.

Los Angeles Games organizers promise one-third of all event tickets will cost less than $100. But that might mean seeing the U.S. basketball team in a preliminary game against South Sudan instead of a semifinal game against France. Or watching an early round volleyball game instead of the finals. And maybe instead of swimming, you’ll go to boxing or handball.

If you want to see a lot of events at a manageable price point, the best time to go is early in the Games before the gold-medal events begin, when tickets are more affordable and are easier to obtain.

(Another hint: Closing ceremonies tickets are always easier to obtain and cost less than opening ceremonies tickets, in part because many athletes and spectators have already gone home by then.)

Wherever you find housing, you’ll want to make sure before the Games begin you’re not too far away from spectator buses to the venues. Due to the strict security inside the Olympic zone, driving anywhere close to an event can be extremely difficult if not impossible.

https://la28.org/content/dam/latwentyeight/games-plan/maps/LA28OlympicGamesMap.pdf

The back packer’s approach, of course, is more seat of the pants. You gamble on finding hotel space once you get to Los Angeles instead of booking it months out. And you don’t buy tickets in advance, instead hoping ticket prices on SeatGeek or TickPick or Stubhub or GameTime will drop close to event time. Or by waiting until just before an event and hoping someone is dumping tickets at a bargain price outside the venue. (I’m not advocating that since scalping is enforced differently at every Games.) I have seen tickets for significant events drop considerably in price just before gametime since Olympic tickets allocated to the various country Olympic committees and sponsors sometimes end up on the secondary market.

Olympic venues typically are smaller than those in professional sports in the U.S. (I’ve seen multiple Olympic hockey games in 6,000-seat venues) though that won’t necessarily be the case in Los Angeles. Swimming, for example, will be at SoFi Stadium, the home of the Rams and Chargers. Basketball will be at the Intuit Dome, home of the LA Clippers; baseball at Dodger Stadium, track and field will be at Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum, where USC football plays.

And want to see softball? You’ll need to go to Oklahoma City.

Don’t get discouraged, however. The sheer volume of sports at a Summer Olympics (35 sports) compared to a Winter Olympics (eight sports) means there are far more events to attend, far more tickets to buy and a much better chance you’ll find something you can afford, regardless of your price point. (Again, organizers say some tickets will cost as little as $28.)

There are other benefits to attending an Olympics, too; the opportunity to talk to people from around the world and see sports and athletes you mostly cannot see at any other time.

TIPS TO WATCHING THE MILAN/CORTINA OLYMPICS

One advantage to covering an Olympics is that venue media seats and housing units are equipped with TVs showing every other sport going on at that time. The Olympic world feed, relied up by broadcasters from every country, broadcasts events from start to finish with no commercials.

Until a few years ago, there was no way in the United States to see such TV coverage; NBC, for example, wouldn’t show the figure skating finals until its prime time evening show, sometimes 12 hours after the event ended, and always with countless commercial breaks.

Now, recognizing everyone with a smart phone or a computer can get results the instant an event takes place, NBC now shows all events live on its Peacock streaming service. In some instances, especially in non-marquee sports, Peacock shows the no-commercial world feed.

If you don’t already have Peacock, it costs only $7.99 a month, and it’s certainly worth it to watch the scores of events that aren’t shown live on NBC or the USA Network. And you can always cancel Peacock after the Games end and owe only the $7.99.

It’s the one Olympic bargain!

Any questions. You can email me at: alanrobinson480@gmail.com

Alan Robinson has been a sports writer since first writing a weekly column for his hometown weekly newspaper in Sistersville, W.Va. at age 15. After spending half a year during college as a part-time writer at the Parkersburg (W.Va.) News, he was hired fulltime at The Intelligencer in Wheeling, W.Va., at age 20. He spent nearly four years there before beginning a 35-year career as an Associated Press sports editor in Charleston, W.Va. (seven years) and Pittsburgh (28 years). He later was a Steelers beat writer/NFL columnist for the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review for three seasons, Following retirement, he covered the Pittsburgh Penguins and Arizona Coyotes for a combined eight seasons as an NHL.com correspondent and also wrote for the Canadian Press. He was chosen as The Associated Press worldwide sports writer of the year in 1986 and 2000 and has won multiple Associated Press Sports Editors national writing awards, including those for deadline writing and Story of the Year. Shortly after joining AP in 1975, he was selected by his peers as West Virginia Sports Writer of the Year in two of his first three years on the job there. Among his many assignments, he covered 10 Olympics, 12 Stanley Cup finals, eight NCAA basketball tournaments, five Super Bowls, the World Series, six National League championship series, three U.S. Opens and two Ryder Cups. He currently resides in Phoenix, where sports is always on at least one of his seven big-screen TVs.

Take the points, or take the risk.

Make the wrong decision, and very likely — as an NFL coach in one of the biggest games of the season — you’ll take the loss.

With an estimated 150 million viewers expected to watch the upcoming Seahawks-Patriots Super Bowl, the most debated and divisive strategical call on Super Sunday could very well be whether to gamble and go for it on fourth down.

After all, almost no other coaching decision has so much riding on it. Go for an almost-certain field goal on a fourth-and-short yardage situation, and the reward is three points — but the potential loss is even greater, four points and the momentum generated by a touchdown.

Sean Payton of the Denver Broncos and Sean McVay of the Los Angeles Rams each gambled on fourth down in the conference championship games — and, partly as a result, each will be sitting at home when the Super Bowl is played Feb. 8 in Santa Clara.

Payton passed up a short field goal attempt on fourth-and-2 from the 21-yard line that would have given the Broncos a 10-0 lead over the Patriots in the AFC Championship game. Payton wanted the seven points, certain that a 14-0 lead would be difficult to overcome in a defensive struggle. But the Patriots held and, as a near blizzard developed in the second half, the Broncos never scored again in their 10-7 loss.

The Rams had a fourth-and-6 at the Seahawks 6-yard line with about five minutes to go and Seattle up 31-27 in the NFC Championship game. Instead of kicking a field goal to get to within one point, McVay went for the lead and quarterback Matthew Stafford threw incomplete. Los Angeles didn’t get the ball back until 25 seconds remained.

Both Payton and McVay were widely criticized for their aggressiveness, the kind you wouldn’t have seen in the 1960s, 1970s or 1980s, when coaches were conservative almost to a fault.

Steelers coach Chuck Noll for example, refused to gamble on fourth-and-goal from the 1-yard line in a 1972 playoff game against the Raiders and settled for an 18-yard field goal, and another short-range kick shortly thereafter. But when the Raiders took a 7-6 lead in the final minute, the Steelers needed the most miraculous play in NFL history, Franco Harris’ famous Immaculate Reception, to survive and win.

And while gambling on fourth down is often viewed as a recent phenomenon — NFL teams go for it nearly twice as often as they did 10 years ago, thanks to coaches such as Dan Campbell of the Detroit Lions — the shift in coaching strategy can be traced back nearly a quarter century ago.

The source? A University of California-Berkeley professor named David Romer, and a mathematical formula that’s way more complicated than E=mc2.

Want to take a crack at it? Here it is: EiDi(gt) Vi=Pgt + Bgt Ei Di(gt+1) Vi-egt

In essence, it’s this: 4+2 (fourth-and-two) = 7 (points) is much more preferable to 4+2 (fourth-and-two) = 3 (points).

And, oh yeah, former Pittsburgh Steelers coach Bill Cowher has a hand in this shift in strategy, too — and, believe it or not, so does a certain sports writer you’re reading right now.

A few nights ago, I was reading ESPN senior writer Seth Wickersham’s excellent piece deciphering Payton’s decision and this caught my eye:

“When to go for it on fourth-and-short and when to kick has become one of the most scrutinized and divisive calls in football, an easy sports talk debate, For most of professional football’s existence, it wasn’t even a decision. Coaches took the points. That began to change in 2002, when a renowned Cal-Berkeley economist named David Romer authored a paper called `It’s Fourth Down and What Does the Bellman Equation Say?’

“Using the Bellman Equation (see above), Romer’s conclusion was clear: the probabilities of what could happen after a successful conversion on fourth-or-4 or less outweighed kicking a field goal and, in some cases, punting and playing field position. Simply put, the math told coaches to be more aggressive.”

My role in this: Romer’s theory was introduced to a nationwide audience when I wrote a piece about it for The Associated Press’ NFL preseason package in August 2002. The story ended up running in scores of papers nationally, including multiple big-city papers. Some of the top NFL writers, including the great Sam Farmer in Los Angeles, subsequently wrote their own stories about it.

“My fellow economists are thrilled with this,” Romer told me. “I’ve been getting e-mails from people … and they’re completely convinced.”

Even if Cowher wasn’t initially. After I gave him a copy of the 42-page study, his conclusion was this: Interesting, but way too risky to apply on a consistent basis.

“Basically you have to recognize that you’re not doing everything by a sense of what the odds are,” Cowher said. “When you drive the length of the field you want to come away with points because, if you don’t, there’s a tremendous momentum you have to take into account.”

Curiously enough, however, as that 2002 season progressed, the Steelers went for it on fourth down 23 times, or nearly double their 12 attempts in 2001, and 22 times the following season. A coincidence? I like to think it wasn’t, especially when Cowher took several fourth-down gambles he would never have made the season before.

I reconnected with Romer in 2012, 10 years after he first authored his study and, while there had been a slow but steady uptick in fourth-down attempts from 2002-08, he felt coaches needed to gamble more.

“There’s a high payoff,” Romer said. “It’s an attractive gamble.”

However, there was a drop-off for a few seasons starting in 2010, and it’s pretty obvious why.

In a nationally televised 2009 game against the Colts, Patriots coach Bill Belichick went for it on fourth-and-2 from his own side of the 50 against the Colts. The gambled failed, and quarterback Peyton Manning — given a short field to navigate — drove the Colts to the winning score.

But despite that temporary falloff, the momentum shifted again and, by 2024, teams went for it on fourth down more than twice as often as they did 15 seasons before. In 2017, for example, teams gambled on fourth-and-1 only 41 percent of the time; by 2024, that increased to 71 percent.

Philadelphia coach Doug Pederson helped fuel the uptick. He was extremely aggressive on fourth down during the Eagles’ Super Bowl-winning season in 2017 (going 3-for-3 during the playoffs), and the stats started spiking upwards league-wide the following season.

By this season, for example, there were 886 fourth-down tries, up from 476 only a decade ago. (In 2024, the ultra-aggressive Campbell’s Lions were a league-best 22-for-33 in fourth down conversions; during the entire decade of the 1980s, only one team, the 1984 Atlanta Falcons went for it as many as 30 times.)

Of course, there is a huge risk-reward factor involved with any fourth-down gamble. In the NFC championship game two years ago, the Lions twice turned the ball over on fourth down in the second half, aiding the winning San Francisco 49ers’ comeback from a two-touchdown deficit.

“I don’t regret the decisions,” Campbell said. “But I understand the scrutiny.”

Just as McVay and Payton did a week ago.

