For the past several months, I have been writing about or recapping episodes from the 1977-1979 TV Show The Hardy Boys/Nancy Drew Mysteries. For the first season, the episodes would flip-flop back and forth between featuring The Hardy Boys and Nancy Drew, and eventually the two would join forces before they began to phase Nancy out all together.
This time we are discussing The Mystery of the Solid Gold Kicker with Nancy Drew as the main investigator.
The episode starts with Nancy at a college football game. She’s inside the controller’s booth at the TV station broadcasting the game and it is never explained why.
Later, though, she’s at a party with the kicker of the team — a surprise guest star, who back then probably wasn’t a star yet.
Yes, that is Mark Harmon as star kicker Chip Garvey
He and Nancy are chatting while Nancy’s best friend George dances with Pete Miller (Martin Kove). The man is clearly old enough to be her dad, but I digress. He admits he is older and says he came to scout out Chip for Chip’s manager because he thinks the kid will go far as a professional ball goes.
Chip suddenly feels a bit woozy, things are going black. Nancy tells him to sit down but before he can a blond struts up to him and starts telling him off about abandoning her after inviting her down from Boston. Then she suggests that he’s going to hit he again.
“How could you do this to me, after all that you promised?” she asks as Chip’s manager tries to pull he out of the room. “After all we meant to each other?”
Chip is completely bewildered by the outburst and says he doesn’t even know the woman. She leaves and soon we are in the car with Nancy and George saying they can’t believe that fight and saying they don’t think they really know Chip at all.
When George drops Nancy off, she realizes she forgot her purse. She goes back to the house where the party was, which we eventually figure out was the house of the manager. Before she gets there we viewers are shown the manager, Ben Halstead (Terry Kiser), standing with the blond girl, Paula, and they are looking down at an unconscious Chip. Paula asks Ben how much he gave him.
“Just to knock him out for a few minutes, that’s all,” Ben answers. “He’ll come around when we want him to.”
So he and Paula set up a scene where Paula is unconscious on the floor and just before they do that, Ben says that Chip is like his own brother. Paula is worried he won’t be able to “come out of this” but Ben says, “He’ll be fine. He’ll be scared, but he’ll be fine and do the right thing.”
Ben says he has to do this to save himself.
Then they position Paula with broken glass around her so it looks like she’s been severely injured and wake Chip up.
He’s lead by Ben to believe that he actually killed Paula. Chip freaks out and says he doesn’t remember anything and that he couldn’t have hurt her.
The hiccup in all of this is George has come back for her purse, looks in the window and sees Paula “dead” on the floor.
She freaks out and drives back for Nancy.
Meanwhile, inside the house, Ben is telling Chip he’ll take care of things for him.
Chip is saying he doesn’t feel right about it and wants to call the police.
George found a phone booth and called Nancy and the police and now she and Nancy are racing toward Ben’s to find out what really happened.
The sheriff, Sheriff Foley, bangs on Ben’s door and tells him what George says she saw.
Foley uses the whole, “Sorry, Ben, but this crazy girl thinks she saw a dead woman on your floor…”
Ben says George is crazy and invites the sheriff to search for any evidence there was a girl lying on the floor.
The sheriff finds nothing and tells the girls they have to go.
Nancy doesn’t let up, though, and wants to see Ben’s vacuum cleaner. She wants to prove that there is broken glass in it.
There isn’t so Nancy and George are forced to leave.
On the way out, though, Nancy notices that Ben’s car is warm. She knows he lied so they drive off to find out where the trash might have been dumped. She drives to a less residential area (I mean how big is River Heights anyhow? I guess it’s plausible there is a less residential area where trash is dumped.)
Miracoulsy, while digging in the dumpster, they find the bag with the broken glass and a vacuum bag.
This is the time for a little humor too as a garbage man almost picks them up while they are snooping.
