1973 NBA Finals
5 items
Restoring Its Former Glory: Part IV
An elated Mattucci, who had mostly kept the news of the tape’s existence under wraps in case the transfer was unsuccessful, could finally let the cat out of the bag. “I felt like I was pregnant,” he joked. “I had this great news, but I couldn’t tell anybody for three months.” Finally, a missing chapter […]
Restoring Its Former Glory: Part III
The first thing Schechter wanted to do was rewind the tapes, but they jammed up almost immediately. So he removed the reels from the cassettes and carefully rewound the tapes slowly on a reel-to-reel machine he built specifically for the task. To rid the tapes of the sticky-shed syndrome, Schechter first tried to absorb the […]
Restoring Its Former Glory: Part II
Back in December, Mattucci was looking for copies of the 1973 Finals for the upcoming 40th anniversary. He turned to a private collector known in the television industry to have a vast archive of master tapes, everything from sitcoms to sporting events. The collector said that he had a copy of Game 5, although it […]
Restoring Its Former Glory: Part I
It’s 2:00 a.m. on a Saturday morning in early March and Maurice Schechter is at a loss. A video engineer with nearly four decades of experience, Schechter has tried nearly every trick in his arsenal to salvage a piece of NBA history, specifically, Game 5 of the 1973 NBA Finals. It was the second and […]