From the Roundtable: MU’s Homecoming game exposure nothing like its TV debut

Homecoming at the University of Missouri was a major tour de force. The exposure of the day’s events on national television programs viewed by millions of college football fans went a long way toward reducing national ignorance of our state university and the institution’s host city — Columbia.
Two production teams from ABC-TV and co-owned affiliate ESPN decamped here for days. They hauled a zillion dollars worth of equipment that up-linked to a worldwide audience of the college pre-game show televised in the morning from Francis Quadrangle and of the game between No. 1 Oklahoma and No. 11 MU played that night in Memorial Stadium.
Reports from anchors and field crews of the network shows were that the turnout of boisterous fans on the quad was outstanding and that they’d love to come back and do it again. And MU’s upset victory was about as dramatic as it gets.
How MU and Columbia basked in the glory of a picture-perfect autumn weekend, defying the predictions of meteorologists who seemed rather certain it would rain on the quad and be pouring around kickoff time.
There were only two major kinks in the proceedings. There was an embarrassing inconvenience when the TV network’s audio failed during the second half of the game and broadcasters had to revert to a mobile telephone patch. There was sadness hours earlier when a visitor coming from Wichita, Kan., to watch the game was robbed and shot to death in a convenience store parking lot, though reports that day were sketchy.
The whole town as well as the University of Missouri — the “city within a city” — was suffused with the festive atmosphere of Homecoming Week as the community bustled with excitement and expectation. House decorations and skits filled Greektown. Downtown Columbia was simultaneously alive with people shopping, eating and drinking before the game and watching the Homecoming parade. Then came Saturday’s rite of tailgating, with fans having a grand time amid a symphony of odors from temporary field kitchens.

My own yen for history and antecedents drew me back to a fall day in New York when I was 9. Thanksgiving Day in 1954, a Thursday, was spent at Uncle Bill’s, where a Zenith console TV with its round screen was lit up for action. The football game I saw, less than a decade before entering the university, was my first contact with Mizzou. The proceedings on Channel 7 (WABC-TV) began at 1:25 p.m. Eastern time as the University of Maryland Terrapins hosted our Missouri Tigers in College Park, just outside Washington, D.C.
I remember the adults complained about the scarcity of college football on the telly that year. Mizzou’s 1954 Thanksgiving Day TV appearance was indeed a very big deal. It was one of just two televised games that day and, in fact, one of only 16 college games telecast all season.
Back then, in the video’s primordial days, the NCAA and its member schools feared television’s effect on the “gate” of paid admissions, so the NCAA decreed that there only be one college game per week on TV. One Saturday they relented and allowed the telecast of a whopping three regional contests. Even crazier, the year before, NBC-TV was allowed to hop-scotch between several games that were under way at the same time!
Production was crude by today’s standards. Where dozens of cameras including an array of aerial units prowled the confines of Faurot Field the other day, three or four stationary cameras covered action during the Maryland-MU game. On the cusp of color’s first full year, there were fewer than 10,000 rather pricey sets extant, and the broadcast was in glorious black and white. At least the sound was turned up from start to finish.
KOMU-TV carried the game that afternoon, but Columbia was still a one-horse town as far as television was concerned. KRCG-TV wouldn’t sign on until the following February, so Channel 8 was affiliated with all four networks — including ill-fated and soon-to-expire DuMont — and thus thought they had access to the ABC broadcast.
However, actually getting the broadcast was a close call. ABC informed KOMU that because the station had not signed up for its Game of the Week college football program, it couldn’t carry the Missouri-Maryland game. In addition, the NCAA objected to KOMU’s broadcast of the game and said it would have a “detrimental effect on local football,” according to an article in the Missourian at the time.
ABC eventually relented and said KOMU could broadcast the game but only if the station would agree to pay the line charges from its closest affiliate, KMBC-TV in Kansas City. A group of local Tiger boosters led by R.E. “Bud” Lucas, whose family owned the Missouri Book Store, agreed to pick up the tab, and the game was shown.
The Thanksgiving Game Day marked the debut of Tiger Athletics on the nation’s television stage, but it wasn’t the first time a team from Mizzou had been on TV.
A few years earlier when CBS really didn’t have much of a television network, aside from a handful of interconnected affiliates on the East Coast, the Tigers played basketball against New York University in the old Madison Square Garden in New York City. Network “flagship” WCBS-TV followed the action with a couple of cameras in a production that by today’s fine standards viewers would absolutely gag at.
Most of us have become rather blasé about television, with its theatrical wide screens, high definition and a gaggle of choices on hand via cable and satellite. But the televised proceedings of Saturday, Oct. 23, 2010, will go down as a huge publicity coup for all of us. We were well behaved, and the outcome was such that we were noted — and noticed — in the national press, including some rather influential newspapers.
It was fortunate that the Tigers’ victory over Oklahoma was nothing like the 74-13 bombing the Terrapins handed us on a Thanksgiving afternoon 56 years ago. That was MU’s worst defeat up to then, but the audience for the Tiger’s game that day was the largest to date.