First, it's almost Saturday in 2020, and you know what that means: It's about time to get our stamps on!™
Second, my YouTube Watch Later queue is working again, and that makes everything better.
Third, I've got some 1974 media (pictured with Ella) backed up and ready for consumption, and so what I'm saying is this weekend is about to blow up!
Here's the office in Evanston, Illinois, where Football Digest was published. I wonder if there are some old John Hadl photographs tucked away on a closet shelf.
ReplyDeleteHere's how Wikipedia describes this little, 10-times-a-year publication: "Football Digest was a sports magazine for fans interested in professional American football, with in-depth coverage of the National Football League (NFL). The magazine modeled the Reader's Digest idea, to bring the best in football journalism from newspapers and magazines that the fans would have otherwise not had an opportunity to read. The final issue was published in November 2005."
ReplyDeleteIt's a fun magazine, with short articles and lots of little notes tucked here and there. "Football Quick Quiz" and "Football Crossword Puzzle" are among the regular departments (I should really go back and add a couple of the crosswords and quizzes as pictures in the root post here to help you better enjoy your quarantines). There's a kind of letters-to-the-editor section, "The Fans Speak Out," that reads like Twitter comments. Here's an unabridged #hottake from Bill Hart of Falmouth, Kentucky, in the February issue: "The St. Louis Cardinals are the most under-rated team in the NFL."
ReplyDeleteUnlike Sports Illustrated, with its Jack Nicklaus golf shirts and cigarettes and liquors for aspiring young sophisticates, Football Digest seems to attract advertisers targeting 15-to-25-year-old sports geeks like me who weren't going on dates:
ReplyDelete-- Sports Action Watches for $14.95 ("Yogi Berra Says: 'I wear the Sportstime Baseball Watch and it's great Select your own favorite sport and watch the action!'")
-- Fleetwood "Instant Replay" record albums ($3.98 each or three for $10) such as Holzman's Heroes about the 1971-72 New York Knicks, The New Red Machine about the 1972 Cincinnati Reds, and, of course, Hail to the Chiefs
-- Lots of posters, pennants, magnetic standings boards, mugs, jewelry and Super-8 and Standard 8 film reels
I want them all.
The lone appeal to boys and young men who are hoping to cross over from the clammy Football Digest crowd to the go-go Sports Illustrated playboys is for a product called the "Powered isokinetic exerciser," which promises "a muscular body and dynamic power!"
The editor, John Kuenster, opens the February issue with a column on, "5 BIGGEST SURPRISES OF THE 1973 SEASON." Now, you have to understand that Football Digest's press schedule was such that Jan. 13 Super Bowl VIII did not make the cover until the April edition, but here are Kuenster's five eyebrow raisers from NFL73:
ReplyDelete-- Minnesota's return to power in the NFC Central
-- Green Bay's regression
-- Rams revival with Hadl and a rebuilt defense
-- O.J. Simpson's rushing total (not quantified or even marked as an NFL record, which probably means the regular season wasn't yet over)
-- "Gritty showing of the Denver Broncos in the AFC's Western Division"
--
(Programming note: These comments come to you as I have the Jan. 26, 1974, made-for-ABC movie, Heatwave!, flickering on the living-room TV set. I love it when the ladies sleep in on Saturday mornings, and it is great to have YouTube Watch Later back.)
ReplyDelete(The male lead in this movie is played by one of the students shaving when Benjamin is trying to find Elaine at her fiancé's frat house.)
ReplyDelete(Oh, cool ... the female lead is Macaulay Culkin's aunt.)
ReplyDeleteI was guessing the editor, John Kuenster, must've known as much about the NFL as anyone in 1974, given that his job was presumably to scour the daily newspapers from around the league's cities for interesting articles or items to reprint--and that still could be true. But it turns out he was known more as a baseball guy (and he edited Baseball Digest, too).
ReplyDeleteHe lived in Evergreen Park, on Chicago's north side, and Century Publishing's Football Digest, Baseball Digest, Auto Racing Digest, etc. were put together in that office building in Evanston, way south of Chicago. That would've been a heck of a daily commute, so this might've been something he did mostly from home.
