History Lesson 
Tuning in Dandy Don
By marrying television, football gained an audience but lost a game
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"To be very honest with you," Forte had remarked, "I'm known in the trade as a real bastard. I extend my cameramen because of the coverage I want. I put an awful lot of pressure on them because I want to get tighter into the game. This makes it tough on the cameraman because he has to pan on passes—he has to do a lot of tough things. But," Forte says, emphasizing each word, "these guys do it. These guys have been with me for three years. At times I know they're really sweating it out, but I've never had a guy come to me and say, 'Jeez, that lens is too tight. I can't cover the game with something like that!' No. These guys just keep working at it."
During the two hours of rehearsal, the crew works efficiently and with purpose. After three years, they know what Forte wants and they work hard to get it. "These cameramen were handpicked," Forte said. "I knew these guys would work hard. I knew that what I wanted for this show, these guys would break their tails to get for me. I remember a shot on the first game we did. It was Cleveland and the Jets. Joe Namath had just thrown an incomplete pass, and instead of leaving the field, he just stood there for a moment in a cloud of dust with this look on his face and in his body—well, it was the kind of shot you would remember.
"My crew is the type of crew that is not only looking for game coverage, they're looking for those shots that people will remember. These cameramen have developed into very creative guys. Christ, when you've got your cameraman thinking for you, too, what else do you want in this business?"
Before Forte is content with the rehearsal, he reviews the graphics and sets the opening shot—a pan of the sky through the hole in the roof. No detail escapes his inspection. Although there is a separate director and producer for Unit B which handles the isolated-play, Forte still calls all the signals. Earlier, Forte had remarked that, in football, the quarterback is the crux of the game. In the telecasting of Monday Night Football, Meredith, Cosell and Gifford may carry the ball, but Forte calls the plays.
During each pressure-filled moment of the three hours of telecasting, the control center in the truck will hum with continual interaction between cameramen, announcers, engineers, technicians, directors, producers. And sitting in the center of this storm of energy and effort will be Chet Forte, calling the signals that determine what you see in your home. From a commercial to the name of a player, if it appears as a part of the telecast, it is because Forte decided that it would.
"The most important person is the viewer," Forte states. "We want to give him the best possible game we can, the best possible coverage. I've got to mesh all the stuff together so we can create the story, get the meat of it. I know exactly what we've got, and it's up to me to make the right decision as to what goes on the air.
"We've got to hold an audience. When things are dull, many times I'll go to Howard to get him to jazz things up. I'll get Howard and say, 'Jeezus, you guys are pretty dull up there. Howard, needle Don a little bit. Get Don to mix it up a little bit, get into Frank, get it going.' We've got to hold an audience! We're primetime viewing. I've gotta buck a movie on NBC, I've gotta buck Bill Cosby. People get down on my back and say, 'Hey, you try to push yourselves off as show business people.' Well, that's exactly what we are. If anybody says we're not in show business, they're crazy. They are absolutely nuts! That's exactly what we're doing on Monday Night—show business."
In any of its myriad forms, show business has a tendency to make gypsies of those who ply the trade. The ABC television crew is no exception. They begin arriving in town on Friday, spend Saturday and Sunday and Monday in preparation. On Monday night they perform. Then, like circus performers, as soon as the show has ended they immediately begin the strike of their equipment. By early Tuesday morning, they are gone, on their way to the next town.
"Sometimes," a young crew member confided, "I think that all of America is simply the same motel corridor endlessly repeated with the same ugly carpet and fake paneling on the walls."
"And the same lousy food", his more jaded co-worker commented sourly, poking at the Claes Oldenburg-like assemblage on his plate. "Would you believe that at breakfast today, this place wouldn't serve eggs any way but scrambled?"
The younger man laughed. "I asked the waitress why they couldn't just fry the eggs rather than scrambling them," he said. "She said that they were already cooked, and scrambled eggs was what we were going to get, like it or not."
"This place is so bad," the second guy continued, "that even the hookers who work it are dogs!"
"Why do you stay here?" I asked. The young man shrugged. "We always use this motel chain. Some sort of deal the show has with them, I guess."