George wonders if they could have dumped the body in that dumpster too and that has Nancy thinking. It is clear there isn’t a body there but if the woman really died — where is her body?
Next we see Ben talking to Pete. Pete says he’s back in Boston and asks what the issue is so Ben tells him about the deputy sheriff showing up with Nancy and George.
Pete laughs. “What? It’s not like they found a body.”
Ben tells him Nancy Drew is involved.
“Yeah?” says Pete. “So what?”
“She’s a part time investigator with the instincts of a bulldog,” Ben says. “I don’t think she’ll let go.”
I don’ really think bulldogs have much instinct other than drooling and trying to lick their bottoms, but..okay….we’ll go with that analogy I suppose.
Pete says, “Ben, we might have to do something about her.”
Uh-oh.
In the next scene we are at a cemetery and Paula’s name is written on a tombstone. Ben is comforting Chip who is saying, “I just can’t believe it. How can she be dead?”
Ben is telling him it’s going to be fine. It was an accident. Chip did nothing wrong and soon he’ll get over it.
“No, I’ll never get over it,” Chip says.
Then he sees Pete. “What’s he doing here?”
Ben said he couldn’t handle it by himself so he had to have Pete help him.
Pete said he was willing to help an up and coming football superstar. “It isn’t fair his career should be derailed over something that wasn’t his fault.”
Ben then asks if he got the other situation figured out and Pete says he did. That he got “them to compromise.”
Chip says, “Compromise? What’s all this about?”
Pete says others know about it but they won’t run to the cops as long as Chip pays them $500,000. Chip says he doesn’t have that money so Pete says he can get it by throwing Saturday’s game and giving those who bet on it their money that way.
Chip says he’s going to go to the police but Ben and Pete talk him out of it because they threaten his family when they realize Chip doesn’t mind going to jail or even getting beat up by the gamblers.
Nancy tries to tell her dad about what she thinks might be happening but, once again, Carson Drew frowns at his daughter, while holding his pipe, and says, “Now that’s a pretty serious charge without any evidence, Nancy.”
Hello? Your daughter was right in the past so maybe, I don’t know, back her up this time?
But nope, he says that there needs to be more evidence. Nancy says she’s already taken the glass to a lab to be tested and that there was carpet on the glass and that can be checked out too. I don’t know what lab would take work from an 18-year-old girl, but, okay, once again, we shall suspend belief.
After Nancy argues with her dad we switch scenes to the lab where an older man with white hair is looking under a microscope right when a man dressed in all black clothes, including a mask, bursts in.
We don’t see the doctor or professor or whatever he is get tied up, but we do see Nancy come in to check on him, cry out when she sees him tied up, and enter the room while the man comes up behind her. Then we go to a “commercial break”. When we come back from the commercial break (there isn’t actually one in the episodes I watch on YouTube), Nancy escapes the man, runs around the island in the lab, grabs a chair and fights the man off, forcing him to flee after she tosses the chair from the window to get attention. This scene had me almost biting my nails — a habit I don’t really have but do when I am a bit nervous.
Despite Nancy’s fight, the man escapes with the evidence.
The doctor did get a chance to look at the glass though and found no evidence that anyone had been hit with it. This has Nancy even more confused.
Then she realizes that someone wanted to steal the evidence because it would show that no one had actually been hit with the vase.
“Dad, I’m going out of town so don’t wait up!” she declares before leaving.
When Carson asks where she is going she says “Boston!” and just hops on a plane. I kid you not.
Maybe Nancy is supposed to be older in this show…I would think so but she goes ALONE to CREEPY PETE’S apartment to confront him!!!
She says she’s looking for Chip but noticed he was staying there. Nancy tells him she needs help with Ben.
Pete asks if it is about Paula and says that the last he saw her was when she left the party. Nancy thanks him and leaves, saying she has a plane to catch. Huh, so she flies in and out of Boston to ask one question. After she leaves Paula shows up to have some “cuddle time” with Pete.
