On This Date presented by Belmont Realty: Fordham Football Plays in First Televised Football Game

On This Date Presented by Belmont Realty
 
With the 2020 fall sports season canceled by the COVID-19 outbreak, we at Fordham have decided to dig back through our archives and provide our fans with content on some of the outstanding teams and student-athletes who have graced Rose Hill over the years.
 
September 30, 1939 – (Queens, N.Y.) – The crowd arriving for today's Fordham-Waynesburg (Pa.) football game at Randall's Island Stadium probably didn't know that they were about to become part of history.
 
This afternoon, the approximate 9,000 fans in attendance saw two iconoscope cameras, which had just been patented by RCA,  on the sidelines, broadcasting the game for W2XBS (now WNBC). Now it wasn't that strange to see cameras on the sidelines but these cameras were different. They were actually sending a live signal to a relay station 10 miles from the stadium and then, by cable, to the top of the Empire State Building, where a large transmitter broadcast the game to the lucky few who own a television (it was estimated that about 500 people saw the broadcast). A top-of-the-line set in 1939, a Clifton, sold for about $600 (over $11,000 today). Thus, the game became the first to be broadcast by a television network.
 
Notable Fordham players who appeared in the game include Len Eshmont, Dominic Principe, Lou DeFilippo, Vince Dennery, John Kuzman, Raymond Riddick, Lawrence Satori and Joe Ungerer, who all went on to play in the professional ranks, as well as Ralph Friegden, father of former Maryland head coach Ralph Friedgen, Peter Carlesimo, who would later serve as Fordham Director of Athletics, and Donald Lambeau - son of Green Bay Packer legend Earl Louis "Curly" Lambeau.
 
As for the game, Waynesburg surprised the Rams by taking a 7-0 lead before Fordham evened the score on a Steve Kozlo rushing touchdown, the first of 34 unanswered Fordham points as the Rams won, 34-7. Friedgen scored twice for the Rams while Eshmont, who led the NCAA in rushing that year, and Principe each scored once.

That winter, the Rams were also involved in the first college basketball to be televised live when Fordham took on Pittsburgh in Madison Square Garden on February 28, 1940.