No doubt Romer, who remains a professor of political economy at Cal-Berkeley, is enthused by this embracing of a strategy he espoused more than two decades ago.

Just goes to show a student should read those boring college papers his professors give him. He might discover a winning formula for life.

Even if Cowher remained skeptical despite what seemed to be his own shifting attitude toward fourth-down calls.

“[If more coaches followed Romer’s thinking] there will be a lot more unemployed coaches looking for professors’ jobs,” Cowher said.

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Wanto to read Romer’s original paper? Here it is (updated several months later);

https://eml.berkeley.edu/~dromer/papers/nber9024.pdf

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Alan Robinson may be reached at alanrobinson480@gmail.com

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Alan Robinson has been a sports writer since first writing a weekly column for his hometown weekly newspaper in Sistersville, W.Va. at age 15. After spending half a year during college as a part-time writer at the Parkersburg (W.Va.) News, he was hired fulltime at The Intelligencer in Wheeling, W.Va., at age 20. He spent nearly four years there before beginning a 35-year career as an Associated Press sports editor in Charleston, W.Va. (seven years) and Pittsburgh (28 years). He later was a Steelers beat writer/NFL columnist for the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review for three seasons, Following retirement, he covered the Pittsburgh Penguins and Arizona Coyotes for a combined eight seasons as an NHL.com correspondent and also wrote for the Canadian Press. He was chosen as The Associated Press worldwide sports writer of the year in 1986 and 2000 and has won multiple Associated Press Sports Editors national writing awards, including those for deadline writing and Story of the Year. Shortly after joining AP in 1975, he was selected by his peers as West Virginia Sports Writer of the Year in two of his first three years on the job there. Among his many assignments, he covered 10 Olympics, 12 Stanley Cup finals, eight NCAA basketball tournaments, five Super Bowls, the World Series, six National League championship series, three U.S. Opens and two Ryder Cups. He currently resides in Phoenix, where sports is always on at least one of his seven big-screen TVs.

Allan Hornyak was a scoring machine, an unstoppable offensive force even on high school courts barren of three-point lines, one capable of outscoring entire teams by himself. Sometimes in a half. He still holds the national record for short-circuiting scoreboards.

Forty miles downstream on the opposite side of the Ohio River, Mike Carson was an offensive juggernaut, even in an era when dunks were banned — and he could dunk with minimal effort. An excellent shooter inside or outside and an intimidating defender, he collected rebounds as if they were as precious as $100 gold coins.

The Ohio Valley region centered in Wheeling, W.Va., has produced dozens of exceptional athletes — let’s start with John Havlicek, Bill Mazeroski, the Niekro brothers and Lou Groza — but rarely if ever has it turned out two basketball players as heavily recruited as Hornyak and Carson were in 1969.

Each was pursued by more than 100 major colleges, and nearly all of the big names. North Carolina, Ohio State, Alabama and Kansas were pushing hard for Hornyak. Kentucky, West Virginia and Southern Cal made it known they badly wanted Carson. And, most of all, UCLA wanted them both. Yes, the very Bruins who were in the midst of winning seven NCAA basketball championships in a row and nine in 10 seasons under the legendary Wizard of Westwood, coach John Wooden.

The word dynasty is often overstated in the world of sports, but in the 1960s and 1970s, the Bruins were a legitimate dynasty.

And the Bruins aggressively recruited Allan Hornyak and Mike Carson, despite having to travel 2,000-plus miles to do so.

Playing 40 miles apart along the Ohio River, Allan Hornyak and Mike Carson turned heads by combining for 4,654 points from 1965-69 … and by turning down the great UCLA

For Hornyak, the Bruins frequently sent him telegrams from whichever locale they were playing that night. For Carson, they had NBA Hall of Fame coach-general manager Red Auerbach write a detailed, personalized letter on fancy Boston Celtics stationery, extolling the virtues of playing under Wooden and collecting championships the way his Celtics did.

But, midway through their senior seasons, neither Hornyak nor Carson had made up their minds about college.

“He can write his own ticket,” said Sy Kolesza, Hornyak’s coach at Bellaire (Ohio) St. John’s High School, a Double-A school located five miles from Wheeling

Tom Cuppett, Carson’s coach at tiny Class A Sistersville (W.Va.) High School, said one Southern school coach swore to him that Carson would start his final three college seasons. Another invited Carson, his parents and his coach to hang out with TV star Bob Hope during a weekend on campus.

“We hear from multiple Top Twenty schools every day,” said Cuppett, who arrived in Sistersville before Carson’s freshman season ostensibly to coach football, only to have the school’s best-ever basketball prospect land in his lap. (He never coached football again, by the way.) “His recruiting mail is piling up in the corner of my office, too; it’s about three feet deep currently.”

The reasons for the recruiting wars were obvious.

The 6-foot-1 Hornyak was the Ohio high school counterpart of college basketball’s ace scorer at the time, Pistol Pete Maravich of LSU, albeit without all the showmanship and I-must-take-every-shot mentality. A long-range shooter later nicknamed the Bellaire Bomber, he averaged an incredible, state-leading 42.7 points per game as a junior — and, as we remind you, without the 3-point shot. He averaged 41.95 as a senior on a 20-2 team.

(Let’s slip in an editorial comment here: If there had been a 3-point line at the time, Hornyak would have averaged 50 points per game his junior and senior seasons, which would have been a national record at the time.)

On January 10, 1969, Hornyak upped the ante even more for the schools pursuing him: He scored 86 points — EIGHTY-SIX — in a 123-63 victory against nearby Warren Consolidated High School (Mazeroski’s alma mater), a quality opponent that came in with a 7-1 record.

Bellaire Bomber, indeed; Hornyak made 40 of 65 shots, including 22 of 33 in a 46-point first half, then scored 40 more in the second half — crediting teammates for passing up shots to get the ball to him. He was 6 of 11 from the foul line, but missed the front half of four 1-and-1s that, if made, would have pushed his total to nearly 90.

Afterwards, he went to an Elby’s Big Boy to get a sandwich with his girlfriend, woke up the next morning and jumped in a whirlpool to alleviate some soreness, then scored 61 — SIXTY-ONE —points that night against arch-rival Bellaire High. That’s 142 points in a span of about 26 hours. Again, the total could have been much higher; he was only 19-of-29 from the foul line against Bellaire.

At this point of the season, Hornyak probably was leaning towards signing with UCLA, and it’s no wonder. At the time, just about every high school basketball player in the country wanted to be recruited by the Bruins, despite the fact coast-to-coast recruiting at the time wasn’t nearly as extensive as it is today.

Hornyak was tempted by the sun and beaches of southern California and the talent that practiced every day inside Pauley Pavilion. He’d even been told on the sly that, while mega-talent center Lew Alcindor (who later changed his named to Kareem Abdul-Jabbar) was about to graduate, the Bruins had a potentially even better replacement lined up. (And they weren’t wrong; Bill Walton signed with UCLA a year later.)

Hornyak admittedly was enamored with UCLA, even to the point of being able to name all the starters and backups.

Carson wasn’t as embedded in UCLA lore as Hornyak was, but he was the envy of nearly every West Virginia high school player: He was being recruited by UCLA and Kentucky (with Bruins chief assistant coach Gary Cunningham in charge of landing him, as he was with Hornyak).

Cunningham certainly had a lot to offer. UCLA won the national championship in 1964 and 1965 before missing the NCAA tournament in 1966, but then began a string of seven consecutive national championships from 1967-73. During the time that Hornyak and Carson would have been eligible (freshmen couldn’t play varsity at the time), the Bruins were 89-1 with three national titles. The Bruins were upset by North Carolina State in overtime in the 1974 Final Four, but rebounded to win again in 1975.

No wonder everyone wanted to go to UCLA back then. Well, almost everybody.

Carson was listed at 6-foot-8 (he would be measured in college at 6-7) and while he wasn’t as prolific a scorer as Hornyak was, he was more dominating as a rebounder (averaging 20 per game as a junior and senior) and a defender. And unlike many inside players of the day, he could score beyond the blocks; as a junior, he was 21-for-21 from the foul line in a game against Parkersburg Catholic amid a streak of 33 in a row over multiple games.

Carson averaged 31 points as a junior on a 20-4 team and 29.95 as a senior on a 22-3 team that was ranked as high as No. 5 statewide in the UPI all-classes poll. He didn’t have an 86-point game like Hornyak did, but also had a 61-point game (against Wirt County, the same team he’d scored 54 against as a sophomore).

(Sistersville, a Class A school in a town of about 2,000, or 5,000 fewer than Bellaire’s population, repeatedly picked on poor Wirt County in basketball. Eight years after Carson’s 61-point outburst, Sistersville shooting guard Richard Summers scored a school-record 74 against Wirt to cap his senior season.)

Hornyak and Carson each received national attention and made multiple All-America teams; Hornyak was chosen for the Roundball Classic in Pittsburgh, the only national all-star game at the time, but passed it up in order to preserve his baseball season eligibility. (A three-sport star, he made the All-Ohio Valley Athletic Conference football team as a quarterback.) Hornyak ended his career with 2,385 points against incrementally better competition that Carson faced; Carson, who benefitted from starting most of four seasons, had 2,269 points.

Hornyak wrestled with his college decision, telling Newspaper Enterprise Association, “I wonder if I’ll look back and say, `Gee, if I had gone here or maybe there, this wouldn’t have happened. Why did I pick this school in the first place? More than anything else, the thought of a wrong decision scares me the most.’ ”

Now, looking back a half-century later, Hornyak almost certainly made the right choice. While UCLA seemed to be the front-runner, and he almost chose the Bruins, Hornyak ultimately chose to stay close to home and picked Ohio State, which was only a two-hour drive away in Columbus.

Hornyak was a big hit as a Buckeye, leading the team in scoring in 1970-71 (22.5 points per game), 1971-72 (21.6) and 1972-73 (24.0) while making All-Big Ten all three seasons and finishing with 1,572 points.. He was a second-team UPI All-American in 1972 and third-team in 1973. He was drafted by the Cleveland Cavaliers (NBA) and Indiana Pacers (ABA) but, no doubt hurt by his lack of size, never played a game in the NBA despite having a strong training camp with the Cavs in 1973.

A basketball junkie for sure, Hornyak kept playing for years in various summer leagues and a thriving independent circuit in Ohio, Pennsylvania and West Virginia (sometimes playing on the very Sistersville court where Carson played). After his senior season, for example, he played in an East-West all-star game in Dayton on April 1, 1973, then flew back to Wheeling to play in an independent tournament that night and the next afternoon — then immediately flew to Philadelphia for another college all-star game. The day after that, he went to Hawaii for a three-day tournament.

“I learned a lot of basketball off [Ohio State] coach Fred Taylor,” Hornyak told the late Bill Van Horne, the esteemed sports editor of the Wheeling News-Register. “He really disciplined my game. I’ll admit that I like to play run and gun basketball, but playing for coach Taylor strengthened my game where it needed it the most. No matter what offense we play, I have confidence I can get open for shots.”

