Until 7 p.m. EST on Nov. 17, 1968, Heidi was just a charming Swiss girl, the title character of Johanna Spyri’s 1880s children’s tale. Heidi never played football. At that moment, though, she became as well known to many pro football fans as Joe Namath.

With 65 seconds remaining in their American Football League game, the New York Jets took a 32-29 lead over Oakland Raiders on Jim Turner’s fourth field goal. The Raiders returned the kickoff to their 23-yard line. NBC the local network televising the game, went to a commercial break.

And the game never returned. “It was determined (before the game) that Heidi would air at 7,” NBC broadcast operations supervisor Dick Cline said. “If football wasn’t over, we would still go to Heidi at 7. So I waited and I waited and I heard nothing. We came up to that magic hour and I thought, ‘Well, I haven’t been given any counter-order so I’ve got to do what we agreed to do.’ ”

Fact: Many avid football fans jammed NBC’s phone lines people before 7 p.m., some demanding that the network stay with the game, others asking whether Heidi would be shown as scheduled. “What it did was, it literally blew out the switchboard,” former NBC executive Chet Simmons said.

With seven minutes to play, NBC had decided to stay with the football game and delay the start of Heidi, but the flood of phone calls prevented executives from getting through to Cline. What most of the nation didn’t see was this…

Oakland quarterback Daryle Lamonica’s 20-yard pass to Charlie Smith and a face-mask penalty put the ball at the Jets 43-yard line. On the next play, Lamonica and Smith hooked up on a touchdown pass. Oakland led 36-32 with 42 seconds to play. The Jets fumbled the kickoff. Oakland’s Preston Ridlehuber recovered at the 2 yard line and scored. Oakland, with two touchdowns in nine seconds, won 43-32.

The anger felt by Raiders and Jets fans escalated when, 20 minutes after the game, NBC issued the final score on the bottom of the screen during Heidi.

NBC president Julius Goodman released a statement 90 minutes after the game calling the incident “a forgivable error committed by humans who were concerned about children expecting to see Heidi. … I missed the end of the game as much as anyone else.”

“It was on the front page of the New York Times,” Simmons said. “And when you say something is on the front page of the New York Times, you’ve got to figure it’s pretty important.”

The game prompted the NFL to insert language into its TV contracts guaranteeing that, in the future, games of visiting clubs would be shown to their home markets. Since then, all major games in major sports are televised in their entirety.

On Sept. 7, 1979, ESPN debuted and quenched sports fanatics’ thirst of sports with and 24 hours of sports.

Probably the most significant factor to come out of Heidi was, “Whatever you do, you’d better not leave an NFL football game” said Val Pinchbeck, the NFL’s former senior vice president of broadcasting.

- The Wanna-be Sports Guy

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Tags | American Football League, Heidi, New York Jets, nfl, Oakland Raiders