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The birth of the TV timeout: Local legend Crowe had hand in development, by David Baron, Houston Chronicle l published March 11, 2011
As you wade through this weekend’s unending string of conference basketball tournaments, you will on many occasions experience one of the industry’s most logical innovations, created with the help of one of Houston’s broadcasting legends, John Crowe.
Crowe, who in the 1980s founded one of the nation’s largest television remote production companies, was an early associate of TVS network founder Eddie Einhorn, who staged the 1968 Houston-UCLA game at the Astrodome and is being inducted this year into the College Basketball Hall of Fame.
Among Crowe’s many production duties while producing games in the Big Eight, the Southwest Conference and the WAC, was working with game and conference officials to schedule television timeouts. It was an inexact science, and it could create havoc with the networks and the teams, he recalled.
“We were at Norman once for a game between Oklahoma and Kansas State that was airing on NBC,” Crowe said. “It was a close game, and the first half was winding down, and I wasn’t getting the timeouts I needed (for the network).
“I told Bill Hancock (at the time the sports information director for the Big Eight and now executive director of the BCS) that the network was on me and that I had to have a timeout, but he said he couldn’t give it to me because it would interrupt Kansas State’s momentum.
“Finally I got down to three seconds left in the first half, and I called (to referees) for the timeout myself. (Kansas State coach) Jack Hartman went through the roof, because he thought I was stopping his team’s momentum. He just went berserk.”
In the wake of the resulting brouhaha, the networks and the colleges reached a compromise: TV timeouts would be called at the first dead ball opportunity at the 16-, 12-, eight- and four-minute marks of each half, in concert with a TV coordinator assigned by the conference office for each game.
“And that’s how we came up with TV timeouts,” Crowe said. “And it worked out just fine.”