The biggest gamble in sports history

WHEN MONDAY NIGHT FOOTBALL DEBUTED 40 YEARS AGO

this month, experts thought it was the most ill-conceived and doomed show ever. Today it's one

of the longest-running programs on TV. A history of the little show that could, starring Howard

Cosell, Roone Ariedge, Al Michaels, John Madden, O.J. Simpson and a host of others

A

hot night in Cleveland, 1970. CBS rules Mon­days with The Dems Day Show and The Carol Burnett Slwxv. NBC runs second with potboiler movies censored for television. And down in the cellar of TV's

big—and only— three networks is ABC, a.k.a. the

Almost Broadcasting Com­pany, rolling out a show the others didn't want.

Monday Night Football isn't daisy-fresh like Doris Day. Director Chet Forte, calling the shots for the show's debut, sits in a cramped, smoky produc­tion truck strewn with candy wrappers, soda cans, pizza boxes, ashtrays, stat sheets and paper cups. Facing a bank of blurry monitors, fiddling with his headset, Forte has to pee something fierce but there's no time, so he unzips his fly,

lills a paper cup and stows the cup in a corner.

"Nobody drink that," he says. 'Oien Forte points at a monitor. "Take one—Howard."

Screens from coast to coast show a tall, jowly man in a purple blazer, holding an ABC microphone lo his chin. His hand is shaking. Howard Cosell, 52, a lawyer turned sportscaster with the voice of a goose, looks nervous.

Beads of sweat dot the edges of his black toupee.

"It is a hot, sultry, almost windless night here at Munic­ipal Stadium in Cleveland, Ohio," Cosell reports.

The riskiest gamble in spoils-TV history is on the air.

Forty years and 626 games later, Monday Night Football is one of the longest-running shows in TV history. Many of its hosts are household names: Howard, Frank and Dandy Don; Broadway Joe and O.J.; Miller, Madden and Michaels; Chucky and Jaws. MNP' ranks second behind 60 Minutes in all-time

ratings but first in total viewers because football games last longer. It's first in surprises, too, since its hosts have been known to croon country tunes, get drunk

on the air and throw up on each other, and that was all in tile first six weeks. It would be 24 years before one of them got arrested for murder.

The show was supposed to be doomed from the start. In the late 1960s executives at all three networks—everyone except ABC's Roone Arledge—believed women would never watch football, and while men might tune in during a tight game between such popular teams as the Cowboys and Colts, nobody would sit through a blowout. Who would ever watch tiie New Orleans Saints, a team that had gone 12-29 in its woeful three years of existence? For CBS and NBC, turning a thumbs-down on Monday Night

Football had been the no-brainer of 1969.

"I'm Ilow-ard Cosett and welcome to ABC's Monday night prime-lime National /''oo/ball League lele\i-

S1OI1 SO11OS.

That Monday-night kickoff between the Browns and Joe Namath's Jets, four decades ago, took place 50 years after the NFL was founded in a Hupmobile \ ~ dealership in Canton, Ohio. At its \ inception the league had been a loose association of'leather-helnieted head-

knockers hoping to turn their sweat into beer money. Haifa century later pro football was still scuffling. Baseball was more popular. Namath, the first TV-era sex-symbol jock, was earning $400,000, but the aver­age NFL salary was $23,000. Most players still held off-season jobs. They didn't, have entourages; they had teammates. On the road they bunked in skanky motels, two men to a room—-except when it was two men, Jim Beam and a groupie or two. John Madden's Raiders jogged from the practice field to a bar, where they would each knock back three triple scotches as warm-up for a night of drinking and skirt chasing.

Linebackers tried to break Namath's gimpy knees. Safeties coldcocked receivers with forearms "bandaged" in plaster casts. Guards and tackles gouged and bit. "We mugged each other," one player remembers. "We gouged eyes at the bottom of the pile, elbowed guys in the balls. You had to dismember a guy to get fined. The game was primitive." It was about to evolve, starting on Monday nights. Prime-time football was Pete Rozelle's idea. The NFL commissioner, a former Rams PR man, had shopped the con­cept for years before ABC's Arledge said yes. A redheaded dynamo who got his start producing a kids' show starring ventriloquist Shari Lewis and her sock puppet Lamb Chop, Arledge told his bosses he was going to revolutionize sports TV. "I'm

tired of football being treated like a religion," he said. "We're going to add show business to sports!"

