For the
1953–54 NBA season, the
National Basketball Association
The National Basketball Association (NBA) is a professional basketball league in North America. The league is composed of 30 teams (29 in the United States and 1 in Canada) and is one of the major professional sports leagues in the United St ...
began a contract with the
DuMont Television Network. This marked the first year the NBA had a national television contract.
Background
The contract had the DuMont Television Network televising 13 Saturday afternoon games. According to the book ''Tall Tales'', NBA owners wanted the presumably "worst" game of the week to be shown on DuMont, because they were afraid if the "best" games were shown, it would negatively affect the gate for that game. Also, even though DuMont wanted the games on Saturday afternoons, a number of owners resisted because they feared that Saturday matinees would not draw as many people as a night game.
The DuMont Network would televise 20 Saturday afternoon games the following season, paying
$39,000 for the rights. DuMont's first game aired on December 12, 1953, with the
Boston Celtics defeating the
Baltimore Bullets 106-75. This was the only year of NBA coverage on DuMont; the Saturday afternoon package moved to
NBC
The National Broadcasting Company (NBC) is an American English-language commercial broadcast television and radio network. The flagship property of the NBC Entertainment division of NBCUniversal, a division of Comcast, its headquarters are l ...
for the season, mainly because NBC could clear the games on far more
stations that
DuMont could.
Games on DuMont were usually
blacked out in the cities they were played in; for example, the three
Boston Celtics home games included in the 1953-54 package were blacked-out in Boston, however,
WJAR-TV in nearby Providence (whose signal covers most of the metropolitan Boston area) did carry the two regular-season Celtics' home games that were part of the DuMont package.
[Boston Globe, December 26, 1953, p.7] Meanwhile, as early as
1948-49, ''
The New York Times
''The New York Times'' (''the Times'', ''NYT'', or the Gray Lady) is a daily newspaper based in New York City with a worldwide readership reported in 2020 to comprise a declining 840,000 paid print subscribers, and a growing 6 million paid d ...
'' reported that all
New York Knicks games at
Madison Square Garden would be televised
locally In mathematics, a mathematical object is said to satisfy a property locally, if the property is satisfied on some limited, immediate portions of the object (e.g., on some ''sufficiently small'' or ''arbitrarily small'' neighborhoods of points).
P ...
. The local station,
WJZ-TV
WJZ-TV (channel 13) is a television station in Baltimore, Baltimore, Maryland, United States, airing programming from the CBS network. It is Owned-and-operated station, owned and operated by the network's CBS News and Stations division, and ma ...
(the forerunner for ABC's
flagship station, WABC), also had exclusive rights to televise Knicks' playoff games.
Schedule
Announcers
*
Marty Glickman
Martin Irving Glickman (August 14, 1917 – January 3, 2001) was an American radio announcer who was famous for his broadcasts of the New York Knicks basketball games and the football games of the New York Giants and the New York Jets.
Glickman w ...
*
Curt Gowdy
Curtis Edward Gowdy (July 31, 1919 – February 20, 2006) was an American sportscaster. He called Boston Red Sox games on radio and TV for 15 years, and then covered many nationally televised sporting events, primarily for NBC Sports and ABC S ...
*
Dick Grossman
*
Lindsey Nelson
Lindsey Nelson (May 25, 1919 – June 10, 1995) was an American sportscaster best known for his long career calling play-by-play of college football and New York Mets baseball.
Nelson spent 17 years with the Mets and three years with the San F ...
*
John Reddy
Marty Glickman and Lindsay Nelson
called Games 2 and 5 of the
1954 NBA Finals for DuMont.
See also
*
List of programs broadcast by the DuMont Television Network
This is a list of programs broadcast by the DuMont Television Network, which operated in the United States from 1942 to 1956. All regularly scheduled programs which were aired on the DuMont network are listed below, regardless of whether they orig ...
*
List of surviving DuMont Television Network broadcasts
The DuMont Television Network was launched in 1946 and ceased broadcasting in 1956. Allen DuMont, who created the network, preserved most of what it produced in kinescope format. By 1958, however, much of the library had been destroyed to recove ...
References
External links
1953-54 NBA Telecasts on DuMont
{{National Basketball Association on television
1950s American television series
1953 American television series debuts
1954 American television series endings
Black-and-white American television shows
National Basketball Association on television
DuMont sports programming