Monday Nights May Never Be the Same

We trade complaints like old friends do, sharing our worries and concerns, back and forth, back and forth.

“OK, now you go,” I say.

So the little girl tells me about school, and how she tripped and fell in P.E. class, scraping her lip and tongue on the playground asphalt.

“Must’ve hurt,” I say.

“Not too bad,” she says.

“You’re very brave,” I say.

“Yeah, I guess,” she says.

Like a good friend, I’m careful not to pry. Later, when she’s over the trauma, I may ask her how she scraped her tongue on the asphalt.

According to her, she didn’t bite the tongue, as you might think. In fact, her tongue hit the asphalt, just like her lip.

My guess is that she continued to talk even as she stumbled and fell. To her, life’s too short to shut up.

So as she was falling, she probably continued to talk about what she was going to do after school or how her dog snores under her bed at night. All the way down she probably talked. Then boom. Then asphalt.

“One boy asked me if I was OK,” the little red-haired girl says.

“You’re kidding me,” I say.

“He’s a new kid,” she explains, which is the only logical explanation for a little boy asking you if you’re OK after you fall on your face.

“OK, now you go,” she says.

On TV, the Cowboys are walloping the Giants. It’s the fourth quarter of “Monday Afternoon Football,” which used to be known as “Monday Night Football,” until some programming whiz decided to start it an hour earlier for the convenience of East Coast viewers, forsaking the tiny state of California, not to mention Oregon and Washington, those little outposts to the north.

“Now it starts so early that most people on the West Coast only see the fourth quarter,” I tell the little girl.

“That stinks, Dad,” says the little girl.

“By the time we’re home and settled in, the game is over,” I complain.

I tell the little girl all about “Monday Night Football,” how when it started almost 30 years ago no one thought it would last, because pro football was like church, a Sunday tradition.

But it caught on big, this Monday night game. People liked it because it gave them something to look forward to on Mondays besides just work.

And there were these two announcers, “Dandy” Don Meredith and Howard “Tell It Like It Is” Cosell, who everybody loved and hated at the same time, brash guys--one from New York, the other from Texas--two places where brash guys tend to congregate, even flourish.

“They’d joke and insult each other, and sometimes late in the game Dandy Don would sing old cowboy songs,” I tell the little girl. “Then Howard would get so upset at this, his toupee would whistle around and almost fly off.”

Before long, I tell her “Monday Night Football” was a tradition.

“Like church?” she asks.

“Yeah, a little like church,” I say.

Over the years, I say, there were lots of good announcers on “Monday Night Football.” There was Alex Karras and Keith Jackson. Fran Tarkenton and Joe Namath.

O.J. Simpson and Frank Gifford were on there too, and still we watched.

“That’s how good ‘Monday Night Football’ was,” I say.

I tell her how on Tuesday mornings, everyone at work would talk about the Monday night game, about how Montana had pulled out another last-minute miracle, or how this Elway kid would never develop into a champion, important workplace conversations that helped grease the gears of American commerce. Back then, as now, American commerce needed a little lubrication.

And I tell her that, in those days, even Los Angeles had a football team.

“We had a football team?” she asks, skeptical now because she knows how a dad can get carried away about the old days. And she can’t remember Los Angeles ever having a football team.

“It’s true,” I say.

“You sure, Dad?” she says.

“Southern California used to have two teams,” I tell her.

“And they played on Monday night?” she asks.

“Sooner or later, everyone played on ‘Monday Night Football,’ ” I tell her. “Even the Saints.”

“Wow,” she says.

On TV, the game is ending. It’s not even the little girl’s bedtime, and “Monday Night Football” is ending. According to my watch, we saw about 12 minutes of it. Far as we could tell, nobody sang.

“Now you go,” I say, prodding her for the next complaint.

She is quiet for a moment. The little girl who talks even as she tumbles is actually silent. She knows that, as complaints go, it’ll be hard for her to top the demise of “Monday Night Football.”

“Once, I had a wart,” she finally says.

“Tell me about it,” I say.

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* Chris Erskine’s column is published on Wednesdays. His e-mail address is chris.erskine@latimes.com.