On Monday Nights, Are You Ready for Some . . . Fun?

Run for your lives, sports fans, the sky is falling.

Oh, please!

If a wrestler named Jesse Ventura can become Minnesota governor. . . .

If a washed-up singer named Sonny Bono, former pro footballers Jack Kemp and Steve Largent and former college quarterback J.C. Watts can become congressmen. . . .

If a non-New Yorker named Hillary Rodham Clinton can run for the U.S. Senate in New York.

If a former New York mayor and radio host named Ed Koch and other non-judges can wear judicial robes and hand down rulings on daytime TV. . . .

If a movie star named Warren Beatty can be mentioned as a possibility for the White House.

If a second-rate actor named Ronald Reagan can become California governor and later U.S. president for two terms, in the process endearing himself to a majority of Americans. . . .

If all this is possible, then the republic will somehow survive famously ranting comic Dennis Miller joining ABC’s “Monday Night Football.”

The announcement came last week that he will team with returning veteran announcer Al Michaels and Dan Fouts, a former San Diego Chargers quarterback who’d been working college football telecasts for ABC.

Is Miller a football commentator by profession? No, but he did sleep in a Holiday Inn last night.

But seriously. . . .

There is grumbling in sports circles about the sports purity of “Monday Night Football” being tainted by Miller, whose long-running “Dennis Miller Live” talk show on HBO has generated a potful of writing Emmys. As if he were some kind of infiltrator intent on subverting a pristine game from within. And as if sports and entertainment weren’t already knotted irrevocably.

That worry is absurd. As were earlier comments that another entertainer considered for the ABC job, Rush Limbaugh, was unsuitable in part because of the fringe-right lunacy he regularly promotes on his syndicated radio show.

Did anyone really believe that Limbaugh, who is nothing if not shrewd about his own career, would be blasting players for their politics? Or if he wanted to, that ABC would let him?

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Perhaps performers who speak out on political issues should be blacklisted. Perhaps Charlton Heston, Hollywood’s most public conservative, should not be allowed to work as an actor until he stops fronting the National Rifle Assn. Perhaps Mike Farrell, among the left’s most articulate advocates, should be fired from NBC’s “Providence” before he sends a coded message to viewers by blinking his left eye.

Perhaps not.

Miller himself is prone to saying lame things on his TV series from time to time. So what? Suddenly the telecast booth of “Monday Night Football” is a rarefied pedestal where white-bearded philosophers communicate in Socratic dialogues (I don’t recall Howard Cosell and Don Meredith wearing togas)? A place where a knowledgeable amateur--which Miller is said to be--can’t complement the observations of sportscasting pros, in this case the able Michaels and Fouts?

There’s fear, what, that with Miller in the booth during a game, fun might break out? Heavens!

I don’t want to get off on a rant here, but the notion that Miller becoming a football commentator violates some kind of taboo on mixing sports and entertainment is as phony as Frank Gifford’s wife. It’s one thing to impose entertainment values on sports in ways that pervert the game, as St. Louis Browns owner Bill Veeck did when he had midget Eddie Gaedel pinch-hit against the Detroit Tigers in 1951. And as Charles Finley did when having his Kansas City Athletics try orange baseballs.

Yet in the booth, why not? Could Miller, even if he were to launch nonstop jokes on Monday nights, be as obnoxious and narcissistic as Dick Vitale is on ESPN when commandeering NCAA basketball games in support of his self-centered monologues that ignore action on the court?

It’s no accident that some announcers have been at least as colorful as the athletes they covered. Sports broadcasters just about always had entertainment as an agenda: From the microphone’s infancy in the 1920s, when legendary Graham McNamee kept both his listeners and envious colleagues spellbound with his ability to hyperbolize and transform even routine sports contests into epic events, to Harry Caray--the Ethel Merman of baseball voices--leading Chicago’s Wrigley Field crowds in singing “Take Me Out to the Ball Game.”

ABC has been playing its own entertainment card on “Monday Night Live” since the show’s inception nearly 30 years ago when it made that historic odd coupling of arrogant New Yorker Cosell and hillbillyesque Meredith, with the bland Gifford doing play-by-play.

Miller is an extension of that. He won’t make a good game bad, a clunker exciting or a meaningless game something to rant about. If he performs well, however, perhaps then he can run for president.

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Howard Rosenberg’s column appears Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays. He can be contacted via e-mail at calendar.letters@latimes.com.

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Laker Reaction

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