Hornyak, by the way, did get to play in Pauley Pavilion, but it wasn’t one of his college highlights. He was held to 10 points as then-No. 1 UCLA beat then-No. 6 Ohio State 79-53 on Dec. 30, 1971; he had four shots blocked by the great Bill Walton and went 0-for-8 in the first half while being guarded by future NBA guard Henry Bibby. UCLA would go on to finish 30-0 that season. (That first half, by the way, can be found on YouTube.)

(Another personal aside: I still think Hornyak could have made an impact in the NBA given the right team and right coach. He was the purest shooter the Ohio Valley ever produced and a natural scorer, and would have thrived shooting behind the NBA three-point line. To me, he’s the greatest high school basketball player in Ohio Valley history; others have had great pro careers (Havlicek, for one), but in high school ball, nobody was better than Hornyak. It’s almost non-debatable.

Mike Carson, unfortunately, ended up with neither the right school nor the right coach. He visited Kentucky and was very impressed, especially by legendary coach Adolph Rupp. But a Valley Boy through and through just like Hornyak, he also chose his home-state university, West Virginia, after being recruited heavily by then-Mountaineers coach Bucky Waters.

“I’ve always wanted to attend WVU,” Carson said the night he signed his letter of intent. “It just has a certain air about it.”

Waters, however, took off abruptly for Duke in March 1969. Carson by then had pretty much decided on West Virginia and didn’t change his mind even after the Mountaineers, rather than searching nationally for a replacement, unwisely elevated assistant coach Sonny Moran to replace Waters.

It was the wrong call. Moran was a small college coach at the major college level and it showed with records of 11-15, 13-12, 13-11, 10-15 and 10-15. (The Mountaineers, by the way, also missed on their next hire, Joedy Gardner, but got it right with the next three: Gale Catlett, John Beilein and Bob Huggins.

Carson was hurt by the quality of coaching at WVU — he would have gotten A-level coaching at Kentucky, a staff that included Catlett at the time — and the transition from playing on Sistersville’s 60-foot floor to the 94-foot major college court. But he was VERY coachable, and very well could have blossomed in a program with upper-tier coaching.

Carson averaged 11 points on the freshman team before red-shirting the following season. In 1971-72, he lettered as the top front line backup in what was a tragic season for the team. Standout forward Larry Harris was declared ineligible at midseason and then died shortly thereafter in a car accident that also badly injured starting forward Sam Oglesby, who was averaging 14 points per game but never played again.

The following season, Carson badly injured an ankle, an injury that effectively ended a career that was disappointing in its results but certainly didn’t adversely affect the even-tempered, patient and unassuming person he was.

After that, Carson was content to play summer league and independent basketball, sometimes in the same tournaments Hornyak played in. He married Anna Flesher Carson, the love of his life, and raised two sons that remain his pride and joy — well, along with his four grandkids. And his beloved hunting, of course; he never left his native Tyler County, and why should he? It was home.

What did Mike Carson miss out on by passing up Kentucky? Records of 26-2, 22-6, 21-7 and 20-8, with three teams reaching the Elite 8 and another making the Sweet 16. He would have been in elite company, too; three of his would-be teammates were Parade All-Americans and three were drafted by NBA teams; 6-foot-11 center Jim Andrews was a first-team UPI All-American.

At UCLA, Wooden, who often preferred to stay on campus to recruit, was disappointed at missing out on multiple prospects in 1969, most notably Hornyak, Carson and 6-10 Mike Fink of Redding, Calif., and took to the road to personally recruit two high school All-Americans, Tommy Curtis of Tallahassee, Fla., and Larry Farmer of Denver. (Farmer averaged 12 points per game as a Bruin senior, Curtis averaged 8.)

Not that the Bruins were lacking in talent. Hornyak and Carson potentially could have played alongside Curtis Rowe, Sidney Wicks, Henry Bibby, John Vallely, Keith “Silk” Wilkes, Swen Nater, Greg Lee and, oh yes, Walton. All played in the NBA; Walton retired as one of the game’s all-time greats.

“If I had to do it all over again, I wouldn’t go to WVU,” Carson told me recently in an e-mail. “In hindsight, Kentucky would have been a better choice. Rupp was a great coach. I didn’t think it through like I should (have).”

Today, that wouldn’t be an issue; he’d enter the transfer portal and be eligible somewhere else the following season. Back in the 1970s, changing schools meant sitting out a full year.

He might have traded schools, but I doubt if he’d trade his life for anyone’s. Only last summer, he was inducted into the Legends of the Ohio Valley by the Ohio Valley Athletic Conference, the nation’s largest athletic conference. Here is the biographical sketch from the program that night:

MIKE CARSON (Sistersville, Class of 1969)–The 6-foot-7 Tiger basketball center was a four-year prolific scorer and rebounder with school career records in both categories. He finished career with 2,269 points–3rd best in Ohio Valley history at the time (now fourth best).

A three-time 1st Team Class A all-state honoree, and captain as junior and senior, he also was 1st Team all-class “Big” All-State two years and 3rd team as a sophomore. He also was 1st Team All-Valley “Small School” captain the 1st team years of selections in 1968 and 1969 when the Tigers went 22-3 and 20-4.

As a freshman, he anchored Tigers to sectional and regional titles and a berth in state Class A tournament in Huntington. He averaged over 30 points a game in final two seasons and 22.4 rebounds a game as a senior. He set a sophomore OV and state record 54 points vs. Wirt County and also tallied 61 points vs. Wirt as a senior. All-America status from Scholastic Coach, Cage Scope and Basketball Yearbook, among others.

He earned a scholarship to West Virginia U. where he was a starter on the freshman team as the second leading rebounder while averaging 10.9 points. A chronic ankle injury limited his varsity play including missing one season. He lettered on the 1972 varsity.

He resides in Tyler County.

Hornyak also is an OVAC Hall of Fame member but, sadly, passed away on Aug. 25, 2025 at the age of 74 in Cincinnati, where he had moved to be near his daughter; he spent nearly all of his adult life in the Bellaire area. Like Mike Carson, he enjoyed hunting and was described by friends as down to earth, caring, unassuming and a good person who never once bragged about his basketball success.

In other words, both Allan Hornyak and Mike Carson were All-Americans in life, just as they were on the basketball court. And they didn’t need a letterman’s jacket from UCLA or Kentucky to prove it.

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Alan Robinson can be reached at alanrobinson480@gmail.com

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Alan Robinson has been a sports writer since first writing a weekly column for his hometown weekly newspaper in Sistersville, W.Va. at age 15. After spending half a year during college as a part-time writer at the Parkersburg (W.Va.) News, he was hired fulltime at The Intelligencer in Wheeling, W.Va., at age 20. He spent nearly four years there before beginning a 35-year career as an Associated Press sports editor in Charleston, W.Va. (seven years) and Pittsburgh (28 years). He later was a Steelers beat writer/NFL columnist for the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review for three seasons, Following retirement, he covered the Pittsburgh Penguins and Arizona Coyotes for a combined eight seasons as an NHL.com correspondent and also wrote for the Canadian Press. He was chosen as The Associated Press worldwide sports writer of the year in 1986 and 2000 and has won multiple Associated Press Sports Editors national writing awards, including those for deadline writing and Story of the Year. Shortly after joining AP in 1975, he was selected by his peers as West Virginia Sports Writer of the Year in two of his first three years on the job there. Among his many assignments, he covered 10 Olympics, 12 Stanley Cup finals, eight NCAA basketball tournaments, five Super Bowls, the World Series, six National League championship series, three U.S. Opens and two Ryder Cups. He currently resides in Phoenix, where sports is always on at least one of his seven big-screen TVs.

Quite frankly, it was the biggest coaching blunder of all time. And it was committed not by a rookie, but by one of the greatest coaches in college football history.

It cost his team a national championship. Yes, a national championship.

Knute Rockne’s Notre Dame team certainly didn’t have the “write stuff” this day …

Amazingly, it wasn’t the result of a tactical error or a personnel mistake, but rather was the by-product of the coach’s own neglect and, it can be argued, his ego and his arrogance.

With the College Football Playoff championship game between Indiana and Miami, Fla. coming up on Monday, it’s almost hard to fathom the following scenario altered the national title race exactly 100 years ago.

A coach intentionally skipped his team’s next-to-last game of the season — a supposed “breather” game before the following week’s game against Southern Cal. Not because of illness or a family crisis or a transportation oversight, either.

He wanted to attend another game — the so-called Game of the Year — so he could write a newspaper column about it.

I know what you’re saying: Impossible! No coach would ever do that, much less Notre Dame coach Knute Rocke, one of the greatest coaches of all time in any sport.

But that’s exactly what Rockne did the last weekend of November 1926. Rather than accompany his 8-0-0 team from South Bend, Ind. to Pittsburgh for a game against major underdog Carnegie Tech (now Carnegie Mellon), he chose to go to nearby Chicago to write about the huge Army-Navy game at brand-new Soldier Field. He also met with a few Western Conference (now Big Ten) coaches ahead of putting out a press release announcing his team’s schedule for the 2027 season.

But not only did Rockne skip the game, he ordered his assistant coaches to start the game with his second team, and not bring the starters off the bench until the second quarter! There were even rumors that Rockne might leave the starters in South Bend and play the game entirely with reserves, to keep them injury-free for the USC game the following week.)

To counter those rumors, Rockne sent a telegram to Carnegie Tech athletic director Clarence “Buddy” Overend reading: “We are pointing for your game Saturday and will give you all we have.”

Except Rockne chose to give his all not to Notre Dame, but to his newspaper column.

Knute Rockne’s pre-game column before the Army-Navy game — he’s in Chicago, but his team is in Pittsburgh!

It was common at the time for big-name coaches and athletes to write newspapers columns (with the help of uncredited ghost writers) about the big events of the day. Babe Ruth did it, for example, at the 1925 Senators-Pirates World Series, sitting in the Forbes Field press box beside Sistersville, W.Va., newspaper scribe Roy C. Heinlein. At least two other big-name coaches, Yale coach Tad Jones and Stanford coach Pop Warner, also attended the game between undefeated Navy and once-beaten Army (whose only loss was to Notre Dame) to write their columns. Only their teams didn’t have games that day.

Red Grange, the most famous player in football history to that point, also wrote a column that weekend arguing the best team in pro football (the NFL was only a couple of years old), could beat the best team in college football! College football, baseball and boxing were the biggest sports of the day, and the common feeling was best brand of football was played in college, not the rag-tag professional league.

Carnegie Tech wasn’t a rollover opponent, for certain. The Tartans were 6-2, with wins against arch-rival Pittsburgh and West Virginia, even though their quality of opponents did not measure up to Notre Dame’s. But Rockne, though publicly professing his wariness about playing them on the road, apparently had such little concern about the Tartans that he didn’t go to the game.

After all, his other employer, the Christy Walsh Syndicate, badly wanted Rockne’s by-line on his column from Soldier Field.

