You Can't Make This Up: Miracles, Memories, and the Perfect Marriage of Sports and Television (32 page)

In 1996, Steve Bornstein, the head of ESPN, took over for Dennis Swanson. Swanson, who’d given me the plum of plums—
Monday Night Football
—was “retiring” at age fifty-eight. In other words, pushed out. And Bornstein would now be running both ESPN and ABC Sports. It was no surprise—I could see it coming from the moment Disney took the deed to the house. A couple of days after he took the job, my new boss called and said, “I want to sign you to a contract extension with alacrity.” I laughed at the word and still throw it out on the air every once in a while, a throwback to that phone call. Steve flew out to Los Angeles later that week and said something that was sweet music to my ears. Over breakfast at the Peninsula Hotel, he said, “ESPN is important. But I want to restore the glory of ABC Sports.” It never happened.

ESPN was founded in the late seventies. Today the cable industry is more profitable than ever. Which is why the major media conglomerates, and even the leagues themselves, have launched cable sports channels. But Disney had a gigantic head start when it acquired ESPN. And once management had started merging ESPN with ABC Sports, the endgame was clearly apparent: the cable channel was going to be the mother ship. The network sports division would be, sooner or later, swallowed whole.

Monday Night Football
started to feel ESPN’s weight in the late 1990s. One example among many: to pump up ESPN’s
Sunday Night Football
broadcast, the network “borrowed”
MNF
’s exploding graphics and took Hank Williams Jr.’s opening song, “Are You Ready for Some Football?” I was walking through a hotel lobby in Denver with Dan Dierdorf when we first heard the song blaring out of a television set on a Sunday night telecast. Dan and I looked at each like, “Whoa, what are we doing here? Isn’t our game tomorrow?”

Also, in 1998, in the name of “synergy”—then the big corporate buzzword—the
Monday Night Football
kickoff was moved up from 9
P
.
M
. to 8:20
P
.
M
., and each telecast opened with a pregame show at the ESPN Sports Zone restaurant in Baltimore. I often felt
synergy
should be spelled “sinergy.” As in sacrilegious. This was just a bald-faced way to promote ESPN’s new restaurant chain. It was Frank Gifford’s first year out of the booth since 1970 and somebody came up with the brilliant idea to have him fly to Baltimore every week and do a short segment from a glass-enclosed cubicle. He couldn’t have looked more uncomfortable. The whole show felt like a cheap carnival act. It might as well have been hosted by Bozo the Clown with a seltzer bottle.

Still, the most dramatic changes for me came in the broadcast booth. At the end of 1997, after a twenty-seven-season run that dated back to the second year of
Monday Night Football,
Frank left the show. His contract wasn’t renewed. (He was only offered that small role on the pregame show.) Things were getting so bizarre at the time that Michael Eisner, then the head honcho of Disney, was set to call Frank to give him the word himself. Frank deserved to hear it from the “big boss.” But Frank was unreachable (it was later learned he’d been undergoing knee surgery) and after several failed attempts, Eisner had to get on a plane for Europe. So it fell to Bob Iger, then number two at the company, to get the word to Gifford. But Frank was still nowhere to be found and Iger would soon be on a plane himself. Word was starting to leak out that Frank’s reign was over and it was important that he’d hear it from the company—and not the press. Meanwhile, even though Bornstein was now heading both sports divisions, a guy named Brian McAndrews had been given a senior management title at ABC Sports. So somehow it was now left to a guy who’d barely been there and would leave soon thereafter to call Frank Gifford. One thing about Frank—he’d seen it all over the years and could be oblivious to the comings and goings in the executive suite. My phone in the house rings the next afternoon. It’s Frank. He was always the coolest guy in the room. So matter-of-factly that he might as well had been talking about the weather, he says, “I think I just got fired by a guy I never heard of.” And thus ended Frank Gifford’s incredible run in the
Monday Night Football
broadcast booth
.

Meanwhile, in one of my first meetings with Steve Bornstein, he made it clear he wasn’t a fan of Dan Dierdorf and didn’t want to renew his contract, which was up the following year. I told him I disagreed with his assessment, but he was intent on making 1998 Dan’s last season as an analyst on the show. And with Gifford now out, there was an open spot in a three-man booth—a role that would be filled by Boomer Esiason.