ReplyDeleteWell, it sounds like a heck of an interesting and meaningful life. Rest in peace, John J. "Jack" Kuenster (1924-2012).
ReplyDeleteI could've gone on a lot longer about Mr. Kuenster. I certainly don't want to creep anyone out, but I'm pretty sure I found a picture of his old house. So nice. This isn't envy or anything--I have a nice house, too. I'm just so happy for him and his family. It looks like (and sounds like from the pretty stuff written about him) they had a lot of fun together. Thank God for that.
ReplyDelete(And, by the way, when that Heatwave! movie turned more to about whether a baby was going to survive--the baby does survive--I gave up on it and moved to a sneak peek of a Lucille Ball/Art Carney/Arnold Schwarzenegger thing coming out this fall 1974. It looks truly fantastic.)
ReplyDelete1974 me thrills at the prospect of Thursday Night Football, and 2020 me appreciated learning more about the origin and operation of TVS. The basic back story, per William Leggett, is that Eddie Einhorn of Patterson, New Jersey, struck it big on UCLA-Houston and staked out its college-basketball footprint (at what appears now to have been exactly the right moment). And here's how it worked: "Wildly unlike ABC, CBS or NBC, TVS is basically a four-man operation that buys rights to sports events, draws up contracts with stations—both independents and network-affiliated—and sells commercial time to advertisers."
ReplyDeleteThe May 6, 1974, Sports Illustrated for Dolphins fans is like January newspaper reports on COVID-19 for humans in the United States. After the fact, it all seems so clear, but, in the moment, we had no idea what was about to hit us.
ReplyDeleteThere's that little World Football League item (with its glancing mention of Larry Csonka, Jim Kiick and Paul Warfield's pending departure from the Dolphins after the upcoming NFL74), and there's this giant thing from Tex Maule on "The Pro Football Revolution." I'm sure Ed Yong wrote this same basic piece for The Atlantic in January, but our dog was sick--I was focused on that.
ReplyDeleteMaule's article is about "nine new playing rules aimed at reanimating" the NFL, "the most sweeping series of changes since 1933." Don Shula, coach of the NFL72- and NFL73-champion Dolphins and only two years away from the first of the only two losing seasons of his head-coaching career, is quoted as saying, "I disapprove of the entire package."
ReplyDeleteMaule, clear as freaking glass: "The altered rules are: 1) goalposts are moved from the goal line to the end line; 2) the kickoff is from the 35-yard line; 3) after a missed field goal, the ball returns to the line of scrimmage or the 20-yard line, whichever is farther from the goal line; 4) on punts and field-goal attempts, the offensive team may not move downfield until the ball is kicked; 5) wide receivers may not be blocked below the waist; 6) receivers may be bumped only once after they have gone three yards beyond the line of scrimmage; 7) wide receivers cracking back toward the ball within three yards of the line of scrimmage are not allowed to block below the waist; 8) the penalty for offensive holding, illegal use of hands or tripping, which usually occur near the line of scrimmage, is reduced from 15 to 10 yards; 9) a 15-minute sudden-death overtime is played if a game ends in a tie."
ReplyDeleteI'm sure Nate Silver or Bill James or Bill Barnwell or somebody has done a great analysis of what this all ultimately meant to the game. I just want to make one point, and I don't want to hear any clever back talk or counter points or criticism of my shoddy logic on this because I'm edgy and in grief over the death of Don Shula this week, and humans in grief almost never let you know when they get mad about the inoccuous things that set them off unreasonably, but they almost never forget or let go of the grudge.
ReplyDeleteNobody loves the Sabols more than I do, but the Sabols loved Al Davis because he was a reality-TV star before there was reality TV, and they loved the Raiders because those uniforms really popped in the northern California sunsets. NFL Films gave the Raiders a platform to put out this garbage notion that the reason the Raiders were the most-penalized team in the NFL and the Dolphins were the least- was because Don Shula wrote all the rules and owned the officials.