“I certainly hope I can get away [for the Carnegie Tech game],” Rockne said the day before to long-time Pittsburgh Press sports editor Chester L. Smith (who also chose the Army-Navy game rather than the game in his own backyard). “If anyone thinks I’m kidding myself about Tech’s strength, they’re daffy. Those babies of [coach Walter] Steffen are liable to knock us off and I don’t mean perhaps.

“I know of no game that we’ve played this year that has concerned me more. Just suppose we let them get a couple of touchdowns on us in the first half. What a swell time we’d have getting them back against that line.”

Rockne, however, wasn’t worried enough to, as he put it, “get away for the game.” Maybe because Notre Dame had allowed only one touchdown in eight games until then, and had beaten Carnegie Tech the previous four seasons by a combined 111-19.

Here’s my guess: Indiana coach Curt Cignetti and Miami coach Mario Cristobal will manage to “get away” for the national championship game Monday night in Miami.

Remarkably, the very scenario that Rockne described to sports editor Smith is exactly what happened during the 2 p.m. game on Saturday, Nov. 27 at Forbes Field, where 45,000 fans jammed into a stadium with a listed capacity of 35,000.

Following Rockne’s instructions, assistant coach Tom Mills started the second-stringers known as the Shock Troops in the first quarter, with the intent of wearing down Carnegie Tech’s starters until Notre Dame’s regulars entered in the second quarter.

But once the starters took to the field, led by captain Eugene “Red” Edwards of Weston, W.Va., Carnegie Tech scored on touchdown runs by Bill Donohoe and C.J. Letzelter in the second quarter to take a 13-0 halftime lead — the very scenario Rockne warned about in his interview with Smith!

Carnegie Tech quarterback Howard Harpster led the two touchdown drives, then drop-kicked field goals of 32 and 45 yards (the latter being quite the distance during that day) to make it 19-0 in the second half. The frantic Irish drove to the Tech 1-yard line in the fourth quarter, but a Carnegie line led by Lloyd “The Plaid Bull” Yoder held them off.

Carnegie Tech then chose to immediately punt the ball back to the Irish on first down, rather than risk a turnover near the goal line. The strategy paid off as the Irish threw an interception on the next play. The Tartans then went on a drive that yielded a couple of first downs to secure the upset of the year, with all the scoring against Notre Dame’s starters.

The 19-0 final is still considered one of the top five college football upsets of all time, along with Centre College beating Harvard in 1921 and Appalachian State beating Michigan in 2007. The Associated Press game story reported Carnegie Tech (which relied on a 14-man lineup, with some players going both ways) “completely outclassed [Notre Dame] … in every department of play” and the win was “decisive … no fluke.”

In the Pittsburgh Press, writer T.C. Youll related, “Rockne’s flaming Notre Dame comet has crashed into the ground, a charred and lifeless ember. … Notre Dame was beaten. The so-called miracle was accomplished. It was more than accomplished. Notre Dame was not beaten — but crushed.”

Rockne, by the way, mentioned not a word about the huge loss in his Army-Navy game column. However, he used his pre-game column the day before to point out that Army running backs John Murrell and Oliver Hewitt tipped the plays on which they carried the ball — the kind of strategical secrecy that no coach today would ever reveal.

Also, in that same column, Rockne observed that, “Notre Dame [his own team!] has gone through a terrific schedule and is beginning to weaken.”

Or more insight for Carnegie Tech before the game!

It’s uncertain whether Navy was aware of Rockne’s strategical intelligence before it played Army to a 20-20 tie before a crowd of 110,000. But, if it did, the knowledge could have well tipped the game Navy’s favor — and potentially cost Notre Dame the title.

If Army had won, Notre Dame likely would have been chosen as the national champ despite the Carnegie Tech loss since both teams would have only one defeat — and the Irish had already beaten the Cadets. Instead, Stanford was chosen by the Dickinson System as the national champion - but before Alabama tied Stanford 7-7 in the Rose Bowl.

Knute Rockne’s post-game column. He didn’t mention his team’s game the same day.

Navy, with its unbeaten 9-0-1 record, finished second in the pre-bowl poll and Notre Dame tied with Michigan for third after ending its season by beating Southern Cal 13-12 in Los Angeles. The more widely accepted Associated Press poll didn’t begin until 10 years later.

Notre Dame won three national titles under Rockne but, had he chosen to go to Pittsburgh that day, theoretically might have won a fourth. Imagine forfeiting that for the thousand bucks or so he earned for his newspaper column.

Rockne apparently listened to the Notre Dame-Tech game on the radio in the press box, all while he “frantically pounded away at his typewriter” according to media observers.

Some coaches who also attended the Army-Navy game were polled afterward by United Press, and they agreed unanimously that Notre Dame lost because Rockne wasn’t there.

Rockne wasn’t so sure, saying later, “It was just one of those things that happen. The team just blew up in that game. Everybody, including the players, were confident Notre Dame would win, now the players are rather gloomy.”

Not exactly “Win One for the Gipper” stuff, was it? Hey, at least Rockne got a byline out of it.

“We felt we were greatly underestimated,” winning coach Walter Steffen said. “We did not do any advance bragging, but we were laying for Notre Dame.”

However, Steffen wasn’t around on the following Monday to celebrate with his team. He went to Chicago himself after the game to return to his job as a Superior Court judge. Despite all this commuting — he took a train to Pittsburgh every Thursday night —he was Tech’s coach from 1914 until 1932, finishing with an 88-53-9 record.

Carnegie Tech coach Walter Steffen had a second job in Chicago, too, just like Rockne did. Only he was with his team the day of the biggest win in school history.

That’s right, Steffen held a second job, too, making it to practice only when he could get away, although he always attended games.

Something Rockne always did without fail from that point on.

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Alan Robinson can be reached at alanrobinson480@gmail.com. All of his stories on Substack are available for free.

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Alan Robinson has been a sports writer since first writing a weekly column for his hometown weekly newspaper in Sistersville, W.Va. at age 15. After spending half a year during college as a part-time writer at the Parkersburg (W.Va.) News, he was hired fulltime at The Intelligencer in Wheeling, W.Va., at age 20. He spent nearly four years there before beginning a 35-year career as an Associated Press sports editor in Charleston, W.Va. (seven years) and Pittsburgh (28 years). He later was a Steelers beat writer/NFL columnist for the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review for three seasons, Following retirement, he covered the Pittsburgh Penguins and Arizona Coyotes for a combined eight seasons as an NHL.com correspondent and also wrote for the Canadian Press. He was chosen as The Associated Press worldwide sports writer of the year in 1986 and 2000 and has won multiple Associated Press Sports Editors national writing awards, including those for deadline writing and Story of the Year. Immediately after joining AP in 1975, he was selected by his peers as West Virginia Sports Writer of the Year in two of his first three years on the job there. Among his many assignments, he covered 10 Olympics, 12 Stanley Cup finals, eight NCAA basketball tournaments and five Super Bowls, He currently resides in Phoenix, where sports is always on at least one of his seven big-screen TVs.

For most of their seemingly-will-never-end season, they weren’t just one of the worst teams in the state of West Virginia, they were one of he worst in the history of their conference, the nation’s largest.

And it wasn’t just that they kept losing, but how they lost — by scores of 71-40, 76-48, 69-36, 85-46, 72-41, 89-64, 91-69, 77-36 … and, the worst of the worst, 111-27.

That’s right, 111-27, in a game in which they were outscored 31-1 in the third quarter. It was almost like a high school team playing against a bunch of pros — which, in a sense, it was. The opposing Bridgeport (Ohio) team’s top player was John “Hondo” Havlicek, who would go on to become the greatest sixth man in history and the author of nearly 26,395 career NBA points.

Havlicek was so good he outscored the Worst Team in the State by himself, 38-27, and probably could have made a game of it by playing 1-on-5.

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Yes, Sherrard really did lose by 111-27 earlier in the 1957-58 season … of course, opposing Bridegport, Ohio was led by future NBA star John Havlicek

But then, in a matter of days, everything turned around for Sherrard High School’s Rams, a tiny school with just 36 boys in the upper three grades located in Marshall County, W.Va., about 15 miles from “big city” Wheeling, W.Va.

And it’s all because Sherrard discovered the Transfer Portal.

The surprise is this was nearly 70 years ago, in 1958.

The Transfer Portal is revolutionizing college sports today — or ruining them, depending on one’s perspective — by allowing athletes to transfer schools on a yearly basis without losing eligibility, and to get paid for it under NIL (Name, Image, Likeness) provisions. Previously, one could change schools only by sitting out a year before regaining eligibility. (It’s also led to college athletes being paid as much as pros, in some instances; Ohio State spent a reported $35 million on its football team this season, yet failed to make a return trip to the CFP championship game.)

But, back in 1958, West Virginia’s high school eligibility rules were even less restrictive than the college guidelines of today. Then, if an athlete’s family moved, even during a season, the player became eligible at his new school immediately. It was the Transfer Portal on steroids.

Imagine the craziness today if such a rule were in place, with schools (no doubt aided by under-the-table cash payments from boosters) enticing star players to transfer just before tournament play, and rosters changing dramatically from December in March.

In 1958, however, there was an air of innocence, a naiveté, to high school sports that’s been missing for a good half-century. It was exceedingly rare for a player to transfer in-season, so when Larry Stead transferred from Paden City High School to Sherrard just past midseason, it wasn’t considered nefarious or suspicious, at least in the local newspapers. It wasn’t even noticed at first.

On Jan. 30, Stead played his final game for Paden City, for whom he was averaging about five points per game. On Feb. 7, he played in his first game for Sherrard, after his family moved to the Mozart section of Marshall County that’s effectively a suburb of Wheeling.

And then everything began changing.

Stead, an afterthought on the Paden City roster, suddenly began averaging around 20 points per game, a perfect compliment to Rams star Don Jones, who had basically carried the team by himself with a 28 points per game average.

Stead’s addition wasn’t revolutionary at first, but the Rams did win two of their final four games after losing all but two of their first 16. Their only wins all season were against New Cumberland (twice), Bishop Donahue and a vocational school.

Then the tournaments began.

The Rams were expected to be one-and-done as they opened sectional tournament play against Bethany (18-2), which had beaten them 80-51 in the final game of the season. Bethany was the Ohio Valley Athletic Conference small school champion that season.

Sherrard, somehow, won 61-57 as Jones scored 29 points

The Rams then played Cameron, which had beaten them twice during the season. Sherrard, somehow, won 51-37 behind Jones’ 29 points.

That sent the Rams into regional tournament play in nearby Moundsville against Williamstown — again, a team that was expected to whip them handily. Sherrard, somehow, won 67-60.

How does a team win more games in the tournaments than it did all season? Sherrard’s coach didn’t even know.

Now, amazingly, a team that was 4-16 during the season was 3-0 in the postseason, and people were starting to notice. The trouble was their next opponent was defending regional champion Sistersville, which had lost only four times and was a heavy favorite to return to the Area championship.

