Don Meredith Favored His Wits Over His Playbook

By Bill Carter, The New York Times, 12/11

In almost everything he tried, Don Meredith was a natural. He played football because that’s what young boys in Texas do — and because he grew up tall, rangy and rifled-armed, the prototype , then and now.

But it was the creative part of the game that excited his imagination. In high school and at Southern Methodist University — where, already known as Dandy Don (a nickname bestowed on him by his brother), Meredith became an all-American — teammates reported that his great joy was simply to run around and throw the ball with abandon, never to study film or the tendencies of the defense.

Talent and insouciance took him a long way. Faced with the dire situation of trailing the in the N.F.L. championship game in 1966, down 14 points before his Dallas Cowboy offense had even run a play, Meredith greeted his rattled teammates in the huddle singing, “I didn’t know God made honky-tonk angels.”

His relationship with the game was never more than a casual acquaintance. Late in his career as a founding member of sports television’s most-celebrated triumvirate, the announcing team for ABC’s “,” Meredith turned up at a production meeting before a game, rolling in a blackboard with a great show of purpose. The production crew sat astonished, waiting for Meredith to engage in some act of fundamental football analysis, to actually grab the chalk and sketch some X’s and O’s, a performance that no one in the room could recall previously witnessing.

Instead Meredith swept his hand across the board in broad strokes, shading in a lovely sketch of a rose.

In Don Meredith, who died last Sunday at 72, the football side, the cowboy

1 / 3 Don Meredith Favored His Wits Over His Playbook

side, the “Dandy” side, was often at war with the artistic side, the moody side, the dark side. Pro football never really satisfied him, not with the limitations on creativity imposed by his control-minded Cowboys coach, . (Meredith took to telling Landry he didn’t want to break down the games in advance and Landry shouldn’t bother talking to him about it — just slide the game plan under his hotel room door.)

But just as the television public would be later, teammates were drawn to him for his fun-loving style and his solid leadership. When Peter Gent, a wide receiver who had a stormy relationship with the Cowboys, wrote the novel “North Dallas Forty,” the quarterback character, Seth Maxwell — obviously modeled on Meredith — was a wise-cracking but ultimately heroic figure. Meredith remained a loyal friend to Gent, once abandoning the “M.N.F.” booth in midgame to talk a security detail in the Dallas stadium out of having a Gent arrested.

Announcing games on prime-time television unleashed Meredith’s flair for spontaneous wit (once, when the camera caught the stone-faced coach of the Minnesota Vikings, Bud Grant, glaring at his team on the sideline, Meredith burst into a rendition of “You Are My Sunshine.”) But his joy in puncturing the pomposity of his broadcast partner, , proved short-lived.

America loved their act; they were “The Odd Couple” in headsets, the nasal, intellectually irritating New Yorker sparring with the drawling, happy-go-lucky Texan. But not much of it was real, at least on Meredith’s side. Where Cosell would seek out the recognition of crowds, acknowledging shout-outs from fans by asking anyone within earshot, “Do you witness the adulation?” Meredith fled from what he labeled the “carnival atmosphere” that surrounded “M.N.F.” The down-home figure the public so adored became an unwelcome burden — and a fiction. “I take Dandy Don and send him into another room,” Meredith said. “He charms everybody. He’s a hell of a guy; but that’s not me.”

Meredith’s restlessness became chronic. He was out of “Monday Night Football” after four seasons, then back in again four seasons later. Contract agreements never seemed final; he always seemed to be reconsidering his options, or his networks, changing the play at the last minute. For a time Meredith threw himself into acting (and he wasn’t bad);

2 / 3 Don Meredith Favored His Wits Over His Playbook

then he slacked off on that. He wrote novels that went unfinished; he painted, mostly for himself.

His second stint on “M.N.F.” was marked by a slackening of his already indifferent work habits, but mainly by a theatrical act that had suddenly switched masks — smiles to frowns. Cosell now genuinely irritated him, especially with his constant criticisms of their partner, , who had become one of Meredith’s closest friends. Backstage, the show grew increasingly toxic; Meredith, as often peckish as puckish, had even less interest in the games being played in front of him.

His last ABC contract up after the 1985 , Meredith would eventually repair to Santa Fe, N.M., with his wife Susan, content to take part in the arts community there, living out his life quietly, pursuing his many muses. He had little interest in reliving the quarterback days or the “Monday Night Football” days.

At the time of his first departure from “M.N.F.” in 1974, Meredith crystallized the restlessness that seemed to overshadow his otherwise hugely successful career, telling an interviewer from Sports Illustrated: “My deepest fear is that one day I’m going to find out that this is all there is to life, and it won’t be enough.

3 / 3