’63 contest marked the debut of instant replay
Army quarterback Rollie Stichweh scored two touchdowns in a matter of a few seconds, at least that’s what many viewers of the 1963 Army-Navy game thought they saw that December broadcast.
Calls flooded into CBS’ switchboard despite announcer Lindsey Nelson’s warning: “This is not live. Ladies and gentleman, Army did not score again.”
The confusion was understandable. What viewers saw was the debut of instant replay, the invention of CBS Sports director Tony Verna. The equipment Verna described was the size of “two Frigidaires” had technical issues, which meant that the Stichweh 1-yard scamper was the only replay used in that broadcast 55 years ago.
Stichweh knows he wasn’t his first choice to be featured in the innovation that changed sports broadcasting and in later years became a tool to change calls on the the field, diamond, ice and court. Verna readily admitted before his death in 2015 he wanted the debut to be of Navy quarterback Roger Staubach, who led the Midshipmen to a 21-15 victory and claimed that year’s Hiesman Trophy as a junior before NFL stardom.
“I think if Tony was able to show Roger, he would have,” Stichweh told USA TODAY this week. “That would make all the sense in the world. The equipment at the time was unpredictable, and you needed time to run back the tape, so there weren’t many opportunities that game. Scoring that touchdown was one of them.”
Less-than-instant replay had been used in sports broadcasting a few years via videotape and the most notable use to that point came just a few days prior to the 1963 Army-Navy game, a contest delayed a week due to the assassination of John F. Kennedy. Jack Ruby fatally shooting suspected Kennedy shooter Lee Harvey Oswald two days after Kennedy’s death in Dallas was recorded live and later played back for viewers.
There was still quite a delay in that technology, one that Verna figured out how to narrow down for live sports. Verna wrote in his 2008 book “Instant Replay: The Day That Changed Sports Forever” that his bosses at CBS --- clearly not as visionary as the execs behind this Saturday’s game --- didn’t allow Nelson to warn viewers what they were about to see that day as Verna admitted in an ESPN interview that it wasn’t a lock that it’d work.
“It came with a tape that had ‘I Love Lucy’ on it and if the tape didn’t record properly, you’d get ‘Lucy’ on the air,” Verna said. “I mean, you had to be careful.”
Slow motion and freeze frames were adopted in ensuing years.
“The two most important innovations for sports television were replay and the first-down line,” Ken Aagaard, CBS Sports’ executive vice president of innovation and new technology, told USA TODAY Sports. “The third would probably be high-definition TV. The Army-Navy game had something to do with all three of those things.”
The Army-Navy game was also one of the first football broadcasts to use the SkyCam (1984), the virtual first-down line (1998) and network broadcast in HD (1999).
There’s some lore behind that first replay in 1963. Since the initial replay needed some time to queue the tape up, there’s a story about CBS sending somebody on the field to act as a drunk fan to hold the game up some so Verna could queue up the replay.
“I can’t answer that,” Aagaard said with a chuckle. “It’s all an urban legend. The folklore changes all the time. I wasn’t there. It was in ’63, I was in high school for Pete’s sake.”
Stichweh has heard the same tale and also could not confirm its validity.
“To be honest, I was totally unaware if it happened,” said Stichweh, who was setting his team up for a 2-point conversion as the incident very allegedly happened. “I was concentrating on playing my position. I don’t know.”