And there were major complaints at the time along the lines of "look how the Americans are ruining our game". Same thing was true for making numbers fixed and especially adding names to the back of the shirts.
And Univision, as I recall. But I can't watch the tapes I made as they are all in Beta format. Canadia's last (and only) World Cup as I recall...
I recall ESPN being the cable caster. Wikipedia says it was ESPN. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_FIFA_World_Cup_broadcasters#United_States
Correct. ABC introduced the score bug in the US on some spring '94 NASCAR races and the 1994 Indy 500, a few weeks before the start of the 94 World Cup. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Score_bug FOX did not begin broadcasting the NFL until the 1994 season, after the completion of the World Cup. FOX did use the "FOX Box" from the start.
My first World Cup memories were of the '74 Cup but those memories are in black n white as I was in Europe and color TVs were not as common place (we certainly didn't own one). Think we finally went color for the '78 tournament in Argentina. No recollection of the '70 tournament as I was only 5 years old but at that time in the States so not even sure my dad (a huge fan) was watching? '82 and on are certainly vivid (back in the US) and very much reliant on Spanish channels. My fondest was definitely 1990 because I bought my first satellite dish (10 footer) in 1987 to follow Serie A and back then, the feeds from Europe we not scrambled. I had 4-5 different language feeds of the World Cup and was in heaven. Too bad the quality of play in that tournament was below par. Today we have HD, different camera angles via internet. Instant highlights, commentary. Hell, this will be my 3rd World Cup watching on a 102" HD projection screen!! Yet we still find things to complain about.....sigh... SA www.soccertvblog.com
My first "major" soccer tournament in the US was the 1980 Euros with Toby Charles on PBS. As was the 1982 WC (no cable in our household then ... we pinched our pennies) 1986 was with Tony Tirado en Español "Gooooooooooooool, Jorge Louis Burrrrrrrrrruchagggga" but I did watch every match and even taped a few (kept rewatching Belgium-USSR 1/16th for the next decade). FWIW, the first WC match I recall watching was the 1970 opener of Mexico vs. USSR. Rec room in a summer resort near Jurmala ... a bunch of screaming men watching it on a 13" B&W TV ... I had no clue what the fuss was about ... but then, a week or so later, I watched the West Germany-England quarterfinal in our old apartment all by myself and was hooked forever ... and the entire 1978 WC was coinciding with my high school graduation exams ... which were supposed to be crucially important for one's future scholastic career ... to prepare for the exams - math, physics, trig, etc. - I naturally watched more WC ... and you wonder why I am where I am now .... typing away my memories on Big Soccer ...
If you would indulge me sharing what will likely be my fondest WC memory...a recent one but one that will certainly stay with me for the rest of my days. Summer 2010 and the local youth/church organization is hosting a large number of Spanish exchange students for the summer. My wife and I agree to house 2 young teenage girls as a good experience for our own daughters (and it was). Well, word got out through the 2 young ladies we were hosting to the rest of the exchange students that "El Señor" of the house is watching the World Cup on a giant screen in his basement. Soon my wife informs me that we are hosting a World Cup Final party for all the Spanish exchange students. ALL 34 OF THEM!! Now, I do NOT live in a mansion. Its a modest home and my basement measures a decent 14 feet wide by 25-26 feet deep. But you throw in a couch, a bar, my desk, etc. and its not that big!! I even borrowed an additional projector from the school and set up a second big screen in my living room upstairs to split up this large group. But to no avail. By overtime, all 34 students as well as some other family and friends were all squeezed into the basement. I actually loved it!! It was like being at a stadium. And on top of that, these were Spanish students rooting on their home country. I was too busy screaming myself to notice but the neighbors told me a few days later that Iniesta's winner produced a sound wave that was heard for blocks!! As memorable as the moment was, what I will never forget is one young man whose name I never did get, that appeared with his friends wearing the unmistakable red-n-white stripes of Athletic Bilbao. He stood out because he was the one screaming at every chance the Dutch had. He was the one whose head hung low when Iniesta scored the winner. He hated Spain!! He made no effort to hide his hatred for what many would consider his home country. But I, as well as all the other students, understood that as far as his perception was concerned and the way he was undoubtedly raised, he was NOT Spanish. He was Basque. If someone had told me that I would be squeezed into my own basement with a bunch of teenagers for the Final of a World Cup - and I mean squeezed in to the point of going to the bathroom could only be a far away dream. My first reaction would be - "please don't ruin my World Cup". Instead it turned out to be my best! SA
Score... holy crap! That was on weekends on the old FNN network. And since FNN had that constant running stock market ticker on the bottom on the screen they kept it in on weekends using it for sports scores. The first use of a continuous sports ticker on tv? No recollection of those games being on Score. But I rarely missed "Time Out For Trivia" with Todd Donoho. lol
SA - I had a Basque exchange student on my street one school year. He always insisted he WAS NOT Spanish, he was Basque and that there was a complete and total difference between the two. His name was Gaizka - of course it was - and he became a rabid Cleveland Indians fan (this was the mid 90's, when the Tribe was realllllly good). He rooted for France because of Bixente Lizarazu.
The irony was that I absolutely LOVED that ticker, being it was in the pre-Internet days of the 80s. It was incredible to have live scores in real time (you used to have to call 900 numbers to call to get scores or hope for an ESPN 28/58 update, ESPN didn't start regularly using a ticker until they launched ESPN2 in the early 90s). Now I hate the damn things, especially on soccer telecasts.
