Under crisp skies and an especially warm October Saturday afternoon, the Jumbotron at Texas A&M’s Kyle Field was aglow, as more than 100,000 people had assembled, making the crowd for football larger than the population of many of the surrounding towns.
Fans had been camped outside for more than a day before kickoff, a sea of maroon and white tents, beer cans, corn hole games and a staggering number of young women in matching maroon cocktail dresses and cowgirl boots. They were there to watch the Aggies face off against the University of Alabama’s Crimson Tide, a collection of souls forming a pop-up, pigskin city of sorts, shared traditions, rituals and governing principles.
And where else but Texas could the Aggies construct what they believed to be one of the most jumbo of the Jumbotrons in the nation, collegiate or otherwise? Measuring 47-by-163-feet wide (7,661 square feet), the board is roughly three times the square footage of the average American home, a replacement for its predecessor built in 2006, which at the time was also among the largest in the country.
A large rectangle on the south side of the field, it perched above the cannon (which boomed every time the Aggies scored), the locker room entrance and was bedecked on either side by a total of 55 American flags, honoring the Aggies killed during World War I. One of the largest “video boards” (a more finessed term used by stadium architects for Jumbotrons), it has become one of Kyle Field’s most consistent stars.
In the minutes before the team took to the field, the Jumbotron rolled documentary-style archival footage of the campus, the team and the stadium, which started in 1904 as a $650 endeavor that seated 500 people. Lore has it that Edwin Jackson Kyle, an agriculturalist known for his extensive writings on pecans, had to front the money himself, as university officials were initially skeptical of the facility’s value. Kyle’s profound interest in topics like soil was left out of the video, which was directed from a control room nearby involving no fewer than 30 people.
Sports and nostalgia go together like nacho chips and fake cheese, the crowd roaring at the images of bold text: “I AM KYLE FIELD” reiterated by a man’s booming, velvety voice. The Jumbotron had personified the field, making it a character of itself in the forthcoming football drama. It could talk, tell you its backstory, wrap fans up in a cocoon of afternoon football. People build attachments to places, but few outside of Disney theme parks will actually speak literally rather than metaphorically. Through its Jumbotron, Kyle Field does.
Then on screen came footage of the players arriving, clad in Beats headphones, looking tough. The flyover of the day - F18s - was announced. The Jumbotron helped lead the stadium-wide prayer, the national anthem, then the state anthem, “Texas, Our Texas.” An energy executive in gray hair and a maroon blazer waved on the screen as the crowd learned that he was the week’s “impact donor.”
Although the stadium was full, at times the eyes of the 100,000 were transfixed by the Jumbotron rather than the field. The screen showed the Yell Leaders, Reveille IX, the mascot collie, the starting lineup that arrived in pyrotechnics and smoke that would have made Siegfried and Roy blush.
During the first quarter, as A&M trailed Alabama 14-3, a row of young men and women, a sea of maroon fingernails, temporary tattoos of A&M’s logo on their faces, and thematic cotton T-shirts, noticed a camerawoman with the Jumbotron staff. She wore a crewmember polo and calmly approached their seats at the end zone. Students never really sit at Aggies games, so those were a minor formality. Shoulders were shaken, gasps released, eyes widened as they pointed at the benevolent camera. They paused. An elephant mascot, Big Al, visiting from Alabama, pelvic thrusted to a marching band nearby.
The camera turned to the students, blasting their images onto the screen before fellow fans, triggering an eruption of collegiate sports ecstasy.
“AAAAAAAGGGGGGGGIIIIIIEEEES!!!!!”
The camera cut off, all told, the affair lasting no more than five seconds, a full-fledged Jumbotron-induced freak out.
“Our goal is to enhance the experience. Not get in the way of it,” Andy Richardson, director of 12th Man Productions, the digital and video production group overseen by the athletic department that manages the Jumbotron production, later told me. “We want to specialize in those goose bump moments.”
Today, we consider the Jumbotron.
Both loved and reviled, the Jumbotron has become ubiquitous to sports arenas as hot dogs, beer, winning and losing, the new organ in the ballpark. It can excite, humiliate, distract and may even provide a pixelated mirror of fans. Long before the spread of smartphones and selfie sticks, Jumbotrons - for better or for worse - put fans into the center of live sports.
And now, as decision makers in sports business realize that smartphones are permanent and evolving appendages of their customer base, the Jumbotron, in all its loud and delightfully tacky majesty, may be under threat.
