[packerd_00]

Use to grab the Sports as soon as the school library opened up in the mornings.

[Jayvegas420]

Do you consider yourself old Ron?

[Underdog5229]

Landline
Call to get recorded lines and scores.

did you have to sit and listen to the scores of 30 games before you got the 1 you wanted to hear? also how often were the scores/recording updated?

[19th Hole]

Do you remember "THE NATIONAL"??
I used to have a newsbox across from by bar/rest.
Great read every morning.
18 months, between January of 1990 and June of 1991
The Greatest Paper That Ever Died

Radically brilliant. Absurdly ahead of its time. Ridiculously poorly planned. The National changed everything about sports journalism — and torched $150 million in the process.
by ALEX FRENCH AND HOWIE KAHN ON JUNE 13, 2011

The National Sports Daily, on the one hand, is a long-dead and short-lived newspaper that, for 18 months, between January of 1990 and June of 1991, attempted to cover sports in a way that no other American publication would, could, or had ever even imagined. On the other hand, the paper is emblematic of the parts of culture and media that were not yet ready to converge. Typewriters and satellites. Mexican titans of industry and American daily news. Content in too many forms. Born from an impetuous whim only a billionaire would call a business plan, the paper quickly began its operations, grabbing all of the talent money could buy. Frank Deford, a writer who had achieved legendary status by the age of 50, was made editor-in-chief; columnists and a feature staff were gathered, poached, and lured from everywhere; every beat in the athletic spectrum was covered, charted, and ranked, from golf to professional wrestling. There were jokes, crossword puzzles, flashy info graphics, gossip, and an attempt to cover world news in brief. Somehow Casey Stengel wrote for The National even though Casey Stengel was dead. The long-form pieces were often exquisite and resonant. The box scores were innovative — a statistical Rosetta Stone. Egos ran wild. Ambitions, unchecked. Everyone’s own ideas, of course, were the best ideas. And it was all just too much: The vision for the paper exceeded the technology available to produce it; the content straddled highbrow and lowbrow in a way that confused potential advertisers and buyers; distribution was a catastrophe; the money could not last. But what transpired in that year and a half launched careers and developed the voices and thoughts that would go on to frame the next generation of sports media. On the outside, The National seems long forgotten. But on the inside, there’s no doubt at all that The National Sports Daily completely changed the game.

♦♦♦

“It sounded exciting. It sounded new. It sounded like it was going to be the best thing ever invented.” — Dave Kindred
“I always tell people, I sailed on that Titanic and it was quite a luxury liner, too.” — Ed Hinton
“Everything about The National was wrong except the end product. The end product was terrific.” — Glenn Stout

[str]

did you have to sit and listen to the scores of 30 games before you got the 1 you wanted to hear? also how often were the scores/recording updated?

Yes. You had to hear a bunch before you heard yours.
They updated about every 10 minutes. They would always tell you exactly which minute they would be back
That was the 1313 number. Brought to you by sports book.com I think ? Lol.
When it was hoops season the guy loved to call William and Mary, Bill and Mare. And used to listen from the pay phone at the track 25 years ago.
Man, things have changed.

[TheMoneyShot]

Calling the 800 number service line was a pain in the a$$. My buddy would always call... took 3-4 minutes each time to run through the entire scoreboard... to get to your game.

On a Saturday night.... guy spending more time getting scores on that service line.... than getting pu$$y. lol

[str]

What did the guys before cell phones, internet and espn do? They have to wait til the paper came out the next day to get scores, then meet the bookie to collect or pay up?

Yes. For a horse race, you waited until the next morning to read the paper and sometimes games as well.
But ... Warner Wolf would give the score of the Cubs home game around 1970 at 5:55 pm on the local news. They did not have lights but everyone else did. I was 17 and my first book was about 25. He did not know that the Cubs did not have lights. Yes , he was apparently an idiot.
We would disguise betting the winner we already knew by betting an if win with the winner of the finished Cubs game with Bob Gibson, or some big favorite, then drive around all night drinking beer and listening to the game on the radio.that made a -200 pitcher about even money. 20 bucks was a LOT of money back then to a kid . You could get most stations east of the Mississippi River after the sun went down from the east coast. Hard to hear it but who cared. My friend and I crushed our book that year. That summer at age 17 I learned that the only way you can actually beat the book is to have an edge. If you want to place a bet just for action , make it a consistent small amount. But when you find a game or horse with a true edge, you send it in.
Harder to find those types today for sure, but they still exist. Gotta be very patient. Not that get even each week crap. Betting is for life, not a week or even a season. Keep track of your plays, learn from your mistakes and find your strengths and weaknesses. Play what you do well at.
Good luck.

