Monday Night Football and the Racial Roots of the Network TV Event

ABC Sports and Monday Night Football

Mocked throughout the industry as the “Almost Broadcasting Company,” ABC was the United States’ least popular network through the 1960s. It turned to sports programming to enhance its industrial standing. Although sports content did not attract the same total audience numbers as prime time fare, it lured the traditionally elusive adult male audience that advertisers were willing to pay a premium to reach. Unsatisfied with simply licensing rights to telecast sports, ABC set out to develop a distinctive way of packaging them. This style is largely credited to Arledge, whom ABC hired in 1960 to produce its National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) football coverage. Arledge fancied himself an artist and believed sporting events warranted creative treatment. Intrigued by the greenhorn producer’s ambitions, Arledge’s superiors asked him to compose a memo detailing his vision. The resulting document became an unofficial mission statement for ABC’s sports coverage. “Heretofore,” Arledge (2002, 30–33) wrote, “television has done a remarkable job of bringing the game to the viewer—now we’re going to take viewers to the game!” He claimed ABC would achieve this by presenting events through dramatic storylines that introduce the locations where contests occur and profile competing athletes. It would adopt an assortment of innovations that borrowed from documentary and dramatic TV genres to offer what Arledge called an “up close and personal” perspective. “In short,” Arledge wrote in conclusion, “we are going to add show business to sports!” This approach would catapult ABC into the United States’ most influential sports TV outlet.

ABC established a year-round commitment to sports programming in April 1961 with the globetrotting weekend anthology program ABC’s Wide World of Sports, which, as its famous introductory lines promised, showcased “the thrill of victory, the agony of defeat,” and “the human drama of athletic competition.” The originally twenty-week summer replacement almost exclusively aired non-live events and possessed a relatively small budget that only permitted it to procure rights to marginal sports. Arledge, however, believed Wide World’s dramatized approach would offset its subject matter’s obscurity. The featured sports’ lack of popularity would also ensure that most viewers were unaware of the events’ outcomes prior to watching them. “What we set out to do was get the audiences involved emotionally,” Arledge (1966, 97) explained. “If they didn’t give a damn about the game, they might still enjoy the program.” Starting in 1964, ABC adapted Wide World’s stylized format and focus on non-major sports to cover the Olympics. By 1968, ABC pegged its entire identity on sports by branding itself as “The Network of the Olympics.”

As Arledge was transforming ABC’s sports coverage, the similarly enterprising NFL commissioner Pete Rozelle was morphing professional football into the United States’ most popular sport through sculpting its brand and ensuring its dissemination to a national audience via television (Crepeau 2014; Oriard 2007). Based on his initial successes, Rozelle surmised that professional football broadcasts could attract a regular prime time TV audience. Neither CBS nor NBC was willing to replace its already lucrative Monday evenings with football. ABC, by contrast, did not have successful prime time programming to replace. But even the “Almost Broadcasting Company” was reluctant to devote its Monday evenings to football. The network became seriously interested only after Howard Hughes’ Hughes Sports Network pursued the package. ABC worried that affiliates attracted to the Monday evening games might abandon it for Hughes’ upstart. It consequently struck a deal with the NFL to launch Monday Night Football for the 1970 season.

Monday Night Football’s success depended on its ability to draw an audience that exceeded pro football’s stereotypically male fan base. The prime time program, Victoria E. Johnson (2013, 262) notes, was “characterized by appeals that bridge audience segmentations or divides.” Building on Wide World, it spanned these demographics by transforming football broadcasts into events that would lure viewers regardless of the featured contest. Armed with the largest budget of ABC’s prime time shows, Monday Night Football recruited marketable personalities to host and increased typical football broadcasts’ two commentators to three. Most notably, it included Cosell to serve as a provocative on-air columnist. “Howard is the sort of personality whose very attitude on the air seems to elicit a reaction,” Arledge explained. “That’s actually his function” (Deeb 1980, E5). Cosell was initially joined by former Dallas Cowboys quarterback Don Meredith and by play-by-play announcer Keith Jackson, whom Arledge replaced with former New York Giants running back Frank Gifford after the inaugural season. Gifford played the debonair straight man and Meredith affected the persona of an affable Southerner unafraid to put the boisterous Cosell in his place. The hosts’ ribbing became an attraction in itself that compelled the New York Times to call Monday Night Football “television’s first sports soap opera” (Amdur 1977, 59).