ReplyDeleteAgain, Maule ... crystal: "The NFL competition committee, composed of Tex Schramm of Dallas, Paul Brown of Cincinnati, Jim Finks of Minnesota and Al Davis of Oakland, had suggested one or another of the changes separately at earlier league meetings, but without success. 'We were given a mandate by the owners this February in Miami,' Brown says, 'so we presented the changes as a package, to be accepted or rejected that way. No one agrees with all the changes, but if we had tried to get them through piecemeal I doubt that we would have gotten any changes.'"
ReplyDeleteIf the ladies weren't asleep when I was first reading that paragraph this morning, I might've exploded into the kind of profanity-laced rage that I usually reserve for driving by the headquarters of big insurance companies. But you better bet it would've been a doozy, invoking the names of Warfield, Otto Stowe, Cliff Branch, Bobby Moore/Ahmad Rashad, Isaac Curtis, Golden Richards and Nat Moore at least.
ReplyDeleteFreddie Solomon and Duriel Harris!
ReplyDeleteElmer Bailey. Sam Greene.
Argh.
The Raiders--as well as the Bengals, Cowboys and Vikings--are going to do pretty OK for themselves here in the next few seasons of revolutionized pro football. Shula, though, is going to have to rethink and remake the Dolphins. It's going to take a while. 1974 me doesn't get it at all.
ReplyDeletePeak Dan Jenkins.
ReplyDeleteMLB74 is off and running, and Graig Nettles of the Yankees is rolling, writes Ron Reid: "Those who dote on projections pointed out that if Nettles continued at his current home-run pace he would surpass Babe Ruth's 60 for 1927 by exactly 31, which may be a trifle much to expect.
ReplyDeleteMeanwhile, "Yankee players were stunned by a trade that sent almost half the pitching staff—Fred Beene, Fritz Peterson, Steve Kline and Tom Buskey—to the Indians for First Baseman Chris Chambliss and Pitchers Dick Tidrow and Cecil Upshaw."
Real me started watching dialing in to the NFL games for real in 1974 and '75, the NBA games in '75 and '76 and then MLB in '76 and '77. I collected baseball cards starting in '75 and picked the A's as my team because I liked the colors and that they were World Series champs on those cards. But I didn't actually start watching games on Channel 3 and Channel 6 and looking at boxscores in The Sun-Democrat until 1976 and '77. And because of that timing, Graig Nettles and Chris Chambliss have always kind of been in my personal, felt-sense hall of fame.
But I'm burying the lede of the May 6, 1974, edition of SI.
ReplyDeleteDateline: Barlow!
On this dark night January rain is falling in the town of Barlow, Ky. Yet the lights are blazing at the high school gymnasium and cars gleam in the rain in the parking lot. Tonight the best women's basketball team on the continent is performing in Barlow and the proceeds from the gate will be split with the Ballard Memorial High School student council, which is planning to use the money to buy, among other things, a new water cooler. All the women on the team have blazing red hair, ranging in hue from near-tangerine to deep cinnamon. They are called the All American Red Heads. They are wearing red, white and blue uniforms, stars, stripes, etc. Tonight, as they do 200-plus nights each year, the All American Red Heads are going to play a man's team, the High School alumni. As always, the men are an assortment of sizes, shapes and basketball skills, a fair cross section of American manhood. Some are still willowy and lithe. Others have soft paunches and fat arms; they will soon be gasping like beached fish, their jowls slick and sweaty. They are dressed in motley clothes, a variety of sneakers. One is wearing black anklets. They are not basketball players anymore; they are barbers, bartenders, teachers, truck drivers, and they play the game from memory. They would be home watching Maude on television if they were not here playing basketball.
ReplyDeleteMy guess is that William Johnson got every word of that right, save for Maude's Nielsens in Ballard County.
ReplyDeleteJohnson reports that the Red Heads beat the former Bombers, 79-69, before a crowd of about 1,400.