Esiason had gotten to know Ken Wolfe and Craig Janoff, the producer and director of
Monday Night Football,
while working with them as an analyst on the World League of American Football in the early-nineties. They had stayed in contact, and with Wolfe and Janoff championing Esiason, ABC hired him to join Dan and me in the
Monday Night
booth in 1998. (This, by the way, all came after a major push at the time to hire John Madden for
Monday Night
—a deal that fell apart at the last minute.) Esiason was thirty-seven, and the year before, had gone back to Cincinnati for a second stint with the Bengals and started seven games. He could still play but with the
Monday Night
opportunity available, he’d decided to retire and make the jump to broadcasting.

It was a thorny year from the start. Each week, we were coming off that dopey pregame show from Baltimore. Dan pretty much knew it was going to be his last year. Wolfe and Janoff were—as they had been for some time—dissatisfied with their contracts, and bristling at a management team, including executive producer John Filippelli, that they didn’t like or respect. And then there was Esiason in and Gifford out. In our first broadcast—a preseason game in Canton, Ohio, during Hall of Fame weekend—minutes before the game, Esiason asked me to introduce him specifically as a “Super Bowl quarterback.” I told him I thought that sounded awkward—people knew who he was. Then, when I brought him in during the scene set, he immediately proclaimed to the audience, “It’s going be a new booth, guys—look out!” Dierdorf and I glanced at each other. Ohhhh-kay.

Dan was let go after the 1998 season—the Pro Bowl was his last game for ABC. Meanwhile, Linda and I stayed after the game in Maui for a vacation. The Broncos had just won their second straight Super Bowl, and the team’s coach, Mike Shanahan, owner Pat Bowlen, and John Elway were all staying at our hotel. One morning, I’m playing golf with Shanahan, who’d been a good friend dating back to his brief run as the Raiders’ coach a decade earlier. When I meet him at the range, he says, “Did I hear that they fired Dan and kept the
other
guy?” I say yes. He says, “Boy, you’re in some business.” That night, Shanahan, Bowlen, Elway, and I went to dinner with our wives at Carelli’s On The Beach. At this point, Elway still hadn’t decided whether he would retire. There were even rumors that perhaps an opening in the
Monday Night Football
booth would entice him to end his playing career and make the transition. At dinner, the topic came up. I asked him if anyone at ABC had contacted him. Elway laughed and said Esiason had come to him and encouraged him to try to get the job.
“
Come with me,” Boomer had told John, “so we can gang up on Michaels together.”

Elway retired but passed on any broadcasting opportunities.

Back in New York a month later, I had lunch with the new president of ABC Sports, Howard Katz, who in the 1970s had been mentored by my father at TWI. (Steve Bornstein had been promoted to the head of Disney’s Internet group.) At lunch, Howard told me he was concerned about the direction of the show. It was our Super Bowl year coming up—and I told him that after all the tumult of the past couple of years, I thought the smartest thing going forward was to avoid any more changes. I told him I felt the best option might be working with Esiason in a two-man booth. And that’s the way it went in 1999.

We did the Super Bowl. The Rams beat the Titans in a thriller in Atlanta that came down to the final play of the game, when Rams linebacker Mike Jones tackled Kevin Dyson at the one-yard line to preserve the St. Louis victory. There would be the regular on-the-field presentations of the Lombardi Trophy and the MVP award and then from the booth, Esiason and I were going to take us off the air with a one-minute recap. But the ceremony ran long—the network wanted to get to some new show on the air that would debut as soon as we were done—and now we’d only have thirty seconds or less. Filippelli, the executive producer, was in the truck and told Wolfe to tell us that we’d only have time for me to say something briefly and take us off the air. There would be no time for Esiason, who then removed his earpiece and left the booth as I was starting the “close.” I wouldn’t see him again until our production meeting the following Saturday night in Honolulu prior to the next day’s Pro Bowl.

By this point, Howard Katz had decided it was time for a big restructuring. And not just in the booth. Wolfe and Janoff were constantly moaning and brooding and had worn him out, too.

WHETHER FAIR OR NOT,
as the new millennium approached, there was a perception that
Monday Night Football
was fraying—even if the ratings said otherwise. In the so-called glory years of the show with Howard Cosell, when there was only network television and no competition from cable,
MNF
had generally ranked around 20th out of 54 shows. In the supposedly “flat” period, it was almost always in the top 10 out of 150 shows.