ABC took careful measures to package Monday Night Football for casual fans—especially women—by placing greater emphasis on storytelling. “On Monday nights,” ABC producer Chuck Howard noted, “we are in the entertainment business, competing against other networks for prime time ratings. Here we work at pontificating less and we also try to document the action in a little more personal manner” (Berman 1976, 35). Monday Night Football also included celebrity guests and highlights of the previous day’s contests at halftime to keep audiences tuned in during the games’ interstices and in case of a lopsided contest.

Monday Night Football used its outsized budget to be more technologically advanced than regular broadcasts. It included state-of-the-art graphics and additional cameras to showcase dimensions of the game beyond other telecasts’ capabilities. The program’s introduction stressed its combination of innovation and entertainment by presenting shots of production rooms full of high-tech gadgetry and packed with harried technicians rushing to create the spectacular affair. Borrowing from scripted programming, it cut to introductory shots of Cosell, Gifford, and Meredith to showcase its featured players. The introduction made clear this was a sports broadcast that belonged in prime time.

Monday Night Football immediately installed itself among prime time TV’s most popular programs. It was “acknowledged by the industry with its highest accolade—event” (Patton 1984, 110). Bars installed televisions to regain customers who were presumably staying home to watch Monday Night Football, bowling leagues rescheduled to accommodate the program, and the Los Angeles Times even reported that arrest rates dropped on Monday nights (Brodsky 1975). Monday Night Football gave ABC a needed prime time hit and a platform from which the still lagging network could promote its other content.

Much of Monday Night Football’s event status grew out of Cosell’s polarizing persona, which attracted both viewers who admired and despised him. The vitriol directed at Cosell often appealed to his relationship with and publicly expressed support for Muhammad Ali. The sportscaster, in fact, claimed that most of the letters he received after Monday Night Football’s premier began with some variation of “you nigger loving Jew bastard, get off the air” (Maher 1971; Shrake 1971). Cosell’s repartee with Meredith on Monday Night Football mirrored—and was partly based on—his conversations with Ali on Wide World. But rather than playing foil to a militant Muslim African American on a non-live weekend program, Monday Night Football had Cosell serve as antagonist to a jovial white country boy in prime time. “From a political bent,” explains Cosell biographer Mark Ribowsky (2011, 213), “the act was defanged” when Cosell teamed with Meredith.

Moreover, Cosell—who repeatedly trumpeted his willingness to “tell it like it is”—and his co-hosts avoided interrogating the NFL’s racist underbelly on Monday Night Football. Alongside Monday Night Football’s emergence, exposes like Sports Illustrated reporter Jack Olsen’s The Black Athlete—A Shameful Story (1968) and Dave Meggyesy’s Out of Their League (1970) detailed the NFL’s inequitable treatment of African Americans through unofficial racial quotas, the paucity of blacks in leadership positions like quarterback, and more. The prime time program, however, elided these newsworthy elements en route to manufacturing and maintaining a comfortable viewing experience for its mainstream audience that would protect its event status.

Brian’s Song

ABC augmented Monday Night Football’s mainstream aspirations with Brian’s Song, a melodramatic installment of ABC’s Movie of the Week that premiered November 30, 1971. Based on a chapter in Chicago Bears running back Gale Sayers’ memoir, the film tells the story of Sayers’ friendship with teammate Brian Piccolo. Initially competing for the same job, the reserved African American Sayers (played by Billy Dee Williams) and the gregarious Italian American Piccolo (played by James Caan) composed an unlikely pair and were the NFL’s first interracial roommates. Piccolo helped Sayers to come out of his introverted shell and recover from a knee injury and Sayers motivated the less talented Piccolo to improve his play. But Piccolo was suddenly diagnosed with cancer and died. Brian’s Song celebrates the teammates’ friendship and mourns Piccolo’s untimely passing.