He did it with the showiest show yet. Nine cameras instead of the usual three or four, including one on the roof of a souped-up golf cart that sped back and forth along the sideline. Handheld cameras caught tight side-

lino shots. (In those days a handheld camera was a guy with a 90-pound pack on his back, followed by a cable puller lugging an antenna, dragging wires along the ground.) Shotgun mikes for picking up grunts and collisions in the trenches. Split-screen images. Slow-motion replays. Ilali'time highlights set to music. Most crucial of all: the shadowy magic of football at night, under lights that made every play more dramatic than anything that happened on Sunday afternoon. Then Arledge added the final ingredient: pro football's first three-man broadcasting team. For the show to work, he said, "our Monday Night commentators have (continued on page 106)

FOOTBALL

(continued from page 94) to be so strong that people watch regard­less of the score."

THREE FOR THE SHOW

Cosell spent the first season upstaging Keith Jackson, a traditional play-by-play man. (Too traditional, thought Arledge, who had a replacement in mind. "Roone was hell-bent on hiring his buddy Frank Gifford," says staffer Dennis Lewin, who would later produce MNE) The third man was former Cowboys quarterback Don Meredith, who retired at the age of 30 because he detested Dallas coach Tom Landry and couldn't hack losing in the playoffs year' after year. A free spirit who dressed in pink pants and a suede cowboy hat for network meet and greets, Meredith got his tele-baptism when director Forte rolled a blooper reel showing him fum­bling, stumbling, tossing interceptions and getting sacked.

"Dan-Ay Don Meredith," Cosell asked, "how does h Jeel. to review the glories of yesteryear?"

"Aw, Howard...I didn't know ya'll were gonna do that." Meredith's wincing smile won over an audience of millions, fust as Arledge expected, he was a per­fect foil for Cosell.

What notxxly expected was how loose the rookie color man would be. During that first game the Browns' Fair Hooker caught a pass, and Meredith observed, "Isn't Fair Hooker a great name? F'air Hooker—I haven't met one yet."

Ilalftime brought the first ofMWs soon-famous highlights with Cosell's nasal narration. Footage of Sunday's games had to be flown to NFL Films in New Jersey—though a blizzard in Buf­falo or Creen Bay would mean a brave PR man might have to drive it there— and from there the footage would be fed to the MNE crew. The best plays from four or five games made the cut. "Howard was brilliant with the highlights," says Bob Goodrich, a gofer who rose to producer a decade later. "As production assistant, it was my job to bring him notes on which plays were coming up. He'd say, 'Young man, I don't need that, fust show me the footage.' And he'd narrate it in one take." When a runner broke a tackle Coscll said, "He cmdd...go all...the way," a line Chris Berman now quotes to fans who think it's Berman's. "Howard was...well, he was Howard," says Goodrich. "One night I made some little mistake, and he told me I had single-handedly destroyed Monday Night Football. The next week he put his arm around me and told everyone how brilliant I was."

Later in the first Monday Might game, with the Jets starting a last-minute drive, the Browns flushed Namath from the pocket. He escaped but forced a pass, linebacker Billy Andrews snagged it and rumbled past Namath, who appeared too stunned to move. Pick-six, game over.

Most directors would have cut to the happy Andrews or the cheering crowd. Forte switched to the golf-cart cam—a shot of Namath, head hanging, beaten. It was the image of the week, capping a vivid debut for Arledge's experiment. He and Forte shook hands with the announcers and thumped them on the back. Then they all went out and drank like Raiders.

"People were calling the network before the game ended," says Lewin. "Half of them blasted Howard for being biased against Cleveland. The other half hated him for being biased against Namath and the Jets." After the game Henry Ford II, who owned the car company that was the show's main sponsor, demanded Cosell be fired. According to legendary producer Don Ohhneyer, "Roone Arledge said, 'Go screw yourself. Nobody tells me who to put in the booth.'"

According to Sports Illustrated, the broad­cast "wasn't too bad." The Washington Star ripped Cosell's "retching prattle." News-ioeek called the show "erratic, indisputably controversial, seldom dull."

Cosell sulked. "Retching prattle?" Play-by-play man Jackson, unmentioned, said he felt like "Charlie Anonymous."

Then the ratings came in. The opener had tripled the previous year's Monday-night slate on ABC. More than a third of all the TV viewers in America tuned in. Fans, including 10 million women—40 percent of the audience!—were buzzing on some chemical reaction catalyzed by the announcers, the camera work, the music and the sheer drama of seeing pro foot­ball at night.

One viewer, a 14-year-old quarterback for Finleyville Middle School outside Monongahela, Pennsylvania, stayed up past his bedtime, sitting in the glow of a brand-new color TV. "Monday Night Foot­ball wasj'Z," says Joe Montana. "You could feel the momentum—this game's gonna leave baseball and Ixisketlmll behind. I thought, If I could just get on there...."

