1996 Week 5, post 2
October 19, 1996
I was the one who said a few years ago that the USC Song Girls were the only folks in college football aside from Notre Dame who could get their own network.
I was wondering, have they done that yet? I was reading that Ted Turner was trying to buy CBS or something, so I figured that CBS might be for sale. I bet the Song Girls could get that network pretty cheap, their programming just isn't as good as it used to be. I did see that they are showing some college football again, but the coverage isn't as good as it could be. They have some pretty lame studio commentators. Nobody as good as the Pony was on ESPN. Where is the Pony?
TV coverage has a long and glorious history in the NCAA. Way back in 1939 the first college football game to be televised, between Penn and Columbia, was played in Manhattan. Back then we didn't have any of that instant replay stuff, so we actually hired actors to recreate the plays live in our studio at halftime.
For instance, on one play Columbia's great single wing tailback Triple "Sedale" Threat took the snap and threw downfield to halfback Vernice "Davis" Anthony for a touchdown. At halftime we were in the studio and we'd say, "let's take another look at that play" and our actors, who were rejects from radio soap opera roles, would line up in uniform, in formation, and try to recreate the play.
Unfortunately, they were all working off of memory, because they couldn't see any replays of the play they were re-enacting (which was why we were doing live re-enactments in the first place), so the scene would be chaos. Triple Threat would throw the ball, it would hit a guy wire, a curtain would fall, and Curt Gowdy would get knocked out and couldn't host any more broadcasts indoors.
That's why you never saw Curt Gowdy do an indoor event or studio work ever again. He always did outdoor football and baseball games as well as "The American Sportsman". He had a paranoid fear of being inside due to that curtain. One time NBC was showing a Jets and Houston AFL playoff game from the Astrodome and Curt got so wired that we had to slip him a horse sedative. Which reminds me. Where's the Pony?
Anyway, I hope the Song Girls get their own network. Maybe they can play re-runs of "Mr. Ed" in tribute to that Trojan horse they run around the track. And they could get Dow Corning as a sponsor.