Brian’s Song’s opening lines, delivered in voiceover by the actor who played Chicago Bears coach George Halas, guarantee the tale’s authenticity and pathos: “Ernest Hemingway said every true story ends in death. Well, this is a true story.” An advertisement for the film included profiles of a black face and a white face inside Chicago Bears helmets. The black face has a tear streaming down its cheek. The ad complements a tear-jerking speech Sayers gives while accepting an award for his ability to come back after injury—a recovery Piccolo aided—by dedicating the prize to his dying friend. “I love Brian Piccolo,” he sobs. “And I’d like all of you to love him too. And tonight, when you hit your knees, please ask God to love him.” The film ends with another Halas voiceover atop the production’s doleful score:

Brian Piccolo died of cancer at the age of twenty six. He left a wife and three daughters. He also left a great many loving friends who think of him often. But when they think of him, it’s not how he died that they remember. But rather how he lived. How he did live.

ABC programmed Brian’s Song to complement Monday Night Football. It premiered, in fact, one night after Monday Night Football featured a Bears game. Moreover, screenwriter William Blinn (1972, 1) sought to create resonances between the film and Monday Night Football by noting in his stage directions that Don Meredith would serve as an ideal narrator. Beyond taking advantage of Monday Night Football’s renown, Brian’s Song reflected the prime time football broadcast’s emphasis on storytelling by showcasing the “human drama” that the NFL harbors. Indeed, Brian’s Song resembles the “up close and personal” stories ABC would routinely use to humanize athletes and build an audience for event coverage.

Also like Monday Night Football, Brian’s Song was produced by white men and directed primarily to a white viewership. It provides a similarly uncritical perspective on race relations and locates the NFL as an organization that fosters interracial understanding. The film depicts race as a barrier that Sayers and Piccolo’s friendship easily transcended. Although he and Piccolo were the NFL’s first interracial roommates, Sayers did not find the arrangement remarkable. “Friends like to room with friends,” he matter-of-factly wrote, “it has nothing to do with segregation” (Sayers and Silverman 1970, 68). In the film, Bears leadership summons Sayers to Halas’ office to propose the trailblazing rooming assignment. Sayers expresses relief when they tell him why he was called in. “I thought it was something important,” he says. Veteran player J. C. Caroline interjects to assure Sayers that he will be judged harshly for sharing a room with Piccolo. “You’re going to be called a Tom by some blacks and an uppity nigger by some whites,” he asserts. “You’re going rock the boat.” Sayers, however, accepts the arrangement without hesitation.

Throughout the film, Sayers and Piccolo make light of the racial differences that provoke such enmity in the world beyond their team and friendship. “The best thing about our relationship as it developed was that we could kid each other all the time about race,” Sayers wrote (Sayer and Silverman 1970, 62). The two joke about hate mail they received because their rooming arrangement—letters similar to those sent to Cosell because of his relationship with Ali. In another instance, Piccolo calls Sayers a nigger in an attempt to motivate his exhausted friend when lifting weights to rebuild his injured knee. Rather than becoming enraged and lifting the weight, Sayers bursts into laughter at his friend’s vain effort to use a racist epithet as a motivator. Their friendship, the film suggests, renders this would-be insult impotent. Their jests about racism, in fact, seem to affirm and strengthen their bond.

