Telling It Like It Was on a Hard Day’s Night

Florida Today sports columnist Peter Kerasotis vividly recalled Thursday that exactly 25 years ago, Dec. 8, 1980, he was watching “Monday Night Football.” The Miami Dolphins were playing the New England Patriots.

He couldn’t remember who won, but he said he’d never forget when Howard Cosell broke into the play-by-play with a bulletin.

“John Lennon ... the most famous, perhaps, of all the Beatles, shot twice in the back, rushed to Roosevelt Hospital,” Cosell said.

Wrote Kerasotis, “Cosell paused. An eternity. He followed with three words, each delivered with its own breath, arriving in classic Cosell staccato timbre. Three words. Only three words. But three words that bore into me and millions of people as if they were each a nail struck with a hammer: ‘Dead ... on ... arrival.’ ”

Trivia time: Rocky Balboa comes out of retirement in “Rocky 6,” now in production. In the previous five Rocky movies, how many times did he win the heavyweight championship?

No Motown? The response to the announcement that the Rolling Stones will be the halftime entertainment at Super Bowl XL in Detroit has been less than enthusiastic by some residents.

Which prompted this response from Mitch Albom in the Detroit Free Press: “To act as if Detroit should be the featured focus of the Super Bowl is like having a birthday bash at a restaurant and learning the chef wants to blow out the candles.

“ ‘What about Motown music?’ people moan. ‘What about Eminem? What about Madonna?’ ... Motown left Detroit, Eminem would never clean up enough for network TV and Madonna lives in England and speaks with a faux British accent.”

Hold the pom-poms: Texas Coach Mack Brown might have been euphoric over his team’s 70-3 victory over Colorado last week, but not for long.

Said Brown in the Chicago Sun-Times, “When I walked out of the stadium, a guy walks up to me and says, ‘Don’t get too comfortable, big boy, Reggie Bush has run for [107] yards in the first quarter.’ That will put a dent in your celebration.”

Just quit, baby: “Leave it to the Raiders to buck the trend,” writes Jim Armstrong in the Denver Post. “While most of the NFL runs the West Coast offense, they’re running the Roberto Duran offense: no Moss.”

Fish market: With Florida’s Miguel Cabrera the only opening-day starter left from last season, Linda Robertson wrote in the Miami Herald: “The Marlins’ bare-bones payroll is now roughly equivalent to that of your neighborhood McDonald’s.”

Trivia answer: Twice. He beat Apollo Creed (Carl Weathers), lost to Clubber Lang (Mr. T), then beat Lang in a rematch.

And finally: Art Thiel of the Seattle Post-Intelligencer notes that the NBA will change its drug-testing policy after Seattle SuperSonic forward Reggie Evans sat out to take a urine test during a game.

Wrote Thiel, “That was a relief to those of us who figured the next attempt to collect [a sample] would be in mid-rebound, pulling down his shorts with one hand and shoving a six-pack at him with the other.”