Immaculate Reception video shows very little of famous NFL play
Weird, how things turn out. While it’s likely the most famous and most replayed replay in NFL history, it’s not very good. It’s unclear, grainy. It shows little and proves nothing.
Yet it remains with us, always. And the unexpected passing of Franco Harris, last week, still doesn’t mean that it’s in need of much introduction.
“I was a 22-year-old NBC production assistant that day in Pittsburgh,” said Mike Weisman, who would ascend to become NBC Sports’ Executive Producer. “I was in charge of graphics — just getting the score right plus down-and-distance.
“We couldn’t miss that Franco Harris catch. We were prepared. We were using six tape machines, a lot for those days. Whatever happened, we couldn’t miss it.”
Dec. 23, 1972, Three Rivers Stadium, AFC divisional playoff, Raiders-Steelers. The Raiders led, 7-6, 22 seconds left. The Steelers, no timeouts left, had the ball at their own 40, fourth down.
Weisman: “The truck logically expected a long pass, so isolated, taped coverage was assigned to the receivers, then one each to the end zones to follow the ball. What could we miss?
“After the play and during all the confusion — was it a catch? A direct catch? Did it hit the ground? Did it first hit [RB] Frenchy Fuqua, which would have made it an illegal catch? Or did it bounce off [DB] Jack Tatum before it reached Harris? — we hunted for the replay.
“But we couldn’t find it, not a telling or conclusive one. It wasn’t there!
“We were totally deflated, completely disgusted. We left the stadium in group misery. The greatest end to a huge game and we didn’t have it!”
It grew worse. The next day NFL Films would release the footage it had filmed. It would show exactly what happened.
“We’d be further embarrassed,” Weisman recalled, “further humiliated. Those guys were good.”
But the “Immaculate Reception,” if it indeed was a catch, was followed by another miracle — of TV ego sorts.
Weisman: “NFL Films didn’t have it, either! Imagine! Misery loves company!”
And so NBC was spared the sole ignominy of failing to show a replay of perhaps the most famous play in NFL history. And I kinda like it that way, a lingering mystery that football fans, replay-rule advocates, archeologists and other chiselers can’t unlock.
And yet, Weisman, semi-retired in Los Angeles, still regularly hears that he was part of the production crew responsible for “The greatest replay in NFL history!”
“I just kind of shrug and smile,” he said. “And tell them, ‘Well, not exactly. It’s a long story.’ ”
Bible-thumping Brees must cut betting Co. ties
Now that he has joined Purdue’s coaching staff, Drew Brees can no longer be invested in or serve as the TV face and voice of a sports gambling operation that’s particularly sucker-targeting as it encourages betting, especially among naive young males, on every game, all game. But Brees remains a devout preacher from the Bible.
Still can’t tell which of Goodell’s virtue-signaling helmet messages Chargers DB Derwin James wore when he tried to decapitate defenseless Colts WR Ashton Dulin, Monday, with a brutal head hit for which he was immediately ejected. Help me, Roger, was it “Black Lives Matter” or “Choose Love”?
Fox’s 20-year filibusterer Daryl “Moose” Johnston still can’t make a non-story short. If it weren’t for his redundancies, which during Sunday’s Packers-Dolphins included “very unique” and how Green Bay’s AJ Dillon took a handoff “and stumbled for a negative loss,” he might be tolerable. Nah.
Hey, Tuesday the Knicks wore their traditional home uniforms — as they played in Dallas.
Nice NCAA student-athlete look during Friday’s Wake Forest-Missouri Gasparilla Bowl — ya got me after “Gas” — as two Missouri players shoved each other after one had broken the code by helping Wake’s QB to his feet.
Don’t know how many times, Saturday, Fox’s Adam Amin and Mark Schlereth told us that both the Giants and Vikings had played very close games this season, but I stopped counting at 10.
As reader Kenny Kaplan notes, this past weekend both the Jets and Eagles ditched their green uniforms for Nike black. Both lost.
Sports merchandisers keep missing the obvious. Who wouldn’t want a Barry Trotz statue or now a Brian Daboll model with a clock in their pleased-to-meet-ya stomachs?
With all the time in the world, flat or round, to show something worth seeing from the halftime studio show, Saturday, CBS chose, from Eagles-Cowboys, a replay of Eagles’ QB Gardner Minshew scoring on a 2-foot, straight-ahead push.
You enjoy NBA games? I once did. Tuesday, Celtics 126, Rockets 102. Field goal attempts: 186. Three-point attempts: 101, 54 percent of all shots taken.
Heck, I recall when NY Representative-elect George Santos and NBC News’s Brian Williams sang as Milli Vanilli.
To assign “Hollerin” Kevin Harlan an NFL game on CBS or Westwood One Radio, is like listening to a bingo caller on a cruise ship loaded with hard-of-hearing seniors. But current broadcast execs favor those who holler, the louder the better. Fair warning: Harlan calls — shouts — Sunday’s Colts-Giants.
Every time I hear “Baker Mayfield” I envision a vintage car, like the 1936 Baker-Mayfield. Let’s not even bring up Booger McFarland.
Franco deserved better from NFL Network
In an NFL season badly afflicted by TV’s inattention to game circumstances and significant postgame interactions between significant players, nothing seems as mindlessly neglectful than what Roger Goodell’s NFL Network did at halftime of Saturday’s Raiders-Steelers.
In one of fate’s crueler acts, Franco Harris was to be honored at halftime, his No. 32 retired to align with the 50th Anniversary of his “Immaculate Reception.”
Harris, 72, suddenly died two days before the ceremony. But the ceremony, now additionally poignant, would proceed.
NFL Network knew it before and after Harris’s death. This was where it had to be, where viewers wanted and needed to be rather than fixated on stats or anything else at halftime of a bad game between bad teams.
But at halftime, as the public address announcer could be heard saying, “We turn your attention …” to a scoreboard video salute to Harris, NFL Network cut to commercials. There was money to be made.
It was nauseating, infuriating, disgusting and singularly indefensible.
But not particularly surprising, was it?
“It’s all about our fans,” Goodell once boasted.
The Brendan Burke-Butch Goring team on MSG’s Islanders telecasts has risen to become a reliably honest and pleasant pair to watch a game with.
Tuesday, early in Pens-Isles, winger Anthony Beauvillier broke down the left side with the puck when he was intercepted by Pittsburgh defenseman Pierre-Olivier Joseph, who adeptly skated Beauvillier off the puck.
Goring, who relies on no frills or word gimmicks, played it down the middle. He praised Joseph with a simple but perfect explanation of Beauvillier’s plight: “Nowhere to go, no time, no space.”
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