For ‘Monday Night Football,’ It Was a Night to Remember

The “Monday Night Football” run that began on ABC in 1970 is over. It ended with the New England Patriots’ 31-21 victory over the New York Jets on Monday night. There is no Monday night game next week, and the series moves to ESPN next season.

Frank Gifford and Don Meredith helped ABC say goodbye, and it was the voice of the late Howard Cosell that Monday night’s audience heard first.

Gifford was at the game in East Rutherford, N.J., appearing at the top of the telecast and talking with Al Michaels at halftime.

The reclusive and gray-haired Meredith, appearing on television for the first time in years, was part of the opening. In a taped segment, he called the series “unscripted and unrehearsed,” adding, “And if you missed it, you had nothing to talk about the next day at the water cooler.”

It was also left to Meredith to say the trademark “Are you ready for some football?” In another taped segment, at the start of the fourth quarter with the Patriots leading 28-7, he sang “Turn out the lights, the party’s over.”

Michaels promised a night of reminiscing, and it was.

It all brought back many personal “Monday Night” memories, and my first face-to-face encounter with Howard Cosell ranks high on the list.

It was Dec. 10, 1973. I was 26 and earlier that year had been assigned to the sports-television beat by Los Angeles Herald Examiner sports editor Bud Furillo.

Cosell, Gifford and Meredith were the featured guests at a luncheon at the Hollywood Palladium before a Monday night game between the Rams, then the Los Angeles Rams, and New York Giants at the Coliseum.

A colleague, Barbra Zuanich, was also at the luncheon, and we decided to talk to Cosell. About a month earlier, I had done a phone interview with him, but I had not met him.

When we approached, he was semi-civil -- probably because of the presence of an attractive young woman. He told us he was very sick and had visited UCLA Medical Center the day before.

“Are you going to be able to go on the air tonight?” Zuanich asked.

“No, I’ll just let those other two guys handle it,” Cosell said.

I said, “Are you serious?”

Cosell’s response went something like this: “What, are you an immature little baby? Don’t you understand, young man, I am ‘Monday Night Football.’ Who would do the intro? Who would do the halftime highlights? Without me, there is no show.”

Cosell then pulled a tattered letter from his coat pocket. It was from a college professor who supported him in his attack on what he liked to call “the bought-and-paid-for print media.” He then told me what a terrible business I was in.

“I’m not going to get into a verbal confrontation with you, Howard,” I said, more than a bit rattled.

I turned to walk away, and he said, “Come back here, young man, I’m not done with you yet.”

By now, he had an audience. I don’t remember exactly what else he said, but it wasn’t pleasant.

ABC Sports publicist Irv Brodsky called me at the Herald Examiner later in the day to apologize for Howard and assure me I wasn’t the first young sports television writer he had attacked.

I saw Cosell again at an ABC function in a home in Westwood. Surprisingly, he was somewhat friendly, inviting me to play pool. But once an audience converged on the pool table, I never got a shot. Cosell wanted to show off his skills with a pool cue, and didn’t want anything to interfere with that.

I remember sitting down with him and his wife, Emmy, during an ABC junket in Montreal, about a month before the 1976 Summer Olympics.

I pointed out that he had a great job that paid well and that he was probably one of the five most famous men in America.

“Can’t you just enjoy all that?” I asked.

He went into a tirade about being persecuted by the print media.

That’s not to imply that all my experiences with Cosell were unpleasant. He was very moody, but when he was in a good mood, he was OK.

I moved from the Herald Examiner to The Times in 1978, and had another memorable meeting with him a few days before the start of the 1984 Summer Olympics. I was at the Universal Hilton, the ABC hotel, when I ran into Cosell, Jim Murray and Brodsky, the ABC publicist. The three of them had been to dinner.

“We were just talking about you,” Murray said. “I was telling Howard about your Friday column, that you said he would be missed if he quit ‘Monday Night Football’ ”

I think Murray had led Cosell to believe the column was more positive toward Cosell than it was. Anyway, Cosell invited me to the hotel bar for a drink.