[jjgold]

Still sportpagers best source for scores direct connection all the time

[UntilTheNDofTimE]

This brings back memories. I was 17 and I had a job outside collecting shopping carts so I was always calling that sports line number. I remember how it used to tell you the final score so if you layed the points you were so happy when it said "the Spurs crushed the Rockets....98-74"

[19th Hole]

Remembering Sports Phone and 976-1313: When sports info was a phone call away


From left, Mike Walczewski, Charlie DeNatale and Cory Eisner of Sports Phone meeting in Eisner's office. Photo Credit: Charlie DeNatale

By NEIL BESTneil.best@newsday.com @sportswatchUpdated July 31, 2015 12:06 PM

PRINT SHARE
Most of the millions of numbers uttered on Sports Phone are long forgotten -- scores of games no one cares about now, results that led to ill-fated wagers and shaped standings from another millennium and another world.
But for many New York-area sports fans of a certain age, seven digits are seared in memory, a phone number that resonates still: 976-1313.
"Everyone 45 and over can recite '976-1313,''' MSG Rangers reporter John Giannone said. "If you were a sports fan -- especially a gambling sports fan -- that number was embedded."
Sports Phone had its own softball team, including Fred Weiner, one of SportsPhone's owners holding the clipboard, "Bullet" Bob Meyer, a harness racing announcer looking at the clipboard, and Howie Rose, voice of the Mets and Islanders standing behind him. Photo Credit: Charlie DeNatale
Said Steve Cangialosi, MSG's Devils announcer, "Only a couple of years ago, I was sitting in a friend's Italian restaurant and was introduced to somebody who . . . knew my name right away and he said, '1313!'''