F.veryone, it seemed, liked the show's cutting-edge camera work, and fans male and female, young and old, die-hard and brand-new, agreed on one thing:

EVERYBODY HATES HOWARD

The least likely TV star since Gumby, How­ard Cohen began life in 1918. By middle age he was a stogie-smoking, Smirnoff-guzzling egoist who called himself the smartest sportscaster alive. He was prob­ably right. No doubt he was the bravest. A lone goose honking Muhammad Ali's praises when the champ was stripped of his heavyweight crown for refusing to fight in Vietnam, Cosell got a flood of hate mail calling him "Jew bastard" and "nigger lover." He owned a dozen toupees, one of which flew off during a scuffle after an Ali fight. A consummate New Yorker who never learned to drive a car, Cosell rode in ABC limousines, stayed in plush suites and indulged a growing thirst for vodka before and during games.

"Howard could booze like nobody else, but sometimes he lost track," an insider says. In the middle of the first season, after downing a few drinks at a preganie party in Philadelphia, he welcomed a Philly fireman to the Monday Night booth. The fireman, dispatched by F.agles owner Leonard lose, left an ice bucket beside Cosell's chair. The bucket held a jug of vodka martinis. Soon the jug was empty and Cosell was mumbling on air, mispro­nouncing the home team's name. "The Phladuff...Phullada...."

Whereupon he leaned over and vomited on Meredith's cowboy boots.

Cosell staggered out of Franklin Field and hailed a taxi for the 95-mile drive home to New York. The next day he denied he'd been drunk, blaming "a vir­ulent virus." Arledge could have fired him then and there. A Family lend test survey asking Americans "Who do you hate?" resulted in this top three: Richard Nixon, Howard Cosell and Satan.

Arledge loved it. With villain Cosell, good ol' boy Meredith and the best sports telecast in TV history, the show galvanized millions of football fans and created mil­lions more. Never mind that according to Goodrich the show was "a circus. I had covered two Olympics, but this was real pressure." Director Forte and producer Ohlmeyer waged war in the truck. Forte was "a genius," says Lewin. "And a wild man." One game found Forte shouting at Ohlmeyer, "Jesus Christ, get with it!" As Ohlmeyer recalls it, "We're yelling back and forth, and in the midst of this chaos 1 put all six cameras on Tom Jackson, who proceeds to intercept the next pass. I pointed at Chet and said, 'Okay, you fuck, now replay it.'"

During the first two years of Monday Night Football, the sport passed baseball as the country's most popular game, the new national pastime. Restaurants and movie houses saw their crowds thin out on Mon­day nights. Some X-rated theaters shut down that night. Crime fell as criminals stayed home to watch the game. And the fame Cosell wanted so much—and knew he deserved—boonicrangcd on him. Sonic fans mooned him. Others organized "I Hate Howard" nights in sports bars, where they heaved bricks at his face on the screen. A stadium banner showed Howard being flushed down a toilet. Another showed a bulging penis stuck in Howard's mouth.

Cosell was baffled. America hated him but loved Dandy Don, whose easy charm masked what Cosell saw as the laziness of a spoiled ex-jock.

The show's dirty secret was that neither of them liked NFL football. Meredith's sig­nature song when one team put the game away—"Turn out the lights, the party's over"—was the relief of a man who couldn't wait to leave the booth. Earning $33,000, feeling underpaid and underappreciated, he barely bothered to prep before games. One night, when Meredith praised the wrong player for a tackle, Forte lipped him over the IF'B—the "interrupted feedback"

line only the crew could hear: "You stupid son of a bitch! Don't talk till Howard asks you a question."

Now Meredith sulked. The most popular member of the top team in sports TV, he squeezed ABC: for a $7,000 second-season raise while the network boosted its ad rates from $60,000 to $100,000 a minute. Soon Monday Night Football was the most profitable program in TV history.

By then Keith Jackson was gone. Jackson was so smooth, he hadn't missed a beat the night Cosell's cigar ashes fell into the cull'of his pants, starting a fire. Witli his pant leg burning, Jackson coolly called a play and went to commercial. It wasn't enough to save his job when the word came down on the one-way phone Arledge used to call the truck: Charlie Anonymous was out, Frank Gifford was in.

HIGH TIMES

Clifford, 41, was football's aging golden boy. A former USC and Giants star, the only

player ever to make All-Pro on offense and defense, Gilford was catnip to the women Arledge saw as the key to ratings.

