Drake was so angry that he punched the side of the production truck and broke a hand.

A rewriting of the software code fixed the problem, Drake said, and the score box recovered — and thrived.

ESPN and ABC, although pioneers in the United States, were not the first to come up with the idea. The score box was devised about two years earlier, in England, by David Hill, who was running Sky Sports and was soon after named president of Fox Sports. His inspiration came as he watched, with growing frustration, a soccer match on the BBC.

“I had been walking the dogs near the Wormwood Scrubs prison,” he said by telephone from Los Angeles. “I got home and sat down around 20 after 3 and wondered what the score was, and for 20 minutes I was never told, and I got angry.

“If I were on the football ground, I would have seen the score. So I said if we ever got soccer, I’d do it. And when we got the Premier League in August 1992, I did it, and my boss called and said: ‘That is the stupidest thing I’ve ever seen. Take it down.’ Two other guys talked me out of it.”

So, Hill said, when his boss called the next week to again order that the box be deleted, he ignored him.

By August 1994, Hill was at Fox, and he introduced what was labeled the Fox box in a preseason N.F.L. game, with John Madden offering his Telestrator analysis of it. Hill recalled receiving five death threats and contacting the Los Angeles police and the F.B.I.