Monday Milestone: Television

“Without the unholy union between sport and television, the sporting landscape we look out on today would be unrecognisable”
– Martin Kelner, ‘Sit down and Cheer’

This Week in History:
1939, May 17
The world’s first sporting event appears on television beginning a long and important association.

Make no mistake, over the past few decades the world of sport has changed.

Somewhere over recent years, sport moved from being a simple pastime, to becoming a business. Consider rugby league of a generation ago, with its suburban grounds, and its part time tradesmen. It was a time when footy was something done after hours, and on weekends. Gee, it was almost as though they played for the sheer love of the game.

Not like today. Granted, most players naturally still love their respective games, but these days sport is a business. Club, state and even country loyalty has become flexible. And this isn’t just confined to rugby league. Professionalism has infiltrated the ranks across a whole range of sports because at the heart of it all beats the almighty dollar, and central to the most important revenue stream in the modern sporting world is television.

Advertising dollars are the cornerstone of the commercialism of twenty-first century sport. And whilst we may whinge and bitch and complain about poor coverage or delayed telecasts, it’s impossible to escape the fundamental importance that TV provides.

So the Milestone this week parks the Delorean outside a ball park in New York City in a different era, but one when the media world was on the cusp of changing and an otherwise innocuous collegiate baseball game between the Columbia Lions and the Princeton Tigers is taking place.

The significance though of this ordinarily unremarkable match, lies in the fact that W2XBS, an experimental station, run out of New York was conducting a first in the world of sport. They were broadcasting the match on television. The successful outcome of this trial would change the world of sport forever. 

Television in its earliest form had been around already for over a decade, ever since John Logie Baird had successfully demonstrated the transmission of moving silhouette images. Technology had advanced and now it seemed obvious to take sport to the next level, and bring it into living rooms and onto couches across the world.

What began that day was a long and successful relationship that has developed to the point where it is now impossible to separate sport and television anywhere. Princeton would go on to defeat the local Columbia Lions 2-1 in an exciting match at Baker’s Field that went to a tenth inning. There was just a single camera, located down the third base line, and Bill Stern called the match. This experimental television station covering the match would go on to become WNBC-TV, a forerunner of what is now known as NBC.

It was a landmark day.

So next weekend when you sit down and turn on the television to watch your favourite sport, think back to where it started; with a simple experiment at a collegiate baseball game.

Because that was a day when the world got a whole lot smaller, and sport as people knew it, changed forever.

 Milestone Five: Important moments in television

1. Despite a number of earlier advances in the technology, the first public transmission of moving silhouette images occurs in 1925 when it is demonstrated by John Logie Baird in London. Australia’s Logie Awards are named after him.
2. First sporting moment on television occurs when Princeton and Columbia face off in their collegiate baseball game at Baker’s Field in New York City in 1939.
3. With the words ‘Good evening, and welcome to television’, Bruce Gyngell introduces television to Australia in September 1956.
4. The first instant replay occurs during an American football match between the Army and the Navy in 1963. The NFL would go on to adopt the concept in the mid-1980s, and then it would spread to other sports around the world.
5. Estimates vary wildly, but seemingly the most watched sporting event was the 2008 Beijing Olympic Games opening ceremony, where estimates range from one to four billion people tuning in, which given the Chinese population seems to have the most credence.