Sistersville was loose and relaxed going into the regional final, so much so that star center Elliott Thrasher, who at 6-foot-4 posed a significant inside threat, showed off for a photographer by dunking during pregame warmups.

Thrasher, however, badly injured an elbow while doing so, effectively rendering himself useless during a game in which he scored only one point in three quarters. Thrasher (who, coincidentally, later became a doctor) was averaging 17.6 points and had scored 23 points the night before against Newell.

Sherrard, taking advantage of Thrasher’s absence, scored a huge 51-45 upset win behind Stead’s 23 points and Jones’ 21 points, giving the Rams their fourth straight win in two weeks of tournament play, as many as they had previously all season.

“It was a little break for us and a tough one for Sistersville,” Sherrard coach Charles “Bud” Jones (Don’s father) told The Intelligencer in Wheeling, W.Va.

Wheeling News-Register sports editor Cliff McWilliams marveled in his column about the impact Transfer Portal ace Larry Stead made on Sherrard’s team

Now the whole state was watching as Sherrard (8-16) was only one win away from the state tournament in Morgantown. However, their Area championship opponent was unbeaten Flemington, led by the state’s leading scorer Paul Popovich and his 41.8 points per game average. (Popovich, like Havlicek, was a future pro, only in baseball. After playing one season of college basketball at WVU, he spent 11 years as a major league infielder with the Dodgers, Cubs and Pirates.)

Flemington was 25-0 and ranked ninth in the state in all classes. Regardless, coach Jones, said, “We have no fear of them.” Not that he could pinpoint why a team that had been so bad all season suddenly was so good — even if Stead, a junior, was a major addition to a lineup now composed of one senior, three juniors and a sophomore.

“It just seems like a miracle we won the regional tournament,” the coach told the newspaper. “I can’t put my finger on a reason for the upsets the boys have turned in.”

Do you believe in miracles? Sherrard did!

The upsets weren’t over, either.

Popovich scored 43 points but, in the biggest upset in the state that season, Sherrard overcame a six-point halftime deficit to win 75-68 as transfer portal ace Stead scored 33 points and Don Jones scored 29 points.

That team that began tournament play with a 4-16 record had now beaten five opponents with a combined 85-23 record, and almost no one could believe it.

Now, Sherrard was headed to the state tournament in Morgantown, where two more unbeaten teams (Aurora and Athens) awaited in Class B. The Rams were an even bigger surprise qualifier than South Charleston had been a decade earlier, when the Eagles advanced to the state tournament following a 5-15 regular season.

Unfortunately for the Rams, this is where the postseason glory train ride ended with a jolt.

Jones scored 20 points and Stead had 16, but Sherrard lost 62-44 to Aurora (24-0), which was led by Bud Winters’ 23 points and 18 rebounds. Aurora went on to lose to Ansted in one of only three state championship games in West Virginia history matching undefeated teams.

“It’s over for us, I can’t complain,” coach Jones told The Intelligencer. “We went a lot further than anyone, myself included, ever thought we could a month or so ago. And I can always look ahead to next year.”

Sherrard certainly wasn’t a 4-16 team in 1958-59, going 19-6 as Don Jones ended his career with 2,354 points — up until then, an Ohio Valley Athletic Conference record. Jones still ranks eighth all-time in West Virginia career scoring.

Jones averaged 29.5 points per game and Stead averaged 21 that season as Sherrard again made it back to the Area finals, only to lose to Fairview 60-59 to fall one game short of a repeat trip to the state tournament. This time, it was considered an upset that Sherrard lost, a defeat that occurred in part because Jones played on an ankle he badly injured in the first half.

Sherrard never did win a state championship before the school merged into John Marshall High School in 1968, although the Rams again reached the Area championship with a 19-5 record in 1965.

But for one magical month in March 1958, the Rams put together one of the most startling tournament runs not only in West Virginia history, but in any state tournament. And just 2 1/2 months after losing by that incredible 111-27 score.

This wasn’t just March Madness, it was March Insanity. Or exactly what the Transfer Portal is creating today, just like it did nearly seven decades ago.

See what you started, Larry Stead?

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Alan Robinson can be reached at alanrobinson480@gmail.com.

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Alan Robinson has been a sports writer since first writing a weekly column for his hometown weekly newspaper in Sistersville, W.Va. at age 15. After spending half a year during college as a part-time writer at the Parkersburg (W.Va.) News, he was hired fulltime at The Intelligencer in Wheeling, W.Va., at age 20. He spent nearly four years there before beginning a 35-year career as an Associated Press sports editor in Charleston, W.Va. (seven years) and Pittsburgh (28 years). He later was a Steelers beat writer/NFL columnist for the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review for three seasons, Following retirement, he covered the Pittsburgh Penguins and Arizona Coyotes for a combined eight seasons as an NHL.com correspondent and also wrote for the Canadian Press. He was chosen as The Associated Press worldwide sports writer of the year in 1986 and 2000 and has won multiple Associated Press Sports Editors national writing awards, including those for deadline writing and Story of the Year. Immediately after joining AP in 1975, he was selected by his peers as West Virginia Sports Writer of the Year in two of his first three years on the job there. Among his many assignments, he covered 10 Olympics, 12 Stanley Cup finals, eight NCAA basketball tournaments and five Super Bowls, He currently resides in Phoenix, where sports is always on at least one of his seven big-screen TVs.

This isn’t the most advantageous time for Pittsburgh Steelers owner and president Art Rooney II to make his first-ever head coaching hire. He can only hope it goes better than father Dan Rooney’s first such search did exactly 60 years ago.

With nine NFL teams seeking a new coach, and so few knock-‘em-out-of-the-park candidates like Patriots coach Mike Vrabel a year ago currently available, this isn’t exactly the year the Steelers would have picked to go looking for only their fourth head coach since the Lyndon B. Johnson administration.

What’s interesting is that if they were another NFL franchise, the obvious top candidate would be the man who resigned Tuesday after 19 seasons as the Steelers’ coach, Mike Tomlin. But early signs point to Tomlin sitting out this coaching cycle, easing into a broadcast job next season and then possibly returning to the sidelines in 2027. (Of course, predecessor Bill Cowher was supposed to take the same route, only to enjoy the comforts of a high-salaried TV job so much that he never went back to the pressure cooker of NFL coaching again.

Likely, we’ll find out in the coming days and weeks if Tomlin’s resignation was truly that, or if it was a mutual decision between him and Rooney to part ways. But the Rooneys simply don’t fire coaches, so I’m guessing Tomlin made this call himself without the need for Art II to weigh in on what would have been a difficult decision.

When Art II’s father, Dan Rooney, had to make his first such keep-him-or-fire-him call going into the 1966 season, it was an easy one. Mike Nixon, hired just before the start of the 1965 season when Rooney and former coach Buddy Parker had a falling out during training camp, simply had to go after a 2-12 season.

At that point, Dan Rooney established the formula for hiring the Steelers have maintained ever since: Namely, don’t hire a retread, like his father Art Rooney Sr. did so many times before. Identify a young, on-the-rise coach with evident leadership skills, someone who won’t ever “lose” his team. Somebody at home in the offensive meeting room as well as the defensive meeting room. And a coach you know will be hired as a head coach by another team if you don’t hire him, even if it’s not for another year or two.

T-shirt companies like 3RiversTees enjoyed a lively business selling these this season …

Rooney’s hiring playbook worked with Chuck Noll (four Super Bowl wins), with Cowher (one Super Bowl win) and with Tomlin (one Super Bowl win). But it did not work with his very first hire, Bill Austin, and he offers quite the cautionary tale that no matter how good a coaching choice looks to be, there’s no guarantee of success.

Austin was 37 (the same age as Noll would turn out to be) and had been a Green Bay Packers’ assistant for six years during the start of the franchise’s golden era in the 1960s and had just spent the 1965 season as the Los Angeles Rams’ offensive line coach. He’d angered Lombardi by leaving for another job, but that didn’t prevent Lombardi from giving the Steelers a glowing recommendation; Lombardi praised Austin’s “temperament and leadership.”

“Bill interviewed well. He seemed like a guy we could get along with, so my dad called Vince to get the inside story,” Dan Rooney wrote in his self-titled autobiography in 2007. “Lombardi thought the world of him, and said he’d make a terrific coach.”

That was enough to convince Art Sr., and he told Dan to hire Austin without doing any other formal interviews. The hiring was supposed to be Dan’s decision, but he acquiesced and went along with his father’s recommendation.

“Danny did a good job [hiring Austin),” Art Rooney Sr. said. “Now all we have to do is get lucky — get lucky in hiring the right man.”

Unfortunately for them, the Steelers’ 33-year-old record of bad luck up until then (no championships, not many winning seasons) still wasn’t over.

“I was trying to bring the Steelers into the modern era, and I knew the right coach was the key,” Dan Rooney wrote. “In this case, the hiring process had been disrupted. It was a single interview. The Steelers deserved better.”

Austin promised to run tough, hard practices and training camps in order to establish the same kind of discipline the Packers always had. The problem was he practiced a bad, bad team much, much too hard, with predictable results.

“Austin believed an athlete … had to play all-out in practice in order to simulate real game conditions. This took its toll on the players, who began to dread practices [as] injuries mounted,” Dan Rooney wrote.

During a training camp practice at St. Vincent College, Austin ordered a full scrimmage run at the same pace as the intense goal-line drills were. The result? Linebacker Bill Saul’s career ended with a knee injury. Defensive end Ken Kortas’ ankle injury slowed him the entire season, as did running back Jim “Cannonball” Butler’s knee injury. Defensive back Paul Martha was hit so hard on a play his helmet cracked, giving him a concussion. All this on the same day.

“That’s when Austin lost the team,” Rooney wrote. “The players no longer had confidence in their coach.”

Austin was a bum hire — he’d go 17-36-3 with Pittsburgh, including a 2-11-1 record in that final season in 1968 that was barely better than Nixon’s record in his one and only season. (Austin then rejoined Lombardi’s staff with the Washington Redskins in 1969 and succeeded him as the head coach when Lombardi died in 1970.)

Bill Austin didn’t have much to work with in 1966 … or 1967, or 1968

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Rooney learned plenty of lessons in hiring Austin — he said Austin was the only coach he ever yelled at — and he made certain not to repeat his mistake upon hiring Noll in early 1969.

That’s why Dan Rooney made the solo call on Noll, who met with him three times before being hired. That’s why it was Dan Rooney’s decision to hire Cowher in 1992, even when many in Pittsburgh wanted him to hire Joe Greene. And that’s why Dan Rooney chose Mike Tomlin in 2007, even though popular assistant coach Russ Grimm appeared to believe the job was his.

But Dan Rooney, who died in 2017, won’t be around for this hiring. It’s Art II’s sole decision. Maybe he’ll hire another coach like Tomlin or Noll or Cowher. But there’s also the possibility he’ll hire a Bill Austin, too.

And the last thing the Steelers need 60 years later is a Bill Austin II.

