Sports In The Year 2001

Speaking of TSQ, it is the opening day of the NFL season, and Tele-Pay is going to bill me the usual $5 to deliver the standard 16-game Sunday programming plus two Monday night and two Thursday night games. However, when it comes to pro football, I like a little more spice than that, and, of course, the league has come up with a series of intricate spectator-involvement programs, which can cost a lot of extra money. Here are a few of the most popular examples:

•There is a Seeing Eye minicam in every player's helmet that sees what he sees during a game. For $10, I can tie into the Seeing Eye system and spend the afternoon calling up individual players' perspectives of the game. Sometimes they are quite beautiful, as when a split end sees the gently spinning football floating into his outstretched lingers as he crosses into the end zone. Sometimes they are spine-chilling, as when a quarterback's Seeing Eye suddenly turns blood-red as he is crushed by a mountainous defensive end.

•There is the X-rated Field of Screams program, which can be paired with the Seeing Eye for a really hair-raising afternoon. It gives you full-volume coverage of all the obscenities and jungle-animal sounds that occur on an average Sabbath in the NFL pits. This also costs $10, and automatically protects children against the filth by zapping itself when anyone shorter than 4'7" enters the room.

•There is the All-Day Sunday package, which costs $25 and, via TV, allows you to be with your favorite team from the moment it gathers for breakfast at its motel until it leaves the stadium that night after the game. This is a case of total immersion in a true-to-life NFL game day, and it is also X-rated, since it includes revolting table manners, dirty jokes, ethnic insults, pregame lavatory habits (including vomiting) and obscene heckling from the bench. Most who have experienced this package believe it should be called All Day Animal House.

•The most expensive and the most provocative of all NFL packages is called Common Huddle. Subscribers like myself pay $600 ($30 a game) up front on Tele-Pay for the entire season. To be registered in Common Huddle, I notify Big MOACT a week before the first game which team I want to huddle with for the year—always the Vikings. Big MOACT then transmits a Viking playbook video for both offense and defense to my Home Control Truck memory bank. And from then on, through the regular season (playoffs are extra) I am invited, via picture and sound, into all Viking huddles, plus sideline strategy sessions and headphone traffic from coaches in the scouting box.

As the plays are called in the huddle, I order up the appropriate video diagrams from my playbook memory, superimpose them on the screen and watch to see how they unfold in real life. That is great fun, but the really heart-stopping high points for Common Huddle subscribers come when we are asked—en masse—to call a play in a game. It happens four times every game, but we never know exactly when until the screen flashes YOU BE THE QB! NOW! We have only 30 seconds to choose our plays and signal our calls to the huddle. A plurality vote among several thousand Viking Common Huddlers picks the play.

I am here to-tell you that there is no greater video thrill than the sensation of watching the Vikes go for a crucial first down—or even score a winning TD (it happened to me once)—on the exact play that I called!

Now, obviously, these extra features (and there are dozens more) can be pretty pricey for your average 50-year-old American baby-boomer employee of the U.S. Post Office with an annual salary of $59,000, which is well above the median household income for the whole country. A standard 20-game NFL hookup plus Common Huddle costs mc $35 a week. Well, it would cost me $35 if it weren't for yet another advertising brainstorm produced by the NFL master web. They call it the Major Marketing Commercials Bonus Plan—generally nicknamed Big Bad Ads. It consists of commercials that are the direct opposite of the five-second Bitty-Bites. Big Bad Ads are elaborately produced three-minute commercials made by the NFL's major sponsors. These commercials will never actually be played on air during games but rather are stored at the Big MOACT replay bank. I can call up a Big Bad Ad to watch in the privacy of my living room any time I want. And why would I want to watch a Big Bad Ad? Well, first, because these commercials are blockbuster production numbers that represent the state of the art in video technology-vibrant, exciting, creative, wonderfully entertaining. But also because I am awarded a bonus credit on my Tele-Pay NFL account for every Big Bad Ad I watch.

It works like this: Say I call up a three-minute United Airlines commercial and watch it in its entirety. I am then automatically awarded a 50-cent bonus to be applied against any Tele-Pay charges I incur during my next NFL game. Two dozen companies each pay the NFL $5 million a year to participate in Big Bad Ads.

New commercials are made once a month, and I make it a point to watch 10 Big Bad Ads each week which means, of course, that I earn $5 worth of Tele-Pay credits for games the following week. You may ask, How does the NFL know I am really watching? Simply because each subscriber to the Big Bad Ad service has transmitted to the NFL master web what is known as an H&BTF (Heartbeat-and-Body-Temperature Fingerprint). By placing my hand on the Big Bad Ad sensor console of Home Control Truck throughout the commercial, my "beat-heat print" is registered electronically—proving to the NFL that it is I, and not my mutt, Gabe, who is watching the set.