The Jumbotron is somewhat static, void of the “like” button that is a signature of Instagram and Facebook, but remains as another window by which fans can be seen to the world, albeit as they shove nachos and Bud Light into their faces. In a world where the seemingly oxymoronic job of reality television casting agent exists, the Jumbotron is still one of the rare pockets of mass media that shows real people doing real things - enjoying a sporting event. Typically, those on its screen don’t have a fleet of makeup artists, hair stylists, fashion consultants or time to be filtered or airbrushed. Yet the Jumbotron is out of fan control, instead operated from some unknown Oz, a digital character actor to the theater of competitive sports. Hence the tension, the joy, the agony of the super-sized appearance.
There are the botched wedding proposals, charming kisses, the balding men with their exposed guts, the bros brandishing bare and often-painted chests, fans break dancing or doing the wave, the clueless ones who don’t realize they’re in its crosshairs, their obliviousness being part of what draws its zoom. Today, Jumbotrons now solicit images and Tweets from fans, which they sometimes rebroadcast, and there’s an even newer, fascinating phenomena; people realizing they’re the star of Jumbotron, then taking selfies of themselves … on Jumbotron. Perhaps media theorist Marshall McLuhan rolls in his grave.
As the art of televised sports becomes more intricate, stadiums and arenas continue to experiment with ways to make the in-person experience further resemble the increasing sophistication and comfort of the couch-view at home, Nicholas M. Watanabe, a professor at University of Missouri focused on sports management, said. Unlike their parents or grandparents, postmodern sports fans had a new alternative: Why pay to leave home when increasingly large screens showed aerial angles of the game, sharp analysis and coverage, to say nothing of avoiding off-couch threats like Sahara-like parking lots or sour weather?
“Jumbotrons have become an essential part of the sport business,” Watanabe said. “Especially in creating excitement and interest from fans. We know that if fans had a good time, it makes it all the more likely that they will want to come back again.”
And lucrative. The rise of the screen has meant the decline of creating permanent signage for sponsors, as well as offering potential advertisers a shot at securing a large number of entranced eyeballs. “Having fans in a stadium is as close to having a captive audience as you will get these days,” he said.
But, where did the Jumbotron come from? And, after decades of dominance, is it on a path to extinction?
One of many unintended consequences of the industrial revolution was the rise of leisure time, particularly for the middle- and working-classes who previously spent much of their time toiling in hard labor or fighting to survive at all. Death and disease had pervaded daily American culture roughly a century ago in a way that’s difficult to comprehend today. Not only was there little time for fun, or sports, in some American cities, nearly a third of infants didn’t live to see their first birthday, the average life expectancy for men was 53 and for women (who were largely relegated to domestic roles and a limited political voice) 57. A simple cut could swell to an infection; flu-like symptoms could foretell a fatal bout of pneumonia. Considering that most Americans were preoccupied with work and survival, mass sports spectatorship as a concept had yet to bloom.
To put it into locker room parlance, life sucked.
The spread of electric lighting redefined daily routines, helping fuel restful and fun indoor activities like reading and board games. For the first time, it also made possible watching sports inside, such as boxing, and paving the way for indoor arenas like the third incarnation of Madison Square Garden, opening in 1925, to be built. Soon, lighting made outdoor recreational games possible, as well, and expanded their reach into the night when people finished work. In the early 20th century, a new, working class of sports fans came of age in the United States. First newspapers and then radio raced to cover every home run, touchdown, point and player, particularly in cities that were attracting workers, the economy shifting from one of rural agriculture to urban industrialization. After World War II, television coverage of sports began in earnest, mostly piggybacking off the interest sports had conjured on radio and in newspapers. The courtship between media and sports had begun, eventually germinating into a full-blow love affair, with more time and disposable income at stake.
As television’s success became a fixture in sports rather than fad, by the early 1980s team owners and stadium architects began to ponder how to incorporate them into arenas, the stadium becoming more like what fans were growing accustomed to at home. While selfie sticks are “narcisticks” and later digital video like YouTube and Vine would allow people to feel like they were the stars of their own television shows, the original goal of Jumbotrons was far less existential; engineers merely wanted a way to display images and show things like game statistics, in bright sunlight. The earliest goals of the Jumbotron were akin to those of the earliest televisions - a way to convey information simply. But like television and film, Jumbotrons also have elements of escapism. They “take us from where we are and deliver us, mechanically, electronically, or digitally to where we want to be,” Greg Siegel, a professor at the University of California at Santa Barbara wrote in an essay for the journal Television & New Media titled “Double Vision.”
Like many technology origin stories, there’s some squabbling over who was there first. Americans may have been quick to embrace the Jumbotron, but its roots likely trace across the Pacific Ocean to Japan. The story likely begins with Mitsubishi’s “Diamond Vision,” the company’s moment of brilliance coming from building a screen using a technology similar to tube TVs before the advent of LCD or plasma screens.