Critics praised Brian’s Song as harboring exceptional emotional power. The Washington Post claimed “tears would be falling nationwide,” and the Los Angeles Times credited the film with leaving “a trail of soggy Kleenex from one end of the country to another” (Casey 1971, B5; Champlin 1980, R2). Critics also cited the film’s unique ability to attract both men and women by combining the traditionally feminized genre of melodrama with the macho world of sports in the style of studio era “male weepies” like Knute Rockne—All American (1940) and Pride of the Yankees (1941). “It became socially acceptable for even the most rugged and taciturn man to shed a tear while watching this movie,” writes Michael McKenna (2013, 51). The production’s appeal across gender divisions mirrors Monday Night Football’s demographic ambitions. Moreover, while women play but a peripheral role in Brian’s Song through Sayers and Piccolo’s wives, these characters are depicted as devoted fans who watch and enjoy pro football. They demonstrate the brand of female follower Monday Night Football strove to build and attract.

Brian’s Song’s critical success was partly a consequence of its depiction of interracial affection and collaboration. “The characters have a universal appeal,” effused the Atlanta Constitution’s Howell Raines (1972, 3T), “you stop seeing color on the screen.” “It makes race relations look so simple and uncomplicated and so right that you wonder what the fuss is about,” echoed the Los Angeles Times’ Don Page (1971, E19). Adding to the chorus, legendary sportswriter Jim Murray (1971, D1) named Brian’s Song “a television movie of extraordinary poignancy and importance in this day when the rhetoric of hate is otherwise drowning out the microwaves. I hope it gets a bigger rating than the Super Bowl. It’s sure it’ll be remembered longer.” The African American press registered similarly enthusiastic praise. “Television should produce more stories like Brian’s Song,” wrote the Chicago Defender’s A. S. “Doc” Young (1971, 28). “That’s what the world needs now.”

Brian’s Song became the most watched made-for-TV movie ever after its premier and the most honored TV movie of 1971. Its accolades included five Emmys, a Peabody, and commendations from the American Cancer Society and the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). It was also cited in the Congressional Record as “one of the truly moving television and screen achievements in recent years.” As Illinois congressperson L. C. Arends said, “Perhaps Brian’s Song will encourage more young people to realize that there is love and compassion in America, if you seek it” (“Brian’s Song” 1971). The film was requested for exhibition at schools, prisons, and even the Pentagon on account of its presumed ability to improve race relations (O’Connor 1972).

Douglas Gomery (1999, 79) observes that Brian’s Song transformed the made-for-TV movie into a respectable and lucrative genre. He also notes that the racial melodrama’s success results in part from its failure to interrogate the structural circumstances that foster and perpetuate racism. Instead, it presents what Herman Gray (1995, 166) calls an assimilationist perspective that “constructs a United States where the historic and contemporary consequences of structured social inequality and a culture deeply inflected and defined by racism are invisible and inconsequential to the lives of its citizens.” Brian’s Song depicts racism as an individual problem that can be overcome if people—like Sayers and Piccolo—simply take the time to get to know and understand one another. It reduces the complexities of racism to a single friendship and encourages viewers to mimic Sayers and Piccolo’s open-mindedness rather than critique or attempt to change the social institutions—including professional football and network television—that foster the persistence of racial inequity.

Billy Dee Williams reinforced this assimilationist sentiment through his celebrity persona and depiction of Sayers. He contrasted the more defiant African American blaxploitation stars emerging at the time as well as rebellious athletes like Ali, Smith, and Carlos. “Blacks respect Williams for trying to change the stereotypes that exploitive films only reinforce,” wrote the Chicago Tribune, “Whites have been impressed by the seeming biracial nature of his sensitivity” (Hurst 1977, H20). Williams called Brian’s Song

the kind of thing I’m interested in doing. . . . I’m not interested in these exploitative-type situations where you’re pitting blacks against whites. I don’t think it serves any purpose except to polarize people more and create less understanding. (Hurst 1977, H20)

“Last year it was the whole militant thing,” Williams added in an interview with the Chicago Defender, “but this year it’s graduated, and I’m happy about that” (“Billy Dee Williams Is Gale Sayers” 1971, 25). Williams and Brian’s Song complement Monday Night Football’s efforts to create a crossover event that situates the NFL as a unifying institution.

