On this day in New York · February 28, 1940
The First Basketball Game on Television
NBC's experimental station pointed a camera at Madison Square Garden for a college doubleheader, and almost nobody in New York owned a set to watch it on.
The facts
- Date
- February 28, 1940
- Game one
- Pittsburgh 57, Fordham 37
- Game two
- NYU 50, Georgetown 27
- Station
- W2XBS, the experimental predecessor of WNBC
On February 28, 1940, NBC's experimental station W2XBS televised a college basketball doubleheader from Madison Square Garden, the first basketball ever shown on television. Pittsburgh beat Fordham 57 to 37 in the first game, and top-ranked NYU beat Georgetown 50 to 27 in the second. W2XBS, the forerunner of what is now WNBC, had already televised the first college football game a few months earlier, and the Garden doubleheader was the next step in figuring out what a TV camera could actually do with a fast, up-and-down game. The broadcast reached so few homes that it barely registered as news at all.
In their words
The day in the words of the people who were there. Every quote is verbatim, and every source links out so you can check it.
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the fact that it was televised was hardly news, not even getting a mention in The Ram's coverage
Fordham University Athletics, recounting how the campus paper covered the 1940 broadcast
Source: Fordham University Athletics
Why it still matters
Every buzzer-beater a New Yorker has ever watched on a screen traces back to this night at the Garden, even though the night itself was so small that fewer than 400 television sets in the entire city could have picked it up.
Sources
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