The First Instant Replay…Thanks to CBS Director Tony Verna

The first isolated camera and a “borrowed” Ampex VR 1000 brought life to a new element of broadcasting that would forever change football and sports coverage.

The following account of how it came to be is from “ESPN College Football Encyclopedia: The Complete History of the Game”.

Dec. 7, 1963: The Birth of Instant Replay

Ask football fans if instant replay has its roots in the college or the professional game and most will go with the pros. But those who tuned in to the Army-Navy game on CBS on Dec. 7, 1963, know better.

When director Tony Verna, a Philadelphia native, returned to his hometown to direct the Army-Navy game that year, he arrived with a unique plan and a giant, 1,200-pound tape machine he had unplugged and transported from the CBS network control room at Grand Central in New York. Unbeknownst to all but a handful of
CBS executives and his crew, Verna was going to attempt to give viewers an immediate second look at a play.

“Video replay” was Verna’s unofficial name for the yet-to-be unveiled and considerably risky innovation. Risky because at that time the Army-Navy game was the showcase game in college football. In this pre-Super Bowl era, there was no grander stage in televised sports than the annual clash between the Cadets and Midshipmen. And in
1963, the stakes were even higher. Millions of Americans would be tuning in to the high-profile military rivalry game because of the assassination of President John F. Kennedy 16 days earlier.

For Verna, the genesis for the idea came years before when, as a twenty something wunderkind recently hired by CBS executive Tex Schramm, he worked on that network’s telecasts of the 1960 Rome Olympics. The network aired the entire Olympics on tape delay — after the tape was flown across the Atlantic to New York. It was then
that Verna learned videotape possesses two audio tracks.

For his special replay, he would use one track for crowd noise, the other for a simple cue system that would help locate the correct spot on the tape. One solid, clean beep would indicate a team going
into a huddle; two clean beeps would indicate a team breaking a huddle.

Several glitches occurred during his first attempts at fusing his taped technology with the game in progress. His monolithic tape machine was spitting out seven to nine seconds of video hash, indecipherable, cluttered pictures, before locking into a clear shot of game action. Occasionally, his machine didn’t work at all. Instead of football
action, the monitor would reveal what was already on the tape, sometimes a scene from ‘I Love Lucy’ or a Duz detergent commercial.

For three nervous quarters, Verna peered into his monitor and studied his two guinea pigs, Navy quarterback Roger Staubach and Army counterpart Rollie Stichweh. Verna had assigned one camera to follow only the two signal-callers, primarily because Staubach was so skilled with his ball-handling and fakes that most cameramen couldn’t
keep up with him. Although Staubach was the winner of the 1963 Heisman Trophy, it was Stichweh who made television history that day.

Stichweh faked to an Army halfback before running into the end zone for a one-yard touchdown, Army’s last in a 21-15 loss. The requisite beeps sounded in the production truck. Words passed through
cables and into headsets. Seconds later, a clear image of Stichweh and the Army offense appeared on the monitor. Verna pulled the trigger and threw the picture on air.

“Here it comes,” he warned play-by-play announcer Lindsey Nelson, to whom he had revealed his intentions only hours earlier, during the taxicab ride to Philadelphia’s Municipal Stadium. Nelson didn’t even have time to forewarn his audience that they would be witnessing television history. Most important, though, Stichweh “rescampered”
into the end zone and the very first instant replay went off without a
technical hitch.

So as not to confuse viewers, Nelson alerted his audience to what they’d just seen: “This is not live! Ladies and gentlemen, Army did not score again!”

During the game, Schramm phoned Verna in the truck. “My boy,” Schramm told Verna, “what you have done here will have such far-reaching implications, we can’t begin to imagine them today.”

In fact, during the early days of the innovation following the 1963 Army-Navy game, the phenomenon became so popular that viewers demanded to see it during practically every sporting event, but unfortunately, there weren’t enough tape machines to go around.

Schramm’s words proved to be prophetic. In the ensuing decades, instant replay – Verna’s not certain which of two announcers, Ray Scott or Pat Summerall, actually named his invention – became a cornerstone component of all sports telecasts.

In the video below, we see Verna describe this and get an interesting glimpse of a CBS TK41 in action from stock footage. Enjoy and share! -Bobby Ellerbee

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