In The Game Behind The Game, his account of televising major sports events at ABC and at CBS, veteran TV sports producer Terry O’Neil writes about coming over to CBS and confronting a broadcasting culture that had pickled itself into a coma decades before. Apparently, the drinking culture at CBS Sports was even more widespread than that which O’Neil experienced working at ABC with Howard Cosell. This was plain even to the casual viewer at home, whose holiday viewing was spiced up annually by the Sun Bowl broadcast from El Paso, during which Pat Summerall and Tom Brookshier regularly discussed how sockless they’d gotten themselves in Juarez the night before.
One of the non-alcoholic symptoms of stultification at CBS was the stubborn refusal to move its in-game cameras from their positions on the 50-yard line. ABC, as O’Neil points out, had long ago moved cameras to the 25-yard lines, as well as leaving one at the 50. This enabled ABC to show more football during its football telecasts which, for TV executives, was akin to perfecting nuclear fusion. But, as O’Neil remembers it, the issue almost came to guns and knives at CBS. People there actually made the argument that at the 50, CBS had “the best seat in the house.” This sounded to O’Neil like they were bragging about cracking the technology of television three days before air.
I have no idea what some of those crusty old relics would make of a modern sports broadcast, during which there are cameras practically everywhere, microphones actually everywhere, and a dizzying array of on-screen graphics meant to satisfy stat geeks and gamblers, who make up much of the target audience for sports TV these days. Hell, sometimes it’s too much even for me, and I remember being amazed by the advent of instant replay, and then further astonished by the concept of slow-motion instant replay. You can actually see the quarterback's tibia rent in two. Scoreboard! I can curmudgeon with the best of them.
For example, we really didn’t need the second-base cam during this year’s World Series. It was OK, I guess, for did-he-get-the-bag? on double-play pivots, but on steal attempts it was completely useless. Look, here comes Mookie Betts. Where’s the ball? Who knows? Did the Yankee catcher drop dead? Who can say, because all the second-base cam could bring us was a huge cloud of dirt. It was like watching a miniature documentary on the Dust Bowl. Junk that sucker. Now.
However, for all my curmudgeonly dudgeon, I remain hopelessly devoted to football’s pylon cam. The pylon cam is the best thing to happen to football telecasts since John Madden bang-zoomed off into the Beyond. In fact, it’s damned useful, especially with the advent of reviewable plays.
For years, “breaking the plane of the goal line” sounded like some sort of astrophysical and cosmological concoction. Did the plane of the goal line extend upwards to infinity? Higher mathematics would seem to dictate that it did. A touchdown in the Rose Bowl is a touchdown on the moons of Jupiter. That’s just science. They also have become helpful in seeing if runners step out of bounds. And you can make a very good argument that the pylon cam is the reason we now see players on the brink of a touchdown reach out as far ahead of them as their arms can stretch, something that must have several generations of football coaches revolving at 78 rpm. These have come to be known as pylon dives.
Are they teaching pylon dives at coaching clinics yet? They should be.
But it’s not for its utility that the pylon cam won my heart. Several times a year, and occasionally, if I’m very lucky, several times per game, a pylon cam will get absolutely lunched in the line of duty. Here comes a lineman’s butt! Whammo! Here comes Marcus Mariota’s face! Splat! Here comes JuJu Smith-Schuster, mugging for the pylon cam. They should superimpose sound effects on the collisions the way they used to do it during fistfights on the Adam West Batman shows. When will it happen? You have to watch and wait. It’s like watching those old Figure-8 wreck-races from Islip, Long Island on ABC’s Wide World Of Sports, which always had the best seat in the house for mechanized mayhem.
And, remarkably, the pylon cam usually comes back for more. The pylon cam plays with pain. It never takes a play off, not even when, say, Chris Jones has dropped, say, Derrick Henry on it. The pylon cam is always there on game day and it plays all 60 minutes.
ESPN debuted the pylon cam during the 2015 College National Championship game. Its first big moment probably came later that year, on Dec. 14, in an NFL Monday night game between the Giants and Dolphins. At a critical moment with the score tied, New York’s Odell Beckham Jr. made one of his OBJ grand illusions in the back of the end zone. On the field, the catch was ruled incomplete, but a pylon cam clearly showed that, somehow, Beckham had gotten both feet down inbounds. The call was reversed and the catch turned into the winning touchdown.