"lie was the reason my mom watched," recalls Jon Gruden, who was nine that year. "My brothers and I had to go to bed at halftime, but we'd sneak downstairs in the third quarter. We wanted to play quarterback like Dandy Don, and we imi­tated Howard: 'This is IIoto-d<\ Co-sell, uq'lnessing the precocity of Tampa /ou'head Jonny Gruden.' But my mom watched because she had a crush on Frank."

Abrasive Cosell, country charmer Mer­edith ("the coolest guy in the world," one staffer says without irony) and golden Clifford—three men in canary-yellow blazers the network introduced in 1971—would make Monday Night Football a national habit.

"Howard, Frank and Dandy Don, those guys were pretty dang entertaining," Montana says.

Meredith, who called the president Tricky Dick, joined Cosell in sipping vodka in the booth. By 1973 Arledge feared he was smoking pot pregame, particularly after he welcomed viewers to Denver with a jolly "We're in the Mile High City, and I really am!" Gifford completed the dysfunctional trio by blowing more lines than Tony Mon­tana, lie called Detroit's Lem Barney "Mel Barney" and Atlanta coach Leenian Bennett "Lecnian Beeman." He turned fair catch into care Jialch and opened a broadcast by saying, "Hi, Frank, I'm everybody."

Cosell, rolling his eyes, gave Gifford a sarcastic nickname. To him Faultless Frank and Dandy Don were members of the "jock-ocracy," lunkheads peddling "redundant jargon the public accepts as mystic insight." He thought they were teaming up against him, and sometimes he was right. Before one game Gilford and Meredith told Ohlmeyer, "We're not talking to Howard tonight."

The producer couldn't believe it. "What if he asks you a question?"

"We won't answer," said Gifford.

"Yeah!" Meredith said.

Ohlmeyer talked them out of it, "but there was nonstop tension" in the booth, he says. When Cosell ripped Baltimore's tackling, Gilford mumbled, "Howard, I wish Balti­more would play with your butt for a while." When Cosell gloated during a dull Giants-Cowboys game, "Gentlemen, your respective teams are performing a comedy of errors," Meredith spoke for both of them:

"At least we have respective teams."

Meanwhile the show was Hying high. "The whole country was talking about it," recalls All-Pro linebacker Phil Villapiano. "The league picked the good teams for Monday Night Football. It was like a Super Bowl every week." Villapiano's Raiders dominated the first decade, going 10-3 on Monday nights. Coach Madden reminded his men of their record, and they taunted other teams: "You'll never play on Monday night."

Villapiano was player of the game in his Monday debut. "That's when I really saw the power of the Monday night game," he says. "People kept coming up to me, saying my name like Howard did. Vil,-\a-pi-annnrw\ La-Z-Boy was one of the sponsors, and the show sent me a La-Z-Boy chair. When we didn't play I stretched out and watched." For teams that had played on Sunday, Monday was recovery day. Players gutted out game after game with broken bones and torn muscles with help from steroids (still legal), speed, hormones (including horse testosterone and primitive black-market human growth hormones) and lots of painkillers. "Monday morning wasn't so bad; you still had some painkillers in you. But that night you felt everything. I'd lie there with some provolone and wine, moaning and trying not to move, yelling, 'Tell it like it is, Howard!'"

Behind the scenes, director Forte played shrink for what he called "three very deli­cate and emotional people." For him at least there were perks beyond the limos, hotel suites and police escorts to the stadium that came with working on ABC's top-rated show. Cosell funneled MNF groupies his way by telling them, "Come to my hotel room, dar­ling," and giving them Forte's room number. Forte, who was known for his between-play

"honey shots" of gorgeous female fans, also used production assistants to recruit the girls for dates with the director—until one honey mouthed "Hi, Chet" for all America to see, including Forte's wife.

In Dallas in 1973, Forte and Ohlmeyer welcomed several beauties into the truck—moments before Arledge arrived unannounced. "Roone turned around, went to the airport and flew back to New York. Chet and I thought we were toast," says Ohlmeyer. Arledge forgave them, "but he never let us forget it."

TURN OUT THE LIGHTS?

