From the snopes article on Mr. Ed:

The difficulty in resolving closely integrated black and white images on non-color television receivers was one of the primary reasons NFL games were not regularly televised until the mid-1960s, when sales of color TV sets started to outstrip those of black-and-white models. When black-and-white television predominated in the nation's living rooms, football games were too often disrupted when players ran into the referees, whose black-and-white striped uniform tops made them nearly invisible to onlookers.

I don't understand this. Assuming that it is true that the refs' uniforms did make them nearly invisible to viewers (and the zebra didn't become invisible, it just looked like a pale-coloured horse), surely the players would still be able to see them.

Bingley

Bingley