The word “pylon” comes from “pyle,” the Greek word for “gateway,” and it came in antiquity to refer to the towering Egyptian obelisks that pharaohs used to mark their various triumphs. (Here in the 21st century, of course, we refer to massive memorials to triumphant vanity as “new stadium deals.”) The NFL tried for years to make the pylon camera work until an engineer in upstate New York named Paul Halsey cracked the problem by changing the transmission technology. He then handed the actual construction of the entire device over to a machinist friend who worked across the street.
(Halsey’s company, Admiral Video, got out of the pylon cam business, citing “liability concerns” and even going so far as to call them “terrible” on the company website.)
The pylon cam was an instant success. Even so, as recently as the end of October, the NFL still wasn’t insisting they be in use in every game. The lack of pylon cams banjaxed a game between the Falcons and Buccaneers when Atlanta’s Kyle Pitts clearly lost control of the ball before, you know, Breaking The Plane of the goal line, but the touchdown was allowed to stand because the replay showed no definitive evidence of Pitts’s fumble, and there was no definitive evidence because Fox, which had the broadcast of the games, had declined to provide pylon cams, which likely would have provided the proof that would have reversed the call. All hell briefly broke loose. The reason for the lack of pylon cams at all NFL games is lost in the tangled question of which is the more cheapskate operations—NFL teams or TV networks—a conundrum that may be beyond all human understanding. ESPN solved that problem by simply selling corporate sponsorships for its pylon cams.
All of which is so much institutional bafflegab. The true worth of the pylon cam always will be its entertainment value. The receiver’s face. The center’s butt. And the ever-present possibility that the pylon cam will be utterly destroyed while recording its own demolition on live television. Which, come to think of it, makes the pylon cam a fairly effective metaphor for the sport of American football.
We are coming into prime pylon cam season. Both the NFL and, for the first time, all levels of college football are in the stretch drive toward the playoffs. Surely, the doughty little pylon cam will be called upon to make big plays at crucial times, Surely, the pylon cam will break someone’s heart. Surely, the pylon cam will bring tidings of great joy to someone else. The pylon cam giveth and the pylon cam taketh away, Blessed be the name of the pylon cam, and of its corporate sponsors.
My favorite seasonal football competition is always the annual FCS championship playoffs. This is because, for some reason, much of the action involves teams from Montana and the Dakotas. This guarantees at least a couple of wonderful episodes of Arctic football al fresco. And there is nothing better for the pylon cam connoisseur than a game played in a snowstorm. Players slipping and sliding, bashing into the pylon cam from unexpected directions. Games that hinge on the fact that, because of the snowfall, the pylon cam is the only thing on the field that knows where the goal line actually is.
(The University of South Dakota now plays its games in a dome, and I am still considering legal action in this regard.)
I already have scoped out the brackets for this year’s FCS championships and I am almost giddy with anticipation. I see a second-round matchup between Montana and South Dakota State, set to be played in northern latitudes at Dana J. Dykhouse Stadium.
And, in my mind’s eye, I already can see the action taking place behind a steady curtain of snow. I can see the yard stripes and out-of-bounds lines disappearing beyond any hope of finding them during the game. I can see offensive and defensive linemen, spinning out like 18-wheelers on 128 during a blizzard. The broadcast crew is helpless. I can see golden moments at the end of the game. On one play, with the game on the line, a team runs a sweep. (Of course, it’s a stupid call, but this is my vision so shut up.) Everybody loses their footing and the last thing that you see on the pylon cam is about 1,400 pounds of Grade-A American football beef descending upon it, butts first.
OK, so one more play: My imaginary coaching staff gets smarter and sends its fullback powering off tackle. Does he score? How the fuck do I know? Have you seen how hard it’s snowing? You can’t even see the damn goal line anymore. But the pylon cam knows. It has recovered from its previous collision with bulk-rate humanity, and now it is the only creature on the field that knows. So I wait, with no real rooting interest in the outcome of the game, one way or another, but warm in the knowledge that, once again, the pylon cam will have broken the infinite plane of my joy, and scored.
