While watching an Elite Eight game of the NCAA Men’s basketball tournament between Duke and Kansas at around 7 PM on a recent Sunday evening, I received an e-mail from my mom telling me that a friend of hers was annoyed because the game had caused the broadcast of the “60 Minutes” interview between Stormy Daniels and Anderson Cooper to be delayed. During a commercial break, I shot back a reply asking if she remembered the Heidi game.

Because I do!

At around 4 PM nearly fifty years ago, I turned on the radio in my room to listen to a crucial football game between the AWESOME New York Jets and the Oakland Goons (I mean Raiders). Towards the end of the third quarter, Mom reminded me to get ready for a visit to the house of her boyfriend, an engineer contemptuous of young people and football. I grumbled inwardly, as the game was exciting, but dragged myself to the car to join my mom and sister, Jenny, for the ten-minute ride to the house.

“Now after the game,” Mom reminded me over the call of the game on the car radio, “you must watch Heidi with Jenny. It starts at seven o’clock, and she has to watch it for her English class.”

“OK,” I mumbled, wanting to listen to the game in peace.

We arrived at the engineer’s house at around 6:30, and the engineer’s son, Jenny, and I retreated to a small room to watch the game’s fourth quarter on Channel Four, the NBC affiliate in the New York City area.

At around the same time, NBC executives were in crisis mode. The network’s president had told the sports department earlier in the week that they had to cut the game off at 7 PM so that the made-for-TV movie adapted from a children’s classic book entitled Heidi could start on time.

No matter what.

At around 6:45, NBC sports executives realized the game was going to end late. Fearful of the outrage among sports fans if they cut out of the game before it ended, they engaged in a whirlwind of conference calls, finally gaining the permission of NBC’s president to delay the start of Heidi until the game ended. But someone had to communicate this change to the person responsible for flipping the switch.

At around 6:58, with around two minutes left and my awesome Jets winning by a field goal, a commercial interrupted the action.

“It’s time for Heidi,” Jenny announced.

“The game isn’t over,” I snapped.

But instead of the roar of the crowd, I heard birds chirping, a flowing mountain stream, and pastoral violins.

I howled.

“Shut up,” Jenny said. “It’s 7 o’clock; it’s time for Heidi.”

“Relax,” the engineer’s son said.

I howled more loudly.

“What’s wrong?” Mom asked from the door of the room.

I tried not to shout. “They started Heidi before the game ended.”

Mom tried to console me. “That’s too bad. But watch the movie; it’s supposed to be good.”

“Can’t I listen to the game on the radio?”

“Now, Peter,” she said. “Just watch the movie.”

But I wasn’t interested in watching the movie because I had read the book in braille, and a story about a boy named Peter being bossed about by his sister named Heidi in the idyllic Alps was too close to my real life.

So I fell asleep.

In the meantime, angry sports fans bombarded the NBC switchboard with so many calls that the switchboard’s fuse was blown — twenty-six times. As Art Buchwald, a popular columnist at the time, put it: “Men who wouldn’t get out of their chairs in an earthquake rushed to the phone to scream obscenities” to anyone who would listen.

Before the movie ended, someone woke me up to tell me that the Goons (Raiders) had scored two touchdowns in the last two minutes to win the game. I was too groggy to be disgusted.

When Jenny and I came home from school the next day, Mom told us that the president of NBC had apologized, promising that other programming would never again preempt the end of a sports event.

Even if a porn star was ready to describe her sexploits with our current playboy president.

If you are interested in reading an entertaining article about the Heidi game, please visit

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heidi_Game