The 2005 World Series, which begins tonight, has a connection to the 1968 college basketball classic game at the Astrodome. And I'm not referring to the presence of a Houston team in each!
Chicago White Sox Vice Chairman Eddie Einhorn, whose team takes on the Houston Astros in the World Series, masterminded the television aspect of the 1968 Houston-UCLA hoops match-up. According to the book Oh My! by Dick Enberg, who did the TV play-by-play for the Houston-UCLA game, the Cougar-Bruin tilt was:
...televised nationally by TVS, a syndicated sports network that was founded in 1965 by Eddie Einhorn, a brilliant entrepreneur who was the first TV executive to see the enormous potential in college basketball (p. 76).
Einhorn (born in 1936) and Enberg (born in 1935) were thus both in their early thirties when they got involved with the 1968 Houston-UCLA Game of the Century. But, unlike Enberg, who has continued broadcasting major sporting events to this day and thus remains in the public eye, Einhorn's work on the business side of sports leaves him largely out of the spotlight.
As noted in the Einhorn biography linked above, however, he has a book coming out in early 2006 on the history of television and basketball. Perhaps that will boost Einhorn's visibility, assuming he makes appearances on sports-related television and radio shows to promote his book.
