"Bob Wright, head of PR at ABC, called and said, 'When does the season start?' " Lowry recalled. "I said, 'How the hell do I know?'
"He said, 'Because Variety sets the season and Bob Knight is not around anymore.' . . . That was the first I'd heard of it," Lowry said.
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"The funny part was, Bob was an institution and in his late sixties; I was in my twenties. It seemed like a peculiar way to settle things."
Lowry, now a columnist and the TV critic at Variety, still gets a chuckle out of it. "It was kind of like 'Lord of the Rings,' because I'm sitting there minding my own business and they call and say, 'Little Frodo, you're the key to everything.' And I was, like, 'What do I have to do with it?' "
According to Lowry, CBS had the Summer Olympics that year and wanted to start the season earlier, on Sept. 14; the other networks insisted on Sept. 21.
"I said the 21st," Lowry said. "After that it didn't come up again for several years. The next time it came up, Nielsen actually agreed to set the date. Nielsen was always in a position where they did not want to set it because they did not want to play favorites with one client over another.
"For whatever reason, they changed that policy and said, 'We will determine it after having talked to clients.'
"Either that or I did a really crappy job."
