They were so decrepit that Maurice Schechter, who has restored tapes damaged by seawater, viewed salvaging evidence of the game as the biggest challenge of his career.

“They were on the brink of death,” said Schechter, the chief engineer at DuArt Film and Video, a postproduction house in Manhattan.

The tapes are precious commodities to MSG Network, which hired Schechter to rescue them and prepare them to be televised as part of its 40th anniversary commemoration of the Knicks’ second — and last — title.

The game was broadcast by ABC on May 10, 1973, from the Los Angeles Forum. The Knicks were leading the Lakers, three games to one, in the third finals between the teams in four seasons. The 7:30 p.m. start time was perfect out West, but the potential number of Knicks fans who stayed in front of their television sets until the final buzzer was almost certainly reduced by the 10:30 start on WABC-TV/Channel 7.

When the game ended — a 102-93 Knicks victory — the video seemed to vanish.

No one — no fan nor anyone at ABC Sports — came forward with a tape, as Bing Crosby’s family did three years ago to say that he had stored a kinescope of Game 7 of the 1960 World Series in his dry, cool wine cellar.

“No one could explain where it was,” said Ken Mattucci, the director for content, licensing and acquisitions at MSG Network. “It was the holy grail.”

Last year, as Mattucci started planning for the anniversary, he contacted a collector he knew and asked if the collector had Game 5. He did. Mattucci, who would not identify the collector but said he was prominent in the field of sports video, does not know how the collector acquired the tapes or if he got them from a person who recorded the game when it was first broadcast.

But there was a glitch: the game had been recorded, somewhere in the New York area, in the little-known Cartrivision format — which preceded VHS and Betamax — and only a Cartrivision system could play its 6 ½-by-7 ¼-inch tapes.

Cartrivision’s home video recorders came along around 1972. They were installed in TV consoles made by manufacturers like Emerson and Admiral. “Leave it to AS to be first to show you the most innovative entertainment system since talking movies,” the department store Abraham Strauss boasted in a newspaper ad.

But in July 1973, Cartridge Television, the producer of the video system, filed for bankruptcy, having used up nearly all its money to introduce its product. A liquidator in Ohio subsequently sold off the surplus recorders, one of them to a 16-year-old in Heath, Ohio, named Tim Thompson, who recalled seeing a flyer that tantalized him: “Videophile’s Dream: Color Cartrivision.”

“Oh my God, I had to get one of them,” Thompson, who does 3-D computer modeling, said from Newark, Ohio. He paid $300 and found a repairman to connect it to his family’s 23-inch TV. A year later, his friend bought a Sony Betamax machine, which produced a better picture, and the Cartrivision’s allure faded.

In recent years, however, Thompson has bought and sold other Cartrivisions on eBay, which is where Schechter found him.

Schechter paid Thompson $99 for one of his 60-pound Cartrivision units. But when he slipped the Game 5 cassettes into its deck, they did not move.

The restoration began when he tucked the tapes into a Ziploc bag with a desiccant to dry them out. Nothing changed. They did not play.

He baked one of the tapes in an incubator. No change.

He used the lubricant WD-40. No luck.

Freezing one of the tapes reanimated only a few minutes of the footage.

Running out of ideas, he asked some of his peers in the restoration business for help; one told him that isopropyl alcohol had brought the sound back on an audiotape.

Schechter went to a small section at the end of the second cassette, which held the latter half of the game. If the labeling on the tape was right, he could experiment by dabbing the alcohol on footage of ABC’s broadcast of the 1973 Preakness Stakes. Schechter mounted the tape onto a reel-to-reel cleaning machine and rigged a system that let the tape pass through a fabric that he had saturated with alcohol.

That, to his glee, worked.

Schechter then cleaned both game tapes with alcohol, which worked on everything but the second half of the first cassette.

Article source: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/04/06/sports/basketball/restored-tapes-show-game-5-of-1973-finals-when-knicks-won-title.html?partner=rss&emc=rss