Print

Mail

wiki links

It's the end of an era in football broadcasting

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."

If it seems as if ABC has carried Monday Night for an eternity, the truth is the network nearly did not get it. CBS and NBC spurned it. So did ABC. But Pete Rozelle, the NFL commissioner, persuaded ABC that he would make a deal with the Hughes Sports Network to syndicate the games to stations throughout the country, including many of ABC's.

"It was only through blackmailing ABC" that the network agreed, said Don Ohlmeyer, who joined the game's production crew in its second season and would twice be its lead producer. (In the second go-round, he hired the comedian Dennis Miller to work in the booth.)

"That was an inducement to carry Monday Night Football -- or for the network to go dark that night," Ohlmeyer added.

Some of the negotiations between Rozelle and Roone Arledge, the president of ABC Sports, took place, seated side-by-side, in a banquette at the 21 Club, often in late afternoons when the restaurant was mostly empty.

"I was doing high-end errands, and once I brought Roone research to 21 as he made points to Pete," said Dick Ebersol, then an ABC production associate, now the chairman of NBC Universal Sports.

In the contract, the league promised that ABC's schedule would feature the "key games insofar as our scheduling judgment can provide," Rozelle wrote to Arledge on May 29, 1969. All the games, Rozelle wrote, would be blacked out "at our election" in the teams' home markets and games that were played in New York were to be avoided.

elation, shock, pride

The reaction inside ABC Sports to the acquisition of Monday Night was "elation, shock and pride," said Dennis Lewin, who was in charge of the replay and isolation production truck that first season. "We were doing the NBA, every major event in amateur athletics, because we'd helped make them big during the Olympics and `Wide World of Sports,' and we were No. 1 in college football. But we thought of this as putting us over the top."

The game in Cleveland offered clues to how "Monday Night" would change the way football was televised, even if the revolution looks modest when compared to today's high-tech wizardry. In its day, the use of nine cameras (versus a standard four or five) to get closer to the action, hand-held cameras for sideline close-ups and reaction shots, split-screen and end zone replays, and Cosell's halftime highlights constituted a visual revelation.

There were no sideline reporters, constant score boxes or Telestrators, commonplace elements of today's broadcasts, and there were only hints of the chemistry that would develop between Cosell and Meredith. Cosell referred regularly to Dandy Don, but Meredith sounded tentative. The division of labor was clear: Jackson gave the basics (Frank Gifford replaced Jackson the next season), Cosell commented when plays ended and Meredith spoke during replays. Sometimes he went a full series without speaking.

One slightly ribald comment by Meredith gave a glimpse into the charismatic, country-fried personality that played off Cosell so well.

"Isn't Fair Hooker a great name?" Meredith said, referring to the Cleveland receiver.

"I pass," Cosell said.

After an interference call, Meredith stumbled but recovered with self-effacing candor. "Now that didn't sound real right," he said. "We're going to try that again later on, folks. You're not supposed to do it. I know that."

The Cosellian sound was abundant, especially during his halftime narration; so were opinions that made each team's fans believe he was their enemy. Cosell and Meredith engaged in one exchange that defined the banter that underscored their partnership.

"They're controlling the ball," Cosell said during a Jets drive during the second half. "That means Cleveland can't score."

"Good point," Meredith said, puncturing a Cosell banality with two words.

The game's artistic peak was a perfectly framed live shot that Chet Forte, the producer-director, held for seven seconds: a shocked Namath, his shoulders slumped, arms akimbo, after an interception was returned for a game-deciding touchdown.

The image was replayed again, for 30 more seconds, as time ran out on Cleveland's 31-21 victory and Jackson promoted the next week's game -- the second Monday in what will be 555 Mondays when ABC's final regular-season game ends on Dec. 26.
This story has been viewed 2042 times.