Shortly thereafter, rival Sony was credited with Jumbotron’s birth, legend having it that Yasuo Kuroki, a longtime engineer with the company, was critical in its creation. Sony had emerged from the despair of World War II as a small Japanese electronics shop with eight employees. In the 1950s, the company grew by building transistor radios that were soon exported to the United States where they became a commercial success.
While engaged in a war with JVC’s VHS system, in 1975, Sony launched the first Betamax video recording equipment, a flop for the brand but an investment in how people continued to use their screens at home, nonetheless. The VHS vs. Beta videotape format war pitted two different (and incompatible) models of video recorders against each other, VHS ultimately winning out in popularity. Four years later, the company released the Walkman, a portable audio device that fundamentally changed the way people listen to music by putting buds in their ears and songs on cassette tapes in their (large) pockets. The company continued to push into compact discs, as well as sound systems for movie theaters, a new era of personal electronics rising and designers like Kuroki trying to understand not only the innards of new devices, but also how people were actually incorporating them into their lifestyles.
Kuroki had joined the company in 1960 and helped create its logo, along with the Walkman, earning him the nickname “Mr. Walkman” among Sony insiders. One of Kuroki’s colleagues, Yuji Watanabe, a chief Betamax engineer, helped design a new microprocessor-based light bulb called Trini-lite, which in a single unit, fused blue, red and green sources. Trini-Lite allowed for great clarity on screen, as well, as computer control, the foundation of the first Jumbotrons. (Kuroki died in 2007.)
“You have to remember that back then, Times Square was still mostly tickers rather than video screens,” Christopher K. Sullivan, a national sales manager with Sony’s sports venues division said. Sullivan joined the company in 1983 and was part of its early Jumbotron sales force. He still works there today. Soon, manual scoreboards were replaced across the country. “The market was wide open, nobody had done that before.”
The 1970s were an era of electronic scoreboards, which just used simple lights against black backgrounds to render words, numbers or primitive images, a bridge between the static signage of old stadiums and arenas, and the Jumbotrons of today. Electronic scoreboards reflected something people wanted from their game experience - a more sophisticated viewing experience - but the technology wasn’t quite there yet. Even when new, they looked strange, out of place, clumsy. What made a Jumbotron a Jumbotron (even if people called them by different monikers lest they step on Sony’s early claim to the official name) was that it actually was like a television screen, able to provide in-depth storytelling beyond mere blinking lights. The image went from being static to active, making the Jumbotron’s role in a stadium or arena larger and more imposing than ever before.
It was with this understanding of how technology worked that at the 1985 World Expo in Tsukuba, Japan, Sony unveiled a Jumbotron to technology journalists, who, according to Popular Science in 1985, marveled at the screen on display being “fully digitized.”
“The Japanese are completely infatuated with video technology,” New York magazine said, also intrigued by the possibility engineers announced that year of a “filmless camera.” The Jumbotron was the “Eiffel Tower” of the Expo, according to the Boston Globe, the standout, memorable icon of the event.
The Jumbotron was quickly embraced by another group that regularly communicated information to large, rapturous crowds: megachurches. Sullivan said he worked on early installations at the Crystal Cathedral in Garden Grove, California. One of the first megachurches in the country, the building stood 12 stories high, an atrium made up of 10,000 glass panes, a natural light nightmare. However, the test of Sony’s Jumbotron there was deemed a success, Sullivan said, noting that it may have been Sony’s first permanent Jumbotron installation. As large and looming as they looked when shut off, Jumbotrons provided close-ups of the faces of clergy, creating the intimacy of the personal preacher at every service, regardless of audience size, a mass-produced, in-person televangelist. Observing its success, particularly in the realm of mass religion, sports team owners began to worry that if they, too, didn’t add the screens to their stadiums, the MTV-fed, cable-ravenous public may curb their attendance at live events. Additionally, it allowed them another opportunity to enhance revenue through in-game advertising.
Early screens were made in Japan, but as the cost of labor there increased, manufacturing shifted to Taiwan and China. The early versions were huge drains on electricity and suffered during inclement weather, but with time have evolved to be more energy-efficient. Sony staffers battled water damage and engineers traversed the country retrofitting and waterproofing the boards, which lived outdoors in a variety of environments that were seldom like those of consumer living rooms. “Green Bay is different than San Diego,” Sullivan said. “There was a lot of trial and error in figuring out the right components.”
