by Howie Mooney
I’ll never forget that day, more than half my life ago, when I got to find my seat up in the exalted space that was the media box at Lansdowne Park. My first sports love as a child was the Ottawa Rough Riders, and I was now being given the privilege of covering them for local television. I’m not going to lie. It was a dream come true.
Now, as time went by, I learned that there were some rules about life and existence up there among the ink-stained wretches and the beglamoured television folk. Simple rules. Like “There’s no cheering in the press box.” Okay. And if you were performing an on-air role, “You don’t direct from behind the microphone.” And the ever-important “Never vomit on your broadcast partner’s shoes.”
I made that last one up. It doesn’t really exist. There shouldn’t really be a rule like that because no one would ever be in the position to throw up on their partner, right?
Right?
Well…during the first year of ABC’s Monday Night Football, one such instance did occur. It was 1970. It was a night in Philadelphia in November. It was cold. The booth at Franklin Field which was holding Keith Jackson, Howard Cosell and Don Meredith – and, in fact, all of the press and radio as well – was not heated and was open to the elements. Calamity could dare ensue. In fact, it did, as Howard Cosell had to leave the stadium before the third quarter began.
The next day, in the Camden (N.J.) Courier-Post, it was reported that “Cosell is out of action with the flu, the grapevine reports”. But time and whispers from people who were there that frigid Philly night have told us that Cosell’s ‘flu’ was actually self-inflicted. In the Baltimore Sun, Jack Chevalier reported that Cosell “hung on to Meredith at half-time last night and blubbered, ‘You’re absho-looly right, Don’…then he vanished for the rest of the game.”
Another paper said he was stricken with “laryngitis” and left the stadium after half-time.
By the Wednesday of that week, more reports were coming out, but they were about Cosell and Meredith having an inability to coexist in the booth. In the New York Daily News, Kay Gardella wrote a column that discussed the goings-on in television and radio in the city. In her opening of that day’s piece, she speculated that perhaps Cosell’s departure from the game was a signal that the two men had difficulties getting along.
Gardella referred to a quote from Meredith that Cosell “was not feeling well and had gone downstairs to rest.” But then, she called Cosell at home to get his side of the story. He told her that he had been stricken with a “virulent virus” and that he would be home in bed for “several days”. Cosell told her, “I started to feel squeamish when the game began and by the second quarter, I had started to shake uncontrollably. So, I quit and headed for the Philadelphia Airport.”
Cosell then described a wild series of events in which he ran for a plane that wasn’t there. Eventually, he found a cab driver who would take him back to New York for $100. That was how he got home. “I’m home now and according to the doctor, I have to stay here.” Indeed, a small story from the Associated Press on the Thursday said he had the flu. So, there you have it. All nice and neat and wrapped up with a bow.
Perfectly innocent, right? Perhaps not.
That Monday was a cold night in Philadelphia. The temperature, when the sun set, was around the freezing point. But the wind chill made it feel much colder. Jim Spence worked at ABC for 26 years. He was senior vice-president of sports at the network from 1978 to 1986. In 1988, he wrote a book, Up Close & Personal: The Inside Story of Network Television Sports. In the book, he said that Cosell would drink “before, during and after telecasts.” His alcohol of choice was apparently vodka.
Ray Didinger is a sports reporting icon in Philadelphia, and he told a story about that November Monday night in a piece he wrote for philadelphiaeagles.com in December of 2013.
Monday Night Football was a brand-new thing in 1970, and it took off, quickly becoming a phenomenon. Some thought that Cosell and Meredith were a bad mix, but many enjoyed the way they played off each other. Leonard Tose was the owner of the Eagles, and he saw the fact that his team was playing a home game on a Monday night as a very big deal.
He held a gala on the late afternoon/early evening of the game on the campus of Penn University. Lobster and filet mignon were on the menu and the champagne, and anything else anyone wanted to drink, was flowing. For Cosell, he was enjoying the vodka martinis. The dinner was open to the working media as well and everyone was attended to by tuxedo-clad waiters.
