The Network Garden - Mark Sigal's Blog

Monday Night Memories on ESPN.com

Bill Simmons, who is easily my favorite sports writer (Why? He is a fans' fan in terms of his sports knowledge, understanding of the human drama, comedy and just plain wackiness of professional sports), wrote a really good article on the "final" installment of Monday Night Football on ABC. 

Final is in quotes because the show is just moving down the dial to sister station ESPN.  In other words, a non-event.  For the footballers who love MNF, they pretty much know how to find ESPN on their remotes.  For the legions who couldn't give a hoot unless their team was playing, or just couldn't give a hoot period, at most they get to see what ABC can offer up on Mondays.

Simmons larger point in the article is that MNF has not really mattered since the original Monday Night Football broadcast team of Howard Cosell, Frank Gifford, and Don Meredith was broken up when Cosell left the booth after 1983, so why all of the sentimentality?

As someone who grew up during this period, I completely agree, but Simmons sets the context best for understanding why the show mattered then as much as it did:

• "Two things made the Cosell Era stand out. First, you couldn't replicate the Gifford-Meredith-Cosell team if you tried (as ABC slowly found out). Gifford was the most popular football player of the '50s and '60s, a matinee idol in every sense, as well as one of the few athletes who successfully crossed over into broadcasting. Meredith was a force of nature, just a likable guy who appealed to everyone in every part of the country. And Cosell pretty much hijacked that show and made it his own personal pulpit -- he was the one who transformed that telecast from "mere football game" to "polarizing television event." Whether you hated Cosell or loved him, you had an opinion about him. He mattered."
• "More importantly, we had like only six channels back then. Maybe "Monday Night Football" was a huge deal, but so was "Fantasy Island," "The Incredible Hulk" and everything else. Yeah, the Meredith-Gifford-Cosell team meant something to me, but so did Bill Bixby and Cheryl Ladd. So did Jimmie Walker. So did Donny Most and Mindy Cohn, for God's sake. Growing up in the late '70s, there really wasn't much to do. I'm telling you....nobody was matching the importance that "Monday Night Football" held during an era where nobody had cable, DirecTV, iPods, video games or the Internet. That was truly the perfect storm of football broadcasting, something we will never see again. At least until Cosell is cloned."

Netting it out, Simmons captures the stupidity of TV executives in changing the perfect theme song (you can listen to an excerpt by watch the clip above) by saying, "The fact that they eventually augmented it with the Hank Williams Jr. song proved what's wrong with television -- here you had the perfect theme song, something everyone loved, and the higher-ups still felt the need to tinker with it. Seriously, do you know one person who watched the beginning of "Monday Night Football" and thought to themselves, "You know what? This music is great, but I can't shake this nagging feeling that it could be better … "

Similarly, he captures the power and bizarre magic of Howard Cosell. "There has never been anyone like him before, or since. Greatest boxing announcer ever. Most divisive football announcer ever. Best agitator ever. One of the most entertaining interviewers ever. By all accounts, one of the biggest behind-the-scenes jerks ever. And his halftime highlights … I just remember watching those games in the late '70s, waiting for the first half to end and hoping that he would spend even 20 seconds on a Pats game. This is one of those "You had to be there" things -- kinda like how you had to be there to understand the sheer magnitude of a detective show that featured Jaclyn Smith and Cheryl Ladd. But you had to be there for Cosell. You just did."

Finally, he captures the unintentional comedy of some truly bad talent pairings in the broadcast booth.  Of the 1985 team of Frank Gifford, OJ Simpson and Joe Namath, he says, "Let there be no doubt … this was the worst broadcasting team of all time. Much like with Cosell and Jaclyn Smith, you really had to be there -- the comedy was off the charts. Repeat: off the charts. When I'm running ESPN8 some day, we will show all the games from this season on an endless loop. You can't even imagine. It was a "Saturday Night Live" skit for 16 straight weeks -- every play sounded like this:

Gifford: "Hostetler back to pass, excuse me, that's Simms, he takes the sack!"

Simpson: "Whoaaaaaaaa! Whoaaaaaaaa! Wow!"

Namath: "He didn't see the blitz … the blitz was on … gotta watch out for the blitz … blitz very bad … blitz bad … "

Simpson: "Ay-yeeeeeeeeeeee!"

(Even weirder, all three of these guys ended up in bizarre tabloid headlines. Gifford had that stewardess thing and the "You have wonderful breasts, I'm extremely aroused right now" quote; Namath had the "I wanna kiss you" moment with Suzy Kolber; and O.J. trumped both of them. And then some. I'd say more, but he's still on the loose. I don't want to provoke him. Back to the column.)

