TMQ: All hail the most important player in NFL history
Plus -- no one controls their own destiny
Last month a milestone was missed – the 57th anniversary of the most important play in the history of football. Of the man and the moment that made American football what it is today.
I refer, of course, to a touchdown scored by Preston Ridlehuber.
Ah, Ridlehuber. A running back from the University of Georgia, he spent a couple desultory seasons in the NFL. Career totals 12 carries, four receptions and one-for-one passing for a touchdown.
Yet Ridlehuber stands as grandest figure in the long annals of American football. Preston today is 82 years old and when he leaves us, will be greeted by the football gods with song and feasting.
What, his name doesn’t ring a bell? Preston Ridlehuber scored the winning touchdown in the Heidi Game.
The year was 1968. Then in Oakland, the Raiders were playing the Jets in the week’s national telecast.
In that simpler time, typically there was just one pro football game on each week. Owners feared any more broadcasting would diminish ticket sales. They hadn’t yet realized the initials “NFL” and “TV” were made for each other.
The Jets were led by Joe Namath, football’s most attention-grabbing player of that period; the Raiders by fearsome Ben Davidson, a six-foot eight-inch defensive end whose specialty was lifting quarterbacks up and body-slamming them onto the ground. Now, a penalty. Back in the day, the crowd went wild.
The game was close at Jets 32, Raiders 29 with a minute remaining. Tick… tick… tick… the clock approached 7 p.m. Eastern, the old highly formalized start of primetime.
In scoring range, the Raiders broke the huddle and – the football scene became a vapor, replaced by an adorable mädchen collecting wildflowers as someone yodeled. The movie Heidi was slated for 7 p.m. Eastern and began exactly on schedule.
Television cut away from football! This will not stand!
In that simpler pre-digital time, fans got final scores by calling up newspapers or local network affiliates and asking for the sports desk, where there were wire services. Thousands who called were stunned to learn Oakland banged two touchdowns in the final 42 seconds and won, the decisive score a fumble fallen on in the end zone by Preston Ridlehuber.
The following day NBC announced that henceforth it would never cut away from a football game in progress, carrying every contest to conclusion regardless of scoreboard. Other networks said the same.
Preston Ridlehuber in 1968. Photo courtesy Las Vegas Raiders.
The first televised football happened in 1958. By 1968, the Heidi Game aftermath established that football would rule the fast-expanding universe of television.
Further, established that nothing is more important than football. The president could be speaking, the Pope could be pronouncing mandatory premarital sex, Belgium might be invading Portugal: no cutting away from the game. All because of Preston Ridlehuber.
Beyond fashion and music, a lot has changed since 1968. That year 40 percent of adults smoked; today 11 percent do. Spectators attending the Heidi Game were free to light up in the stands. Today in California you’d be arrested if you tried to light up at a hotel cocktail lounge.
Since 1968 smog in American cities is down 74 percent; the number of women working outside the home has increased from 23 million to 77 million; marriage has become much less common (in 1968, six percent of Americans age 40 were never-married, now that share is 26 percent); today the United States and Russia possess only 20 percent as many nuclear warheads as they had in 1968.
Nuclear disarmament is the best thing that’s happened in the current generation, and millions aren’t even aware it occurred – subject of an All Predictions Wrong after the season ends.
There are many other indicators of change since 1968, and most are positive – which you’d never know from the ritualized gloom of the media and politicians. But one thing definitely has not changed: football is the most important subject on television. We have Preston Ridlehuber to thank.
Jennifer Edwards as Heidi in the 1968 production.
In conspiracy news, until his injury on Sunday, Micah Parsons was subject of many offensive holding instances that weren’t called. Sometimes Parsons was held, uncalled, by two offensive linemen at once.
Mike Florio of Pro Football Talk proposed NFL officials are turning a blind eye to offensive holding because the league wants more scoring in order to please gamblers who bet “the over.” Putting your money on the over pays off if the scoreboard spins.
In young adulthood a labor lawyer, Florio became a self-taught NFL commentator when he founded Pro Football Talk in 2001. Later NBC acquired the website. Since Florio got an on-air gig at NBC’s Football Night in America, he’s become a member of NFL establishment.
That a member of the NFL establishment thinks gambling is reducing the integrity of the game seems telling.
