By Bill Koch
Most serious UC basketball fans know the story of the Bearcats' overtime upset of top-ranked Ohio State in Kansas City in the NCAA championship game of 1961. It was the first of two straight national titles for UC, both coming at the expense of the Buckeyes in the title game.
But very few of those fans have actually been able to see the game unfold with their own eyes, unless they watched it live on TV 60 years ago.
Now they can.
On Sunday night, from 8-10 p.m., thanks to the vision and perseverance of Emmy Award-winning producer and director David Ashbrock, fans can watch the game on WSTR-TV, Channel 64, hosted by Dan Hoard and Terry Nelson, the radio voices for UC basketball broadcasts.
I’ve known that Ashbrock was working on this project ever since he mentioned it to me at a UC basketball game a few years ago, but I didn’t know how passionate he was about it or why it was so important to him until I called him Friday, the day after he left me a voice mail proudly proclaiming that after six years he had accomplished his goal.
“It was a struggle, but it’s going to happen,” Ashbrock said. “As long as 10 or 15 years ago I wondered if this could be a possibility. I never really spent too much time on it until, I’d say, 2015. I had (then-UC coach) Ed Jucker’s film and I had an audio recording that was recorded off the air, and I wondered if the two could be integrated together.”
Ashbrock didn’t tackle this difficult project to make money. For him, it was a labor of love. It was also a challenge he was determined to meet no matter how many obstacles he had to overcome. And there were lots of them.
“This is one of the most important and unlikely events in the history of Cincinnati athletics across the Reds and Bengals and everything,” he said. “The Reds’ World Series are cherished by people. But to many other people, winning the national basketball championship is just as big a prize.
“There was no recording of the game that people could go back to. There just wasn’t such a vehicle. It was important to me to help people relive this whole experience so they could sit down and watch the game as it unfolded in real time and have something they could hold on to as a souvenir.”
Ashbrock started with Jucker’s actual coach’s film, which Jucker’s wife had provided years ago through the intercession of former UC sports information director Tom Hathaway. But syncing the audio to the film was no easy task. The audio was missing the overtime period and the last two minutes of regulation.
Ashbrock asked John Kiesewetter, the former Enquirer TV-radio writer who now writes for WVXU, to spread the word that he was looking for audio from the game. John Perin, a long-time, avid UC fan and sports director of WOBO Radio, answered the call.
But again there was a problem. Perin’s copy was recorded on a half-track machine and Ashbrock had to play it back on a quarter-track machine. To make it work, he had to realign the tape heads with his finger, a very tedious, and sometimes painful, process.
“It sounds like a lot of minutiae,” Ashbrock said, “but it’s an incredible amount of work to get this thing reconstructed in a way that it will actually feel like a live broadcast. But it does.”
If you’re interested in the technical details, Kiesewetter does a much better job explaining them in the story he wrote for WVXU.
Ashbrock originally planned to put the game on a DVD and donate it to the UC athletic department, which could sell it and use the proceeds to fund scholarships. But as time went by and technology changed, people weren’t buying DVDs anymore, so he sought a local television station to air it.
He thought he had it set up to be aired last year on WKRC-TV, which he believed would have been perfect timing. The NCAA Tournament had been called off because of the pandemic and there was no live sports programming on TV. But the NCAA refused to allow him to air it because it had imposed a moratorium on all NCAA-related programming.
“I was so frustrated,” Ashbrock said.
But the tournament is back this year – the Final Four will be played this weekend – and since this is the 60th anniversary of the first UC-Ohio State title game, the timing worked out OK after all.
Ashbrock found several UC boosters to help defray the NCAA’s $1,500 rights fee in addition to some of his other expenses. But he’ll never be compensated for all the time he expended to make this happen.
That’s OK with him. This is his gift to UC fans.
“I tell myself, your payday is going to be delivering this to an audience,” he said.
When I asked him why this was so important to him, Ashbrock, a UC graduate, talked about the connection he made with UC fans and the school during 25 years of producing and directing UC basketball games on FOX 19, starting in 1980 and ending in 2007. (There was a two-year gap where he didn’t do the games because Channel 5 owned the rights.)
Today the talented Ashbrock is an independent contractor involved in myriad projects. But his heart remains with UC basketball.
“I have a deep, deep bond and interest, a connection to UC,” he said. “I think I also have developed this love affair with the UC fans. I think they deserve to see this. I would have felt so disappointed and almost like a failure if I didn’t get this done. I’m pretty emotional about it.”