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Alan Robinson may be reached at alanrobinson480@gmail.com

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Alan Robinson has been a sports writer since first writing a weekly column for his hometown weekly newspaper in Sistersville, W.Va. at age 15. After spending half a year during college as a part-time writer at the Parkersburg (W.Va.) News, he was hired fulltime at The Intelligencer in Wheeling, W.Va., at age 20. He spent nearly four years there before beginning a 35-year career as an Associated Press sports editor in Charleston, W.Va. (seven years) and Pittsburgh (28 years). He later was a Steelers beat writer/NFL columnist for the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review for three seasons, Following retirement, he covered the Pittsburgh Penguins and Arizona Coyotes for a combined eight seasons as an NHL.com correspondent and also wrote for the Canadian Press. He was chosen as The Associated Press worldwide sports writer of the year in 1986 and 2000 and has won multiple Associated Press Sports Editors national writing awards, including those for deadline writing and Story of the Year. Immediately after joining AP in 1975, he was selected by his peers as West Virginia Sports Writer of the Year in two of his first three years on the job there. Among his many assignments, he covered 10 Olympics, 12 Stanley Cup finals, eight NCAA basketball tournaments and five Super Bowls, He currently resides in Phoenix, where sports is always on at least one of his seven big-screen TVs.

By Alan Robinson

Curt Cignetti of Indiana University is arguably the college football coach of the year, but that honor probably doesn’t recognize him enough. He should be the Coach of the Century.

In only two seasons, Cignetti — a former West Virginia University backup quarterback — has taken the team with the worst overall record in the history of major college football to two College Football Playoffs, an undefeated regular season and the top ranking in The Associated Press poll. The Hoosiers (15-0), coming off a Big Ten championship game victory over Ohio State and playoff routs of Alabama and Oregon, will play Miami (13-2) on the Hurricanes’ Hard Rock Stadium home field in the national championship game on Monday, Jan. 19.

Alabama, of course, was coached from 2007-23 by Nick Saban, who is overwhelmingly regarded as the best coach in college football history. Like Cignetti, who played at Morgantown High, Saban is a former West Virginia high school quarterback, at state champion Monongah, who later won seven national championships at Alabama and LSU.

Cignetti and Saban go way back in their relationship, too. Saban, as a defensive assistant at West Virginia in 1977, used to chew out Cignetti, the scout team quarterback, for being too competitive during drills by trying to create offense rather than running the upcoming opponent’s plays. That stubbornness didn’t prevent Saban from hiring Cignetti in 2007 as his recruiting coordinator and receivers coach at Alabama.

The Saban connection is often pinpointed as a major reason for Cignetti’s enormous success — the copying of some of Saban’s terminology, schemes, mindset, creativeness and philosophy. But there is another College Football Hall of Fame coach who influenced Cignetti — and Saban, too — even more.

To know Curt Cignetti to know Frank Cignetti, but I suspect not nearly enough people know about the father.

Frank Cignetti coached West Virginia from 1976-79 after succeeding Bobby Bowden and later coached at alma mater Indiana (Pa.) University from 1986-2005, going 182-50-1 and twice reaching the NCAA Division II championship game.

Saban calls the elder Cignetti “the best recruiter I’ve ever known,” and, based on Indiana’s overwhelming success in bringing in players — including Heisman Trophy-winning quarterback Fernando Mendoza, a portal transfer — that’s a trait that’s carried down from father to son.

And let’s get one thing straight right away about Curt Cignetti. Because he was born in a Pittsburgh hospital, he’s been called a byproduct of western Pennsylvania’s fertile football factory, a Pittsburgher, a Pennsylvanian. He’s not. He’s a West Virginian through and through, even if he doesn’t have the birth certificate to prove it.

Curt Cignetti moved to West Virginia at age 9 in 1970 when his father was hired for Bowden’s staff and he didn’t move away until graduating from WVU with a degree in finance and joining Pitt’s staff as a graduate assistant in 1983. That’s 13 of the most important years of his life in the Mountain State and if you listen to him talk, you can pick up what often sounds to me like a distinct West Virginia accent (with a few Sabanisms thrown in).

Cignetti acknowledged as much after the Ohio State win, saying (paraphrasing now), “I’m from West Virginia, the home of Mr. Clutch [Jerry West] and he [Indiana Heisman Trophy winner Fernando Mendoza] is our Mr. Clutch.”

(Frank Cignetti and family in 1976: Frank Jr., Frank Sr., Curt, Theresa, Mrs. Cignetti (Marlene) and Lisa. WVU Sports Photo)

Frank Cignetti didn’t have the success that his son has enjoyed on the major college level — he was 17-27 in four WVU seasons — but that doesn’t sully the fact that he was an exceptional football coach. A coach who, with a little more luck and a little more patience from his superiors, might have had great success in Division I.

Because when he took over at West Virginia in 1976, he didn’t really stand a chance.

First, Bowden had left the cupboard bare talent-wise after defeating North Carolina State in the Peach Bowl in 1975 and departing immediately for Florida State, forcing Cignetti to essentially rebuild from scratch.

How easy was that?

Cignetti only had to recruit against Pittsburgh, which went undefeated and won the national championship in 1976, then was 50-9 the next five seasons; Penn State, which was was 61-11 from 1977-82 and Ohio State, which was 45-13 from 1976-79. Who do you think a western Pennsylvania or Buckeye state high school player is going to choose?

Cignetti certainly couldn’t pitch facilities to potential recruits, because he didn’t have any. Old Mountaineer Field was beyond antiquated, with its 35,000 splinter-filled bleacher seats, total absence of parking and absolutely zero amenities. There was no practice facility. Weight rooms were spartan. Private player dorms with 24-hour food service and athlete-designed menus? Not even a figment of anyone’s imagination.

That didn’t prevent Cignetti from recruiting the Parade Magazine Player of the Year in 1977, South Charleston High School running back Robert Alexander, which was seen as a major coup; Alexander was heavily courted by nearly every major college program. But Cignetti needed time to rebuild a program with so many deficiencies, and time was something he had too little of in Morgantown.

Cignetti, almost from the day he got the job, tried to pitch the necessity of a new stadium with a modern shell building for practice, partly to further attract recruits like Alexander. But even his own administration didn’t favor it; incredibly, athletic director Leland Byrd and the university campaigned for a renovated Mountaineer Field, a project that likely, if undertaken, would have cost more than building a new stadium. (Hey, dad, let’s not buy that new Ford F-150, let’s go rebuild that 2004 Ford Econoline van instead!)

Finally, others outside the university came to their senses and the state Legislature, at the urging of Gov. Jay Rockefeller (and with the allocation of some Rockefeller-controlled dollars) appropriated enough money for a new stadium and shell building for WVU and a new stadium for Marshall University, too.

By then, however, it was almost too late for Frank Cignetti to save his job.

WVU was 5-6 in 1976 before starting a promising 4-1 in 1977, only to lose four in a row and five of six to again go 5-6. And the bottom fell out in 1978, when an overscheduled West Virginia was 2-9, with only one win in the final 10 games and bad losses to No. 3 Oklahoma (52-10), Colorado State (50-14), Pitt (52-7) and No. 2 Penn State (49-21).

Still, when the season ended, Cignetti’s biggest concern wasn’t losing games, It was potentially losing his life.

He became quite ill during a recruiting trip to see Pineville High School running back Curt Warner and was hospitalized. Doctors at first couldn’t figure out why Cignetti was losing weight so rapidly (45 pounds) that he twice needed surgery to keep him alive.

Cignetti was so ill with what was finally diagnosed as lymphomatoid granulomatosis (a rare Epstein-Barr virus cell disorder that primarily targets the lungs and affects only a few patients a year) that he was given the last rites of the Catholic Church. The four Cignetti children, including Curt, were told their father was dying; another son, Frank Jr., who also went into coaching and has been a college and NFL assistant for more than 30 years, took the news especially hard.

But, incredibly, Cignetti finally regained consciousness during his month-long hospital stay and began asking about the football team. His total recovery took months, but in what was called a medical miracle, Cignetti survived.

However, his career was in jeopardy. By this time, Dick Martin had succeeded Byrd as athletic director, and the 2-9 season and Cignetti’s condition convinced him to make a coaching change. Not only did he begin targeting candidates, he offered the job to former Colorado coach Bill Mallory and told him to start hiring assistants.

On a late summer Thursday in 1979, I broke a story for The Associated Press that WVU was planning to fire Cignetti. The story was accurate and caused quite a firestorm, generating front-page headlines across the state.

But, by the following Monday, when the firing was to have been formalized, so many WVU alumni and fans complained to the athletic department and the state Board of Regents about the unfair treatment of Cignetti (whose determination to live deservedly drew great admiration), his dismissal never took place. Cignetti himself was so upset that he demanded a meeting with Martin to convince him he was fit enough to remain on the job.

“I still have some bitterness towards West Virginia, especially a couple of individuals,” Curt Cignetti once told me. “Everybody could see that program was ready to turn the corner, that the talent was there, especially with the new facilities.

“My father went all over the state, trying to get the new facilities built. He knew that was the way to go.”

Although Cignetti did a good job recruiting despite all of the setbacks and obstacles — remember, Saban said his recruiting presentations were the best he ever saw — Martin got his wish after another 5-6 season in 1979 and fired Cignetti.

“I think that no matter what my record was that season, I wouldn’t be back,” Cignetti told me in 1982, after he became the athletic director at alma mater Indiana University of Pennsylvania.

Martin hired Michigan assistant Don Nehlen, although Nehlen had a not-distinguished head coaching record at Bowling Green (even losing to the Young Thundering Herd, the post-plane crash Marshall team of 1971). Of course, Nehlen turned out to be an exceptional hire, establishing WVU on a national level and playing for a national championship in 1988.

However, Nehlen benefitted from everything Cignetti didn’t: The new stadium, the increased revenues and fan interest; the greatly upgraded practice facilities, the huge upswing in booster and alumni donations. And he took advantage of Cignetti’s players, too; Nehlen inherited 20 starters from that 1979 team.

When WVU made its first bowl appearance in six years in 1981, upsetting Florida 26-6 in the Peach Bowl in Atlanta, more than two-thirds of the lineup was composed of Cignetti recruits, including soon-to-be NFL players Oliver Luck (to me, the most underrated player in WVU history), and Darryl Talley.

That’s not to say there weren’t missteps during Cignetti’s four WVU seasons.

The highly celebrated Alexander turned out to be a major disappointment, struggling in Cignetti’s veer offense before finally becoming a 1,000-yard rusher when Nehlen switched to an I-formation in 1980. Cignetti probably should have adopted the I-formation and plugged in Alexander sooner than he did, rather than easing him in and out of the lineup for two years.

With Alexander already in place, Curt Warner ignored the Mountaineers and wisely chose to go to Penn State, where he became a two-time All-American back and the No. 3 pick in the 1983 draft. He ran for nearly 1,500 yards in his rookie NFL season with the Seattle Seahawks. Alexander gained only 31 yards in two NFL seasons.