Totally agree. But for me that Score ticker moved so fast that it took me two or three loops before I finally figured out the score of whatever game I was most interested in, especially with baseball because they used to show the scores with innings included. (eg, "NYY 002 010 020 - 5 10 0, OAK 100 020 30x - 6 8 1" and it would go by too fast for my liking)
Ah, I hate the ticker. It is one of the worst TV inventions. I get why people were using it in the past, but now they should run a note about their facebook or twitter account and free up the screen space for sports action. I have some DVDs from Euro 80 that are complete games and called by a US announcer. There were also a US announcer (maybe the same guy) who called an all German UEFA Cup final. Anybody know who was doing these broadcasts? It wasn't Soccer Made in Germany because the games are unedited and the announcers is not Toby Charles. I didn't recognize the voice, unlike some other odd games here and there (Chick Hearn calling some old league games under the name Chuck Hearn).
Great stuff. Some really bad American announcers. I recall 86 NBC with Charlie Jones, then ESPN in 98 Twibell, 2002 Edwards, and 2006 O'Brien really bad. It was simple for me if it was not a quality commentator I would switch to Spanish and always record in Spanish, which I did for most World Cup' s my first was in 1982. I do recall Soccer Made in Germany with Toby Charles @ the epic 82 West Germany-France Semi-Final being shown. Incredible match. The SIN Univision networks would always show great matches and qualifiers each Saturday on taped delay obviously back in the day too. Miss that stuff. Soccer on tv has cone a long way and it still leaves a lot to be desired with shite commentators being pushed in our faces like Gus Johnson. No reason that this should be the case. Networks need to wake up and leave the commentary to the real professionals.
Jeez, I'm stumped on this one. The only full showings I remember of those were in Spanish on that SIN weekly series 'Futbol Internacional' with Tony Tirado. But full matches in English? Any idea what network it was on, or if any local station ID call letters appear at various points of the games? On another subject, anyone know what was the first pay-per-view soccer match in the U.S. was? I still have my recording of the 1993 UEFA Champions League final Marseille-Milan from ppv (although I had a hot box at the time and so watched it for free). The commentator never said who he was and it wasn't until years later when he became a regular presence on ESPN that I recognized it was Derek Rae. He did the match solo. No halftime of any kind whatsoever. Just a live shot from overhead of the Munich Olympiastadion with the score shown until the teams came out for the second half. Later that summer there was Spanish ppv of Copa America from Ecuador. But I'm guessing these weren't the first ppv soccer games in this country.
made in 1986 by NBC when it carelessly allowed Paul Gardner into the booth. Gardner is an English-born soccer journalist who covers the game for the New York Times, Britain's World Soccer magazine, and the U.S. weekly Soccer America. He is informed, opinionated, and articulate, and while at large in Mexico he violated most of the canons of the color man's trade He quoted Shakespeare on the air
Back in the late 1970's, there was a show similar to "Soccer made in Germany" called ... "Soccer made in England" ... or something like that ... that's when I watched a lot of old Liverpool (the glory days of Rush, Dalglish, the Kennedy's, Heighway, Grobelaar, Neal, et al) and the UEFA Champions Cup winners Nottingham Forest (under Brian Clough, with Gary Birtles, Tony Woodcock, Martin O'Neal, John Robertson, Viv Anderson, Peter Shilton, et al). The PBS program had the same 1-hr edited format as the Toby Charles program and was narrated by the recently passed on Mario Machado (who was an LA area newscaster and even featured in several film cameos, the most notable of them being in the original "Robocop" from 1984) . IIRC, the Made in England was canceled by PBS in 1979, though the reruns aired for a while longer. Ironically, the 1979 Champions Cup final between N-Forest and Malmo was aired as a part of "Soccer Made in Germany". A year from then, Mario emerged with "Soccer made in Argentina" - the WC defending champion at that time with most players still on the domestic payrolls - but that never took off. In retrospect, it's kind of surprising that the German soccer proved to be more popular than the English but a lot, I assume, had to do with funding. The German government subsidized the broadcasts (RDF may owned the German rights anyway) and that subsidy ended in 1987 or so, when the show went off after a decade on the air. The late'70's-early 80's was slim picking for a soccer fan in the Midwest. Even the old NASL matches were often taken off the air for the local weekend news/interview shows and something more popular with the beer drinking clods like bowling. (which is how I became familiar with names like Pete Weber, Mark Roth and Earl Anthony). The ABC bowling shows were presided by the venerable Chris Schenkel.
I used to watch that as well. The program was called "Star Soccer" and occasionally Machado would be joined on commentary by a variety of special guests who were somehow connected to the game in the States. I recall the 1979-80 season being the last with Machado. Then for the 1980-81 season PBS showed what I believe were the ITV weekly episodes of The Big Match with legendary British commentator Brian Moore handling the action (although I think it was still called "Star Soccer" on PBS). What I looked forward to the most every season was the League Cup final because PBS would show a two-hour full match episode with the original UK broadcast. But first division league matches were always the one hour edits. They never showed an FA Cup final. As I recall, "Star Soccer" switched from PBS to ESPN for the 1981-82 season which was terrible because the four-letter network would ruin it by inserting commercials every 10 or 15 minutes. Don't think it stayed on ESPN for long, maybe one or two seasons. Not sure where/if the program turned up next. EDIT: Anyone remember PBS showing a few matches of the 1981 World Youth Cup held in Australia? West Germany beat Qatar (!) in the final which was played in a driving rainstorm.
The 1974 World Cup was a precursor to PPV--closed circuit but you had to find a movie theater that was showing it though. I couldn't afford to do it and was not driving yet anyway (there was, I think, only 1 theater in Philly showing it and the nearest commuter rail station was about 5 miles away).
lol I used to make scrapbooks as well, starting with the '82 tournament (my first). Never got around to finishing the 94 version (left off with the quarterfinals, iirc) and I still have newspapers from '98 collecting dust.