Tuning in Dandy Don
By marrying television, football gained an audience but lost a game
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"Hypothetically," Meredith says, "I would like to do two movies a year. But I have no ambition to do a movie just to say, 'Hey, I did a movie!' For that reason, I may never get to make one. Because I'm not going to do just any part. I've had opportunities to do roles both in television and motion pictures, but they were like I described earlier. No, I'll just wait until something comes along that offers me a chance to be more than an ex-football player."
Would the public be able to accept easy-going, humorous, exuberant Dandy Don as a reticent, repressed, weather-beaten Texas rancher? How would they accept the knowledge that Meredith, like Gid, has a side of his character that is locked away from public display and that "the good ole boy" that keeps Gifford and Cosell company at the Monday Night Football game is only one role played by a complex and introspective Don Meredith?
"A lot of people think that Howard and I hate one another, when really, just the opposite is true," Meredith says. "I really love Howard. He's a beautiful guy."
But if the role fits, Meredith plays it, especially if the role is good show business. The Emmy that gleams upon a bookcase in his apartment dramatizes just how well Meredith understands television.
"This medium is powerful," he explains. "Last year they told us that more people watched one of our games than the total all-time audiences of Gone With The Wind, From Here To Eternity and The Music Man combined. More people saw that one game than have seen Hamlet since it was written." He shakes his head ruefully.
"Ever so often I look up and see it and I think," once again, Meredith is acting, "whewwww, man! You're strong, box! You're strong!" He drops the acting and says quietly, "It's so strong that it's changed the whole world."
Meredith is also sensitive to the impact that television has had on the sport with which he has been associated for so long. "The effect of television on football has been tremendous. For me to give the full impact would be impossible, because I'm not aware of all the financial transactions. But I don't think it is any big secret that, without TV, the growth of football would have been delayed a great deal. I don't believe that football, without TV, would ever have become as big as it is right now."
It is Meredith's contention that the visual power of televised football captures the fans. "In the last four or five years, the television coverage of football has gotten very good. The esthetic side of football has been brought to the American public. People can see and appreciate the fact that a guy six foot six, weighing 270 pounds, can move as though he were in a ballet. They can see that it's a matter of physical coordination in a way that couldn't really be appreciated before.
"Television", says Meredith," has also brought to the public more of the players' personalities. For many, many years, the football player has been stereotyped. Television has made a great breakthrough in giving people another idea, the idea that a player is not just some big, dumb..." Meredith finished the thought with a grimace. "Some of them are," he says, "but most of them are college-educated, and a lot of them are very sensitive people. Hopefully, some of this quality is coming across. If it does, there will be another section of fan that will watch the game and appreciate it for these attributes."
But Meredith is not completely easy with the marriage between television and football. "There are dangers inherent when the game becomes so much an entertainment. Now I am nowhere close to being any kind of authority, and this is strictly my observation. But you have two different things here—a sport and a fine entertainment package. It depends on how people watch it."
How we watch it depends in large measure on what we see, and what we see—the plays, the players, the announcers—is the product of some of the most intensive, pressure-filled work one can imagine. To the man controlling the cameras, Don Meredith is just one element in a never-ending flow of choices about what is to appear on our television sets. Choices, that is, about what action we see, about what we will think of Don Meredith versus Howard Cosell, and about what football on television will be like for us. The men who make those choices take a fierce professional pride in their work.
Chet Forte glares at a wall of 19 TV monitors, each reflecting a different view of Texas Stadium. None of the images are bright and clear enough for the director-producer of ABC's Monday Night Football, the man who decides what we see, both of football and of Meredith.
"What's the trouble, huh?" Forte demands loudly. "What's going on here for Christ's sake?" A basketball star in his college days at Columbia, Forte is a small, compact, intense whirlwind. Everything he says comes out fast, emphatic and a little shrill. "Somebody got a light meter? We gotta measure that light and see if they've got what they say they've got."
Every Sunday night during the football season Forte sits before an altar of various sized TV screens and speakers that is wedged into a tiny space in a large trailer truck. He is flanked by his young co-producer Dennis Lewin and another assistant. The three of them sit intent before the images that flicker in front of them.
"Try video," Forte commands. "See if they can brighten it up, huh? This is pitiful!" he moans. Next to him Dennis Lewin is speaking softly into the headset mike he wears. This Sunday-night rehearsal ritual is designed to test the cameras and lenses Forte uses in his constant attempt to get in close on the action.
"I'm always looking for tighter shots," Forte had explained earlier, discussing his craft. "That means putting a tighter lens on the camera. Regularly, a cameraman on the 50-yard line, if he has an 18-to-1 lens, may be able to crop, on his widest shot, say 25 yards. Well, I take the 18-to-1 and put an element on it. With it, this cameraman may now only be able to crop 15 yards at his widest. This puts an awful lot of pressure on my cameramen."
Not only does Forte have to see what his cameras can do in the stadium, but he has to be certain that the technical engineers (called "video") can use the picture that results from these elements. "Sometimes video can't handle it and they'll say, 'Chet, you have to get back a little wider.' Then I say okay, because our picture quality has to be good. So I may be forced to go wider. That's why we have this rehearsal. It lets me find out what the camera can do."
A figure appears in the doorway to the control booth. "Chet," he says quietly, "we don't have a light meter." It is one of the 50 crew members that mill industriously around the three trailer trucks of equipment.
Forte groans, "What is this, huh?" he says disgustedly. To him, lighting is the most important attribute of a stadium. It takes good lighting to get good pictures. "In some stadiums, like Minnesota, the lighting is dreadful," Forte said. "When a stadium is a problem for telecasting, it is usually because of the lighting."
"Whattaya think," he says to Lewin, motioning toward the wall of screens, "you think it's the monitors?"
Lewin shrugs. "Could be," he says, dubious.
Grimacing at the dim images, Forte leans toward his mike and demands of a cameraman, "Okay, let's see what you've got." Diana, his pretty young friend, appears on one of the larger screens. She and Jack Gallivan, the technical director, are standing in for Cosell, Gifford and Meredith. Tomorrow night, the "talent" as the announcers are referred to by the technical people (with a slightly patronizing tone), will stand there to introduce the telecast.
The inside of the trailer looks something like the NASA control center if it were compressed by a car-crushing machine and jammed inside a truck. In addition to the wall of monitors, there are a bewildering array of switches, buttons, telephones and microphones in front of the three men. Every image that the nine cameramen focus on is fed into this tiny space for Forte to select what will appear on the television set in your home.
"I have full control," Forte maintains, "because nothing goes on the air until I say it goes on the air."
The sharp eyes and the quick reflexes that made him a college basketball all-American in 1957 are still in evidence as Forte clips out orders rapidly, his New York accent sharp and imperative, his eyes always moving, catching every detail.
Suddenly he turns to the writer who is peering into the truck from the doorway. "Your guy got a light meter?" he asks. Startled, the writer can only stare at him. With a quick movement Forte indicates one of the small screens, which shows the magazine photographer and two of the crew technicians standing on the field staring intently at something in the photographer's hand. The writer nods. The photographer, almost forlorn with his tiny camera amid the millions of dollars worth of ABC equipment, does, indeed, have a light meter, which is quickly pressed into use.
"Good," Forte snaps. "Camera two, let me see that shot without the element," he says, shifting his attention without breaking stride.
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