There was a time before Monday Night Football, but that was an eon ago, when prime-time sports were rare and CBS and NBC carried the only professional football they believed they ever needed, on Sunday afternoons.
But on a sultry Monday evening in Cleveland, Sept. 21, 1970, when the Browns played the Jets, that television equation was rewritten forever with the first game in a 35-year run on ABC that will end with the Super Bowl on Feb. 5.
The series that brought viewers Howard Cosell, Don Meredith and 13 other announcers in the booth, including the current tandem of John Madden and Al Michaels, will move, for economic reasons, from the once dominant but now drastically downsized ABC Sports to ESPN, its powerful cable sibling in the Walt Disney Co with a smaller universe of viewers.
On that evening in Cleveland, no one had the foresight to know if prime-time football would work, let alone endure on a single network over four decades. And no one, of course, knew that what cost ABC US$8.5 million that first season would soar to a price of US$550 million annually for the network, or to the US$1.1 billion ESPN will pay next year.
The first words of the New Football Order were provided by ABC's Keith Jackson: "From Municipal Stadium in Cleveland, Ohio, two powers in professional football meet for the first time ever as members of the new American Football Conference of the National Football League."
There was not a scripted opening tease or a rowdy Hank Williams Jr. song. The risk then was whether anybody would be ready for some football at 9pm Eastern, even if ABC had proved in 1968 that sports fans would watch the Summer Olympics after dusk. But this was Jets-Browns on a third-place network -- in a three-network universe -- gambling on the future.
There on the field was Cosell, in a maroon ABC blazer, his right hand trembling, as he interviewed Joe Namath and his Jets co-captain, Al Atkinson. He chatted on one side of a split screen, with Jackson, and then with Meredith, the former Dallas Cowboy, who looked abashed to be introduced in his new TV career with a reel of his old quarterback sacks.
not so dandy
"Dan-dee Don Meredith," Cosell said, "how does it feel to review the glories of yesteryear?"
Meredith dabbed his perspiring forehead with a handkerchief, and as Cosell watched on the left side of the screen and chuckled, Meredith said: "I didn't know y'all were going to do that. Nobody told me that. I was all set to tell you about these two quarterbacks, and I'm going to do it anyway."
This was to be the new paradigm of sportscasting, not the game-in-a-cathedral model of CBS and NBC, but up-close, camera-rich, three-in-the-booth entertainment. It starred Jackson, who was more comfortable in the college game; Meredith, a TV naif; and Cosell, the controversial and adenoidal voice renowned for his commentary and boxing, but not for football.
All those years and a few billion dollars later, the creative and viewership legacy of Monday Night Football is secure, despite occasional troughs in its allure and the quality of its production. The current production crew is trying to fend off separation anxiety and end the season with a flourish. Michaels will move with the games to ESPN, while Madden will go to NBC to call Sunday night games.
The day before the Dallas-Philadelphia game on Nov. 14, Fred Gaudelli, the producer of Monday Night Football, said: "We want to be proud of the last thing we did. We don't want anyone to say we're mailing it in."
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