When Instant Replay Debuted During the Broadcast of a College Football Game in 1963, It Revolutionized the Way We Watch Sports

Less than two weeks after President John F. Kennedy was assassinated, an Army-Navy football game played in front of a crowd of 102,000 spectators at Philadelphia’s Municipal Stadium on December 7, 1963, might have been a subdued and somber affair.

For the crowd watching at home on CBS, however, football changed forever when Army quarterback Carl Stichweh faked a handoff and ran for a touchdown. Just a second later, he appeared to do it again. But this wasn’t a second touchdown. It was the first use of instant replay.

At first, this historic game almost didn’t take place. In the wake of the Kennedy assassination, many sporting events were called off, and the raucous, patriotic annual match between the two service academies nearly met the same fate.

Kennedy, a Navy veteran and football fan, had been a steady presence at the annual game. “For those who were privileged to cover Army-Navy and Orange Bowl games, the president was such a familiar sight that he became almost a personal friend,” Associated Press sports reporter Bob Hoobing wrote.

Navy Beats Army in 1963: The Football Game That Paid Tribute to JFK

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The game was originally scheduled for November 30—just eight aching days after the assassination. But at the request of the Kennedy family, who insisted that the late president and committed Navy fan would have wanted the game to go on, the Army-Navy bout was pushed back by a week.

In the meantime, Tony Verna, a young CBS director, was hatching a plan to test an innovation that would change sports and live television forever.

Like other major networks, CBS had used a bulky videotape machine called the Ampex VR-1000 to replay highlights since the mid-1950s, according to Smithsonian historian Eric S. Hintz. But finding the precise moment or desired play on the tape was challenging.

“Preparing these replays required considerable time and effort,” Hintz wrote. With up to ten seconds of video static before each clip, replays were imprecise and hardly instant, airing only during halftime or after the game.

Verna, for one, imagined that the long, actionless stretches between football plays could be filled with clips of moments that had just transpired from different camera angles, keeping viewers entertained and engaged with the game. The challenge was to queue up the replay perfectly.

His innovation was to mark the tape with audio cues that could signal the exact points where an instant replay should start. One beep meant the huddle broke; two beeps meant the quarterback was ready for the play to begin. Starting at the first beep, Verna planned to allow visual static to air just long enough before the second set of beeps, at which point the instant replay would beam into millions of living rooms across the country.

On the way to the stadium in a cab on the morning of December 7, Verna nervously told the veteran CBS crew about his plan. “For an intrepid director,” he later told the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review, “I had a lot of trepidation.”

The first few times Verna tried to queue up replays of the Army and Navy quarterbacks during the game, old footage from the used videotape CBS had provided him came onto his monitor. Instead of Navy quarterback Roger Staubach rolling out of the pocket to deliver a pass, he saw Lucille Ball in an old “I Love Lucy” episode.

INSTANT REPLAY

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Verna and his team tried again, making about 30 failed attempts before Stichweh ran into the end zone for an Army touchdown in the fourth quarter. Verna watched the static turn to a clear picture on his monitor and give two clean beeps. “I had to make sure it wasn’t Lucy,” Verna later said. Then it was a go: Stichweh ran into the end zone again.

“This is not live! Ladies and gentlemen, Army did not score again!” announcer Lindsey Nelson told the crowds at home.

After dozens of false starts and a high-stakes game, the first instant replay was a success—helped along by the ups and downs of a game considered by some to be the greatest-ever bout between Army and Navy.

“People saw it, and they wanted it,” Verna told the Tribune-Review. He and CBS quickly honed the technique, using it again at the Cotton Bowl a month later. By the next fall, CBS used instant replay for most of its NFL games, turning an innovation from December 7, 1963, into the future of live television coverage.

Eli Wizevich | | READ MORE

Eli Wizevich is a history correspondent for Smithsonian. He studied history at the University of Chicago and previously wrote for the El Paso Times.