Now we are back in the car with Nancy and George and George is complaining that she got tickets on the 50 yard line and they should really be there. Nancy says she understands but that they need to stay on the case.
So instead they go to see Skipper, an older man who cleans her dad’s office. Nancy tells George she’s on to the plan and believes Paula is alive and Ben and Pete made it look like she died to blackmail Chip.
Inside she talks to the salty Skipper who once traveled all over. She wants to know about the time he was knocked out with a knock out drug and what the symptoms were.
“It’s more like a sail ripping apart in a typhoon,” Skipper says. “It screams through your ears.”
Obviously Nancy is starting to figure out that Chip was drugged.
She and George head back to the football game, with Nancy hoping to be able to talk to Chip after she saw him miss two field goals on the TV that Skipper was watching the game on.
Nancy bursts into the control room and demands – hold on I need to laugh a bit here. Whew. Need to wipe my eyes now. Okay so she demands that the man in the control room bring up a video from the game the week before because she wants to see if Paula was sitting with Ben, who she’s sure she saw on the screen when she was in the control room last week.
“It’s terribly important,” Nancy whines.
Eventually the man agrees and they look through – during halftime. While they are looking, Pete calls the bad gambler/mob guy and tells them it looks like it’s in the bag since Chip missed two field goals. The mob guy says he just found out Chip moved his whole family out of town so it looks like maybe Chip isn’t actually going to throw the game.
“Maybe this girl Nancy Drew is the probl’m ‘ere, Pete, see? I told you she need to be watched, see?” That isn’t actually what the guy says. I’m just making it more gangster-like for you.
Okay, so Pete says he’ll take care of it.
Now we are back to Nancy and she sees Paula and Pete together. She asks how to get to the field so a good-looking man helps her but only gives her a pass to get past the guard. In the meantime, Pete sees her running and he starts to follow her. He calls to her but she starts running even faster to get away. She’s able to escape and get to the entrance of the field but is stopped by security.
Eventually she breaks through and then we see Paula in a black wig in the stands sitting next to Ben. They see Nancy run to Chip and they are definitely nervous.
Nancy tells Chip that Paula is possibly alive and tells him not to throw the game. He says he isn’t going to throw the game.
“People miss sometimes and that was just my time,” he tells her.
It’s time for him to kick and she tells him good luck but he says, “If I miss this, who is going to believe me?”
He doesn’t miss, though, and Nancy meets Ben and Paula trying to leave with Pete in handcuffs behind her. I think she saw Ben and Paula in the stands in the control booth earlier and that’s why she knew where they were sitting, but I started to get confused, so don’t take my word for it.
She confronts Ben and shames him for taking advantage of his friendship and then confronts Paula and rips off her black wig. Paula is like, “Wha’eva!” Okay, she isn’t — she just scowls in snobbery.
The episode ends with Chip telling Nancy, George, and Carson that he is out of the bowl game but will at least be able to finish his degree. He feels awful for not going to the police before. Skipper comes in and gives an encouraging speech to Chip about him becoming his own man, “which is much more important than any point after touch down….” He then tries to launch into a bawdy story about “a man who meets a wench in Hong Kong,” but Carson quickly stops him. Skipper shifts gears and says his next story is much cleaner and then — what happens? You must be able to guess by now if you’ve been reading these recaps.
Yes, everyone laughs and the episode ends.
This one also guest-starred Howard Cosell, the famous sports broadcaster.
For whatever that is worth.
So next up — taking a deep breath — I am so excited — is a two-part episode that features Nancy and The Hardy Boys together.
I don’t know when I will be sharing that recap but I am super duper looking forward to it because I am a super duper dork.
If you would like to read some of my other recaps you can find them at the top of the page under “Old TV Show Recaps.”
Hello! Welcome to my blog. I am a blogger, homeschool mom, and I write cozy mysteries.
You can find my Gladwynn Grant Mystery series HERE.
