ABC Sports Archives - Retro Reminiscing Video and Pictures

THE NIGHT MONDAY NIGHT FOOTBALL WAS BORN — SEPTEMBER 21, 1970

Can you imagine the NFL without Monday Night Football?

On September 21, 1970, America sat down for the first regular-season broadcast of ABC’s brand-new Monday Night Football — the New York Jets against the Cleveland Browns.

Now here’s something I didn’t realize: NFL teams had played occasional Monday games before this. CBS and NBC had even experimented with a few Monday-night telecasts during the 1960s. But this was different. This was the beginning of a weekly national television institution.

And ABC didn’t treat it like an ordinary Sunday football game moved to Monday.

Producer Roone Arledge wanted a show. He roughly doubled the usual number of cameras, emphasized instant replay and graphics, and put three personalities in the booth: Keith Jackson, Howard Cosell and former Cowboys quarterback Don Meredith. Frank Gifford, who many of us associate with that classic booth, wouldn’t replace Jackson until 1971.

Then there was the game itself.

A huge 85,703 people packed Cleveland Municipal Stadium. Cleveland jumped out to a 14-0 lead, Homer Jones returned the second-half kickoff 94 yards for a touchdown, and Joe Namath kept fighting back. The Jets actually outgained Cleveland 454 yards to 221.

But with New York trailing 24-21 late in the game, Cleveland’s Billy Andrews intercepted Namath and ran it back 25 yards for the touchdown that sealed a 31-21 Browns victory.

And listen to the music on those early broadcasts. The famous MNF music most of us recognize wasn’t there yet. The original theme was “Score,” written by Charles Fox, with that wonderfully funky Hammond-organ sound of 1970. “Heavy Action” didn’t arrive until years later.

What ABC created that night went far beyond football. Monday night became an event. You knew the voices, you knew the personalities, and if you were a kid, you probably tried negotiating just how much of the game you were allowed to stay awake for.

Were you watching Monday Night Football in those early years — and who do you remember most: Cosell, Meredith, Jackson or Gifford?

Cathy Rigby Built Quite a Career After the Olympics

This old Cathy Rigby Stayfree commercial brings back a completely different Cathy Rigby memory for me.

Back in the 1990s, I worked as a Communications Specialist at Caldor’s corporate headquarters in Norwalk. We were opening a new store in Pennsylvania and Cathy Rigby was there to meet customers and sign autographs. What I remember most about her personally was how soft-spoken and very polite she was. Nothing flashy at all, and that stuck with me.

Most of us remember Cathy first as the young American gymnast who became one of the faces of the sport. She competed in the 1968 and 1972 Olympics, but something I had forgotten is that her most historic medal didn’t come at the Olympics. In 1970, she won silver on the balance beam at the World Championships, becoming the first American gymnast ever to win a World Championships medal.

After retiring from competition, she did something a lot of famous athletes struggle to do — she kept finding ways to turn that recognition into a long career.

There were the Stayfree commercials, which became one of her best-known endorsement campaigns. She also spent 18 years covering gymnastics for ABC Sports, did other television and fitness work, and then built a whole second career on stage.

And that second career became huge. Rigby began playing Peter Pan in the 1970s and returned to the role for decades, eventually earning a Tony nomination in 1991. She and her husband also moved into producing through McCoy Rigby Entertainment.

Then there’s Caldor itself, another memory for a lot of us. The chain was founded in 1951 by Carl and Dorothy Bennett, and even the name came from them — CAL from Carl and DOR from Dorothy. By the time I worked there, it had grown into one of the Northeast’s best-known discount chains.

So for me, this commercial connects three different things: a familiar face from television, a remarkable post-Olympic career, and my own memory of meeting Cathy Rigby years later through Caldor.

Do you remember her most from gymnastics, the Stayfree commercials, Peter Pan, or somewhere else?

ABC’s Wide World of Sports

For generations, Saturday afternoons meant watching Jim McKay “span the globe” on ABC’s Wide World of Sports. Beginning in 1961, the program introduced viewers to famous championships, unusual competitions and athletes they might never have seen otherwise. What was supposed to be a one-summer program became a television institution whose traditional anthology format continued until 1997.

Its most famous scene was not a victory. It was Yugoslav ski jumper Vinko Bogataj losing control and crashing through the side of the ramp during a 1970 competition. ABC repeatedly used the frightening tumble beneath the words “the agony of defeat,” making Bogataj one of the most recognized athletes on American television, even though most viewers never knew his name.

Do you remember watching that skier crash every Saturday, and did you ever know his name was Vinko Bogataj?