Posted on 02/02/2016 9:29:50 AM PST by Theoria
Troy Haupt is a 47-year-old nurse anesthetist here in North Carolina's Outer Banks. He has a secret to reveal about Super Bowl I: He owns the only known recording of its broadcast.
CBS and NBC, which televised the game, did not preserve any tapes. But the copy that Haupt owns -- of a broadcast that launched the Super Bowl as an enormous shared spectacle that attracts more than 100 million viewers -- might never be seen on any network. The N.F.L. does not want to buy the tapes and has warned Haupt not to sell them to outside parties or else the league will pursue legal action.
Unless the league and Haupt make a deal to resolve the financial differences that have privately divided them since 2005, the tapes will stay in storage in a former mine in upstate New York.
"This year had to be the year, with all the hype of Super Bowl 50," Haupt said.
The tapes are a bizarre heirloom that, for decades, sat largely ignored in the attic of his family's three-bedroom house in Shamokin, Pa., deteriorating from shifting temperatures.
Haupt's father, Martin, taped the game. Haupt never knew him. Haupt and his mother, Beth Rebuck, say they have no idea what he did for a living back then. They also don't know why he went to work on Jan. 15, 1967, with a pair of two-inch Scotch tapes, slipped one, and then the other, into a Quadruplex taping machine and recorded the Green Bay Packers' 35-10 win over the Kansas City Chiefs. He told his family nothing about his day's activity.
It would take another eight years for Martin Haupt to tell his wife what he had done. By then, they had divorced and both had remarried.
(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
Lousy journalism school writing makes the story almost incoherent.
I had no problem reading it at all. Some examples of bad writing might help.
Question to all here.
Why would the NFL not want the tape?
And why would they not want anyone to see it?
Any ideas?
So after 50 years the NFL still has rights in this case???
I read and understood the entire article. Interesting story.
Copyright laws are only good for 25 years, right?
Tell them to go pound sand... I want to see it
My guess is that they want it, but not at the asking price.
These tapes won’t last forever they need to be preserved and why would the NFL not want them is beyond me.
It can’t be a matter of money if nothing else you would think Green Bay and Kansas City would want them enough to buy them.
Why is it of any consequence for the first paragraph that he never met his father?
It’s the trying to make it an unfolding story and human interest story rather than simply stating what happened and what the status is.
I know where a couple of working quad VTRS are at and am sure I could set up.
The biggest problem with old videotape is that it deteriorates, even in perfect climate control.
If it were me, I would have found an outfit with a quad machine and scraper and bumped a copy off to some modern formats.
Ive had a few disintegrate on me during playback.
That in itself shows the corruption of our political/legal system by crony capitalists and their owned politicians in Washington.
It should be legal for the tape owner to make money off of this after 25 years or so—especially 50 years later and the NFL doesn’t want it.
A million?
Then they countered with $30,000.
Seems small potatoes for the NFL at a million.
I understood it, but it is cloyingly annoying.
I think as far as he selling the tapes, the NFL does not have a leg to stand on.
If he (or anyone he sold it to) started selling duplicates or showing the tapes commercially, the NFL (and CBS and NBC) may have a case.
They probably didn’t have any legal disclaimer about taping it then, so they cant go after him on this angle. He actually also didn’t tape it himself so they can’t go after him for that either.
NFL may not want to pay what he’s asking, if they’ve talked about it. They also dont want him to profit off it if they won’t.
Unless the tape quality is terible, it would make sense to buy them and remaster for sale by NFL. Split the proceeds.
Longer than 25 years.
They got rid of their own tapes on top of that.
Establishes he was not involved in any way with recording this or knowig about it til way later on.
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