ReplyDeleteOutside, a strange white limousine awaits them, a Toronado 28 feet long, emblazoned with huge red letters saying ALL AMERICAN RED HEADS across the four doors on each side. The women climb inside. Rain drums on the roof and the grand white vehicle rolls hissing over the wet parking lot and out onto Route 60. The seven heads of red hair can be seen, but barely, through the streaming windows. The All American Red Heads are sealed inside the car they call "Big Whitey," insulated from the outside world as if in some kind of rolling space capsule. Here is where they spend far more of their lives than they do on a basketball court. Tonight they will stay in Paducah, 25 miles away. In the morning darkness they will rise and drive 400 miles, nine hours, across much of Kentucky and most of Tennessee to still another town where they will play another high school alumni team that night.
Oh, my word, where did they stay? Where did they stay!?! The Holiday Inn off Park Avenue, near Cardinal Point? How I wish I knew! Where did they eat? Pizza Inn? I'll bet it was Pizza Inn. Or Dairy Queen. I'm going to have to restart my Newspapers.com subscription to see if I can learn more.
William Johnson's delightful road-trip text is punctuated with several Neil Leifer photographs. My favorite is of the Red Heads' giant car. But there are also several action shots from inside a gym, and I would guess these are from the game at Ballard Memorial, where Johnson appears to have gotten most of his material. But they also might be from the next game, in Morristown, Tennessee. I wish I knew Ballard's gym well enough so that I could recognize it (or not) from the backgrounds. Didn't that school have its green plane logo painted on its center-court jump circle?
ReplyDeleteNo. 83 among the CASH BOX Top 100 Singles for the week ending May 18, 1974: "King of Nothing" by Seals and Crofts.
ReplyDelete79. "Living in the USA," Steve Miller Band
ReplyDelete77. "Rhapsody in White," Love Unlimited Orchestra
71. "Come Monday," Jimmy Buffett
68. "Daybreaker," Electric Light Orchestra
66. "I'm Coming Home," Spinners
63. "No Charge," Melba Montgomery
ReplyDelete61. "I Am What I Am," Lois Fletcher
51. "Another Park, Another Sunday," Doobie Brothers
43. "Lookin' for a Love," Bobby Womack
ReplyDelete42. "Rock Around the Clock," Bill Haley and the Comets
43. "Lookin' for a Love," Bobby Womack
ReplyDelete41. "I'm a Train," Albert Hammond
37. "Star Baby," Guess Who
32. "Be Thankful for What You Got," William DeVaughn
24. "Best Thing That Ever Happened To Me," Gladys Knight and the Pips
ReplyDelete20. "I'm In Love," Aretha Franklin
6. "Midnight at the Oasis," Maria Muldaur
3. "The Entertainer," Marvin Hamlisch
2. "The Streak," Ray Stevens
And No. 1 is "Dancing Machine" by the Jackson Five. Here they are on April 4, 1974, performing it on The Tonight Show, without Johnny Carson as Bill Cosby guest hosts, as Jack Klugman sits in. (Michael's robot is a stunner.)
ReplyDeleteTelevision!
And now here's Julie Andrews as Norton, with Jackie Gleason.
ReplyDeleteBecause ... television!
I get the point that SI is making here. Still, football can never get here fast enough for me.
ReplyDeleteAlso per the May 27, 1974, Sports Illustrated, MLB74 has commenced:
ReplyDeleteAL WEST
CHI 18-15 OAK 19-18 KC 18-18 TEX 18-19 MINN 15-16 CAL 17-20
AL EAST
DET 18-15 MIL 16-15 BALT 17-16 NY 19-20 CLEV 17-18 BOS 17-19
NL WEST
LA 28-10 CIN 19-15 SF 21-18 HOUS 20-21 ATL 19-20 SD 15-26
NL EAST
PHIL 19-16 ST. L 19-16 MONT 14-14 NY 17-19 CHI 13-19 PITT 11-21
This Barry White hit, of which I was unaware, is magnificent. Just totally lifts me out of the yuck. Thank you, Barry White and the Love Unlimited Orchestra, which, by the way, is also a magnificent name.
ReplyDelete