Still, despite all that, total viewership was down simply because of the rise of cable. Instead of just two other options, CBS and NBC, as there were in the seventies, now viewers had a hundred choices. We were now competing against a whole universe of shows, from other sports programming to early-stage reality television to professional wrestling’s
Monday Night RAW
. And Howard Katz had a big change in mind. “What would you think,” Howard asked me, “if Don Ohlmeyer came back to produce
Monday Night Football
?” Katz and Ohlmeyer were very close. Howard had spent a number of years working at Don’s production company.

I’d known Don since the 1970s. He was a disciple of Roone Arledge and had produced
Monday Night Football
in the early years. Don had been supportive in getting me to ABC in the first place, and then had left to run NBC Sports and then, later, NBC Entertainment. He’d made NBC megamillions by overseeing the “Must See TV” Thursday night lineup in the 1990s. Don had retired from television in 1998 at fifty-three years old. He’d been there, done that, and needed a break. But was it temporary or permanent? Even Don didn’t know at that point. We were playing golf two or three times a week and I’d never seen him happier.

“You’re never going to be able to get Don,” I said to Katz. “He’s enjoying life too much. He’ll never do this. Don’t get me wrong. If you could, it would be great. But I just don’t see him coming back for a job he already had twenty-five years ago. I just don’t see it happening.”

Don and I had lunch shortly after that and he told me that Howard had spoken to him about coming back. And then he surprised me.

“I’m thinking about it,” he said. “I have some ideas that are totally out of the box, but the only way I’ll do it is if I have real autonomy.”

Don didn’t want the increasing collection of executives and bean counters at ABC and ESPN interfering with his plans. He had big ideas, and wanted the freedom to execute them.

“What do you have in mind?” I asked.

“Number one, Esiason’s out. We can find any number of better analysts. But I’d also want to put someone in the booth from outside the football world. Someone who will get people talking.

“I know one thing, though,” he continued. “If I ever did this, you’d have to buy in.”

I told him the idea was very intriguing. This could range anywhere from sensational to a total bust.

Sure enough, a week or so later, Don Ohlmeyer came out of retirement. That ended Wolfe’s fourteen-year run as producer. And he had the autonomy he needed to really shake things up. He sent Esiason packing and hired a new director to replace Janoff. His name was Drew Esocoff, and Don, who’d never met Esocoff, loved the way he had directed that year’s Sugar Bowl. How’d
that
hire turn out? Well, Drew and I have now worked together for the last fifteen seasons. Nobody today and nobody ever has done it better than Drew. Ohlmeyer always understood showmanship and had a great sense of what works and what doesn’t. He knew a great director when he saw one. And he was never afraid of risks.

However, before Don could start looking “outside the box” for a new guy in the booth, Bill Parcells resigned as the head coach of the Jets. That’s when Parcells had that famous quote—“Write it on your chalkboard, I’ll never coach again.” Of course, three years later, Jerry Jones would help Bill erase that chalkboard. Anyway, Katz, Ohlmeyer, and I figured if we could sign Parcells, we’d go with the more conventional two-man booth. Bill would bring enough to the table. He was a Jersey guy, a New York icon, and a coach who’d won two Super Bowls. I was excited at the prospect.

Katz had dinner with Parcells on Long Island to gauge his interest in the job. Bill said he’d need some time to think about it and, among other things, had a number of questions he wanted to ask me. Over the next few days, Parcells and I had two long phone conversations. I’d known Bill over the years, through covering his teams, as a man who had a lot of answers. Now he was posing the questions. And they were all thoughtful, insightful, and thorough. He wanted to know everything about everything—how would
this
work, how would
that
work, what if we tried this, explain that dynamic to me, and so on. Bill had had a little prior broadcasting experience at NBC and understood the business. The more we talked, the more excited I became. I thought it would be a great pairing. Before we hung up on the second conversation, he said he was going to take a couple of more days to think about it. Among the things that were holding him back was the travel. He hated to fly. Also, I wasn’t completely convinced that coaching was totally out of his blood. The last thing I said to him was, “Bill, I hope you’ll do this. I think it’ll be great and we’ll have a lot of fun. But there’s one thing I have to say to you—the people who work on this show live and breathe
Monday Night Football
. It’s an honor to be a part of. Please don’t think of this as a halfway house between coaching jobs. If you take it, we have to know you’re all in.”