That was about 9 p.m. I left the bar around 1:30 a.m.

A number of Cosell’s ABC colleagues joined us at various times. One was Mike Pearl, now the executive producer of ABC Sports. Another was Mike Eruzione, the captain of the 1980 U.S. Olympic hockey team who worked the ’84 Summer Olympics for ABC.

At one point during the evening, I asked Cosell about rumors that he was thinking about retiring from “Monday Night Football.”

He said he would make a decision on the Monday after the Olympics ended. I said, “Can I call you?”

He said, “I don’t know if I’ll take your call, but you wouldn’t be doing your job if you didn’t try.”

I called his office at ABC in New York on that Monday without any luck. I tried again the next day, telling the woman who answered the phone in Cosell’s office that he was expecting my call.

I was told he was at his vacation home in West Hampton but if he called in, he would get my message.

Lo and behold, Cosell called back. I’ll never forget his opening words: “How are you and Mike Eruzione getting along these days?”

During the Olympics, I had been critical of Eruzione’s role. ABC had him doing offbeat features from such places as Rodeo Drive in Beverly Hills.

Cosell went on to say, “It’s the end of a chapter. I am quitting ‘Monday Night Football.’ ”

A year later, in his autobiography “I Never Played the Game,” Cosell devoted a page and a half to that phone call. He wrote that I had somehow gotten his home phone number and he had “inadvertently” given me a national exclusive.

Cosell claimed to always tell it like it is, but maybe in this case he didn’t want to admit that he had actually returned the phone call of a lowly print journalist.

Cosell was often resentful of Gifford and Meredith, who were respected and popular players in their day. They had clout and standing in the NFL that Cosell, no matter how hard he tried, could never achieve.

Cosell went on a campaign against what he called jockoracy -- the practice by the networks of hiring sports commentators based largely on their marquee value.

As an announcer, Gifford at times was criticized for his see-no-evil approach and some embarrassing slips of the tongue. In 1979, Gifford identified Dallas Cowboy defensive back Dennis Thurman, a former USC Trojan, as Thurman Munson, who had been killed in a plane crash less than two months before.

But off the air, Gifford was always a delight.

Maybe we got along because we had a certain kinship. He was from Bakersfield, 50 miles south of my little San Joaquin Valley hometown of Strathmore. Gifford’s father was an oil-field worker and the family moved often throughout the San Joaquin Valley. When he told me about the little towns where he’d lived -- Avenal, Alpaugh, McFarland, Shafter and Taft -- I knew them all.

I last saw Gifford at Don Klosterman’s wake at the Bel-Air Country Club in June 2000. It was two years after his 28-year run on “Monday Night Football” had ended.

We sat together and reminisced about our mutual friend, Klosterman; about our childhoods in the San Joaquin Valley, and, of course, about “Monday Night Football” and Cosell.

Gifford, a class act, was loyal to Cosell, as usual, although such loyalty hadn’t been mutual. Cosell was always going out of his way to criticize Gifford.

Meredith, besides being a former Cowboy quarterback, brought personality to the booth. He would do things like kissing Cosell on the cheek, then making a face. One time when a male fan was caught on camera sleeping, but awoke long enough to raise his middle finger, Meredith quipped, “He’s saying, ‘We’re No. 1.’ ”

Meredith left the show in 1974 and went to NBC with the promise of acting opportunities. For the most part, that part of his career failed.

He then returned to “Monday Night Football” in 1977 and stayed for seven seasons.

The last time I tried to reach Meredith, in the early 1990s, a woman answered the phone at his home in Santa Fe, N.M., told me to throw away the phone number and not to call again.

Coincidentally, I was on vacation visiting an uncle in Santa Fe in 1994, and took a city tour. Our tour guide pointed out Meredith’s home and said, “His wife usually calls to complain when she sees our tour vans.”

Meredith truly had become on a recluse.

In their heyday, the team of Gifford, Cosell and Meredith clicked like no other. They made sports broadcasting history.

Now, the show they made into a national institution is changing channels.