The Muhammad Ali of Football

Don Meredith left Monday Night Football after the 1973 season to join NBC. Arledge sought a replacement with comparable star power and ability to spar with Cosell. He settled on Fred Williamson, an outspoken African American former NFL defensive back. Williamson nicknamed himself “The Hammer” because of his (now illegal) signature tackling style of striking opponents with his forearm, which he described to Life magazine as “a blow delivered with great velocity perpendicular to the earth’s latitudes” (“The Hammer” 1967, 12). The media-savvy athlete called himself the “Muhammad Ali of Football” and, like Ali, was not averse to playing the heel to drum up publicity. For instance, Williamson took it upon himself to improve attendance at Kansas City Chiefs home games while playing for the team.

I called a press conference and said “Kansas City is the worst town I’ve ever been in. Bunch of crackers. Hicks. I don’t know why they traded me here. The broads are ugly. I don’t want to be here.” Two weeks later 48,000 showed up for our game and they all stood and booed Fred Williamson. (Maher 1974, C1)

After retiring from football, Williamson transformed his brash persona and good looks into an acting career. He played the role of Spearchucker in Robert Altman’s M*A*S*H (1970), appeared in the TV sitcom Julia (1968–1971), and starred in blaxploitation films such as The Legend of Nigger Charley (1972) and Black Caesar (1973). In October 1973, the rising star became Playgirl’s first African American centerfold.

Williamson’s job on Monday Night Football, which the New York Amsterdam News praised as a “broadcast breakthrough,” was the highest profile sportscasting position an African American had achieved in U.S. television (J. P. Murray 1974). As part of Williamson’s Monday Night Football contract, ABC agreed to let him produce, direct, and star in two made-for-TV movies. “Fred’s football ability and expertise are obvious,” said Arledge.

His acting talent has made him one of the most sought-after personalities in Hollywood. He is an interesting, articulate, and charismatic personality who will work well with Howard and Frank to bring a new perspective and excitement to Monday Night Football. (“Fred Williamson Joins Monday Night Football” 1974, 2)

Shortly after hiring Williamson, ABC sent its reformed Monday Night Football lineup on a tour through several cities with large African American communities. “They were excited,” Williamson remembered, “because they knew I would talk back and be as witty as Howard.”

Although African American audiences met Williamson’s addition enthusiastically, his edgy demeanor contrasted the prime time program’s mainstream aspirations. For instance, Williamson showed up to one of the preseason press conferences wearing two gold chains. Dangling from one was a clenched fist like those Smith and Carlos raised at the 1968 Olympics. Attached to the other was a solid gold penis and testicles (Gunther and Carter 1988, 163). Williamson also joked that he was hired “to bring color” to Monday Night Football’s previously all white cast and claimed he was preparing for the season not by studying, but with “a lot of bedroom exercises” (Maher 1974, C1). Taking a page from Ali’s book, Williamson also questioned Cosell’s ability to match his wit. “I’m a street cat, man. My gift of rap and wit is much quicker and sharper than Howard’s. This cat is all book learning, book knowledge” (Maher 1974, C1). Williamson appealed directly to his blackness and sexuality to construct his broadcasting persona and stress its difference from his Monday Night Football co-hosts.

Although he shared their racial identity, Williamson contrasted Gale Sayers and Billy Dee Williams’s crossover appeal. The Chicago Tribune, in fact, praised Williams by locating the African American actor as a welcome alternative to the more militant “Fred Williamson type” (Hurst 1977, H20). Williamson, for instance, refused to wear the standard necktie while working for ABC. “I’ll wear your ABC yellow jacket,” he said to producers, “I ain’t wearing no fucking tie” (Gunther and Carter 1988, 166). Moreover, Williamson explained his unwillingness to conform to ABC’s commercially driven expectations along racial lines. “I’m not going to change my image; I’m going to be me,” he told The Sporting News. “If white people can’t relate to me that’s going to be their problem, not mine” (Craig 1974, 65). He thus embodied the racial divisiveness that Monday Night Football and Brian’s Song suppressed.