In any event, read the article and watch the clip.  If you like the clip, share it with a friend by clicking the Share option or grab it by clicking the Grab option and pasting the text into your website or blog.

Forbes Karlgaard on "My Life As a Blogger"

I am a big fan of Rich Karlgaard, dating back to his days at the late, great Upside magazine.  These days, in addtion to being the Publisher of Forbes Magazine, he writes the Digital Rules column for the magazine, which invariably offers fresh perspectives on entrepreneurialism, making sense of the economics behind the freight train of digitization and some how-tos on maintaining a healthy life/work balance.

Karlgaard has recently joined the blogosphere, which on the heels of a somewhat attack article on blogs in Forbes a month or so back (not by Karlgaard), is interesting, and only affirms the healthy balance between different writers in an influential publication.

In any event, in his latest Digital Rules column Karlgaard posits on "My Life As a Blogger."  The full article is worth a read but his conclusions, which I agree with follow:

• Blogging is not overhyped. You may be forgiven for thinking so, as no day goes by without a story on blogs. But blogs are no fad. They are cheap and easy to do. And blogs fulfill that deepest of human needs as defined by psychologist Abraham Maslow: self-actualization.
• Don't judge blogging by the "average" blog. The average blog is amateurish, just as the average crooner is no American Idol. The law of large numbers guarantees that. At the top of this huge pyramid are thousands of readable and useful blogs.
• The best bloggers write about what they know, and when they don't know, they link to more knowledgeable sources.
• Blogs really do threaten the mainstream media. Thought experiment: Suppose you call yourself a pro-technology supply-sider. A reader with such an outlook will find a home at RealClear Politics...because the editors of those überblogs see the world in the same way. You might ask, "Well, doesn't the Wall Street Journal see the world likewise?" Yeah, mostly. But the WSJ needs thousands of employees and tons of ink and paper to produce its product. RealClear Politics gets by with fewer than ten employees.
• Are blogs good or bad for business?  When companies and people do the right thing, the majority of bloggers will write good things about them. But that's the rub, isn't it? Any company that wants a good reputation in the blogosphere must earn it. That means treating customers, suppliers, employees and shareholders with fairness and dignity, doesn't it?
• Bad companies and shady dealers will get their heads handed to them in the blogosphere. We all say hooray to that! But be aware. The slow and stubborn--those I call the institutionally stupid in my Forbes.com blog--will get slaughtered, too.

eHub Interviews vSocial

Emily Chang's popular eHub site interviewed vSocial the other day to get some color on our strategy, the market opportunities and challenges we face.  Here is an excerpt but read the whole interview:

"vSocial, at its core, is about two things. One is really nailing the "job" of making the video upload and sharing process brain dead simple so it just works. This extends to sub tasks like uploading, encoding, descriptions, tagging, ratings, user comments, syndication, integration with video iPods, and sharing and embedding in remote sites. The other is enabling users to actually "do something" with video clips beyond the site just being a big hard drive..."

Interviewed in The Social Networking Weblog

vSocial, the video clip sharing community that I have talked a bit about, is starting to build some buzz.  In fact, I was recently interviewed in The Social Networking Weblog about the service, which is growing by leaps and bounds, and in my humble, but highly biased opinion, really delivers the goods.

On a side note, folks in the blogosphere who want to incorporate videos into their postings, might be interested in Blog It!, a feature recently added to the service that allows users to create full blog postings to their Blogger and/or TypePad accounts via a real time graphical editor that you can call up whenever you come across a video on vSocial that you want to write a post on.

The benefit of Blog It! is that you can create these posts while watching the video that inspired you (or that you uploaded), and do so without having to leave the service to log into Blogger or TypePad. 

Less disruptive from a workflow perspective, and can always go back and tweak within those services' native tools, but designed to obviate the need.

The definition of a great man

Chuck Klosterman, writing in the Page 2 section of ESPN.com, has written a really interesting read analyzing why Phil Jackson, he of the many basketball championships, took on the mess that is the Los Angeles Lakers these days. 

Fundamentally, Klosterman argues that in order to become a great man, Phil Jackson must finally taste failure.

As a student of both sports metaphors and the pattern recognition of history, I found this a compelling read.

Here is an excerpt:

• As such, historical figures are remembered for the things they accomplish and the victories they win -- if life were a movie, the collection of those achievements would comprise the plot. But people are always defined by their greatest failure. You learn very little about a man's character from his success; truth exists only within adversity. And adversity is what Jackson needs to define himself as A Great Man; without it, he's just a tall dude from Williston High School who won a lot of games with a lot of talent.

Check out the full article HERE.