CBS Sports Archives - Retro Reminiscing Video and Pictures

WHEN SATURDAY AFTERNOON SPORTS HAD EVERYTHING

Looking back at this 1977 CBS promo, I’m reminded how different Saturday afternoon sports TV used to be. One edition of CBS Sports Spectacular gave us world championship boxing, NHRA drag racing, professional arm wrestling and The World’s Strongest Men — all on the same show.

The hot rods are what caught my attention. The footage came from the 1977 NHRA World Finals, a historic season that saw Shirley Muldowney become the first woman to win an NHRA world championship.

The arm wrestling has a story too. Promoter Steve Simons had formed the World Professional Armwrestling Association in 1974, hoping to move the sport out of bars and present it as a legitimate competition. By 1977, it had made its way onto national television through CBS.

And the strongman competition was brand new. This was the first year of World’s Strongest Man, won by Bruce Wilhelm. One of the competitors was Lou Ferrigno, right around the time America was getting to know him as The Incredible Hulk.

Even the boxing featured WBC welterweight champion Carlos Palomino.

That’s what I miss about shows like CBS Sports Spectacular. You might tune in for the drag racing and end up discovering boxing, arm wrestling or strongman competition.

Do you remember spending Saturday afternoons watching shows like this?

CBS NFL Today 1977 — When Sunday Football Started With Brent, Phyllis and Irv

There are certain sounds that can immediately take you back, and this old CBS NFL opening from 1977 does it for me.

Before RedZone, fantasy-football apps and having practically every game available somewhere, Sunday afternoon football meant turning on one of the three networks. If you were watching the NFC, chances are you were watching CBS.

And The NFL Today had become part of the ritual.

There was Brent Musburger, Irv Cross and Phyllis George, with Jimmy “The Greek” Snyder contributing his predictions. What I never really appreciated at the time was how groundbreaking that desk was. Cross became the first Black man working full-time as a national television sports analyst, while George — the former Miss America — helped open a door for women in network sports broadcasting that had barely existed before.

And then there’s that music. The theme was called “Horizontal Hold,” written by Jan Stoeckart under the name Jack Trombey. Hear a few seconds of it and suddenly it feels like Sunday afternoon again.

The football itself was different too. 1977 was the last 14-game NFL season. The league had already voted that spring to expand to 16 games beginning in 1978, along with an expanded playoff format.

CBS had the NFC, NBC had the AFC, and ABC had Monday Night Football. Pat Summerall and Tom Brookshier were CBS’s top game announcers, and there were no streaming packages or instant access to every matchup.

The NFL Today became so successful that its studio format helped establish the blueprint for the pregame shows we still watch today. CBS eventually lost NFL football when Fox took the NFC package beginning in 1994, but The NFL Today returned in 1998 when CBS came back with the AFC.

Does hearing this opening bring back Sunday afternoons in your house — and who do you remember most: Brent, Phyllis, Irv or Jimmy the Greek?

CBS Sports Spectacular

Do you remember when CBS Sports Spectacular could fill an afternoon with sports we rarely saw anywhere else? This short promo is a perfect example, jumping from championship boxing and roaring NHRA dragsters to the brand-new World’s Strongest Man competition

Carlos Palomino was defending his welterweight title, Shirley Muldowney had just become the first woman to win an NHRA Top Fuel championship, and future Incredible Hulk star Lou Ferrigno was testing his strength against athletes from several different sports

What made CBS Sports Spectacular so much fun was never knowing what might come next. It could feature a major championship one week and something completely unusual the next. Long before we had cable sports channels running around the clock, programs like this introduced us to athletes, competitions and entire sports we might never have discovered otherwise

Did you watch CBS Sports Spectacular regularly, or did you usually tune in only when a favorite sport was featured?