He looks across the table, his eyes old and tired in his boyish face. "Sometimes you don't even know what town you're in because all places seem just alike. Lobbies, rooms, airports, rented cars—all of it is the same."
"You've really got to like this business to take the hassles," remarks the cynical companion. "There is always something going wrong—lost luggage, messed-up reservations. I'm beginning to wonder if anything works right in this country."
"Well, at least you have the admiration of the groupies," I remarked, referring to the young women who seem to gather around anything relating to football, including the television crews who cover the game.
The more experienced crew member lit a cigarette and inhaled wearily. "Even the groupies look the same," he sighed.
"It's a hard grind, but its challenging," muses a member of the production staff, "because it's live television. When you're telecasting live, it's more demanding, but also more exciting. Sports broadcasting is about the only live television there is."
"For me," Forte asserts, "live telecasting is where it's at. When you put together a telecast where the cameras are good, the announcers are good, the shots are good, you sit down afterwards and say to yourself, man, we were just on the air for three hours! Three hours—doing isolated camera replay stuff, talking to the announcers, working nine different cameras and sometimes the blimp with a camera, too, and everything live. Then somebody comes up to me and says, 'Hey, did you see that beautiful show so-and-so did for Sonny and Cher?' Now that is a hell of a show, but those guys have time and they use video tape. They can do it over if they blow it. Because we're live, we only have one time—right now." Forte paused, took a breath, then plunged on. "Don't get me wrong. I'm not putting down the tape shows. It's just a different medium from live telecasting."
"I love live television," Forte said. "I'd love to get live stuff like the old Playhouse 90 back again. This is the stuff I'd like to do eventually. The live shows we used to have on TV—some of that stuff was fantastic. The medium puts pressure on you when you telecast live, but sometimes you get better performance out of your people. So what if you flop now and then or blow your lines occasionally? Live broadcasting is the heart of the medium.
"Those of us in sports broadcasting know this better than anybody. Wherever ABC Sports has been with Wide World of Sports or the Olympics in Mexico City or Grenoble or Munich—wherever we've been, it has been live. And it has always had this exciting quality. If we could take this live quality over into other areas of television, it would be great. Roone Arledge would be great with this kind of stuff."
Arledge, the President of ABC Sports and the Executive Director of Monday Night Football, is a constantly-felt presence around the production, although he did not arrive on the scene until late Monday. Meredith is on the air because of Arledge.
"Arledge is a programming genius," Forte stated unequivocally.
"Arledge was the one who hired Don Meredith after a thirty-minute conversation..."
"It was Roone's idea to use the three announcers..."
"It was Arledge's concept to have the two-unit coverage of the game..."
"Roone was the one who had the idea for the award-winning billboard that announces the show..."
"Arledge was the one who brought Cosell and his hard-core reporting into football..."
Time after time Arledge was acknowledged as the generator of the ideas that shape and distinguish the telecast of football.
Forte is candid about the Arledge method, "By looking for the tighter shot and the inside reporting on sports, Arledge puts a lot of pressure on people. But by putting that pressure on you, he makes you better. Arledge brings his people along and teaches us by putting us under pressure. But I think we all want that pressure. Arledge has the ability to get the best out of people, even if, sometimes, it is by dastardly means.
"If he doesn't get the best out of you, you're not going to be around. He's not an easy man to work for. Yet," and here Forte actually paused for a minute, "he's an easy-going kind of guy. He will call you up to say, 'Hey, the weather is fine in New York, the leaves are falling. Outside my window I can see Central Park and its beautiful.'" Forte shakes his head. "But he's definitely a genius when it comes to programming. I understand he is getting to some other kinds of live television now, other than sports. He'd be terrific with that kind of stuff."
Forte sits in the truck watching the overcast Texas sky appear on the monitor. "Okay," he says. "That's how we'll start tomorrow night. If there's a moon, we'll try to get it in the picture." Rising abruptly, Forte breathes deeply and flexes his shoulders. "Think that does it for now." He looks at the ten or more crew members who are jammed into the small space and standing outside the door. "Anything else? No?" he nods once emphatically. "Okay. That's it." Then he moves quickly out the door of the truck.
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