Meredith jumped to NBC in 1974, signing a $200,000 deal that stated he could never be called Dandy Don or Danderoo. To replace him, Arledge considered NFL heroes Paul Ilornung, Sam Huff and Bart Starr, as well as former college players Burl Reynolds and Bill Cosby. He chose Fred "the Hammer" Williamson, a Chiefs cornerback turned 1'laygirl centerfold and blaxploitation actor. "I'll bring some color to the show," joked Williamson, who lasted three weeks. To replace him, Arledge turned to ex-Lion Alex Karras, best known for being suspended for betting on NFL games and punching a horse in Blazing Saddles. Karras at least had wit. After serving his suspension he was asked to call a pregame coin flip and said, "Sorry, I'm not allowed to gamble." In the Monday Night bcx)th he tk one lcx>k at Oakland's baleful, shaved-head Otis Sistrunk and said Sistrunk was "from the University of Mars." Karras lasted three seasons, but ratings skid­ded. He was no Meredith. In 1977 Karras was booted in favor of...Don Meredith.

Rejoining what he called "the Monday night traveling freak show" made him Dandy Don again, but if Meredith was selling out he got a fair-hooker price: $400,000 a year. With Howard, Frank and Don reunited, the show rejoined the Nielsen leaders with more than 13 million viewers a week. Commercials were selling for a record $125,000 a minute. Less than a decade after ABC paid the league

$34.5 million to televise the first four years of Monday Night Football, the price rose to $592 million for another four. And the revolution was on. During the 1970s the NFL became the first sports league to draw most of its reve­nue from television. Soon, thanks to TV lights that would sell for $2 billion in 1982, every team in the league turned a multimillion-dollar profit before selling a single ticket, parking spot, pennant, hot dog or beer.

Other sports work better watched in per­son: the leisurely pace of a baseball game, NIIL skates slashing ice, a hoops crowd on its feet for a last-second shot. Only football is better on TV. Seen live from all but the best seats, NFL action has always been a mud­dle. Who's got the ball? Half the fans don't know. "In the stadium, a four-yard gain is a four-yard gain," said Cowboys owner Jerry Jones. "On TV it seems like Armaged­don." No wonder he put the world's biggest Jumbo lion in his stadium.

Cosell's Armageddon came suddenly. It wasn't sucking Smirnoff bottles dry during games that brought him down or publicly calling Meredith and Clifford "the imbecile and the mannequin." It was a sentence he uttered on September 5, 1983. When the Redskins' five-foot-seven Alvin Garrett, who is black, nabbed a pass, Cosell cried, "That little monkey gets loose, doesn't he?" He was no racist—Ali's longtime champion and a close friend of Jackie Robinson's, Cosell even called his children little mon­keys. Garret! said he considered the line a compliment. But it was too late. Hounded by critics who called him a bigot, betrayed—• he though!—by O.J. Simpson, whom he brought into the booth only to have Simpson join the jockocracy and rip him on the air ("Howard, you have a firm grasp of the obvi­ous"), Cosell said to hell with it. He quit the show—the first media star sacked by politi­cal correctness.

TURNAROUND

'The mid-1980s sucked," says an ABC source. "Without Howard, it wasn't special

anymore." The year before Cosell left, MNF ranked 10th in the Nielsen ratings. The year after, it fell to 25th. The show's early suc­cess had led all three networks to supersize their football coverage; they were now run­ning 20 hours of NFL and NCAA games a week. By Monday fans had seen enough football. MNF was running last in its time slot, trounced by Cagney is Ixicey. A 198-1 matchup of the big-market Giants and glam­orous Niners set an unexpected record: the show's lowest ratings ever. As a reward for its earlier triumphs the MNF team got to call that year's Super Bowl; the show set pro­duction records with 40 cameras, 50 mikes, 17 video machines, a blimp, a helicopter and the first million-dollar commercials in TV history. But Meredith seemed bored. Simpson spouted cliches. Clifford was as stumble-tongued as ever, referring to the Dolphins' Mark Duper and Mark Clayton as "the two Dupers."

"Don and Frank were still special," says Montana, that year's Super Bowl MVP, "but the show had lost some luster." Its low point came the following season, with Meredith gone for good and a worst-yet trio of Clifford, Simpson and newcomer Joe Namath in the booth. It would take two more years and two more substitutions to save the franchise.

"By then I was head of production at ABC Sports," says Lewin. "I told my boss, Dennis Swanson, 'Monday Night Football's a little stale with Frank and O.J. and Namath. We keep trying to recapture the magic of Howard, Frank and Don, but it's not working.' I sug­gested putting Al Michaels on play-by-play, making Frank the color man and maybe adding another guy later. That third per­son would be Dan Dierdorf, and Al, Frank and Dan would have the longest run of any booth team ever—you can look it up."