After only three preseason games, ABC fired Williamson and paid off his contract without making the movies that came along with it. Arledge called it a mutual decision and cited Williamson’s lack of chemistry with Cosell as the main reason behind the termination. Days later, ABC hired former Detroit Lions defensive lineman Alex Karras, another athlete-turned-actor who starred in The 500 Pound Jerk (1973) and appeared in Blazing Saddles (1974). Comprising a goofy and oafish contrast to Williamson’s rebellious tough guy, Karras co-hosted alongside Cosell and Gifford for three seasons until Meredith returned in 1977. Although not as outwardly defiant or combative as Williamson, Karras was also controversial. He was suspended for one year during his playing career for gambling on games, a grave offense in professional sports. Despite his checkered past, Monday Night Football deemed Karras a more suitable complement to the prime time TV event’s commercial goals and the representational politics that support them than Williamson. It was acceptable to feature a white man who gambled on professional football but not a black man who refused to wear a tie, openly flaunted his sexuality, and did not care whether white audiences liked him. Incidentally, Karras’ eventual role as the adoptive father of an African American boy in the short-lived sitcom Webster (1987–1989) further reinforced Monday Night Football’s and Brian’s Song’s celebration of interracial harmony through eliding the sociopolitical realities underlying U.S. race relations.

Monday Night Football’s Racial Roots

ABC built on Monday Night Football’s success and brand recognition by adding Monday Night Baseball in 1976, a series of prime time Major League Baseball broadcasts that adopted Monday Night Football’s entertainment-driven format. The new program gave ABC Sports a stable presence on Monday evenings that spanned most of the year. ABC also used Monday Night Football’s popularity to launch big budget prime time TV events beyond the sports genre. The network premiered its first miniseries, the courtroom drama QBVII, on a Monday evening in 1974 after Monday Night Football’s season ended. Two years later, ABC debuted the miniseries Rich Man, Poor Man—an epic and critically lauded melodrama that traces the working class German American Jordache brothers’ divergent fortunes in post–World War II United States—on a Monday evening between Monday Night Football and Monday Night Baseball’s seasons.

Most notably, in 1977 ABC premiered Roots on eight consecutive evenings between Monday Night Football and Monday Night Baseball’s seasons. The twelve-hour melodramatic adaptation of Alex Haley’s bestselling 1976 book about his ancestors’ lives in Africa, enslavement in the United States, and eventual emancipation became television’s biggest ever hit. Roots was, according to Helen Taylor (1995, 48), “the film trade’s dream ‘crossover’: a feature which appealed to the urban black mass market as well as the majority white audiences.” Anecdotes abounded about dips in restaurant and bar patronage while the program aired that mirrored the stories surrounding Monday Night Football’s event status.

The miniseries’ initial run captured eight of the top thirteen largest ever TV audiences. The other five slots belonged to NBC’s 1976 airing of Gone with the Wind (1939) and Super Bowl broadcasts. Television executive Neil Kuvin likened Roots to a “Super Bowl every night” because it so dominated TV schedules and fifty cities declared “Roots weeks” to commemorate it (“Why Roots Hit Home” 1977). The Atlanta Constitution’s Paul Jones (1977, 3C) claimed that Roots’ staggering audience numbers “might never be topped unless the professional football teams decide” to move the Super Bowl “to a night game.” Inspired by the success of Monday Night Football and Roots, the NFL actually began scheduling prime time Super Bowls in 1978. Super Bowls steadily eclipsed Roots’ record viewing numbers in part because of this scheduling shift. Beyond its connection to Monday Night Football, Roots’ consecutive nightly model adapted the format of ABC’s Olympics coverage, in which the network displaced its regular programming for the sporting event’s duration. “If any evidence was needed as to the growing appeal of ‘event’ programming,” observed the Los Angeles Times’ Cecil Smith (1977, G1), “Roots supplied it.” The program solidified ABC’s first ever achievement of top ranking among U.S. TV networks in fall 1976, an accomplishment gained in large part through its coverage of both the Innsbruck Winter Olympics and the Montreal Summer Olympics that year (Quinlan 1979, 228). Smith claims that the boost Roots gave ABC compelled NBC to pay $87 million to secure rights to the 1980 Moscow Summer Olympics—a more than threefold increase over the $25 million ABC paid for the Montreal Games—in hopes the event could enhance its industrial and cultural standing. Thus, in addition to the context in which its importance is usually noted, Roots grew out of and reshaped the economy of network sports television.

