America's Game by Michael MacCambridge

Author:Michael MacCambridge [MacCambridge, Michael]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-307-48143-6
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2008-11-25T16:00:00+00:00

15

Prime Time

The unified and expanded National Football League, now comprising twenty-six teams in two thirteen-team conferences, kicked off its fifty-first season on Sunday, September 19, 1970. The future of American spectator sports arrived the following evening, at 9:00 p.m. EDT on the ABC Television Network, as the opening weekend's final game was introduced on prime-time television, not with a shot of the stadium, or the crowd, or the key players, but instead with a self-referential scene set inside a television control booth, and the voice-over of a director urgently counting down, “Five seconds to air, four, three, two, and … take tape!” As a jazzy riff surged forward and the opening titles flashed on the screen, Monday Night Football took to the air.

From Municipal Stadium in Cleveland, Ohio, where the Cleveland Browns would play host to the New York Jets, ABC's play-by-play man Keith Jackson opened the broadcast, before turning it over to his broadcast partner, Howard Cosell, standing down on the field. “It is a hot, sultry, almost windless night here,” Cosell intoned, and his voice bespoke gravity, a sense of occasion. It was, to be sure, just another regular season football game. But in the electric tension of the sellout crowd and the urgency of Cosell's delivery, it was as though something more important was going on. Sports in America would never be the same.

It is easy to forget, more than thirty years after the fact, when pro football's preeminence seems so assured, how much of an uphill struggle Rozelle fought, throughout much of his first ten years as commissioner, to bring the NFL to prime time. Pro football's rapid ascent in the ’60s did little to alter the conventional wisdom within the television industry that spectator sports were too parochial, too male, too unsophisticated to qualify as big-time entertainment.

In the short history of television, the only sport to receive a long look in prime time was boxing, which nearly died because of it. But while boxing promoters rued the consequences of overexposure, advertisers and television executives took a different lesson: sports wouldn't play in Peoria, at least not at night when the wife and kids were in front of the television. From the end of Friday Night Fights on NBC in 1959 to the beginning of Monday Night Football in 1970, there had been a bare trickle of sports shows on any of the network's prime-time schedules. The smattering of events—the Orange Bowl, or baseball's All-Star Game, or the occasional one-off prime-time broadcasts of NFL games—were viewed as anomalies.

Rozelle had argued for years that football would be a natural for a prime-time slot and that the right package of games would only increase the league's following. But his early efforts at promoting a package of Friday night games ran into stiff resistance from both the NCAA and the Alliance of High School Athletic Associations. When Congress approved the 1966 merger, it also wrote into U.S. law that the league couldn't play games on Friday evening. (The previous

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