This Day in Sports History (Instant Replay Used for First Time)

December 7, 1963—Today, as I watched in a coffee shop the New York Giants fumble away chances against the Philadelphia Eagles, it occurred to me that I owed the endless slow-motion repetition of their futility to the invention of instant replay, first used on this date 45 years ago in the fourth quarter of the Army-Navy game.

Present at the creation was the man better known to a generation of Mets fans as announcer Lindsey Nelson. Many fans probably remember him best as the smoothly professional partner of Bob Murphy and Ralph Kiner in the broadcast booth. Me, I recall him for another reason: his, er, colorful attire. Granted, the 1960s and 1970s saw an astonishing amount of clothing curiosities. Still, it was a good thing that I was never on the Nelsons’ holiday list, as I might have found it hard to distinguish the Christmas tree in the living room from Lindsey in one of his green jackets.

For the Army-Navy game, Nelson and fellow announcer Terry Brennan had been told about the innovation in a cab ride before the contest. But CBS director Tony Verna warned the two that the device couldn’t be mentioned on air until it was ready.

Verna’s reticence about plugging the technology might also have had to do with questions of taste. Not only had the Army-Navy game itself been postponed a couple of weeks because of the JFK assassination, but so had pregame promotion of this significant change in TV technology.

It took Verna five or six tries during the game to get the technology to work. Once it did, he indicated to Nelson that it should be mentioned any second now.

Perhaps because of the newness of the technology, Nelson was at extreme pains to inform viewers that what they were watching was not live. "Well, I started in quickly to tell the folks what they were about to see was not live, and another touchdown, but in fact a replay of what they had just seen," Lindsey wrote in his autobiography, Hello, Everybody, I’m Lindsey Nelson. "I repeated my information and realized that in my urgency and excitement my voice was rising. I was practically screaming."

It’s probably just as well that the sportscaster did so—in the vintage black-and-white recording of the play, the touchdown run by Army quarter Rollie Stichweh was indistinguishable from live video.

A few years later, the process became more readily available when the Ampex Corp. took a camera it had mounted on a Studebaker for taping practices and began applying it—first to help isolate the Navy’s problems with aircraft-carrier jets, then to ABC using it on Wide World of Sports.

I’m convinced that at least part of the reason why football began to replace baseball as the national pastime in the 1960s was its increasingly adventurous use of technology such as instant replay, camera angles and graphics—increasingly employed by Chet Forte, the Columbia basketball player who became director of Monday Night Football. Forte’s rise—and eventual manic fall from grace because of a gambling addiction—were depicted in a roman a clef called TV by Brian Brown, who was sports editor of The Columbia Daily Spectator while I was an undergrad.

A few years after the Army-Navy game, the term “instant replay” had come into common-enough use that it was instantly recognizable when used by guard Jerry Kramer when he wrote his bestselling diary of his 1967 season with the Green Bay Packers, the team built and prodded into two-time Super Bowl champions by the most successful football coach in the history of my high school, St. Cecilia of Englewood, N.J., Vince Lombardi.