Roots was also ABC’s most widely acclaimed program since Brian’s Song, gathering 145 total awards, including nine Emmys and a Peabody. And like Brian’s Song, many located Roots as an important text with the potential to improve racial understanding. The miniseries “was credited with reviving and strengthening the black history offerings in schools and colleges, with enlightening whites about black heritage, and with improving the quality of television programming” (Fishbein 1999, 273). The production also “led to the expectation among some observers that the days of serious African American drama had finally arrived in American television” (Havens 2013, 54). ABC Entertainment president Fred Silverman proudly called the miniseries “one of the most important television events of the last 15 or 20 years” and predicted “there will be Ph.D. dissertations written on the TV production of Roots” (Deeb 1977, A13).

But also like Brian’s Song, Roots was produced by mostly whites and made with a white audience in mind. Brian’s Song screenwriter William Blinn, in fact, served as Roots’ script supervisor and wrote the screenplay for its first episode. Critics rightly charged that the miniseries sanitized Haley’s book to appease mainstream expectations and make the story more uplifting. The TV adaptation’s revision of Haley’s subtitle from The Saga of an American Family to The Triumph of an American Family evidences this effort to enhance the program’s salability. “Instead of a milestone film on the realities of slavery,” wrote the Los Angeles Times’ Stanley O. Williford (1977, C5), “Hollywood has produced pablum.” In particular, critics like Williford suggested that Roots filtered African American history through a familiar narrative of immigration that “invites white audience members to identify with the struggles” of the main characters “while relieving them of the responsibility to acknowledge the social and political contradictions underlying race relations in the United States” (Tucker and Shah 1992, 335). To be sure, Roots presented the story of Haley’s kin through a framework similar to the one Rich Man, Poor Man used to narrate the Jordache family without addressing the vast differences that separate black and white experiences in the United States.

Roots’ creators admitted to taking measures to ensure the miniseries would attract white viewers and justified this decision through appealing to prime time network television’s commercial exigencies. “You have to remember that . . . the TV audience is mostly white, middle-class whites,” frankly explained executive producer David Wolper, “we were trying to reach the maximum white audience” (Wolper and Troupe 1978, 148). Blinn added that it would be foolhardy “to do four hours of television without showing a white person with whom we could identify” (Wolper and Troupe 1978, 48). Although recognized as a groundbreaking and edifying television representation of African American history, Roots was geared toward the presumed interests of the white audiences it needed to become a historically successful prime time network TV event.

Roots’ efforts to appease white audiences have been trenchantly critiqued as evidence of network television’s broader tendency to privilege satisfying mainstream expectations over furnishing equitable, responsible, or accurate depictions of African American culture. But these representations emerged in part from the unlikely genre of sports television—a connection heretofore unexplored in scholarship on sport or media. Monday Night Football established audience expectations and programming flows ABC used to launch TV events outside the realm of sport that extended and solidified the popular prime time program’s racial politics.

Monday Night Football’s Racial Legacy in Prime Time

Monday Night Football’s popularity steadily waned through the 1980s and 1990s as sports programming became a staple in prime time and cable TV proliferated. But the program’s conservatism persisted. For example, the season after CBS’s infamous 2004 Super Bowl halftime show—wherein the pop singer Justin Timberlake accidentally ripped off a piece of fellow entertainer Janet Jackson’s costume to expose her breast—ABC implemented a five-second delay during Monday Night Football to ensure nothing like this would occur during the legacy prime time program. It was the only network to institute such a delay, which an ABC Sports spokesperson called a “precaution” that would not “change the viewing experience” (Sandomir 2004).

