Four decades ago, American pro football fans were blitzed by a bad call. Not on the field–but in the control room. Executives at NBC ordered the sports department to break away from an exciting match so the network could air a made-for-television film based on a favourite children’s story. NBC has been cursed for that blunder ever since.

While the infamous game took place in 1968, the story goes back to 1880, when Swiss author Johanna Spyri wrote a children’s book about the life of a young orphan. The name of that orphan and book: “Heidi.” It was so popular, it led to sequels (not written by Spyri) and movie adaptations. (The best-known film version was made in 1937, starring Shirley Temple as the young girl.)

NBC commissioned a new version of “Heidi” to air for the 1968 holidays. The Spyri book was adapted by a young writer named Earl Hammer Junior (who would later gain fame with the now-classic Depression family drama “The Waltons”) and directed by Delbert Mann. Jennifer Edwards (daughter of Blake Edwards) starred as Heidi, with Michael Redgrave as her grandfather. (Others in the cast included Maximilian Schell, Walter Slezak, Peter van Eyck, Karl Lieffen and Elisabeth Newmann-Viertel.) The maker of Timex watches purchased all the air time, and NBC scheduled the new “Heidi” for Sunday night, November 17th, 1968, pre-empting its popular anthology “Walt Disney’s Wonderful World Of Color” and the situation comedy that followed it, “The Mothers-In-Law.”

Three hours before “Heidi” was scheduled to air, NBC broadcast its regular Sunday afternoon football game. That fall day in Oakland, California was a showdown between two of the best teams in the American Football League–the defending champion Oakland Raiders and the upstart New York Jets, a team that had become a force to reckon with, thanks to its able and flashy quarterback Joe Namath. Because the game was set to begin at 4:00 Eastern Time (1:00 PM in the Western time zone), there was no concern the game would run over into prime time. Most football games usually took less than three hours, so NBC felt confident it could air the game within the three-hour period, allowing the much-hyped “Heidi” to air on schedule.

What the Peacock Network did not count on was a nail-biter. Both teams were in fine form, with the lead changing hands often. By late in the fourth quarter, a 26-yard field goal by Jim Turner put the Jets ahead 32 to 29. By that time, it was just before 7:00 PM Eastern Time, and the game had just 65 seconds left to play. With so little time left, it seemed there was no way–short of a miracle–the Jets could lose. NBC quickly cut to a commercial break, while a decision was made on whether to stay with football or go to the network’s prime-time line-up. Under its contract with Timex, NBC was required to air “Heidi” on time. Before the game aired, the network’s broadcast operations supervisor, Dick Cline, was told to cut away from the game at 7:00 PM sharp so that “Heidi” could go on. But with such a close score, network executives were quickly flooded with calls from football fans who wanted NBC to stay with the game. And there were calls from distressed parents who pleaded with the network to air “Heidi” on time. Top executives decided to call Cline and order him to stay with the game until its conclusion. But because of the flood of phone calls from pigskin and “Heidi” fans, the NBC executives couldn’t get through. Worse, since the game was carried over NBC’s phone lines (satellite coverage was in its infancy back then), Cline could not see the outcome from the network’s West Coast operations in Burbank, California where he was located. So as ordered, after the commercial break ended, Cline gave the word to stop broadcasting the football game on the East and Midwest time zones.

Immediately, viewers were treated to NBC’s animated peacock colour logo, before “Heidi” went on the air. The move didn’t affect West Coast viewers, who were able to see the entire game played out. But for millions of fans in the Eastern and Midwest, they had to settle for young Jennifer Edwards and her co-stars recreate the story of the little Swiss miss. Here’s what they missed:

The game resumed after the commercial break, and the Jets suffered a penalty, giving control to Oakland. Charlie Smith ran for 43 yards for a touchdown, putting the Raiders ahead 36-to-32. But during the kick-off for the next play, the Jets’ Earl Christy allowed the football to land on the two-yard line, giving the Raiders’ Preston Ridlehuber a chance to grab the pigskin and score a SECOND touchdown for Oakland. The final score: Raiders 43, Jets 32–one of the most sensational plays in American football history.

East and Midwest viewers who were still watching NBC learned of the outcome, thanks to a crawl about 20 minutes into “Heidi” that announced the results. And that led to a flood of phone calls from angry fans, blowing out the network’s switchboard.

When they couldn’t get through to NBC, calls went to the New York Police Department, the New York Telephone Company and “The New York Times.” That evening, NBC President Julian Goodman issued an apology, calling the incident “a forgivable error committed by humans who were concerned about children expecting to see ‘Heidi’ at 7:00 PM. I missed the end of the game as much as anyone else.” (Not surprisingly, Goodman didn’t win a lot of sympathy from the audience.) Because the audio portion of the game was not preserved, play-by-play announcer Curt Gowdy was told to reconstruct the game’s original call, which aired (with the film) the next day on NBC’s news programs, including “Today” and “The Huntley-Brinkley Report.” Some stories have it that NBC ordered a special phone “hotline” to the broadcast operations supervisor so that the incident would not be repeated. In his own book, Dick Cline–the man who gave the order to cut to “Heidi”–claimed Goodman called him on a special line and ordered him to cut back to the game. By that time, according to Cline, the video link to the stadium was cut off and would have needed a series of events to be turned back on. NBC compounded its public relations fiasco by running ads in the nation’s biggest newspapers the next day, bragging of the critical response to the new version of “Heidi.” The ad featured a quote from Joe Namath of the losing New York Jets: “I didn’t get a chance to see it (‘Heidi’), but I heard it was great.”

The fallout was tremendous. It wasn’t bad for the Raiders, who later that year defeated the Jets in the AFC games and went on to win Super Bowl Three with a 16-to-7 victory over the Baltimore Colts. But the National Football League was so angry it demanded future broadcast contracts to include a provision that required the networks to air all football games in their entirety. Today, Sunday games generally run into overtime on the East Coast. It’s not a problem for NBC, which schedules its Sunday games in prime time. CBS simply bumps its Sunday night prime time schedule to run past 11:00 PM in case of an overtime game. Fox schedules reruns of cartoons such as “The Simpsons” and “King of the Hill” during the 7:00 to 8:00 PM timeslot that can be pre-empted if a game runs long, allowing the remainder of Fox’s entertainment schedule to air intact.

The “Heidi Game” was one of those rare television events that caused a chain reaction–and proved once and for all the popularity of professional football in the United States. Perhaps the best final words came from Val Pinchbeck, who was the National Football League’s chief of broadcasting: “Probably the most significant factor to come out of ‘Heidi’ was, whatever you do, you better not leave an NFL football game....It sure let you know that you better not take my football away from me at 7:00 PM.” No doubt, millions of pigskin fans would second Pinchbeck’s emotion–then and now.