
The Electronic Coach (1959) [video] - furcyd
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dhh8Ao4yweQ
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svat
Knuth talks about this video in his "Web of Stories" interview:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RnMkW8M1ZGk&list=PLVV0r6CmEs...](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RnMkW8M1ZGk&list=PLVV0r6CmEsFzeNLngr1JqyQki3wdoGrCn&index=12)

> I was manager of the basketball team, at Case.

> And I’ll say a few words about that, because after I got into computers
> later on, I combined that with my managing the Basketball team. So I devised
> a strange formula that I don’t believe in much any more, but anyway, I had
> it at the time, where you could compute each basketball player’s real
> contribution to the game.

> [...] So I calculated a huge number of statistics for every player, and I
> had a spotter, who would call to me, and I could write it down, every little
> thing, and after the game I would go and punch cards that recorded all these
> statistics, and fed them into a little computer program [...]

> So Case’s Coach, Nip Heim, loved this system, and you know, he posted these
> numbers, and the Case News Service was always good at trying to plant
> interesting stories in the local paper, so they sent reporters out [...] and
> IBM heard about it. So IBM sent out [a camera crew] to make a film of me
> spotting a game, [...] our Case team playing basketball [...] how I would
> punch the cards, you know, and put it into the IBM computer. Before they
> took the shot of the IBM computer, they planted a great, big IBM sign on the
> machine, so that nobody could fail to miss it [...] and it’s getting printed
> out on the IBM printer, and then the Coach is looking at it and posting this
> up.

> So this was a little movie that I was in, about two or three minutes long.
> IBM supplies this movie to CBS, and they put it on the Sunday Evening News
> with Walter Cronkite, and all my relatives in Florida can see me on TV. This
> was very exciting. Also US News and World Report ran a story about it, and
> so this was my connection between computing and sports, when I was at Case.
> This was also a clever way for IBM to get their advertisements in there,
> rather subtly, but it was fun.

> That was when I first realized how hard it must be to be a movie star,
> because I had to walk through these scenes six times everything, you know,
> punch those cards over and over again. How could Audrey Hepburn possibly
> look so beautiful after the sixth take, you know?

(Thanks to [https://github.com/kragen/knuth-
interview-2006](https://github.com/kragen/knuth-interview-2006) for
transcribing the videos.)

------
tomcam
Donald Knuth doing moneyball with computerized stats for Basketball teams as a
1950s college student!

