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Monday Night
Football's chance magic
Cosell and
Meredith created the show's chemistry
By Ed Robertson
With
“Monday Night Football” leaving ABC in December after a run of 35
years, much ink will be spilled on the subject of the show’s legacy.
Consider it wasted ink.
Yes, these things are all true. “MNF” most certainly changed
the way football was televised. It turned professional football into
entertainment in the way it had not been prior to the show's first airing
some 35 years ago.
Yes, it was certainly magical in its time and for actually quite a
long time. The Monday NFL game will never be the same, never so grand
or nearly as much fun on ESPN, where it moves after ABC. It will be just
another football game.
Indeed, all these things are true as spoken.
But do not
make the mistake of assuming from all such blunderbuss-like pronouncements
that what became "Monday Night Football" was a brilliant stroke
of programming.
To believe so is to give history, and ABC, way too much credit.
Real credit belongs to chance and circumstance, which always seem to be
the true handmaidens of success, particularly in television.
That's not to deny ABC any credit for knowing what the show
had to be when they set about to create it. Network executives knew that
for “Monday Night Football” to work they needed to package it to
attract both football fans and non-fans alike. That meant convincing
viewers that they weren’t just watching a game but a full-blown
entertainment event with larger-than-life characters.
What made it work was the chemistry in the broadcast booth,
but it wasn't just any chemistry of the sort that's now common across all
sports. It was a couple of very unique personalities, Howard Cosell and
Don Meredith. They were "Monday Night Football." And while the
show survived many years after they left, it was never the same and never
going to be the same, no matter who ABC teamed up in an effort the
recreate their magic.
And while credit goes to ABC executive Roone Arledge for pairing up Cosell
and Meredith,
not even he
could have anticipated the kind of chemistry that would evolve between
the two. In many respects their success was simply one of those flukes
of television.
Cosell was a skilled yet acerbic broadcaster with an opinion on
just about anything, whether it was related to football or not. He was a
polarizing figure but also a great television personality. He tackled
controversial issues, ranting at will against conventional wisdom. In
typical Cosell fashion, he defended boxer Muhammad Ali after his was
stripped of his boxing title for refusing to enter the Army at the height
of the Vietnam War.
Viewers tuned into “Monday Night Football” as much to
yell at Cosell as they did to watch the game.
Meredith was a onetime Dallas Cowboys quarterback with a
freewheeling sense of humor who played the clown. He was actually a quick-witted man who was more than capable of holding his own with Cosell.
The two men understood their chemistry and their role as
entertainers. Whenever the game hit a lull, viewers could count of their
verbal sparring to kick in.
By the show’s second season (1972), “Monday Night
Football” was clearly a cross-culture phenomenon. You never knew what
the broadcasters were going to say, or for that matter who would pop into
the broadcast booth. Over those years the likes of John Lennon, Ronald
Reagan, Burt Reynolds, Ted Kennedy, Ethel Kennedy, Dorothy Hamill, John
Denver and Henry Kissinger appeared on the show.
Neither Cosell nor Meredith would survive on television
today, and precisely because they were so outrageous and unpredictable.
Even in his peak years, Cosell, who died in 1995, came off too often as a
self-parody, barking, cajoling, throwing his arms around, issuing
broadsides on whatever thought popped into his head.
And it was just this outrageous behavior that drove the
success of "MNF."
In the end, "MNF" was a phenomenon of a time,
and that time has passed. We as a society are
less amused by the
outrageous, easier to tire in the presence of rants, and more serious
about our sports. We take our fun more seriously, which in many ways is
too bad.
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April 20, 2005
©
2005
Media Life
-Ed Robertson is a
television historian and a regular contributor to Media Life.
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