Turn Out the Lights, The Party’s Over
Don Meredith, the crooning former Cowboy quarterback in the Monday Night Football broadcast booth, has died of a brain hemorrhage at the age of 72. Meredith was a star at SMU, then got drafted by the dreadful expansion Cowboys team and led them from an 0-11-1 season in 1960 to title game losses in 1966 and 1967, the latter aka the Ice Bowl. Meredith’s easy humor even softened hardass coach Tom Landry. Before the 1966 title game, Meredith showed up in the locker room with a heavily stitched face and said he had tripped into a plate glass window and couldn’t play. Landry walked in. The locker room fell silent as he walked to his star quarterback. And erupted in laughter when Landry peeled off the mask applied by a make-up artist. Even better story if Meredith hadn’t sealed the loss with a late interception. A year after retiring, he provided humor to balance stolid block of wood Frank Gifford and a folksy counterpoint to blowhard Howard Cosell on Monday nights. He explained: “I’d just wait for Howard to make a mistake. Didn’t usually take too long.” With many tuning in for the broadcasters as much as for the games, Meredith gave a reason to stick around in blow-outs: when a camera found a solitary Oiler fan during a loss to the Raiders who promptly gave the finger, Meredith offered, “He thinks they’re No. 1;” in a game where the Cowboys were getting stomped and the crowd had started chanting “We want Meredith,” he assured viewers, “No way you’re getting me down there.” He later became the Lipton Tea shill and missed a throw on King of the Hill that cost Hank $100,000.
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