As Didinger wrote in his piece, “Cosell was drinking martinis to brace himself for the long, cold night ahead. Apparently, he overdid it.” The subject was also covered in the book Monday Night Mayhem by Marc Gunther and Bill Carter. They talk about the situation as the game got later into the second quarter. “Suddenly, with a minute to go (before halftime), Cosell went white. He pitched forward and threw up all over Meredith’s cowboy boots.”
Roone Arledge came up to the booth to check on Cosell and assess his ability to continue. He decided that Howard’s night was over. Cosell had a security man with him and Arledge asked him to make sure that Cosell got back to New York. Discreetly, the former policeman got the ABC star out of the stadium and into a cab. According to Didinger, the cab took Cosell back to New York. As Cosell had told Kay Gardella, the price for cab fare was a little under $100 without a tip.
The Eagles won the game by a score of 23-20 over the Giants. The win was just their second of 1970. The Giants record fell to 6-4. Neither team would make the post season. The big thing about that season was that it was the first year of Monday Night Football. The broadcasts would revolutionize the game, bringing it to primetime and allowing more people to see it than ever would have without it.
It also showed the league that there were plenty of opportunities to publicize and monetize the game. It was the beginning of the transformation of the NFL from another professional sports league to the monolithic and omnipresent body that it is today and will continue to evolve into as time moves on.
Keith Jackson served as the play-by-play man on Monday Night Football for that first season alone. He went on to become the premier man of college football until he retired in 2006. He also filled so many other roles on ABC, doing major league baseball, NBA basketball, boxing, auto racing, PGA Tour golf, the USFL and Olympic Games telecasts. He was the consummate professional and was remembered as that after he passed away in 2018.
Frank Gifford took over the Monday Night Football reins from Jackson in 1971. The story goes that Gifford was ABC’s first choice for the play-by-play role for Monday Night games, but his contract with CBS kept him from moving over until the show’s second season. The chemistry between Gifford, Cosell and Don Meredith was something that was unique to its time and will never, ever be duplicated.
Don Meredith had been the first quarterback of the Dallas Cowboys when the team joined the NFL in 1960. He played nine seasons and ended his football career at the end of 1968. He joined the new Monday Night Football venture in 1970 and stayed there until the end of the 1973 season. From 1974 to 1976, he was Curt Gowdy’s partner on NBC football broadcasts. He then returned to ABC doing football analysis on Monday nights until Super Bowl XIX at the end of the 1984 season.
While Gifford and Meredith became stars and the primetime football machine made them all very well known, Howard Cosell became bigger than all of them. Cosell was one of those people who really defined the 1970s. Between the Monday Night games and his relationship with Muhammad Ali and his job hosting Battle of The Network Stars, Cosell was as recognizable as anyone during those years.
One of the most well-known moments involving Cosell came the night of December 8, 1980, when he broke the story of the assassination of former Beatle, John Lennon, at the Dakota Hotel in New York. Cosell knew Lennon personally and to have to tell the world that this beloved man was killed on a Monday Night Football telecast was as incredible a television moment as one could imagine or experience.
But despite all his fame and his notoriety, Cosell was known to be far from content in life. Jim Spence, in his book, Up Close & Personal, characterized Cosell as “one of the unhappiest human beings on the planet.” He also saw him as “an insecure, overbearing man who became impossible to work with late in his career.”
That may be so, but for many of us who were growing into ourselves in the 1970s and 1980s, he was one of those bigger than life figures who defined sports television during those years.
Whatever his faults, whatever his qualities, he will always be remembered.
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Howie’s latest book The Consequences of Chance, seventeen new and incredibly detailed stories of outlandish and wild events that occurred in sports over the last fifty years, is available on Amazon. It’s the follow-up to his first books, Crazy Days & Wild Nights and MORE Crazy Days & Wild Nights! If you love sports and sports history, you need these books!
You can hear Howie, and his co-host Shawn Lavigne talk sports history on The Sports Lunatics Show, a sports history podcast, on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon Music, iHeart Radio, TuneIn Radio and Google Podcasts and WHEREVER you find your podcasts. Check out The Sports Lunatics Show on YouTube too! Please like and subscribe so others can find their shows more easily after you. And check out all their great content at thesportslunatics.com. There’s so much to read, listen to and watch.
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