According to sportswriter Bud Shrake, "If you joke with Clifford about football, you will be the only one joking." In 1986 Clifford accepted what he saw as a demotion—from straight play-by-play to color man—to make room for the most focused play-by-play man alive. Al Michaels, then 41, best known for calling the 1980 U.S. Olympic hockey team's "Miracle on Ice" ("Do you believe in mira­cles? Yes!"), prepped for every game as if he were cramming for final exams. Michaels was thrilled to join Monday Night Football but worried he was arriving too late. On the day he got the job an ABC executive said, "Congratulations. You got invited to the orgy after the girls went home."

After a solid season in a two-man booth Michaels and Clifford were joined by 290-pound Dan Dierdorf, a six-time All-Pro tackle who dwarfed the other announcers. "Dierdorf is boarding a leaking boat," Sports Illustrated cracked. Instead he helped right the ship, pairing Cosellian barbs ("Andre Waters is the NF'L's cheap-shot artist") with a schoolboy's love of the game. When the 1987 players' strike led to owners fielding teams of "replacement" players, Dierdorf ripped both sides. Years later, in Denver, John Elway's four-yard touchdown run gave the Broncos a 28-24 lead with 1:29 left. Montana, now with the Chiefs, led them 75 yards as the clock ticked to 00:08. Sore-shouldered, 38 years old, Montana took a last snap and found Willie Davis,

who stretched as he fell and touched the ball to the pylon. In the booth Dierdorf shouted, "Lord, take me now because I have just seen it all!"

Montana remembers that game too. "Maybe Monday Night was getting its luster back," he says.

"Getting the magic back," Dierdorf says. "We still had Frank, our tie to the 1970s glory. But we were more of a sports broad­cast. Nothing against jokes or songs, but we were all about the game. And our ratings went up and up."

Michaels makes the same point. "Every­one talks about the glory days of Monday Night Football. But that was a different era," he says. "You had three network affiliates, a local VIIF station or two and a UIIF sta­tion you could get if you put tinfoil on the rabbit-ear antenna on top of the set. By the time we dominated our era we had Animal Planet, the Weather Channel and 15,000 others to beat. What really frosts me is lazy critics saying the old Monday Night was a raging success when it was about 20th in an environment of 54 shows a week. We were fourth out of 150!"

While Michaels, Clifford and Dierdorf surfed the ratings into the show's third decade, the industry was changing. Pro­duction costs for the weekly on-location extravaganza had risen faster than ad sales could cover. When Dierdorf came aboard, MNF was losing $1.5 million a week. Capi­tal Cities Communications, a conglomerate known for pinching pennies, had bought ABC for $3.5 billion. The days of limos and luxury suites were long gone. Michaels found himself riding to games in a rented Ford Taurus, humming a theme song that he, like everyone else, loved the first thou­sand times he heard it.

"Monday Night Football Fanfare," the show's brassy bup-bup-bup-bummm, came first. In 1989, after a first tiy at a long-form theme

fell flat, an ABC- producer phoned Hank Williams Jr.'s manager, Merle Kilgore.

"Does Hank know anything about foot­ball?" the producer asked.

"Does Hank know football? Hank's an American," Kilgore said. "You bet he knows football."

Williams adapted his country hit "All My Rowdy Friends Are Coming Over Tonight" and was soon duelling with Bon Jovi, Big Bird, Bill Clinton, Snoop Dogg, Steven Tyler, Britney Spears and several million others, all celebrating the return of Monday night as a national holiday. By the mid-1990s Monday Night Football was again the top-rated show on ABC.

"A lot of good it did us," an insider says. "We got sold to Mickey Mouse."

MONDAY NIGHT MENACE

In 1996 the Walt Disney Company bought Capital Cities/ABC for $19 billion. Since Disney already owned ESPN, some media watchers warned that the cable stepchild might eat the network, but Michaels and Dierdorf weren't worried. They had the top-rated sports show. They no longer had their tie to 1970s glory, though, not after Su/.en Johnson got through with Gilford. In 1997, after 25 years of televised boners, Gilford met Johnson for a series of trysts at a Manhattan hotel. It was a trap. The busty blonde flight attendant had been hired by a tabloid that installed secret cameras in the room. After some TV porn and oral sex, tlie 66-year-old Gilford told her, "You're so perky!" His wife, Kathie Lee, offered sex­ual healing. ("Each time you make love, that person feels forgiven," she perked to People.) The network, less forgiving, used the scandal as an excuse to shift Clifford to the pregame show, where he split time with Chris Berman's booming "Monday Night Blast" from the ESPN Zone in Baltimore—• an early sign of things to come.