Despite ABC’s paranoia surrounding Monday Night Football’s live broadcast, the program elicited controversy for a cross-promotional spot that aired before a November 15, 2004, game between the Dallas Cowboys and Philadelphia Eagles. The promotion featured Nicolette Sheridan as Edie, a main character in ABC’s salacious prime time series Desperate Housewives. Wearing only a towel, the sexy and manipulative Edie propositions Eagles star receiver Terrell Owens—a brash and media-savvy ballplayer out of the tradition of Fred Williamson whom cultural critic Mark Anthony Neal (2004) dubbed the “poster child for the don’t-give-a-fuck black male athlete”—in the locker room before the game. She begs Owens to skip his “little game” and cater to her “needs.” Owens rejects Edie’s advances until she drops the towel. “Aw hell. The team’s gonna have to win this one without me,” the grinning receiver says as Edie leaps into his arms. The promo then cuts to Sheridan’s co-stars Teri Hatcher and Felicity Huffman, who are sitting down to watch the game with beers and popcorn. Performing the brand of female fandom Monday Night Football has so long striven to cultivate, Hatcher and Huffman dismiss Edie’s actions as “so . . . desperate” and then turn to the camera to ask the audience “Are you ready for some football?” as the broadcast begins with Hank Williams Jr.’s longtime theme song.

An NFL spokesperson immediately attacked the cross-promotion as “inappropriate and unsuitable for our Monday Night Football audience” (Battista 2004, D1). Pittsburgh Steelers owner Dan Rooney named it “the most disgraceful thing I’ve ever seen. It’s on at 9 o’clock,” he fumed. “Kids are watching” (Shapiro 2004, D1). ABC issued an apology that agreed the promotion was in poor taste. To be sure, the spot was a decidedly desperate attempt to spark the widespread water cooler chitchat Monday Night Football once so easily elicited during a time when the program’s event status was dwindling.

Although perhaps crude, the cross-promotion was no more explicit than the sex and violence that pervades typical prime time network programming. Accordingly, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) ruled that it did not merit punishment. But the New York Times’ William Rhoden (2004) argued the outrage was not a consequence of the promo’s suggestion of sex, but rather sex between a famously defiant black man and a white woman. Like Williamson’s provocative jewelry and jokes about his “bedroom exercises,” Owens’ blackness and sexuality were deemed too divisive for the program’s consensual ambitions. He was consequently disciplined. Also like Williamson’s brief stint on Monday Night Football, the promotion was quickly forgotten. However, it suggests Monday Night Football’s racial politics carry a legacy that affected network TV representations and discourses surrounding the medium beyond the sports TV genre and more than three decades after its 1970 premier.

Traces of these racial politics endure in the convergent, post-network environment Monday Night Football helped to propel and in which it is now enmeshed, particularly since The Walt Disney Company’s 2006 decision to move the program from ABC to its cable property ESPN. For example, in a 2014 postgame interview on Fox, an emotionally overwhelmed Seattle Seahawks cornerback Richard Sherman loudly trumpeted his prowess and dismissed his competitors’ vain efforts to thwart him: “I’m the best corner[back] in the game!” Indeed, Sherman’s gesture grew out of the boisterous tradition Ali established on network sports TV during the 1960s. Two years later, dejected Carolina Panthers quarterback Cam Newton abruptly left the postgame press conference CBS held after its coverage of the Super Bowl, which Newton’s Panthers lost. After each incident—both of which appeared on network TV during prime time—a widespread collection of pundits attacked the football players’ behavior as inappropriate. Sherman was deemed an unruly “thug” and Newton a petulant brat. But these critiques, as commentators quickly pointed out, betrayed a racist double standard in popular media culture. White players who behaved similarly were not judged so harshly and, in some cases, were even commended (Coates 2014; Khan 2016; King 2016). While neither instance occurred on Monday Night Football, the attitudes they elicited echo the TV event’s tradition of packaging race for prime time audiences and evidence the expectations it established.