USD Football 1992

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ABC SPORTS

Producer Roone Arledge took football coverage to a higher lev~I after entering the scene in 1960.

created all the distur– bance of a gentle breeze on a cool day. Yet Dunlap foresaw the happy-that is to say, profitable-marriage of football and television at its earliest, most unlikely stage, much like two adult lovers who first came to know each other as quarreling adolescents.

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Despite the technical and human prob– lems, to say nothing of the lack of televi– sion sets, the game would ultimately come to define the medium, and vice versa. The pace was ideal-shon spuns of intense, at times violent. action, interspersed with breaks just long enough for viewers to recover and producers to gear up for the next play. And on the professional level, the game was you ng enough that rule

changes to promote better viewing were simply a matter of pen corrections during the off-season, as opposed to extended bickering with intransigent traditionalists. Critical mass, however, was still years away, even when the number of sets in America topped 8 million in 1950. "The hard core fan will watch football regard– less," says Randy Robens, PhD, a history professor at Purdue University and co-

author of Winning is the Only Thing: Sports In America Since 1945, "but it's the average fan that needed to be drawn in, the one who will watch a trap play and have no idea what's going on. He, and she, needed to be educated, because when you know more, it elevates the experience." In fact, the most popular spons on televi– sion in those years immediately following World War II were the ones that needed no

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