A couple of months later Michaels and Dierdorf were watching the premiere of Sunday Night Football on ESPN when they heard Hank Jr.'s MW anthem.

"They took our music!" Michaels said.

Dierdorf still can't believe it. "That was the eye-opener. When ESPN management took what was unique to Monday Night and gave it to Sunday, we knew ABC Sports was on its way out. It was all ESPN from there."

Says Michaels, "There is synergy that's helpful and synergy that's garbage."

Into an unsettled booth jogged Norman "Boomer" Esiason, the NFI.'s 1988 MVP, who bristled when Michaels urged him to "go past the rudimentary—people want to hear more than what you'd do on third down." Bounced alter two seasons, Esiason blamed Michaels, claiming he'd been back-stabbed at "Al's Broadcasting Company."

ABC Sports president Howard Katz was irantic. "We've got to make Monday Night special again," he said. Producer Don Ohlmeyer considered Jimmy Johnson, Sterling Sharpe, Tom Jackson, Robin Rob­erts and Billy Crystal. lie was about to offer Chris Rock a seat in the booth when Rock's opposite came through the door.

Rush limbaugh auditioned for Ohlmeyer in a cramped IIollywd studio, sounding off to a tape of the Titans-Bills Music City Miracle playoff while Michaels called play-by-play and new hire Melissa Stark faked sideline reports. Iimbaugh wowed them all. He could have been football's whitest color man, but NFL commissioner Paul Tagliabue nixed the idea. Iimbaugh, who went on to lose an ESPN gig when he called Donovan McNabb an overrated quarterback, imply­ing that McNabb benefited from reverse racism, returned to radio, and Ohlmeyer picked another wild card.

Same studio, same Music City Miracle, take two: In one frenzied factoid-filled hour, Saturday Night Live alum Den­nis Miller ("Cletidus Hunt? 'That's not a player; that's a raid on a sorority") won the Dandy Don chair in the Monday Night booth. Before his first show in 2000 he told Michaels, "A year ago I was sitting in my underpants, eating peanuts, watch­ing the game. Now I'm announcing it!" Ohlmeyer restored the limos, hotel suites and expense accounts of the glory days. Michaels, quarterbacking an all-new team featuring Miller, Dan Fonts and sideline speed bump Eric Dickerson ("Al, when it's muddy, football players use cleats"), set­tled in for what he calls "two enjoyably bizarre years."

Miller's chatter made news at first. He said the Chiefs' 44-year-old Warren Moon was "older than the cuneiform in Nebuchadnez­zar's tomb." He implied that the 49ers were gay: "Is it just me or are they doing an awful lot of ass patting?" lie spewed lines that would get him fired today: "Ouch! Marino goes down quicker than his Boone's Farm-infused sister in the back of my T>8 Cutlass!" But even at his best he sounded scripted. At his worst, Miller sounded like the obnoxious guy on the next bar stool.

"I've seen women pee standing up with better aim!"

In the end one of the few highlights of 2000-2001 was the pregame fireworks show

that set Melissa Stark's sweater on fire and left Stark, unlike Miller, unscathed.

LAST OF THE BOOM YEARS

John Madden couldn't stomach Miller's act. "I thought the game was the entertainment," he said. Two years later he got a chance to prove his point.

In 2002, 17 years after Cosell said Mad­den was "past his peak," the former Raiders coach took a pay cut to join Michaels in what ABC billed as a two-man dream team. ABC signed him for four years at $5 million a sea­son, and on his first night at work a wicked hit drew his patented gravelly "Boom!"

"Let it be duly noted—the first Monday night boom," said Michaels. lie wasn't count­ing two booms on the "tough-actin' Tinactin" commercial that had just aired, and that was part of the problem. At 66, the same age as Clifford when Clifford was put out lo stud, Madden was mentally sharp, but his shtick was getting stale. He and Michaels may have been the best bth team since the show's first season, but ratings continued a seven-year slide into the red. With NFL rights fees and production costs rising, the show was losing $150 million a year.

When Stark got pregnant, produc­ers hired a curvy turducken named Lisa Guerrero, a former Rams cheerleader who knew her demographic. "If some 18-year-

old thinks I'm hot, then I embrace that," said Guerrero. If the party wasn't over, it was winding down. The network's next biainstoi in was a halftinie feature in which NIL players got punked, Ashton Kutcher-style. Welcome to the new Monday Night Football: Tony Holt tricked into wearing a tiara and tutu.

