This. The first World Cup I remember was 1982 and at the time the UK only had three channels. You honestly could not escape the World Cup.
Similarly, the FA Cup final has been huge as long as I remember. I’d even say that with certain changes, like teams concentrating on the Champions League and the FA Cup Final no longer being the last game of the season, has meant it is even less important now.
I live in the USA but close enough to Canada that we pulled in CBC back in the rabbit-ear days. The Stanley Cup finals have always been a big deal, especially when a Canadian team is in it.
AFAIK, the three biggest sporting events in Canadian history in terms of public engagement were the '02 and '10 Olympic men’s hockey finals and the '72 Summit Series with the Soviets. The first two were watched by about 2/3 of the country. 4.3 million Canadians (out of a 22mil population) watched the final game of the '72 series , but bear in mind it was in the middle of the night since the game was in Moscow. My mother can tell me exactly where she was when she heard that JFK had been shot, and when she heard Foster Hewitt say “Henderson has scored for Canada!”
Wikipedia says the '66 Wirld Cup final is the most-watched television event in UK history, narrowly beating out Princess Diana’s funeral.
The city of New York seemed to think that the Mets winning the baseball championship in 1969 was a big deal.
Ticker tape parades probably aren’t what they used to be, seeing that ticker tape is harder to come by, many building windows are sealed and dropping all that paper isn’t viewed as environmentally friendly (they swept up 578 tons of paper after the Mets’ 1969 parade, which still didn’t compare to the 971 tons dropped during the Manhattan parade to celebrate the 1981 return of the Iran hostages).
I remember at the time they were talking about how people would throw computer punch cards out the window in 1969…ticker tape had pretty much disappeared. It was kind of a gag that Gomez Addams had one in his house on the “Addams Family” sitcom a few years earlier, along with his rather antiquated business suit. Also I think there was both a spontaneous throwing paper out the window on a Thursday afternoon when the Mets won and a more formal ticker tape parade a few days later with the players there.
I suppose NASCAR championships weren’t really a big thing back in the 1950s and 1960s. Probably became more popular when a tobacco company, looking for ways to advertise after cigarette advertising on TV was banned, became the sponsor and they could promote the “Winston Cup”. Richard Petty, who has been there since the beginning, says that the Daytona 500, which didn’t start until 1959, didn’t become the big race until around 1970…before then it was the Labor Day race at Darlington.
A sports reporter (Dave Anderson?) said that in 1960 the Winter Olympics wasn’t a really big deal. CBS would confine coverage from Squaw Valley, CA to one hour on weekday afternoons. Which is why the 1960 USA hockey gold medal is virtually forgotten while the 1980 is so remembered…few people saw it. The winning goalie, Jack McCartan, signed with the New york rangers who proudly advertised “He gets $1,000 a game”… a big figure at the time.
It was never as big a deal as the World Series.
I remember this too. Late 70s-early 80s? Weren’t all the playoffs, even the finals, on tape delay? Things sure have changed.
I also remember only a few years later, in the mid-80s, that the playoffs were a huge deal. I think Magic Johnson and Larry Bird might have had something to do with that …
Absolutely. Magic and Bird (and, a few years later, Michael Jordan) were hugely instrumental in building the NBA’s popularity in the 80s and 90s.
My mother still remembers coming home from school and watching the 1960 World Series, when Bill Mazeroski hit his walk-off home run at the bottom of the 9th. That was a HUGE deal here in Pittsburgh.
The first franchise that the NFL put in Dallas in 1952 failed miserably. The first game attracted 18,000 people to the Cotton Bowl (75,000 capacity) and the team was awful. The owner went bankrupt before the end of the season and they ended up playing as a traveling squad, not playing any home games after early November. The NFL replaced the Texans with the Baltimore Colts the following year. I’m guessing had they tried to put an equally bad team (as any expansion squad would be) in Atlanta in the 1950s the public there would have been equally as enthused.
California did turn out to be a much better market for pro football, the 49ers came in via the AAFL merger and the Rams moved from Cleveland and were very successful in LA from the start.