The Things We Miss: Sports Scores
THE THINGS WE MISS
#2 : The suspense of getting sports scores
Remember what being a sports fan was like before smartphones, computers, and thousands of sports channels?
Back then, we got one game on TV. That was it. On a really special day, maybe two ball games were shown. The backup? Radio! Trouble was, radio stations carried local teams only. If you were a fan of some other team or another place, you were shit out of luck. And if you were a sports bettor, getting scores sometimes required waiting until the next morning and reading the newspaper.
But, I’ll say this: All that mystery heightened the suspense! Remember Howard Cosell’s Monday Night Football highlights? Hell, that was the actual highlight of our week!
As I said, sports gamblers had it really rough. With no ESPN nor the internet, all major cities had “sportslines.” Sometimes they were called “scorephones.” Anyone else remember?
They were almost always run by sleaze bags, mostly paid (worthless) touts and fronts for organized crime. You dialed an 800 number. Then, you waited and and were forced to endure one mind numbing sales pitch after another from “expert handicappers” promising tomorrow’s “game of the year” or special “lock” for an extra fee. Finally, patience wearing thin, some guy with a scratchy voice who sounded like a hitman in Reservoir Dogs would bark out the scores of each game played that day on a recorded line.
Oh, and if it was college basketball season — with a hundred games — and you were waiting for a score on the Pacific Coast, you might be hanging on the phone for another ten minutes. Oh, and some of these sportslines cost 99-cents a minute. So, it might take 12 minutes to finally learn if Oregon beat Arizona and covered the spread. In the 1980s, I must have dropped a couple of thousand dollars in quarters, calling sportslines.
Even going to the ball game heightened the suspense. Those old stadium scoreboards were ancient. Talk about no frills! Many stadiums changed the scores by hand, with some guy tasked with sticking a placard in a window slot. I think Boston still does this. Several stadiums did not even respect the visiting team enough to put up their names. Take this sign from late ’60s Cleveland, which always seemed dark and muddy. Glancing at the photo, I have to wonder — who were the “fans” who decided not to show up with front row seats in the upper deck at a Browns game? Oh wait, it’s the BROWNS. It looks like the deck chairs on the Titanic. Given Cleveland’s miserable football and baseball history, the stadium should have just put up a sign saying — “HOME.”
Today, March Madness starts. Games will be shown and live updates will plaster the smartphones of every fan and bettor. On second thought, may I don’t miss the old days as much as I thought.