Most serious UC basketball fans know the story of the Bearcats' overtime upset of top-ranked Ohio State in Kansas City in the NCAA championship game of 1961. It was the first of two straight national titles for UC, both coming at the expense of the Buckeyes in the title game.
But very few of those fans have actually been able to see the game unfold with their own eyes, unless they watched it live on TV 60 years ago.
Now they can.
On Sunday night, from 8-10 p.m., thanks to the vision and perseverance of Emmy Award-winning producer and director David Ashbrock, fans can watch the game on WSTR-TV, Channel 64, hosted by Dan Hoard and Terry Nelson, the radio voices for UC basketball broadcasts.
I’ve known that Ashbrock was working on this project ever since he mentioned it to me at a UC basketball game a few years ago, but I didn’t know how passionate he was about it or why it was so important to him until I called him Friday, the day after he left me a voice mail proudly proclaiming that after six years he had accomplished his goal.
“It was a struggle, but it’s going to happen,” Ashbrock said. “As long as 10 or 15 years ago I wondered if this could be a possibility. I never really spent too much time on it until, I’d say, 2015. I had (then-UC coach) Ed Jucker’s film and I had an audio recording that was recorded off the air, and I wondered if the two could be integrated together.”
Ashbrock didn’t tackle this difficult project to make money. For him, it was a labor of love. It was also a challenge he was determined to meet no matter how many obstacles he had to overcome. And there were lots of them.
“This is one of the most important and unlikely events in the history of Cincinnati athletics across the Reds and Bengals and everything,” he said. “The Reds’ World Series are cherished by people. But to many other people, winning the national basketball championship is just as big a prize.
“There was no recording of the game that people could go back to. There just wasn’t such a vehicle. It was important to me to help people relive this whole experience so they could sit down and watch the game as it unfolded in real time and have something they could hold on to as a souvenir.”
Ashbrock started with Jucker’s actual coach’s film, which Jucker’s wife had provided years ago through the intercession of former UC sports information director Tom Hathaway. But syncing the audio to the film was no easy task. The audio was missing the overtime period and the last two minutes of regulation.
Ashbrock asked John Kiesewetter, the former Enquirer TV-radio writer who now writes for WVXU, to spread the word that he was looking for audio from the game. John Perin, a long-time, avid UC fan and sports director of WOBO Radio, answered the call.
But again there was a problem. Perin’s copy was recorded on a half-track machine and Ashbrock had to play it back on a quarter-track machine. To make it work, he had to realign the tape heads with his finger, a very tedious, and sometimes painful, process.
“It sounds like a lot of minutiae,” Ashbrock said, “but it’s an incredible amount of work to get this thing reconstructed in a way that it will actually feel like a live broadcast. But it does.”
If you’re interested in the technical details, Kiesewetter does a much better job explaining them in the story he wrote for WVXU.
Ashbrock originally planned to put the game on a DVD and donate it to the UC athletic department, which could sell it and use the proceeds to fund scholarships. But as time went by and technology changed, people weren’t buying DVDs anymore, so he sought a local television station to air it.
He thought he had it set up to be aired last year on WKRC-TV, which he believed would have been perfect timing. The NCAA Tournament had been called off because of the pandemic and there was no live sports programming on TV. But the NCAA refused to allow him to air it because it had imposed a moratorium on all NCAA-related programming.
“I was so frustrated,” Ashbrock said.
But the tournament is back this year – the Final Four will be played this weekend – and since this is the 60th anniversary of the first UC-Ohio State title game, the timing worked out OK after all.
Ashbrock found several UC boosters to help defray the NCAA’s $1,500 rights fee in addition to some of his other expenses. But he’ll never be compensated for all the time he expended to make this happen.
That’s OK with him. This is his gift to UC fans.
“I tell myself, your payday is going to be delivering this to an audience,” he said.
When I asked him why this was so important to him, Ashbrock, a UC graduate, talked about the connection he made with UC fans and the school during 25 years of producing and directing UC basketball games on FOX 19, starting in 1980 and ending in 2007. (There was a two-year gap where he didn’t do the games because Channel 5 owned the rights.)
Today the talented Ashbrock is an independent contractor involved in myriad projects. But his heart remains with UC basketball.
“I have a deep, deep bond and interest, a connection to UC,” he said. “I think I also have developed this love affair with the UC fans. I think they deserve to see this. I would have felt so disappointed and almost like a failure if I didn’t get this done. I’m pretty emotional about it.”
Comments
Post a Comment