Jumbotrons never left religion, being embraced by everyone from Billy Graham to Pat Robertson to Jerry Falwell. Politics, too, have gravitated toward the screens, weaving them into rallies and eventually to inaugurations, expanding the audience for live participation in history, notably when Barack Obama was sworn in for his first term in 2008. Six years earlier, and as New York was making an ill-fated bid to host the 2012 Olympic Games, Manhattan Borough President C. Virginia Fields even had the new Jumbotron at the 168th Street Armory named after her as part of the facility’s 10th anniversary renovations. “Clearly, I’m honored that the Armory has named the Jumbotron after me,” Fields said in a statement at the time.
Baseball, in particular, worried it was losing its grip as in the 1970s fans began to become disenchanted with the homely new wave of teams, athletes and multi-purpose stadiums that had taken over the culture once made up of bat-wielding heroes like Babe Ruth and Jackie Robinson playing in ballparks like Ebbets Field. Over the next few decades new flavors of extravaganzas were needed and Jumbotrons, many stadium architects and owners felt, could aid in reversing the downward momentum.
It began in 1980, when American audiences first saw a large video screen in at Dodger Stadium during the 1980 MLB All-Star Game.
By 1987, Dodgers pitcher Orel Hershiser complained that the board at San Francisco’s Candlestick Park was distracting. The Giants refused to turn it off as the Dodgers hit, but compromised by showing a frozen image of a Giants cap on the screen rather than flashing different images. Were Jumbotrons a sign of a new generation, one that was more interested in action taking place on screens rather than in real life, an argument that was raging over the increasing popularity of at-home video and arcade games?
That same year, a columnist for the Los Angeles Times wrote: “Every stadium has to have a message board, you know, because fans can’t enjoy themselves unless they can watch on a TV screen what’s going on live right in front of them on the field. Also, the screen allows fans to enjoy commercials, stupid cartoons and between inning roving camera shots of small kids smearing ice cream on their faces.”
Backlash aside, many stadium and team owners saw the large screens as a necessary compromise to a new era of fans who needed screens to be entertained during inevitable downtime during games. This was a new generation of sports fans; one that wanted to see both game and screen in real time. Over time, they began to expect it. Then, and now, they had financial potential and soon they were everywhere; Sony put Jumbotrons in concerts, on the back of moving trucks, in Times Square. Competitors began making large, outdoor screens, too, Panasonic winning the contract to create one for the 1984 Olympics at the Los Angeles Coliseum. “Welcome to the MTV Age of American sports,” United Press International proclaimed in 1987.
With price tags ranging from $500,000 to $2.5 million (not including the cost of cameras, a control room and related labor), UPI estimated at the time that 60 Jumbotrons had been constructed nationwide. The standard size was 27 feet by 36 feet, a fraction of the size of those like at today’s Kyle Field. Soon a new generation of retro ballparks, like Baltimore’s Camden Yards, which opened in 1992, both tried to nod to tradition, while being fully-modern and Jumbotron-welcome. The Jumbotron had made its journey from scorn to acceptance.
“The concept is to entertain the fans with the form that’s best known to them,” John Hays, the Angels vice president of marketing said in 1988. “And that’s the TV format, where a fan watches at home and sees replays and profiles. We take those kinds of things and transfer them right back into the ballpark. The scoreboard provides flexibility. It literally can do anything a computer can do.”
That wasn’t very much in the late ‘80s, but Jumbotrons eventually grew to include closed captioning, expanding the experience for hearing impaired fans and also democratized some of the nosebleed-seat experience, offering close-ups of players making the game more than specks on a field or a court. Jumbotrons began to offer detailed statistics about the action on field, making the 150-year-old art of scorekeeping a relic hobby. “The scorecard is vanishing faster than the $2 hot dog,” The Wall Street Journal reported in the summer of 2001, partially blaming “the screaming Jumbotron. “Baseball today is designed for fans with short attention spans and big wallets.”
Similarly, in a treatise in a 2001 edition of the journal, Leisure Sciences, Professors George Ritzer and Todd Stillman argued that the Jumbotron played an integral role in making the postmodern ballpark more commercialized, or “McDonaldized.” The risk, they argued, was that with increased commercialization like that displayed on Jumbotrons, ballpark magic eroded, superficiality ascended.
“People now go to consumption sites to engage in leisure-time activities and consumption itself has become the major leisure-time activity for many people,” Ritzer and Stillman said. “In theoretical terms, whatever boundaries existed between leisure and consumption have ‘imploded,’ as have those between the settings that we think of as being devoted to each.” (Some fields, including Texas A&M’s Kyle Field, have opted for their Jumbotrons to never play commercials, rather static promotions that mimic signage.)
Then, there’s the kiss cam.
