Sponsor (Jan-Apr 1958)

Record Details:

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by Joe Csida Sponsor backstage Behind the fee tv scenes First I phoned the Olympia in Miami Beach, and was told that the house was completely sold out. When the ladies who answered the phones for the theaters in downtown Miami, and in Coral Gables conveyed the same depressing message I realized that I had vastly underrated the appeal of Sugar Ray Robinson and Carmen Basilio. I never should have waited until the very afternoon of the day of the middleweight championship tussle. But I realized, too, that if this situation held true for any appreciable number of the other 170-odd theaters, arena and other establishments around the nation, which were showing the Teleprompter closed-circuit telecast of the fight, that we were probably about to set a new high gross for a closed-circuit sports telecast. Ned Irish, the executive vice president of the International Boxing Club, promoters of the bout, subsequently confirmed this. The IBC's end of the closed-circuit telecast take was somewhat over $300,000, and approximately $60,000 better than that taken in for the previous Robinson-Basilio tussle. Fight towns (New York, Philadelphia, Boston, New Orleans, Los Angeles, Denver, etc.) were all virtually SRO. In New York at the Loew's Broadway flagship house, the State, they were putting a $5 and $7.50 per seat bite on the customers, and had customers begging to be bitten. Practically all other Loew's and RKO houses in town put the ropes up two to three hours before fight time. Can fee tv be stopped? In the Cow Palace in Frisco, the State Fair Music Hall in Dallas and in arenas in Houston, Louisville, Rochester and Syracuse, local fight promoters ran the telecast preceded by a handful of live bouts. In Frisco fans spent $25,000 to catch the fight at the Cow Palace, though about 10,000 of the arena's 16,000 seats went begging. The Cow arena box-office was scaled up to $5.50. It was significant in Frisco, that in addition to the 6000-plus fans who made it at the Cow Palace, at least three theaters, the Paramount, the Golden Gate and the Telenews did from good to SRO business with the fight. The latter house, as a matter of fact, only contains 400 seats, but it had no trouble in filling all of those at $6.50 per ducat. Irving Kahn estimated shortly after the fight that the telecast grossed very close to $1,500,000, kicked in by 364,876 fans. It takes no imagination at all to see, on the basis of this fight, why fee television cannot be stopped. Closed-circuit or Government-licensed vhf or uhf channels, I don't know. But stopped, never! As soon as more, less expensive and better-performing equipment can be built, it isn't hard to conceive of twice the 175 locations which carried the Robinson-Basilio tiff carry any number of other major sporting events. Or other key entertainment events. I do not believe the day is very far off when we will see some major event grossing $5,000,000 to $10,000,000 in a closed-circuit telecast. And if— as is entirely {Please turn to page 31) SPONSOR • 19 APRIL 1958 WILS 106 r Greater Audience than Station B — all day 5000 LIVELY WATTS More Listeners Than All* Other Stations Heard In LANSING contact VENARD RINTOUL & McCONNELL, INC. '17 Central Michigan counties with $1,696,356,000 spendable income. WILS $j& ftjftf c^tffa ASSOCIATED WITH WPON— PONTIAC, MICHIGAN