Last Monday, while drinking, I shared with you my musings as I watched the seventh game of the 1952 World Series.
Last night, while drinking, I watched the very first Monday Night Football game, a contest between the New York Jets and the Cleveland Browns on a hot September night in Cleveland Municipal Stadium, in 1970.
Here was my live account. I interspersed it with italicized excerpts from a Huffington Post piece I wrote five years ago about why football connects me to a certain part of my childhood and comforts me so reliably, a skill that has come in handy almost nightly over the last several months.
***
I was a kid before ESPN came along and injected sports into every home.
Our Hudson, Ohio home had music, so I took piano lessons. Dad was into antique cars, so I went to car shows. Both my parents were into horseback riding, so I did that. I didn’t know about sports, beyond the cultured-sounding “human drama of athletic competition,” which we saw some Sunday afternoons on ABC’s Wide World of Sports.
But when I was about 10 years old, I suddenly and totally fell in love with football. I vaguely associate this cataclysm with a “math football” competition among the homerooms in fifth grade at McDowell Elementary. Playing for Mrs. Anderson’s Dolphins, maybe I figured that if football could make math fun, it could make everything fun.
It sure made reading fun. Every afternoon I rode my bike to the Hudson Public Library until I’d read everything they had on the NFL. I don’t remember checking the books out. I remember reading them in the library, and hearing in the silence the roaring echoes of real stories about magic men with magic names. Johnny Unitas. O.J. Simpson. Bart Starr. Jim Brown. Gayle Sayers. Joe Namath.
For a boy growing up in a WASPy little Ohio town where everyone was named Murray or Sullivan or Butler or Keane, these men’s names were as strange as anything from Tolkien. Curly Lambeau. Big Daddy Lipscomb. Bambi Alworth. Roman Gabriel. Sam Huff. Ray Nitschke. Chuck Bednarek. Dick Butkus. Zeke Bratkowski!
I read about The Sneaker Game, the Heidi Game, the Ice Bowl, the Immaculate Reception, Wrong-Way Regal, Ghost to the Post, The Longest Game, the Sea of Hands, the Perfect Season and The Greatest Game Ever Played.
I gaped at the pictures of the sun-splashed September grass, the crisp-clear October air, the mud-caked men of November, the frozen granite fields of December and the Super Bowl palm trees of January.
It was all impossibly rich — and to me, impossibly beautiful.
***
We pick this game up in the middle of the first quarter with the Browns up 7-0. Play-by-play man Keith Jackson just described the crowd noise as a "cacophony." Don Meredith said, "What in the world is that?" Jackson replied, "I got that from Howard." Cosell, of course.
***
I just watched a 60-second Marlboro ad showing cowboys working with their horses at dawn, making coffee and smoking cigarettes. No words until the last 10 seconds. "Come to where the flavor is. Come to Marlboro Country."
***
I just watched Rod Serling narrate a commercial for the 1971 Ford LTD.
***
The 1970 Browns had a starting wide receiver named Fair Hooker. He won the job (presumably fair and square) from a receiver named Homer Jones.
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The Jets coach is named Weeb Ewbank. What's more, Weeb Ewbank actually looks like a Weeb Ewbank.
***
The Bo Scott just scored for the Browns, putting them up 14-0. That was a very big lead in 1970. Unless, of course, you were playing against Joe Namath. Who got the ball and immediately hit on a first down pass. To Emerson Boozer.
***
I just saw a Goodyear commercial convincing men they owe it to their wives to buy the best tires. "When a woman's at the wheel, Polyglas means more than mileage." Say what you will about the sexism, I do think that's an original English sentence.
***
Boozer just scored a touchdown to make it 14-7. Speaking of that, how about one more vodka lemonade.
***
As bewildered as my parents may have been at my Fosbury flop into football history, they must have been glad to see me spending so much time at the library.
Maybe as a form of encouragement, my dad started watching Cleveland Browns games with me on the big TV, up in my parents’ bedroom. Our English Springer Spaniel had lived the first few years of his life in a civilized house, and so when Dad and I would yell and slap high-five, the dog reasoned that a fight had broken out. He would bark madly, shattering the Sunday afternoon peace and prompting shouts from my startled mother, below. “Jesus! What’s going on up there?”
Incredible things were going on up there. That year, the Browns happened to have a season seemingly made for me.
Brian Sipe was a fragile little quarterback that an undersized 11-year-old could relate to. With a black rubber sleeve protecting his weak right elbow, Sipe heaved the ball over the line like a shot put over a woodpile, and it somehow wobbled into the waiting arms of enough resourceful Browns receivers that Sipe somehow won the MVP of the American Football Conference that year.
That wonderful team was known as the Kardiac Kids, because every victory was last-minute. (And so were the losses.) I could go on about the Kardiac Kids, and their coach, Sam Rutigliano, a kind of Phil Donohue figure who said things like this, after a tough loss: “There are 800 million Chinese who didn’t even know we played today. We’ll get over this.” I could name every player on the roster, right down to Dino Hall, the short, slow, butterfingered kick returner who we loved anyway. In fact, it is very hard for me to stop writing about that team. Let’s move on, before we get to the bitter playoff loss against the Oakland Raiders, when Sipe threw a terrible interception in the back of the end zone when all we had to do was kick a short field goal to win the game and I walked out of my parents’ bedroom and sat on the stairs and sobbed.
***
Now Al Hirt, the concert trumpeter, is deep-sea fishing and swilling Miller High Life, "the champaign of beers."
***
Dandy Don Meredith is having a terrible time referring to Fair Hooker without making a crack. "There's old Fair Hooker," he said.