No one is clear when, precisely, the tradition of pointing a camera at an unsuspecting couple then asking them to kiss in front of an ocean of peers began, but it christened the Jumbotron as a vessel for intimate-public moments. By the 1980s, it was flourishing, particularly as a way to offer drama during lulls in a game, but also opening the door for the awkward moment of zooming in on siblings, or two strangers who don’t know each other at all, resulting in a moment that is at best awkward, at worst sexual harassment.
In 2005, Esquire listed “Propose via stadium Jumbotron” as one of its “59 Things a Man Should Never Do Past 30.” In trying to explain the penchant for public proposals in 2005, The Wall Street Journal pointed to the booming wedding industry, which now even includes “proposal consultants,” reality TV shows like TLC’s Perfect Proposals, and “a culture that celebrates attention-seekers.” The Journal pointed to an Orlando Magic game that year in which the Jumbotron flashed, “she said no,” a gasping crowd and a woman running off the court. However, the couple were actors and part of a stunt concocted by marketers, who charged $50 to $200 a proposal.
“A wedding is a moment of ‘lay celebrity’ - you’re the star of your own show - and now people want to extend that to the proposal,” Elizabeth Freeman, a wedding historian and associate professor at University of California, Davis told the Journal.
And the kiss cam has also been a beacon of gay rights. While the New York Liberty in 2002 had lesbian star players like Sue Wicks, a 2002 issue of The Advocate raised concerns that lesbians were underrepresented on the Jumbotrons.
Ady Ben-Israel, a lesbian fan of the team and others staged a “kiss-in” in which they stood up and kissed each other during every time out during an August game against the Miami Sol.
“It’s a double standard,” Ben-Israel said. “They want our money and support, so why can’t they acknowledge the lesbian fans filling the stands?”
Ironically, Sony would lose its commercial hold on its screen brainchild. The term “Jumbotron” itself, once trademarked by Sony, eventually slipped into generic usage and eventually became dormant. In its heyday in the ’80s and ’90s, Sullivan, of Sony, estimated that the company controlled 75 to 85 percent of the Jumbotron market. But as more companies entered the business, by 2000, the company had lost its edge in the market and curbed its business. While Sony does extensive business in sports venues, it no longer makes the large screens today.
The original Jumbotrons were trying to mimic television screens, but eventually morphed to trying to mimic the screen of the Internet, both in visual interface, attempts at interactivity and by creating a faux sense of intimacy. And it was a two-way road; high-definition televisions spread in size and relatively shrunk in cost, making the possession of a personal Jumbotron at home more possible for millions, the best view of a game sometimes being at home.
It could be argued that the Jumbotrons were the original “second screen” experience long before the term became a sports media favorite to describe an era of mobile devices and laptops becoming attached to the palms of fans. As the 20th century teetered into the 21st, not only did Jumbotrons become even bigger to ensure those at the venue could see the action just as they could at home, their role was changing yet again.
Even a generation after its popular spread, there were still some Jumbotron holdouts. Built in 1914, until recently Chicago’s Wrigley Field was believed to be the only major North American professional sports stadium or arena without a Jumbotron. That changed in April, when the Chicago Cubs unveiled video boards as part of a $375 million renovation, a decision that architecture professor and ballpark historian Philip Bess decried on the website ChicagoSide as a “super-sized mistake.” Notre Dame, another notable Jumbotron avoidee, announced this year that a new “video board” would be included in its upcoming stadium renovations.
Back in College Station at Kyle Field, the young men and women in maroon who had their five seconds of fame near the end zone were out of breath by the time the Jumbotron panned away.
Shortly after the Aggies unveiled their board, they learned that it would not, in fact, reign for long as the largest in collegiate sports. This summer, rival Auburn University unveiled a new $13.9 million video board, measuring 190 by 57 feet, twice the size of a basketball court, the largest in college sports and a new marker in the continuing arms race of collegiate sports construction. All told, the board has been embraced, but like some of its predecessors, it has garnered criticism for its price tag and fear from some fans that its strobe light effects might trigger epileptic fits.
“To photograph people is to violate them,” Susan Sontag wrote in “On Photography” “by seeing them as they never see themselves, by having knowledge of them as they can never have; it turns people into objects that can be symbolically possessed. Just as a camera is a sublimation of the gun, to photograph someone is a subliminal murder - a soft murder, appropriate to a sad, frightened time.”
The Aggies Jumbotron camerawoman walked away.
“That was AWESOME!” one young woman said to another. Two young men high fived. Then, they all unpeeled their smartphones and were sucked into their screens, the team’s loss unfolding before them, a private viewing in public. (Alabama ultimately overpowered Texas A&M, 41-23.)
As one invention rises, an old one blinks out.
