Electric Football: Norman Sas' Invention Thrilled Kids Before Video Games

So it really took an MIT grad to come up with electric football?

Not exactly.

But it took an MIT grad to come up with electric horse racing and then decide that there was no money in that, but that there might be in a football version.

Norman Sas was a mechanical engineer, another egghead from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He served in the U.S. Navy and worked in plastics and turbines for General Electric.

In 1948, he became president of a family-owned company founded by his father. The company was named the Tudor Metal Products Corp.

Sas, with his mechanical engineering degree and his Navy experience and his time with GE, was, above all else, a visionary.

The Tudor company had itself a horse racing game whose pieces moved on a sheet of vibrating metal, powered by good old-fashioned electricity.

In the late 1940s, pro football was entering its golden age. Television, the burgeoning technology of the time, was a big part of the nation’s growing interest in the gridiron exploits of pro football teams.

Sas decided to hop onto football’s potential gravy train. He looked at his family company’s horse racing game and got ideas.

“Watching these horses run,” he once said (as quoted by The Washington Post), “I thought, ‘Gee! If we could come up with some football figures and get them running against each other, we’d have a football game.’”

Indeed.

So Sas instructed his workers to start cranking out more vibrating sheets of metal, with two big changes: paint them green and include white gridiron markings, and break the horse molds and create new ones to look like football players.

Then, as Sas himself noted, they’d have a football game.

Norman Sas is gone now. He passed away last week at age 87. His electric football game likely has entertained millions of kids since its invention over 60 years ago.

I was one of those boys. Maybe you were, too.

Even now, I get a twinge of excitement when I say the words “electric football.”

I hear electric football and I am taken back, immediately, to the Christmas of 1971.

I’m not sure if I asked for Sas’s game, but I knew it could be found in the annual Sears Christmas catalog. I used to marvel at just the small photograph of the game—a sort of aerial shot, with all 22 molded plastic men painted to resemble NFL teams facing each other in two platoons of 11, ready for action.

There was a cardboard replica of a “stadium” with fans, clipped to the game, along with holes cut out for the plastic knobs of the scoreboard.

A beautiful thing.

So I came downstairs on Christmas morning in ’71, and there, on the floor under the tree, was an electric football game.

I stormed to it and immediately wanted to know which teams Santa had brought me.

“The Bears and the Vikings! The Bears and the Vikings!” I cried. The Bears were in white.

My dad corrected me. He must have been there when Santa delivered it.

“The Giants, not the Vikings.”

“The Bears and the Giants! The Bears and the Giants!”

A kid never forgets his first electric football game, no more than he forgets his first bike, his first crush, his first paying job.

My first Tudor electric football game was more than just a game—it was a whole world.

The game itself was fun, even if the players did mostly end up on the sides, vibrating uselessly, by the time each play ended.

But it wasn’t just the playing of the game that mesmerized me. It was the components—the plastic yellow goalposts; the felt footballs; the green bases upon which the players stood and which had tiny plastic bristles on the bottom that caused the players to move on vibration; the “timer,” which consisted of two plastic gears that were located in one of the end zones; and most of all, the painted uniforms.

I owned several electric football games throughout my childhood, and without question the most fun, for me, wasn’t actually playing electric football—it was ordering teams who might one day find themselves on the metal field in my bedroom.

Tudor, inside its game instructions booklet, displayed full-color photos of all the NFL teams depicted as electric football players, painted in replica uniforms, in home and dark jerseys. Each tiny helmet had a “logo” painted on it, which was really just a blob of paint in a color that closely matched the actual logo.

Oh, how I would look at those pages over and over and make my wish list for what teams to order.

Picking my spots carefully, I would put in a request to mom from time to time. She’d usually come through, depositing a check in the mail, and when that small brown box arrived—well, let’s just say it was like Christmas morning all over again.

The teams came in vacuum-sealed plastic bags, with the names and colors printed in black on the outside, e.g. LIONS D (for dark).

Even today I can pretty much tell you which NFL teams I owned in electric football and in which jersey—dark or white.

I would be remiss if I forgot the stick-on jersey numbers, which came on sheets and were color-coordinated with the uniforms.

Electric football was a world in of its own, and I lost myself in that world from age eight to 18. Even as high school seniors, my friends and I would gather at my house after school and play, but with a twist: We fashioned a piece of cardboard that was placed vertically on the line of scrimmage, to shield the formations from each player.

Only when all the players were situated, pointed and angled would the cardboard be lifted, revealing the matchups. Then, that magic switch would be turned on.

Sas’ invention was more than just a hobby for kids. Once it was licensed officially by the NFL in 1967, the cash started flowing into the league offices.

“For the first 10 years, we generated more money for NFL Properties than anyone else,” Sas once said.

But that was in a day before video games, which took electric football down like a blindside tackle.

Norman Sas, I wonder if you knew how many boys you made happy by giving them the world of electric football.

A whole lot more than if the game had been electric horse racing, I’ll tell you that.

Goodbye, Norman—that MIT degree came in handy, as it usually does.