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August 29, 2007  If you've followed and enjoyed GSN's Grand Slam, you can thank Michael Davies for his persistence and faith in the project five years after he first tried to sell a network on it.Davies, every producer who has ever put together an elimination format and all of us who have made game show tournaments appointment television owe a debt of gratitude to a forward thinking gentleman----Norm Blumenthal. Where this genre is concerned, Blumenthal is the Father of the Tournament of Champions. Though Norm would amend part of that title. "It was always the Challenge of Champions on Concentration," Blumenthal told me in an interview five years ago. "All the other ones that came afterward were called 'tournament of champions.'" Norm was one of the most underrated craftsmen for his innovations and creative stunts as executive producer of Concentration. In the fall of 1959, G.E. College Bowl offered the first "championship playoff" between its two undefeated champions of its first season with Colgate vs. Rutgers. The $64,000 Question allowed some of its top winners opportunities to return for additional shots at running the gauntlet. However, that was not a tournament, only a desperation attempt to prop up the show's flagging ratings in 1958. What ultimately became television's first elimination playoff between top players of a game show was not what Norm originally had in mind. "What I wanted to was to take (former Brooklyn Dodgers pitcher) Ralph Branca, who won 17 games on our show, and put him up against another of our top winners," Blumenthal said. "Ralph was one of the greatest players we ever had." Norm wanted to have the World Series of Concentration in a best four-out-of-seven format just as the structure of baseball's October Classic. NBC said no. The reason? Gillette, sole sponsor and holder of broadcast rights for the Series, jealously guarded the use of the name. The razor company had no intention of a game show siphoning its prized sports moniker. So, Norm went his own way. He developed a legitimate tournament, a four-way playoff, pitting his top four Concentration players of the previous year. He didn't abandon the best-of-seven. The possibility of a four-game sweep was always in the picture but as talented as his champions were, many of the showdowns went to six or the full seven games. Intense drama built, which also heightened the ratings during the November sweeps. Norm commissioned a replica of Auguste Rodin's "The Thinker" (which Dwayne Hickman stood in front of in a city park for his direct-to-audience narrations on Dobie Gillis). He called it The Connie. The statuette became arguably the most coveted of its kind in television. The most memorable Challenge of Champions queen of them all was Mrs. Ruth Horowitz, who was the first Game Show Congress Contestant Legend in 2005. Ruth, who now lives in South Florida, ran the table as an undefeated 20-game champion in 1966 and was the precursor of Thom McKee and Ken Jennings with her long winning streak. "I still have my Connie," Mrs. Horwitz told the GSC audience at a Concentration reunion with Blumenthal, game creator Buddy Piper and producer Ronnie Greenberg. "Aside from my marriage and my family, it was the most wonderful experience of my life." Norm developed a concept which was an incomparable audience builder. Yet, he was not happy with what NBC did with his concept after its second year. "We had built such a rating that this executive from NBC suddenly declared that every game show on the network would have a tournament of champions the next year," Blumenthal said in his earlier interview. "I didn't like that at all. I felt that was something we created and should have been unique to us. When everyone else on the network started doing a tournament of champions, it took some of the luster off of ours, even though we were the first." Some eventual copycats worked, some did not. Fred Silverman pushed Mark Goodson into having a Password Tournament of Champions when the CBS version's ratings began declining in 1967. Only it wasn't a tournament. Contestants who had won the maximum $700 were brought back for one more two-game set. No provision was made for eliminations. No ultimate champion was crowned. The whole thing was a clumsily-staged affair. The same mistake was not made when Password returned on ABC in the '70s. A far more exciting head-to-head elimination between the year's top winners saw Martin Milner and Greg Morris as the celebrity players for the semifinals and Carol Burnett and Elizabeth Montgomery guiding contestants through the grand championship. A young attorney, Louis Retram, blitzed the field the first year and then knocked off the annual champions of 1973 and 1974 in a best-of-seven playoff. Retram, who has not surfaced since his halcyon days, was the greatest Password contestant ever. Split Second, one of the most underrated quizzes in television history (and a show I would love to see Davies get the rights from his old mentor Monty Hall to remake), had what may have been the most exciting tournament of champions in no small part because of its thrilling Countdown Round finale. With $25,000 on the line and a trip around the world as well as a shot at another car on the line, Tom Kennedy was a master at building drama until the grand champion was crowned. Davies' own Who Wants to Be a Millionaire tried a Millionaire Champions Classic in May 2000 but it didn't work. An ample roster of the show's first-year winners of $250,000 or more was invited back. However, the failure was twofold. For one thing, the returning winners were required to divide their second winnings equally with charity. That caused some who would have taken risks on higher-valued questions to put on the brakes for fear of shortchanging a non-profit agency. The other flaw: it was not a tournament. Millionaire is a single-player game. You can't eliminate an opponent when you aren't playing one. Viewers did not have an ultimate playoff which would likely have sent the ratings soaring. I contended in 2000 in this very space and I contend now that if ABC had bought a format from Davies such as Grand Slam, the life of the prime time Millionaire may well have been extended. Just as The $64,000 Challenge acted as an extension of The $64,000 Question for two years in the fifties, a Slam-like game pitting the biggest Millionaire winners in a head-to-head showdown may well have built on the short-term celebrity those contestants achieved and taken the pressure off WWTBAM to carry up to four nights a week on the ABC schedule. Oh, for retro thinking. Jeopardy!, in the current generation, has the signature Tournament of Champions. Its various tweaks of the T of C structure with different age brackets has been so successful that Harry Friedman opted to do a summer teen tournament this year. The show's viewers typically remember the annual T of C winner long after other players have come and gone. When you watch the Sept. 8 finale of Grand Slam, the idea of an all-time, all-star grand champion of game shows will still be mythical. In a tournament of this ilk, it's often the luck of the pairings, the draw of specific questions and age is even a factor---particularly in the area of pop culture questions, which are more likely to be tailored to an Eminem generation moreso than Gene Kelly's. Yet, for those of us who have long awaited a showdown of some of the best of the best (yes, a few names are not here but that is for another column), Grand Slam has given game show enthusiasts the same focal point for debate and pondering that college football offers (and the neanderthals who run that sport and its Cro-Magnon college presidents still won't give us a playoff on the gridiron). Every good idea in television usually owes its roots to something which originated earlier. David Letterman and Jay Leno would not be where they are without Steve Allen, Jack Paar and Johnny Carson before them. Ray Romano would not have had those rich years of Everybody Loves Raymond had Lucille Ball not opened the first door to the situation comedy in 1951 in the same Monday night time slot. Michael Davies has brought quiz devotees a format which does not necessarily prove who is the greatest player of all time but---in the structure of an elimination tournament---gives us an all-star champion. Yet, Grand Slam would not be what and where it is today on GSN without the innovation and craftsmanship of the man who gave us the game show championship tournament----Norman Blumenthal.   Miss Francis' gowns by Bonwit Teller © Copyright 2006 TVgameshows.net. All Rights Reserved. |
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