Nehlen, upon his hiring, called the loss of Curt Warner a major setback and said, “We can’t have any more Curt Warners” get away. It probably didn’t matter anyway with Warner set to to to Penn State but, with Cignetti ill, WVU’s recruiting of Warner was turned over to an assistant who, within a year was back in high school ball, rather than assistant Joe Pendry, who would go to be a USFL head coach and a coordinator at multiple major colleges and the NFL for decades. (Pendry, in fact, was on Saban’s first Alabama staff along with Curt Cignetti.)

Interestingly, after Frank Cignetti was fired, both he and his son stayed at WVU; the elder Cignetti in an administrative role in the athletic department for two years, Curt as backup quarterback to Luck and Jeff Hostetler. Each could have moved on, but instead showed their determination by sticking it out.

“It was very difficult. It was very, very difficult,” Curt Cignetti once told me. “I could say it wasn’t. but I’d had a good spring in 1980 and I thought, `Maybe I can play here. When you’re No. 2, you always have some hope.”

Just like when Indiana was No. 2 a couple of weeks ago and was expected to lose to Ohio State in the Big Ten title game, but won to 13-10 on Dec. 6 to keep its undefeated season going.

And remember Bill Mallory, the man who was supposed to succeed Frank Cignetti in 1979?

He still wanted the West Virginia job before Nehlen was hired, but was told by Martin there were too many ill feelings remaining in the state from the summertime attempt to dislodge Cignetti. Mallory subsequently went on to coach another 17 seasons, the final 13 at —guess where — Indiana. He went 0-11 there in his first season in 1984; his best record was 8-3-1 in 1988.

Now, 64-year-old Curt Cignetti is doing things no coach was ever supposed to do at Indiana, where basketball is king and football was an embarrassment, a sport played in near anonymity before half-filled stadiums mostly there to watch opponents such as Ohio State and Michigan.

Cignetti took the job without hesitation or reservations; he’d succeeded as a head coach at IUP (taking over in 2011, five years after his father retired), Elon and James Madison. When asked at his introductory press conference why he was so certain of success in a job where his predecessors knew only failure, Cignetti said, “It’s pretty simple. I win. Google me.”

His father, who passed away at age 84 in 2022, could have said the same thing. Google him. He won, too — in football and in life, and his son is the proof positive of that.

—-

Alan Robinson has been a sports writer since first writing a weekly column for his hometown weekly newspaper in Sistersville, W.Va. at age 15. After spending half a year during college as a part-time writer at the Parkersburg (W.Va.) News, he was hired fulltime at The Intelligencer in Wheeling, W.Va., at age 20. He spent nearly four years there before beginning a 35-year career as an Associated Press sports editor in Charleston, W.Va. (seven years) and Pittsburgh (28 years). He later was a Steelers beat writer/NFL columnist for the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review for three seasons, Following retirement, he covered the Pittsburgh Penguins and Arizona Coyotes for a combined eight seasons as an NHL.com correspondent and also wrote for the Canadian Press. He was chosen as The Associated Press worldwide sports writer of the year in 1986 and 2000 and has won multiple Associated Press Sports Editors national writing awards, including those for deadline writing and Story of the Year. Immediately after joining AP in 1975, he was selected by his peers as West Virginia Sports Writer of the Year in two of his first three years on the job there. Among his many assignments, he covered 10 Olympics, 12 Stanley Cup finals, eight NCAA basketball tournaments and five Super Bowls, He currently resides in Phoenix, where sports is always on at least one of his seven big-screen TVs.

Impossible, incredible and, yes, immaculate.

It was all that and more — much, much more — and it occurred 53 years ago this week. There’s nothing memorable or numerically important about that anniversary, except that Dec. 23, 1972 will always be the day Pittsburgh Steelers fans remember with the same boundless joy as the date of their marriage, the birth of a child, a graduation from college.

Franco Harris’ remarkable, magical, breathtaking Immaculate Reception wasn’t just the greatest play in Steelers history, it was the greatest play in NFL history. It was voted so (overwhelmingly) by the NFL Network in 2019, and longtime NFL Films impresario Steve Sabol once told me there was no other play like it in the million miles or so of footage in his archive, and that’s good enough reasoning for me.

The sheer improbability of it was astonishing enough, but the consequences of it shaped a dynasty unlike any the NFL has ever seen.

Before we delve further into a play that isn’t likely to be matched even if the NFL plays for another century, here are a few sidebars from the that Steelers-Oakland Raiders AFC Championship Game I believe you need to know (besides the final score: Steelers 13, Raiders 7):

— The NFL itself often referred to it as the first playoff game in the Steelers’ 40 years-until-then history, but it wasn’t. The 1947 Steelers lost a 21-0 decision to the Philadelphia Eagles in a special playoff game to decide the Eastern Conference champion.

— Harris’ impact upon the Steelers that season was arguably greater than that of any rookie in team history (he ran for 1,055 yards and 10 touchdowns despite starting only 10 games) yet, only the season before, he wasn’t even the best player in Penn State’s backfield. (All-American Lydell Mitchell ran for 1,567 yards, Harris gained 684 yards.)

—Terry Bradshaw’s pass that became the Immaculate Reception was intended for running back John “Frenchy” Fuqua, but the play was designed for neither Fuqua nor Harris, but rookie wide receiver Barry Pearson, who was playing in his first career game and had never made an NFL reception.

—If anyone from Pittsburgh tells you he watched the game in his living room or basement game room on WIIC-TV (Channel 11 in Pittsburgh), he’s lying. The game, incredibly, was blacked out under NFL rules for a 75-mile radius from Pittsburgh, even though thousands of fans who wanted to buy tickets couldn’t do so because the game sold out so quickly. That’s why outbound traffic on the parkways that morning was almost as heavy as it was inbound towards the stadium as thousands of Pittsburghers drove to Erie or Youngstown or other distant points to watch the game on, for example, WKYC-TV in Cleveland.

— Bradshaw didn’t see the greatest pass of his career — and neither did Steelers owner Art Rooney Sr.

— Current Steelers owner Art Rooney II was a ballboy that day and unsuccessfully tried to retrieve the ball that Harris caught (it was never recovered by the team).

— Despite decades’ worth of protestations by the Raiders, notably safety Jack Tatum and the coach John Madden (yes, that John Madden) that Fuqua deflected the ball to Harris, which would have made the catch illegal, the play WAS LEGAL based on NFL rules at the time. And we’ll show you why.

— Millions of NFL fans have based their opinions over the years as to whether the play was legal or not based on the widely seen NFL Films’ version of the catch. That’s unfortunate because NFL Films’ replay is a spliced-together mess (the start of the play shown WASN’T EVEN that on which Bradshaw threw the pass, it was from a play earlier in the game. Ray Mansfield is shown snapping the ball to Bradshaw when, in fact, Jim Clack was the center.) The definitive replay is the actual NBC game broadcast, the tape of which wasn’t uncovered until 25 years later in 1997.

— It took 15 minutes from the time Harris crossed the goal line with five seconds remaining before the game officials signaled touchdown. During that time, Harris actually gave the very first interview about the catch, even before he knew officially whether he’d scored!

— It can be argued that ANOTHER Raiders-Steelers game that season was even more pivotal to the dawning of Pittsburgh’s Super Bowl era than the Immaculate Reception game.

Remarkably, Harris told me years later that “The play didn’t hold any significance to me, none whatsoever. It didn’t even enter my mind. … It wasn’t at the top of your mind because we were doing so many other great things [like winning four Super Bowls in six years] that it wasn’t really part of much conversation.”

Oh, but it’s still the topic of considerable conversation more than a half-century later.

Before that game on Christmas Eve eve, both teams talked confidently — the Steelers were 11-3, the Raiders were 10-3-1 — before the first Pittsburgh playoff game since the 1970 NFL merger turned into a defensive slugfest. The Steelers led most the way, a 6-0 advantage created in part because coach Chuck Noll chose to kick a field goal rather than gamble on a fourth-and-goal from the Raiders’ 1.

But Raiders quarterback Kenny “The Snake” Stabler, inserted late for an ill and ineffective Daryle Lamonica, led an 80-yard, 12-play drive capped off by his own 30-yard touchdown scramble with just over a minute remaining in the fourth quarter and the great George Blanda kicked the extra point. Raiders 7, Steelers 6.

The sighs of disappointment from the overflow crowd of 50,350 were still hanging over Three Rivers Stadium when the Steelers took over at their own 20-yard line with 1:13 remaining.

Terry Bradshaw, attempting to drive the Steelers into range for a potential game-winning Roy Gerela field goal try, hit Franco Harris on a pass for nine yards and running back Frenchy Fuqua for 11 to the Pittsburgh 40.

But three straight incompletions, two on passes broken up by All-Pro safety Tatum, created a do-or-die fourth-and-10 from the Steelers’ 40 with 22 seconds remaining.

Bradshaw was supposed to hit Pearson on a post pattern (and, remember Pearson had never caught a pass in an NFL game), but immediately found himself under heavy pressure from Horace Jones and Otis Sistrunk and was forced to scramble to his right.

Bradshaw couldn’t find anyone open until momentarily spotting Fuqua running down the left hash marks about 20 yards downfield. Bradshaw heaved the ball his way and immediately got leveled.

(As a result, Bradshaw never saw what happened next and neither did Rooney Sr., The Chief, who was convinced the game was over and got on a elevator down to the locker room to console his players.)

What did happen has long been debated.

Tatum and Fuqua arrived simultaneously with the Pete Rozelle-signed football, which deflected high into the air upon impact.

To those watching on NBC, it momentarily appeared the pass was incomplete as it tumbled out of sight, only to have a trailing Harris — who’d made a shoetop grab invisible to the live TV audience — enter the picture with football in hand, steaming towards the end zone.

The immediate reaction: Oh my God!

A few yards away on the Steelers sideline, defensive end L.C. Greenwood said, “The next thing I know is guys are jumping around and there goes Franco and I’m saying, `Lord, I hope he has the ball.’ “

He did. Harris shrugged off safety Jimmy Warren at the 10-yard line and hit the end zone with five seconds to go after the most insane 60-yard play in NFL history. For a moment, nobody seemed to know what had happened: the players, the fans, the TV viewers and, most of all, the officials.

Bradshaw, still on his back deep downfield, heard the roars of the astonished crowd and incorrectly surmised, “I’ve just thrown the greatest pass of my life.”

Was it legal under NFL rules at the time, or not? We’ll get into that in a second. First, watch the NFL video many of you probably haven’t seen:

Anyone who watched or listened to the game no doubt remembers where they were at the time and, over the ensuing decades, Harris heard the personal stories of hundreds of hundreds who did.

On Feb. 1, 2006 in Detroit, days before the Steelers-Seahawks Super Bowl, he heard mine.

I interviewed Harris a countless number of times over the years, and I needed to talk to him that week about being the only Pro Football Hall of Fame player to play for both Pittsburgh and Seattle. (Harris finished up his career with Seattle in 1984 after being cut by the Steelers during a training camp contract dispute. He was released while on the verge of breaking the NFL career rushing record despite being pictured on the Steelers’ media guide cover that season.)

