From the archives: Game to be televised nationally

Original Date of Publication: Sept. 18, 1951

SC and the National Broadcasting company have combined to achieve television history with the announcement yesterday that the Trojan-Notre Dame football game, Dec. 1 in Memorial Coliseum, will be televised coast-to-coast over the new microwave relay system.

The “live” telecast will be the first to emanate from Los Angeles over the permanent west-to-east transmission channel.

KNBH, channel four, will air the game locally while other viewers throughout the country will watch the famed intersectional battle over local NBC outlets.

The announcement, made jointly by Willis O. Hunter, director of Intercollegiate athletics, and officials of, Notre Dame and NBC states that the game rights have sold for sponsorship to Westinghouse Electric company.

It also mean that Coach Jess Hill’s Trojans will be viewed coast-to-coast twice during the 1951 season, the national telecast of the SC-Army game from New York, Nov. 3, having already been announced, NBC will also carry that game.

Both games will be televised as part of the National Collegiate Athletic association’s experimental television program which involves a series of “controlled telecasts.”

The coast-to-coast telecast will also open the Trojan-Irish series, which has drawn a total audience of 1,712,015 fans since its beginning in 1926, to a far greater national audience.

Under the permanent transmission system of the American Telephone and Telegraph company, the program will go from Los Angeles to San Francisco and then to Chicago by the microwave network. From Chicago it will be sent on to New York and other eastern points by the present coaxial cable connections.

Although this game will be the first sports event to go from west to east it will not be the first such program carried on the new relay. Earlier the new system will bring the world series to the east coast from the west.