Events in 1940 aren't as great as the years that preceded them. The US had just gotten out of the Great Depression in 1939, according to the Encyclopedia Britannica, and tensions were rising within the country on whether to join World War 2 or not. The country was divided between the Isolationists and Interventionalists, according to the National WWII Museum. Only the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor broke the dam of growing support for war against Japan, and eventually Italy and Germany.
Despite the rift in American society at the time, there was still evidence of unity going around, and nothing unites a country more than a good 'ole game of basketball.
1940 may have been a year of strife for the American people, but it is also a time when televised sports matches were introduced to the public.
Here is the story of the first televised basketball game:
The First Televised Basketball Game In The World
The first basketball game ever televised was the match between the University of Pittsburgh and Fordham on February 28, 1940, at the Madison Square Garden, New York City, according to the NCAA's official website.
Yes, the first televised basketball game was a college basketball game.
The game was aired exclusively by W2XBS, which was also known as Channel 4 New York back then. Today, you may recognize the TV station as WNBC, the flagship station of the NBC television network.
Around 400 to about a thousand people tuned in to their TVs to watch the University of Pittsburgh defeat Fordham in a landslide score of 57-37. Unfortunately, the fact that the match was televised didn't rile up as much attention as a televised basketball game between the LA Lakers and the Miami Heat would be today.
According to Flurry Sports, Mitchell Stephens, a professor of journalism and mass communication at NYU, the number of American homes with TV sets of their own could be measured in the thousands - a small number compared to today's numbers.
TV broadcasting was still in its infancy at the time the first televised basketball game was aired. At the time, people were more used to listening to the radio for news and other kinds of announcements than to television.
As such, neither the Pittsburgh Press nor Fordham's school paper, the Fordham Ram, mentioned that the game was to be the first televised basketball game, per the Fordham Ram's official website.
This lack of enthusiasm for television and televised sports resulted in a small number of artifacts to remember the event.
Televised Basketball Since The 1940s
Despite this lack of fervor in the public for televised sports games, TV networks would eventually catch the public's attention. By the 1960s, Eddy Einhorn founded the TV Sports Television Network (TVS) and made efforts to get college basketball games on TV waves by speaking with coaches, athletic directors, and TV executives.
Despite the slow start, televised sports games eventually became a thing. Today, more than ten sports channels Americans can tune in to, such as ESPN, NBC Sports, Fox Sports, CBS Sports Network, and Golf Channel, per Reviews.org.