Franco Harris was pictured on the cover of the Steelers’ 1984 media guide, but was cut before the end of training camp in a contract dispute and subsequently hooked on with the Seattle Seahawks.

Harris was the featured speaker that February night before a crowd of 600 at the National Football League’s fourth annual Diversity Business Forum, an event that attracted numerous NFL executives and players to the Max M. Fisher Music Center He told me to meet him that night beforehand, and we’d chat for a few minutes (which turned into quite a few).

When I arrived, and after he did a very brief TV interview, he invited me to join him for a buffet dinner they’d set up backstage. After I finished up the prerequisite Seahawks-specific interview, we started about talking football in general and, of course, the Immaculate Reception.

I told him that, in 1972, I was wrapping up my first year as a full-time sports writer at The Intelligencer in Wheeling, W.Va., and how I (foolishly) passed up a chance to cover the game in person to watch it on TV.

A newly opened Ramada Inn outside Wheeling (and only about 50 minutes from Three Rivers Stadium) advertised that its high-powered TV antenna would bring the game in from the Cleveland station. A group of us from the paper booked a room so we wouldn’t have to journey afar to watch the game.

It was a very fun afternoon for the majority Steelers fans in the room — until Kenny Stabler intervened, and the mood quickly turned from fingers-crossed optimism to downcast resignation to defeat.

When it was fourth-and-10 and mere seconds remaining, it seemed to the dozen or so of us in the room that even a miracle couldn’t save the Steelers.

That’s why I will never ever forget the sight of the Bradshaw pass seemingly falling incomplete only for — and it seemed like a minute later but, of course, was only a second or so — Harris to streak into the picture with the ball in his hands racing toward the goal line.

(This, by the way, is one reason why the NBC broadcast tape is so far superior to the NFL Films version. On the NBC tape, the pass clearly deflects off Tatum’s shoulder pads; the NFL film version is far less conclusive.)

I’ve covered Super Bowls, Olympics, the Pirates’ incredible Game 7 playoff loss to the Braves in Atlanta in 1972, and thousands of other games from the pros to high schools. But I told Franco that I’ve never ever heard a sound like that when he caught the pass — a spontaneous, earthquake-level outburst of sound, disbelief and joy that caused the entire hotel to literally shake on its foundation.

I am certain, I told him, I’ll never hear anything like that again.

At this point, Harris and I have talked for so long now that he’s twice been interrupted by one of the dinner organizers who says, “Mr. Harris, we’re ready for [your speech] now. … [and a few minutes later], Mr. Harris, they’re waiting on you.” Yet he postpones for a good 15 minutes so we could finish up talking; you know the interview is a good one when your subject doesn’t want to end it!

Getting back to the game, watch in the NBC replay where, from the end zone camera view, it’s quite clear the ball deflects off Tatum’s right shoulder … so obvious that announcers Curt Gowdy and Al DeRogatis (who are sitting in the stadium’s 300-level almost directly over the play) never question it.

By the way, Myron Cope, the Steelers radio analyst that day, was the man who first uttered the words “Immaculate Reception” on the public airways, during color commentary that night on WTAE-TV. Mere minutes before Cope went on the air, a woman named Sharon Levosky called the newsroom and told him her friend, Michael Ord, came up with the name during a post-game party.

Cope took moments to think, and decided he loved it. Everyone else east of Oakland, Calif., did, too. It was the perfect name for the imperfect play.

“I think the play embodies so much of the element that we believed about and we play sports for and that is to never give up and play to the end,” Harris said. “As long as there’s time on the clock, there’s a chance you can win.”

(Cope, by the way, said years later that WTAE had another camera angle that clearly showed the ball deflecting off Tatum, but the video clip was buried somewhere in the station’s tape vaults never to be unearthed again.)

Steelers coach Chuck Noll certainly knew what he saw.

“Franco made that play because he never quit on the play,” Noll said. “He kept running, he kept hustling. Good things happen to people who hustle.”

The Raiders, who were certain they had won the game, thought it was a damn bad way for a very good team to lose a game. An illegal way, they contended.

Madden and the Raiders contended the ball deflected off Fuqua to Harris, which would have voided the touchdown because two offensive players could not touch a pass in succession. However, as the NBC replay shows, the ball clearly struck Tatum, thus making the play legal from the millisecond he did.

As the NFL rulebook in 1972 stated: “If a defensive player touches a pass first, or simultaneously with or subsequent to its having been touched by only one eligible offensive player, then all offensive players become and remain eligible.”

As hundreds and hundreds of celebratory Steelers fans poured onto the field, Madden and the Raiders argued furiously and, in the press box, Raiders owner Al Davis kept screaming the pass was illegal.

Referee Fred Swearingen still hadn’t signaled anything because he hadn’t see the entire play. Amid the chaos on the field, it took him a few minutes to confer with the other officials to determine what they’d seen.

Three didn’t see the play fully, they told him, and two felt the ball struck Tatum. Swearingen relayed that to NFL officials chief Art McNally in the press box as the two conferred during a brief call after Steelers executive Jim “Buff” Boston escorted Swearingen to a phone in one of the stadium’s baseball dugouts.

There are conflicting accounts of their conversation but, based on multiple descriptions, it was brief. According to the NFL, Swearingen told McNally, “Two of my men ruled the ball was touched by opposing players (Tatum and Fuqua) and caught by Harris” and therefore the catch was legal.

The next day, Bob Oates of the Los Angeles Times described the phone call this way:

McNally: “What are you going to call the play, Fred?”

Swearingen: “I’m going to call it a touchdown. It was a legal catch.”

McNally: “That’s right.”

It’s become somewhat of an urban legend (at least in Oakland) that the two also discussed whether the officials would be in danger if they ruled in favor of the Raiders, but no accounts at the time mentioned that. Several others in the press box later described the call as being much too brief for the subject to come up.

Amid all the shouting and finger-pointing, the Raiders had only themselves to blame for having to play in Pittsburgh that day in the first place.

After all, it was their SECOND loss in Three Rivers Stadium that season; the Steelers also beat them 34-28 in the season opener on Sept. 17, 1972. If the Raiders had won that day, they would have been home for an AFC divisional playoff game and the Steelers would have been on the road, likely at eventual Super Bowl champion Miami (who would go on to beat the Steelers 21-17 in the AFC Championship game in Pittsburgh on New Year’s Eve).

The Immaculate Reception game is often called the day the Steelers became the Steelers of the ‘70s; the day that, after four decades of endless losing, they realized they had the makings of champions. Two years later, they would begin a run of four Super Bowl wins in six seasons.

“What makes the play so special is people started to realize how great of a team we had. … As far as I was concerned, we were the No. 1 team of all time, and you can’t separate that play from the decade,” Harris once told me. “We went from the worst to the best.”

That isn’t hyperbole, either. From their founding in 1933 until 1968, the year before Noll arrived, the Steelers’ winning percentage of .394 was the worst of any major pro sports team. They were the worst of the worst. Noll’s first season in 1969 (1-13) was worse still.

But, to me, a very strong argument can be made it was the September game that was the catalyst for the Steelers’ transformation from awful to awesome. Until 1972, they hadn’t had a winning record for eight years; from then on, they would go on to have 13 consecutive winning seasons.

At the start of the ’72 season, there was no Terrible Towel, no Steel Curtain defense, no Franco’s Italian Army (preseason football magazines projected Harris would be a backup that season, not a 1,000-yard rusher). The Steelers had won only 12 games combined the previous three seasons; the Raiders had won 28 games and two division championships.

But the Steelers proved to themselves that day in September they could play with the NFL’s best, and they went on to go 11-3 and 7-0 at home during the season. They didn’t need yet another game in December to tell them they’d arrived. They already knew it.

Madden already sensed his Raiders and the Steelers were beginning a very big rivalry, one reason he never got over the Immaculate Reception loss. Al Michaels worked with Madden for years on TV, and he once told me Madden “never really liked coming into Pittsburgh [after] that game.

“I tried to joke around a little bit [about it], but his brow would crease a little bit and he wouldn’t laugh,” Michaels said. “It was something that hung with him. He felt he should have won that game, and it could have been another Super Bowl for him.”

The Raiders ended the decade with one Super Bowl win, in the 1976 season, to the Steelers’ four.

Oh, and by the way, here’s a remarkable story I hadn’t known previously about Harris giving an on-field interview BEFORE the game ended:

https://www.wesa.fm/sports/2025-12-23/he-told-art-rooney-about-the-immaculate-reception-and-was-first-to-interview-franco-harris-about-it

And while I’ve read numerous newspaper game stories from that day, I’ve thought one of the best was written by the late Nick Bedway, my former colleague at the Wheeling newspapers.

Because of the incredibly tight deadlines for a holiday weekend newspaper, he had to quickly travel the 59 miles back to Wheeling and write a game story for the Sunday News-Register without the benefit of postgame interviews, but I think he produced a thorough, readable, detail-filled story in a very short time. I especially liked his description of Al Davis in the press box:

https://ohiocountywv.historyarchives.online/viewer?k=steelers&i=f&by=1972&bdd=1970&d=12241972-12241972&m=between&ord=k1&fn=wheeling_news-register_usa_west_virginia_wheeling_19721224_english_19&df=1&dt=10

Also lost to the years is the reasoning why the fourth-down play, called “66 Circle Option,” was intended to be thrown to Pearson, who never caught a pass that season.

But then the Immaculate Reception wouldn’t be the Immaculate Reception without so many mysteries, so much drama, so much intrigue, so many subplots, so much of the impossible becoming the accomplished.

And that game was partly the reason why Congress didn’t wait for the NFL to act on its own, passing legislation in 1973 that called for all games to be televised in the home market as long as they were sold out 72 hours before kickoff.

The Steelers haven’t been blacked out since.

____

Alan Robinson has been a sports writer since first writing a weekly column for his hometown weekly newspaper in Sistersville, W.Va. at age 15. After spending half a year during college as a part-time writer at the Parkersburg (W.Va.) News, he was hired fulltime at The Intelligencer in Wheeling, W.Va., at age 20. He spent nearly four years there before beginning a 35-year career as an Associated Press sports editor in Charleston, W.Va. (seven years) and Pittsburgh (28 years). He later was a Steelers beat writer/NFL columnist for the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review for three seasons, Following retirement, he covered the Pittsburgh Penguins and Arizona Coyotes for a combined eight seasons as an NHL.com correspondent and also wrote for the Canadian Press. He was chosen as The Associated Press worldwide sports writer of the year in 1986 and 2000 and has won multiple Associated Press Sports Editors national writing awards, including those for deadline writing and Story of the Year. Immediately after joining AP in 1975, he was selected by his peers as West Virginia Sports Writer of the Year in two of his first three years on the job there. Among his many assignments, he covered 10 Olympics, 12 Stanley Cup finals, eight NCAA basketball tournaments and five Super Bowls, He currently resides in Phoenix, where sports is always on at least one of his seven big-screen TVs.