In 2004, with the show entering its 35th season, the landscape changed again. The NFL re-upped with CBS and Fox for a total of $8 billion through 2011. That was more than the combined TV rights for the Olympics, MLB, NBA and NHL. It left Sunday and Monday nights for ABC and ESPN—if Disney met the league's asking price. The price, unreported until now, was $1.5 billion. Disney said no. The NFL's negotiators warned that there was another bidder in the mix. Disney, appar­ently thinking the league's warning was a bluff, didn't see NBC blitzing from the blind side.

In 2005 Disney boosted its offer to $1.55 billion—$50 million more than the league had asked for. loo late. The league announced that NBC had landed Sunday nights. "Sunday is now the better night," said Tagliabue. Now only Monday night was left, and if ABC kept Monday night, ESPN would have no prime-time football. That couldn't happen, because Disney based its

sub fee, the rate it charged cable subscrib­ers, on ESPN carrying NFL games in prime time. And that, in turn, is why ABC lost Mori' day Night Football. Thirty-five years of TV history lost out to sub fees.

Michaels and Madden's penultimate game drew 12 million viewers, the lowest-rated Monday Night game in 15 years. The final week's meaningless Jets-Pats clus­ter fumble wasn't much better. Sideline reporter Michele Tafoya, a new mom, channeled Gosell by vomiting moments before kickoff. The Jets lost by the same 31-21 score by which Namath's Jets had lost the first Monday game. The MNF era ended just after midnight with a clip of Meredith singing "Turn out the lights..." fading into Hank Williams Jr.'s mournful "...the party's over."

or is it?

So who's the joker on there now?

"Me!" says Jon Gruden, who sported a Joker mask to make the point that some players are versatile, like wild cards.

lie's no Dandy Don or even a Tony Korn-heiser, the announcer he replaced last year, "lie's better," says a colleague. "ESPN's had a good broadcast since it gave it to the foot­ball guys."

Since taking over MNF in 2006 the cable colossus has put its own stamp on the show.

Last summer Gruden, Ron faworski, Mike Tirico and producer Jay Rothman spent a week on an ESPN bus, rolling into Pitts­burgh for a Steelers preseason game and from there to Giants Stadium in East Rutherford, New Jersey, eating and sleep­ing football. "That was our training camp," says Gruden, who's as amped offscreen as on. The former Raiders and Bucs coach, who won Super Bowl XXXVII with Tampa Bay, had no trouble with Xs and Os but fought butterflies. "I had stage fright—and Rothman was no help!" The producer was prepping his stars for their first live broad­cast when he mentioned the show would be seen by more than 10 million viewers all over the world. "Gruden, don't screw it up," he added.

Gruden choked on the air more than once. "I stuttered. I froze up." When an early-season game ended with a last-gasp interception, "I got all excited, cut in and started doing play-by-play."

"Gruden, that's Mike's job," said the voice in his earpiece.

"Sorry!"

Gniden still needs to cool his inner Chucky, and Jaworski sometimes spews helmet-head jargon ("It's big to allow the jack linebacker to go sideline to sideline"), but with Tirico playing traffic cop, the ftball guys made MNF worth watching in 2009.

Immediately after each Monday game the announcers get iPods with the audio so they can listen to their work as they fly home. Next morning a package arrives— CDs of the game and of the teams playing next Monday. Jaworski screens his video at the New Jersey headquarters of NFL Films, where he has a private Jaws cave. Gruden watches his while running on a treadmill in lampa. Each Thursday they kick ideas around by conference call. On Saturday morning they fly to the game site to watch the home team practice and meet with its coaches and key players. Ditto for the other team on Sunday, plus a production meeting. Two Monday meetings and hours of last-minute cramming lead to a pregame speech from Gruden.

"I get fired up," he says. "Last year in Green Bay I said, 'This is Lambeau Field, men. Hallowed ground. Let's deliver a championship broadcast in a champion­ship setting!'" The game drew 21.8 million viewers—the most ever to watch a cable-TV program and several million more than MNF averaged in its last year on ABC. Afterward Jaworski and Gruden handed out game balls to the crew. By the end of the season the seven highest-rated shows in cable history were all Monday Night Football on ESPN.

On the eve of its 40th anniversary, sports TV's riskiest gamble is a hit again. But what kind of hit? A basic-cable imitation of a once-proud franchise or something new and improving?

"All I know," says Gruden, "is that when I was coaching, people stopped me in the gro­cery story to gripe. 'You blockhead, throw it to Galloway!' Now they come up and do the music. 'Bup-bup-bup-bummm!' Women, teenagers, little kids. Every form of life likes Monday Night Football."

goill; til

i m tired of football deing treated like a religion; said

ARLEDGE.

II

¦ff