Right after the game in Jack Murphy Stadium on August 18 -- and Skycam's crippled although successful enough performance -- Brown and his crew began dismantling the apparatus. Three hours later -- with hundreds of feet of cables rewound, Skycam and console and computers back in their protective trunks, and the trunks safely stowed in the big rented truck -- it was time to confront the questions everybody had been raising as they worked together packing up. It was 1:15 a.m., less than 12 hours to game time in L.A. The discussion went back and forth, from the problem with motor number one, to the possibility of flying with only three wires, which would limit the field coverage, and to money.
"We're flat broke," said Brown. "If we don't go, we'll have to return the $4,500 deposit. We'll have to find some cheap motels, hang around here in California, try to fix the motor, and then do the game next week [Skycam's next scheduled preseason assignment, also in the Coliseum, and also for NBC]. It's your call."
As McConkey said later, everybody was working too many hours, and too hard, and for too little money for such decisions to have been made at the top. Besides, Brown's brand of leadership could be seen in the deep calluses on his hands from hauling equipment around. They decided to head back to the hotel, gather in Brown's room, and share their predicament with NBC. Just short of 3:00 a.m. Pacific daylight time, (6:00 a.m. eastern), with Brown talking to a just-awakened Ken Aagaard, vice-president of operations for NBC Sports, they decided not to take a chance flying with three wires. They scrapped Skycam's coverage.
Late the next morning, Sunday, with all but one of their rooms canceled and a conference room in an annex building secured as a makeshift workshop, they pored over the suspect motor trying to pinpoint the problem. A spare motor, or other backup parts, might have kept them on the job instead of in the pits, but Skyworks has seldom had a spare anything; for want of money and hands, a second Skycam lay half-built back in Pennsylvania. By Sunday afternoon, equipment littered the room. Several tables, stripped of their white cloths, were converted to workbenches. The crew had unwound about 50 feet of cable from the drum of the suspect winch/motor combination and had strung it through a pulley jerry-rigged to the rough-hewn ceiling beam. From there, out the ground-level door, the cable ran across a sidewalk to the parking lot and, finally, around the rear axle of one of the crew's rental cars.
The Skycam computer, still programmed with the stadium configurations for the football game the day before, had no idea it had a Mustang by the tail. As far as it was concerned, it was still in Jack Murphy Stadium, flying a camera. In quick succession, the crew meshed instructions:
"Are you ready to chance it?"
"Here we go."
"Watch yourself, just in case the cable goes wild."
A mere upward tug on the elevator joystick, as always, signaled the winch to wind in cable. Obediently, it did, pulling the Mustang across the parking lot toward the door. But when a buck/boost transformer was brought into play, to lower the system voltage to the level detected in the stadium, the motor emitted the horrible groaning of the day before. The groaning was loud enough to drown out the yells of confirmation; loud enough, too, to drown out the warning cry from outside. When the Skycam brake was finally applied, the Mustang stood perched with one wheel up on the sidewalk.
With some of the crew staying with friends to save money, and all of them living off their unused return plane tickets, they got the system working smoothly again. On Friday, it flew virtually troublefree in the Coliseum, above the crashing bodies of the Raiders and Jets. Flying faster and more expansively than in San Diego, it occasionally popped up, unannounced, in some of NBC's coverage. But peering over the line of scrimmage and flying with the ball on a few kickoffs and punts, it also provided some exciting new views of a sport with sagging TV ratings.
Brown and his crew returned to Philadelphia, buoyant. Then, a few days later, in what has become the roller-coaster tradition of Skycam, crushing news arrived from the NFL's director of broadcasting, Val Pinchbeck: There would be no NFL coverage for Skycam this season. The NFL just was not ready "to jump in and say, 'Let's go." said Pinchbeck.
Things looked as bleak as they had for some time -- more depressing than missing the Olympics at Sarajevo, more frustrating than the nosedive on the set of Birdy, more damaging than bumping into the goalpost in its tryout for the summer Olympics. For the time being, Brown had lost the sale. But even with no schedule of NFL coverage to wave in front of would-be investors, he would not call it the crucial sale. Skyworks would stay dark for a week, then attempt to run for a while on rental revenues (the current rate is $6,800, but additional costs for set-up, piloting, travel, and insurance can bring the tab to more than $20,000). A couple of rock concert jobs were lined up . . . some soccer matches . . . some college football games. . . . The company would try to rekindle film interest.
Brown has begun preliminary discussions with a division of Bechtel Group Inc. about the possibility of using Skycam, or something like it, for hazardous jobs inside nuclear reactors. And he will continue a conversation -- already in the works before the news from the NFL, but suddenly turned up a few notches -- with a representative of Japanese industry. The NFL decision, he said right after hearing it, "might prove to be crucial to the failure of Skyworks as a business. We'll have to see. But I don't think it will be crucial to the future of Skycam. It will be sad for me if this thing flies west [out of the country].
"But," he added, "I'm sure it will fly."
A few days later, CBS Sports called: Was Skycam available on December 1 for the Army/Navy game in Philadelphia's Veterans Stadium? Perfect, Brown thought, a hometown show. No travel. Easy setup. Some of the rigging was still in place from the earlier demonstration. Perhaps his "Skyluck" was about to change.
"Yes," he answered in mock seriousness. "I think we're available for that weekend."
