East Coast Kahuna

TV Football

Sunday afternoon is a traditional time to watch NFL Football. Because of the time zone difference, my Dad and I used to watch football games starting early Sunday mornings. We would usually watch a couple of games, being done by early afternoon. In Hawaii, we usually watched games featuring West Coast teams: SF 49'ers, Oakland Raiders, LA Rams, SD Chargers.

I remember when the telecommunication satellite Lani Bird first allowed live TV telecasts to Hawaii. Note: To pinpoint when this took place, I looked up Lani Bird - here's what was on the nasa.gov website. Intelsat II-A, also called "Lani Bird," was the first communications satellite of the Consortium's Intelsat II series. Lani Bird was launched in October 1966 to transmit transpacific communications, but failed to achieve synchronous orbit. It was named by the Hawaiian press; "Lani" meant "bird of heaven."

Although the satellite was not completely successful, it still would work for certain time periods. One of the early football games which was televised was a college game featuring Michigan State. (Recently, The Honolulu Advertiser ran an article by Mike Gordon reminiscing about this event. The motivation was that three players on this National Champion team were from Hawaii. Another game shown was the Army vs. Navy game, which was a popular rivalry at the time. I remember Roger Staubach as being the Navy QB then. We were also able to see the Super Bowls live, starting with the first one.

At first when I moved to the mainland to go to MIT, I got out of the habit of watching football regularly on Sundays. But at the end of the season, I always watched the playoffs. Later when we moved to Yonkers, I started watching a lot of the New York Giants. Moving to Ithaca, I still liked the giants, but started liking the Buffalo Bills (this was when they went to four straight Super Bowls and lost all of them). Finally, I stopped watching Sunday afternoon football when my daughter got busy with soccer games on Sunday afternoons. I still watch the Super Bowl and some of the playoff games, but not much else anymore.

posted by tjh14850 @ 9:43 AM