I remember fans were allowed to hold up signs. Specifically, I remember there was a QB controversy. Some fans liked Richard Todd and some liked Matt Robinson. Examples of signs in that era: "Todd is G-d" and "Re-Todd". It was pretty funny if you ask me.
Is that the one where the flying lawnmower flew into the stands and killed a fan or was that another game? I had a friend that went to the killer game.
Cold and windy. Bought a $5 SRO ticket at the Jets office in Manhattan. Parked my car at Main St. and rode the 7 one stop. Saw all the games in 68. No TV home games.
I had a question about that. Was that game shown locally on replay later that night? I know they used to do that with preseason games back in the day …..:
Had season tickets at Shea through most of the seventies, the first year or two in the bleachers at the open end of the stadium. It was as cold and windy out there as anywhere in the semi-civilized world. It was also about a ten minute walk to the closest men's room. After I paid part of my penance my seats got moved to the bleachers in the closed end of the stadium a few rows in front of the walkway that was used mostly by visiting team fans as the standing room only location. Oddly, it seemed just as cold and just as windy as the open end but there was a concession stand and bathrooms right behind us. Early in the season the wind would kick up the uncovered infield dirt and blow it in your face for a few hours. I'm not sure if they always covered the dirt with grass after the baseball season ended but did at least most years. By 1979 I had moved farther away and was doing shift work and gave up my seats - the fact that the Jets organization was offering me more seats every year but refused to move me to a regular seat with a back and arms was also a factor. I did, however, end up going to that first Monday Night game against the Vikings as the ending of a very long weekend that started the prior Friday flying to Michigan to visit a friend at grad school and see the Michigam - Minnesota game. Minnesota lost twice. Everything said here about it is true - and then some. A huge fight broke out under the big scoreboard at halftime and was still going on in the middle of the fourth quarter; the rent-a-cops were so outnumbered and their pay was so low I'm surprised they even stayed until the end of the game. Real cops were nowhere to be seen. As the game ended a bunch of high school kids were going after a security guy who was only a couple of years older than them until some bigger fans got between them. MNF started at nine o'clock at that time and if you figure those kids got out of school at three they were drinking for nine hours by that time. Even guys who worked until five had four hours to get a load on before kickoff - it was brutal out there. I'm pretty sure the Giants had also not had a home Monday Night Football game before then but I kind of remember that there was some kind of marketing reason by ABC or the NFL behind it rather than lousy records of the NY teams. It's too bad that the city and the Mets made it so hard for the Jets to stay there but it would be great for the Jets to be back in Flushing Meadows again. An updated clone of Lucas Oil Stadium in the parking lot between CitiField and the Grand Central Parkway with only the name of one team on it would be ideal!
Good stuff. I was gonna ask about the flying lawn mower! Sad someone had to die, but a great concept none the less. Sorry about the cold...what doesn't kill ya makes you stronger!
So the Jets-Raiders championship game was blacked out in NY It was replayed at 11:30 on channel 4 that night. I was 11 years old. My father took me to the Wakefield Theatre in the Bronx to see Yellow Submarine, so I wouldn't know the score. As soon as we walked out of the movie, someone yelled, "The Jets won!" I still watched it, since I was off from school because of Christmas vacation. '68 AFL championship game was the only time I remember a regular season or play-off game shown on tape. The '69 Jets-KC play-off game was blacked out and not shown on tape. (I was there!) Interestingly, when the Giants and Jets played for the first time in the regular season in November of 1970, that game WAS televised live That game was at Shea. Shea was unique looking on TV because the stands were so massively high, then cut off at about the 30 yard line. It was crazy if you sat at the edge of right or left field upper deck stands. You'd look one way and see a huge modern stadium. You'd look the other way and felt like you were going to fall out of the stands. I'll give more recollections in another post.
I loved flying into LaGuardia when there was a game on. You could literally look down and see the players. Same for sitting in the stands. You could look up and see the passengers on the plane looking down.
OK cool story- I thought I had read the Oakland game was replayed later that evening. I assume the KC game was not because they lost….the Giants game at Shea was probably sold out - hence no blackout. That game would have been on CBS. Yes Shea was a very uniquely built stadium…I was there once for a Mets game. Thanks for answering my question!
Actually, Shea was not at all unique in design, it was formulaic for stadiums of the 1960s built to house both baseball and football teams. These were invariably round with lower stands that moved from perpendicular orientations for baseball to parallel for football. Veterans Stadium in Philadelphia, Three Rivers Stadium in Pittsburgh and Riverfront Stadium in Cincinnati are some other examples. "Common knowledge" at the time, whether accurate or not, was that Shea had been engineered to allow the completion of the circle of stands in the outfield and the capacity for a roof to be added; something that never happened. Early plans for Three Rivers showed it with part of its circle open like Shea and Riverfront in its last two years of use actually had outfield sections removed so the replacement stadium could be built into that area. You could be sitting in the front row of the mezzanine on the fifty yard line in any of these stadiums and still be over fifty yards from the nearest sideline. I do believe that of those mentioned Shea was the ugliest with its outer walls consisting of random squares of corrugated metal originally painted in the orange and blue of the Mets. That did nothing at all to keep the winds out of the seating areas but channeled them through at a faster rate. Those eventually got removed only to have the Mets paint the whole place a horrendous almost purple shade of blue for its last few years.
