The Golden Age of Basketball

[The 1982 CIF California Championship Division 1 final's influence on the history of television broadcasting was underestimated. It was a night that witnessed a miracle of live television. It served as an excellent template for the NBA's future broadcast strategy and featured two iconic figures.]

————————Excerpt from the 2001 published work "The ultimate assist: the relationship and broadcast strategies of the NBA and television network" by John A. Fortunato.

During the 15-minute halftime break for the two teams, the control room at CBS headquarters in New York began broadcasting advertisements to television: Burger King's beef patty burgers and Kellogg's boxed cornflakes.

Neil Pearson, the new head of sports at CBS since last November, asked in the control room, "Halftime break is on, did the Nielsen Company transmit the viewership ratings?"

After some hustle and bustle in the control room, a staffer came over with a fax, saying, "We've just received the data, and the viewership rating is roughly 4.3, which is not bad, similar to a regular NBA game."

Nielsen is the largest television viewership rating survey company in America. They use signal receivers and surveys to collect data on program viewership for various television networks, providing data support for the valuation of TV programs' quality and advertising pricing.

During halftime, the Nielsen Company sent rough data collected by signal receivers to the CBS sports department. This data was unprocessed and not precise, but Pearson couldn't wait for the precise data to be available.

Seeing this result, Pearson's brow furrowed because broadcasting the CIF California Championship was one of the important decisions he made after taking charge of the sports department in November.

The development of the basketball market in the 80s wasn't promising, and professional basketball had slumped. The 1981 finals had only a 6.7 viewership rating, a quarter of that for the 1979 NCAA finals.

Taking advantage of this decline, Pearson managed to secure the broadcast contract with the NBA at a bargain price of $88 million during contract negotiations as soon as he took office, which was considered Pearson's proud debut.

But once the contract was signed, Pearson, of course, hoped the basketball market would recover, and more people would want to watch basketball programs.

This CIF Southern and Northern California final was one of Pearson's attempts, and a month later, on March 29, CBS was also set to broadcast the NCAA college finals. High school and college basketball took turns stealing the spotlight.

He hoped that these youth sports events would attract young basketball fans and show the market a different kind of competition from professional basketball, cultivating a positive and uplifting image of the sport.

"A 4.3 viewership rating is just so-so. Now it's halftime, and by the third and fourth quarters, we will lose more and more viewers. The final result will certainly not be as good as 4.3."

Pearson wasn't too disappointed with the 4.3 rating, but he wasn't fully pleased either; he realized he had overestimated the appeal of high school games.

Although the game had a great hook, the competition between Southern and Northern California, including a Chinese team and their Chinese star.

But the last Chinese person to attract Americans was Bruce Lee, and he had been dead for almost 10 years.

That kid named Gan, to be honest, Pearson hadn't watched his games; he was just too busy to find the time.

However, in places where Pearson and the real-time data from the Nielsen Company couldn't reach, in California, and other regions across America, something was happening.

In San Francisco, at Gan's Restaurant, in the Chinese restaurants of Chinatown, in Korean restaurants, at places like The Beginning bars, many people gathered in front of televisions to watch the game.

In the first quarter, people watched while drinking, eating, and chatting, but from the second quarter, when Gan Guoyang made that block, everything changed.

People became focused, excited, and more invested until halftime when Gan Guoyang and Miller had a spat near midcourt; people couldn't wait to see the third quarter.

The commercials felt long, and some decided to go home, where 15 minutes was enough time to turn on the TV and continue watching.

That night, in an underground music bar in Los Angeles, halfway through the performance, suddenly a musician brought up a TV set, saying today's show was over, they had to watch a game.

There were boos from the audience, but the musician said, "I'm doing this for a friend who passed away. He asked me that if that person made it to the finals, I must watch it, either live or on TV."

Some people cursed and left, but most stayed to see what game it was — basketball, a stiff and boring thing, uninteresting.

But by the end of the first half, the music bar had more people than before, everyone engrossed in the game, excited by the showdown between numbers 11 and 30.

During halftime, more people left, looking for someplace else to watch the rest of the game, to a mall, to church, or anywhere that could get CBS.

In New York, in an office in the Olympia Building, David Stern was reviewing and amending labor contract drafts line by line, losing count of how many revisions he had made.

Since last summer, the NBA had been stuck in a quagmire of negotiations between labor and management, with the owners wanting to cut costs, establish a new revenue-sharing system, and especially, set a salary cap to control unrestricted payrolls.

As for the players, they firmly disagreed. Stern, as the league's Executive Vice President of Business and Legal Affairs (a new position created for him by O'Brien in 1980, handling law, marketing, public relations, television broadcasting, and more, all by himself), had a head-to-head confrontation with the Players Union president, Larry Flesher.