So it goes for the alumni of Sports Phone, a New York institution that lasted for a quarter century, faded into history a mere 15 years ago and yet today seems as plausible as getting a Mets score via smoke signals.
To summarize for youngish readers: In a time before results were accessible anytime, anywhere, most fans desperate for information had nowhere to turn other than brief updates at 15 and 45 minutes after each hour on all-news radio stations.
Enter Sports Phone, which after a failed earlier effort, began in 1975 to offer updated roundups -- in 58 seconds -- for a small fee (originally a dime).
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At first, the call-in number was 999-1313 and later there was an alternate at 976-2525, but fans knew where to look, and found young, eager announcers bound for bigger things.
(Don't bother calling now, the numbers are no longer in service.)
YOU KNOW THEM NOW
One in a series of print ads used to promote SportsPhone. Photo Credit: Charlie DeNatale
The alumni list includes -- and this just scratches the surface -- the current TV voices of the Yankees, Mets, Islanders and Devils, the radio voices of the Giants and Mets, the Knicks' public address announcer and the primary official scorer for Mets and Yankees games.
"There were a lot of young, enthusiastic, aggressive guys," said Knicks P.A. voice Mike Walczewski, 59, forever "King Wally" to Sports Phone callers and an original from '75. "It's just amazing when you look at the roster of people we had there."
Take Mets and Islanders announcer Howie Rose, 61, who worked on the original staff while still attending Queens College -- and after being recommended by Marv Albert. Rose was president of Albert's fan club at the time.
"For me it was like anchoring the 'CBS Evening News,''' said Rose, who said he earned $5 an hour. "When you're 21 and want more than anything to be on the air and someone says, 'I heard you,' that is the same sort of tonic a comedian must get when he gets on stage and hears a roar."
A Sports Phone jacket. Photo Credit: Charlie DeNatale
SNY's Gary Cohen, 57, was on in the early years, as was MSG's Al Trautwig, who still was a student at Adelphi when a key early executive named Mike Farrell brought him aboard.
"In college I remember hearing an ad for it," said Trautwig, 59. "What a concept! You can actually get the scores whenever you wantt"
Initially the results came in via an old-fashioned ticker. "You lived to hear that sound when you were waiting for the final score of the final West Coast game," Rose said.
But eventually the service had stringers in press boxes, which was faster. Sports Phone also sent staffers into the field to gather audio, providing invaluable interviewing experience for a generation of journalists.
A Sports Phone T-shirt. Photo Credit: Charlie DeNatale
SPORTS PHONE IS CALLING
Sometimes the interviews did not even require leaving the building at 919 Third Avenue in Manhattan. Rose recalled the night in 1976 when he spoke to the Maple Leafs' Darryl Sittler after he had totaled 10 points in one game.
He simply called the Maple Leaf Gardens switchboard. "I would say in as deep a voice as I could muster up, 'Could I have the locker room, pleasee' And damn if they didn't ring the phone," Rose said.
Five years later, Wayne Gretzky scored his 50th in his 39th game. "We called Edmonton and tried to get Gretzky on the phone," said Howie Karpin, 61, now of SiriusXM Satellite Radio and an official scorer at Mets and Yankees games. "Two hours later we get a collect call from Wayne Gretzky, and we interviewed him on the phone."
Sports Phone mic flag. Photo Credit: Charlie DeNatale
By the early 1980s, Sports Phone was a force, bringing in four million calls a month, with branches in Detroit and Chicago.
The New York crew had a pipeline to Fordham that delivered in addition to Walczewski and Giannone, future Yankees announcer Michael Kay, future Giants announcer Bob Papa, future YES analyst Jack Curry and future Washington Nationals announcer Charlie Slowes.
The non-Fordham roster included future Dallas Mavericks voice Chuck Cooperstein, out of Friends Academy in Locust Valley.
The New York office also provided updates to markets in the South, which led some announcers to use pseudonyms to sound less ethnic. Papa was Scott Randolph. Giannone was John Gannon. Karpin was Johnny Lee. Slowes was "Peachtree Pete" in Atlanta.
The Manhattan building that housed Sports Phone for much of its history, with the bar P.J.Clarke's below. Photo Credit: Charlie DeNatale
Cangialosi often did the Atlanta updates. "I was a 20-year-old kid, and I probably knew more about [the Braves'] Biff Pocoroba than any man should," he said.
"We did the Tampa fishing phone from New York," Trautwig said. "You called this guy Bob who talked about Buoy 17 and the causeway."
QUICKIE QUIZ
In addition to scores and interviews, there were other features, including "Quickie Quiz," to keep callers interested during slow times. The quizzes would bring in 400 to 500 calls. One of the most avid contestants was a young Kenny Albert, now the Rangers' radio voice.
"He was always the first or second person to call," said Charlie DeNatale, 61, who began at Sports Phone as an announcer and later was a marketing executive. Kenny Albert! So there's another Sports Phone alum, of a sort.
The service was big business, but for the young (mostly) men in the offices, there was plenty of time for fun, too. P.J. Clarke's was downstairs. So was Michael's Pub, where Woody Allen appeared regularly on the clarinet. Runyon's was nearby, too. Ken Samelson, a longtime staffer who later helped edit the Baseball Encyclopedia, recalled colleague Bob Grochowski -- a/k/a Bobby G -- dumping a bottle of Champagne on him during a raucous night at P.J. Clarke's after the Mets won the 1986 World Series.
"Fordham didn't have frats, so as close as we got to a frat is we'd go to Sports Phone and watch games and watch other things that maybe were unmentionable when you were waiting for the West Coast games to end," Giannone said.
Kay, 54, recalled once bringing sisters to the office on a double date with Giannone. "We made out with them at Sports Phone at like one in the morning," he said. "We had the codes to get in. We didn't have apartments or anything, so that's what we did."
Women staffers were few and far between, but ESPN's Linda Cohn was among them. She recalled in her autobiography that one of the TVs usually was tuned to the Playboy Channel.
Veterans credit the job for teaching them accuracy and succinctness. One category of callers required accuracy more than others.
"For years, fans would come up to me and say, 'When you were on Sports Phone, you always gave me good scores; I hate when so-and-so is on because I always lose when he gives the scores,''' said Papa, 50. "As if it actually mattered. But the gamblers are superstitious by nature."
Usually updates were freshened every 10 minutes or so. On NFL Sundays, it was every two minutes.
"It was overwhelming," Kay said. "I mean, the pressure was enormous. You had to knock it out in a minute and if you didn't the last words didn't get on, and that didn't help anybody. You had to get it right. I was 19 or 20. It was not easy."
DeNatale recalled Kay as a novice whom the veterans would send out for coffee. "Nobody wanted to put him on the air because he had a really awkward sounding voice," DeNatale said.
Said Samelson, "They used to order him around: Go to the deli! And look at him now. It's great."
Some of the resident grown-ups were memorable characters, too, such as Guy LeBow, a veteran radio man whom more than one alum compared to the fictional anchorman Ted Baxter from "The Mary Tyler Moore Show."
In short, it was an adventure.
"There was an air of zeal for sports and the people around you," said John Cirillo, who went on to be the Knicks' public relations man and now has his own P.R. firm. "You knew that they had such passion and were such outstanding broadcasters that they were going to be big time."
But that was not foremost on the workers' minds as they were doing it. "The concept of getting paid to talk sports was otherworldly for me at the time," Giannone said.
What could be betterr "I distinctly remember Gary Cohen walking out the door (when he left the job) and thinking, 'Wow, good luck with that!''' Trautwig said.
During the baseball strike in 1981, "we were dying," Walczewski said.
So Sports Phone decided to have the 1969 Mets face the 1961 Yankees in a seven-game Strat-O-Matic series. "Calls went up 400 percent," King Wally said. "The Mets won the series in seven games. That was typical of the entrepreneurial spirit."
GAME-CHANGERS
The beginning of the end was WFAN's debut in 1987, complete with an ad campaign that specifically targeted Sports Phone. Gamblers' access to beepers hurt. So did companies blocking access to such phone numbers during work hours. So did ESPN2's bottom line.
The World Wide Web was the final blow.
By the end, at which point the offices had moved to Elmont and later Franklin Lakes, New Jersey, announcers simply were getting scores off the Internet and reading them for the phone.
"All you had left were people on the road or people who had dial-up and were too lazy to boot up the computer," said Don La Greca, 47, of ESPN New York Radio, who oversaw the final days of the service.
DeNatale is trying to organize a reunion of alums for next summer, perhaps during the All-Star break.
Some are celebrities now, others less so. But to some they always will be King Wally -- or Peachtree Pete.
"Early on it was so much fun to get paid to watch sports and goof around," La Greca said. "With all the things I have done, it was probably the most fun I had in the business."
Said Cangialosi, "Young men and women ask, how did you get started in the businesss and my story just isn't tangible to them anymore. All of us had this avenue back then and we all worked tremendously long, crazy hours, but it was such a blessing for a lot of us, too."
Trautwig said he still thinks about those days whenever he is driving on Third Avenue and passes 919. For those of us who did not work there, another series of figures lives on.
Said Karpin, "Everybody remembers the phone number."


