We’ve said it before, but it sounds new every time we think about it: No one needs to be angry unless they choose to be.
Does anyone remember the Heidi game?
In 1968, the Oakland Raiders played the New York Jets in football.
NBC TV execs knew that a football game typically took two-and-a-half hours. So, they allotted three hours and scheduled the movie Heidi to start at 7 p.m., eastern time, since they knew, for sure, that the afternoon game in California would be over.
You know how scheduling goes. No one accounted for clock-stopping penalties and time-consuming injuries. (Oakland pummeled quarterback Joe Namath and broke his jaw. He said he’d been more beat up by girls).
NBC management made the decision to let the game conclude on live TV and start Heidi, a romp about a girl and her grandpa yodeling through the Alps, a minute or two late. The execs then questioned their decision as they needed a huge audience because it was time for the network sweeps – whoever got the biggest audience would get the most advertising.
NBC changed their executive minds and assured numerous callers that Heidi would start precisely at 7. Then they switched horses in midstream, again, deciding to air the football game to its conclusion.
The teensy little problem that no one anticipated was jammed phone lines. Viewers started calling NBC to make sure the game would be shown in its entirety. The other half of viewers wanted Heidi. Telephone lines were so maxxed out that NBC execs could not reach their own control room to tell them to stay with the football game.
The game was tied at 29 with 65 seconds left – and all 65 seconds were after 7 p.m.
Suddenly everyone from New York to Oakland was watching Heidi.
What nobody saw was the Jets kick a field goal that put them ahead. Then the Raiders’ QB, Daryle Lamonica, passed for a touchdown, putting the Raiders back ahead.
The Jets fumbled the kickoff, and the Raiders scooped the ball up and ran two yards for another touchdown. Two TDs in nine seconds!
Phone calls to NBC blew out the lines, so fans called the AFL, the NFL, the NYPD and wrong numbers, just to vent. The deed was done, the game where no one saw the end was over, Heidi’s gramps was blowing an alphorn on the Matterhorn, and that was that.
NBC vowed to never, ever, cut a football game short again. Mistakes are those things we only make once…
This event was 54 years ago and someone in the Sunday garage brought it up to explain that once we get mad, it stays. We laughed. Because it’s true.
I think the United States has been at war my entire lifetime and it’s hard to see that we have preserved, protected, or benefited anyone. Korea, Vietnam, invasions of Grenada and Panama, Gulf War, Bosnia, Iraq, and Afghanistan, plus interventions all over except Ukraine – what is it we’re after?
What if California, Oregon and Washington (COW) decided to stop all shipments of wine and vegetables to other states? We wouldn’t revolt, right? We’d find other sources to feed our pleasures. Would we take up arms against those who border us and speak our own language? Unlikely.
But what if North Korea decided it wanted all the wine and vegetables in COW, and threatened to take it?
That would change the game. We would fight and we’d all be on the same side.
A woman in her late seventies, with a barn where she stores empty beer bottles, was in the Sunday garage and said that if we were invaded, as Ukraine has been, she wouldn’t be able to figure out how to fire a missile launcher or an AR-15, but she could sure make a lot of Molotov cocktails.
Words can lead to feuds, whether they are shot from our mouths or our pens, until it all becomes loud, futile and repetitive.
It’s hard to un-eat psychological sewage, but unless ordinary people jam the phone towers demanding that we stop fighting over oil and religion, we’ll keep doing this relay race.
I’d rather watch Heidi.