By Tom Weber, KWMU
St. Louis, MO – This weekend marks the 24th anniversary of the Miracle on Ice' game in which the USA Olympic hockey team beat the Soviet Union.
It's one of the best-known sports calls ever, when announcer Al Michaels asked "do you believe in miracles?" with the clock winding down to 0.
But no one in St. Louis saw it live.
That's because the game started at 4:00 p.m. St. Louis time, and Olympics coverage on Channel 2 (KTVI, the ABC station back then) wasn't scheduled to start until 7:30.
Long-time anchorman Don Marsh was in the middle of a call-in show about taxes when he interrupted his guest to break the news
"When they announced the miracle finish I blurted it out on the air; I thought it was information people wanted," Marsh said. "Although I suspect some of them, and I don't recall if that's the way it worked, but probably - if they were waiting to see it on delay, were mad that I had given the outcome."
Two days later the U.S. won gold by beating Finland in a game that was aired live.
Marsh says there was probably never any plans to air the game, given its afternoon start time, "because at that time of day they'd generally run syndicated programming or programming where all the advertising dollars would come to the station and they were then and they still are now reluctant to interrupt programs like that."