In Memoriam: Joseph Donald Meredith, 1938-2010

[thatcrazycajun]

I never was that much of a football fan in childhood, though as an adult I gained interest in my college alma mater's team's fortunes as well as those of the perennially hapless New Orleans Saints. But even before I spent a few years living in the Dallas area, I knew fellow Texan "Dandy Don" Meredith for his career as a legendary Cowboys quarterback, his TV and film acting and commercials (remember those "Lipton Tea lover" ads?) and his ability to hold his own down on a football field with the likes of Roger Staubach and up in a broadcast booth with both Frank Gifford and Howard Cosell.

Yesterday, the unquestionably most colorful member of that pioneering television-sports triumvirate died at 72 of a sudden brain hemorrhage in his Santa Fe, NM home. ABC News' Diane Sawyer gave us the sad news this evening that the man who helped make Monday Night Football the success it was for many years on that network has passed...and that yet another icon of my youth is gone.

Unlike a whole lot of people today, I will not show the questionable taste of singing that Willie Nelson tune Don alsways used to croon whenever a game was obviously all over but for the final whistle. But with only Gifford now left of the founding trio and MNF having long since decamped to ABC's corporate sibling ESPN as its broadcast-air ratings declined, it can be safely said that the party is indeed well and truly over.

Comments

[supergee.livejournal.com]

He made MNF a whole lot of fun.