***
For several straight years at Christmas, I only wanted jerseys and helmets of NFL teams. I played “electric football,” a toy that was imbecilically conceived, and terribly noisy to boot, involving a motor that shook a sheet of metal. The teams my game had come with — the Cowboys and the Broncos — were forever insanely vibrating in the opposite direction, or around in circles until the ball carrier skidded out of bounds with a 30-yard loss, all over the buzzing din of a vibrating sheet of metal. Electronic football — a handheld game in which little red dashes represented football players who you wore your thumbs raw trying to avoid — was by comparison much more satisfying.
I played football during recess, of course; and still remember a touchdown run around the right end at McDowell; the kid thought he had me, but I was too fast. I played football at friends’ houses, once intercepting a pass in perfect stride and returning it all the way down the left sideline for a touchdown. Mostly, I played football by myself in the backyard, usually in full uniform including Walter Payton-style mouthpiece. I punted the ball straight up in the air and tried to judge the bounce in order to catch it, juke an invisible safety out of his invisible jock strap and dive for a touchdown, across the septic tank drainage trough.
Meanwhile, football and other sports were the way I began to expand my vocabulary and explore larger questions. I remember my parents chuckling when I directed them to watch a replay highlight that contained, as I put it, “the moment of truth.” I remember them listening patiently to my politically precocious dinner-table comparison between quarterbacks, running backs and receivers as “white-collar workers,” and offensive lineman as “blue-collar workers,” and my enthusiastic sixth-grade social studies conclusion that society needs both kinds of workers, just like a football team does!
***
I first realized the what football did for me as a grown-up the day my pregnant wife was scheduled to be induced to deliver our first and only child. My wife was on her hands and knees scrubbing the house. I had finished my work and did not know what to do with myself. I found myself—without really ever deciding to go there—at the bookstore, in the sports department, sitting at a table and turning the pages of a huge coffee table book, looking at pictures of members of the Fearsome Foursome, the Doomsday Defense, the No-Name Defense, the Steel Curtain, the Orange Crush and the Purple People Eaters.
When I need to not be an adult for a little while, I pretend I'm a little kid pretending I'm a pro football player from the 1960s or 1970s.
These days, I need to not be an adult for a little while just about every single day.
***
I just saw a commercial for Champion spark plugs. Commercials during football games in this era were all for men: car batteries, tires, beer, cigars, razors. Nothing even unisex, like AT&T.
***
"Isn't Fair Hooker a great name?" Meredith asks, rhetorically.
***
I've never admitted this before: The very first time I heard about a thing called the "Information Superhighway"—which turned out to be the Internet—maybe about 1993 or 1994?—the only personal benefit I could think getting from it was watching Super Bowl III in its entirety, with commercials. (This was Joe Namath and the Jets' preposterous upset of the heavily favored Baltimore Colts. By now I've seen that game at least four times.) I could never think of any other purpose for the Internet than that. Come to think of it, I still can't.
***
Halftime, 14-7 Cleveland. Howard Cosell offers highlights of other NFL games over weekend, a tradition that would last a dozen years at least, which tells you your first ideas are often your best ideas.
***
The unappreciated Homer Jones just returned the second-half kickoff 85 yards for a touchdown. 21-7 Browns. That was a big lead back then. Unless you were playing against Joe Namath.
***
I'm eating peanuts now. Like a motherfucker.
***
Boozer is inspired tonight. But I brag.
***
Touchdown, Boozer. "Watch this again," Keith Jackson says on the replay, "as Boozer really busts it." 21-14 Browns.
***
My parents made me go to bed at 9:30 Eastern on Monday nights. That was usually well before the first quarter was over. It's 11:30 right now, on a school night. Fuck you, Dad.
***
In 1970, Miller could claim with a straight face that High Life was "the best beer there is." Now look. There have probably been a few hot afternoons or hot nights in bowling alley/bars where I might have agreed that Miller High Life is exactly the beer I wanted to be drinking at that time. But the best beer there is! This puts me in mind of the great Seinfeld acceptance speech at the Clio Awards where he says he loves advertising because he loves lying. Me too!
***
September, 1970. Nixon was president and Vietnam was all napalm and B-52s. RFK and MLK had been assassinated two years earlier. Four students had been killed at Kent State four months earlier. The only thing that seems to matter tonight, is this.
***
Don Cockroft kicks a field goal, putting the Browns up 24-14, which was a big lead in those days …
***
(Said Emerson Boozer about that great Jets upset of the Colts in Super Bowl III, "It was during the postgame celebration that we learned [Jets officials] must have thought we'd lose because they hadn't ordered any victory champagne. So someone went next door to the Colts' locker room and 'borrowed' their champagne.")
One of the ways I pass the time watching these old football games is to find out what became of these players. According to the Baltimore Sun, "After football, Boozer worked as a CBS commentator, owned a machine shop and then a bar/restaurant on Long Island. Eight years ago, he retired as head of his town's parks and recreation department. Married 46 years, he mentors at-risk youths at local schools, plays golf and walks as much as 1 1/2 miles daily."
***
We're in the fourth quarter now, 12:50 to play. Boozer is being treated for leg cramps, and the Browns trainers just tried to wake up their completely unconscious receiver Gary Collins with smelling salts.
Whatever happened to smelling salts?
***
Namath is moving the Jets. A pass to Richard Caster. Another to George Sauers. (Wide receivers named Richard and George!) And Sauer scores. 24-21 Browns, with 3:22 to go. No wonder Monday Night Football caught on.
***
Supposedly, Don Meredith said during this game, "Fair Hooker. I haven't met one yet." But now I've listened to the whole thing, and I can tell you, it's a myth.
***
Namath just threw a game-losing interception and looks cooler than you and I look in our finest hour.
How, my friends, do you get through the night?
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