While reading about the 1980 “Miracle on Ice” US vs USSR Olympic match, I remembered that the game was on tape delay. I also recall hearing that 1970’s NBA finals games were also tape delayed. If you followed sports back then, did that affect how you watched (or didn’t watch) the games? Did you have to make an effort to avoid hearing the scores? Does anyone still see recorded or rebroadcast sporting events?
All the time. The Olympics are always shown on a tape delay. Very often, the attractive events are held at a bad time slot (For instance, events held in the evening in the upcoming Beijing Olympics would be held in the early morning on the East Cost of the US). NBC has tape delayed events for quite a few Olympics. The swimming event held at 9 PM in Beijing would probably show up at 9 PM EST in the US the next day.
Generally, sports shows during the Olympics do something so as not to be spoilers (like telling people to close their eyes as they put the results on the screen). But some places just give the event results as they come in.
It was also quite common for college football up until the early 1990s. You didn’t get to see every single game of the local teams. Most games were shown on tape delay later on Saturday nights. I was a kid, so I usually listened to them on the radio, then stayed up to watch part of the tape delayed broadcast.
Currently, with the Fox College Sports channels, they also show games on tape delay. I’ll watch some of these even if I know the score because I’m interested in seeing a particular team or player. During football season, I watched tape delayed Arizona State and Oregon broadcasts to see how good those teams really were.
No. It’s hard to convey, to people who weren’t alive at the time, how difficult it was to get information in the 1970’s. There was no cable TV (at least not where I lived), so during most of the day there was no news on television, and there were no “screen crawls”. Generally, if you missed an event, you had one chance to get the score–by watching your local 10 o’clock news between 10:20 and 10:23, when the sports guy would give sports scores.
If you missed that, you had to wait until you got your newspaper the next morning. If the event ended after 10:00 at night, it wouldn’t be in the next morning newspaper, so you had to wait until the following morning. There were a few all-news AM radio stations by the mid-1970’s, after music moved to FM, and you could tune in at certain times during the day and get sports scores. Or you could make a toll call on your telephone. That was it.
Believe me, in that era, it was a lot harder to get a score than to miss a score.