.

[Mr. Teaser]

I forgot which offshore sportsbook was promoting this??? You had to deposit 500 or 1000??? I can't remember? Pager and service was Free.

Bookmaker. I got mine through this.

[tony_come]

Like 10 years ago. That was torture.

Would have to call a Sportsline service that would report the scores to you every inning or so.

Especially horrible if you were out in public and had to sneak into a bathroom stall like a loser just to check scores in private.

How things have changed.

That ain't me

[Mr. Teaser]

buddy i remember before espn watching scores scroll on i think it was cnn or it was a news outlet.

Before the scroll CNN had "Headline Sports" that would update scores.

[ChuckyTheGoat]

Any good free 800 score-phone still around?

[ChuckyTheGoat]

19th Hole...how many SBR posters are in those photos?

[ChuckyTheGoat]

Before the scroll CNN had "Headline Sports" that would update scores.

"I'm Van Earl Wright. CNN, Headline sports!"

[19th Hole]

Any good free 800 score-phone still around?

Free Scorephones

Atlanta, GA (404) 842-1313	Madison, WI (608) 467-0333
Baltimore (410) 484-1818	Miami, FL (305) 669-5433
Birmingham, AL (205) 945-5544	Minneapolis, MN (612) 284-4000
Boston, MA (617) 723-1818	Mobile, AL (251) 666-5400
Buffalo, NY (716) 824-2525	Nashville, TN (615) 244-8888
Charleston, SC (843) 769-7200	New Orleans (504) 456-9700
Charlotte, NC (704) 342-1313	Philadelphia, PA (215) 471-3000
Chicago, IL (312) 609-1313	Pittsburgh, PA (412) 645-9800
Cleveland, OH (216) 623-1313	Rochester, NY (585) 454-1616
Columbia, SC (803) 765-1313	San Francisco, CA (415) 692-3525
Dallas, TX (972) 423-3111	Scranton, PA (570) 342-6500
Greenville, SC (864) 370-2828	Syracuse, NY (315) 437-1313
Houston, TX (713) 774-1200	Trenton, NJ (609) 528-2500
Las Vegas, NV (702) 220-3737	Washington DC (202) 898-1818
Little Rock, AR (501) 588-4400	Worchester, MA (508) 755-2700

[Slipknot26]

What did the guys before cell phones, internet and espn do? They have to wait til the paper came out the next day to get scores, then meet the bookie to collect or pay up?

Yes ,go get the morning paper out of the mailbox , straight to the sports section listing scores while sitting on the shitter.
Rip the toilet paper off the roller , only after finished , throw it against the wall seeing the fukkin Braves lose for the 12th day straight .
Those were the days

[Mr. Teaser]

"I'm Van Earl Wright. CNN, Headline sports!"

Yes! Either that or I'm Jerommmmme Jeranovich and this is CNN headlinnnnne sports