Will He Go Long?
Come Tonight's Kickoff, All Eyes Are on Tony K.

By Paul Farhi
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, August 14, 2006

Talk about managing your expectations. Facing his big new TV gig, Tony Kornheiser is setting his somewhere south of ankle-high.

Partly because of that low-ball approach, Kornheiser's debut on "Monday Night Football" figures to be one of the more interesting story lines as the venerable but creaky show begins its 37th season tonight at 8 on ESPN, as the Oakland Raiders visit the Minnesota Vikings.

Kornheiser -- who wrote in his Washington Post columns last week that he was "terrified" and fully prepared to just "wing it" in the booth -- is only the third non-athlete to sit in the color commentator's chair on "Monday Night Football." And the subplot thickens: The performance of one of those predecessors, smart-alecky comedian Dennis Miller, was widely panned.

Kornheiser's self-scouting report notwithstanding, his friends and colleagues are convinced that the co-host of ESPN's yakfest "Pardon the Interruption" will ably step up to the mike.

"He'll be terrific," said Don Ohlmeyer, the veteran sports producer and TV programming executive. "Three announcers don't work unless you have three distinct voices. And no one will ever confuse Tony with the other two" -- play-by-play man Mike Tirico and fellow analyst Joe Theismann, the ex-Redskins quarterback. (Among "Monday Night Football's" innovations has been the three-announcer format, which relies on the chemistry of a play-by-play man, an analyst and an opinionated "third chair.")

The retired Ohlmeyer knows a thing or two about sports broadcasting. He produced "Monday Night Football" during its golden years of the '70s, when it featured Frank Gifford and Don Meredith -- and the non-jock other than Miller to whom Kornheiser is most often compared: the polarizing, love-to-hate-him legend that was Howard Cosell.

While working for ABC in 2000, Ohlmeyer chose Miller as "Monday Night Football's" Third Man, after giving Kornheiser an off-air tryout. (Ohlmeyer deemed the pre-"PTI" Kornheiser as not quite ready for prime time.)

Miller was something else again. During the comic's two seasons in the booth, beginning in 2000, the media criticized his know-it-all persona. They also derided Miller for his frequently quizzical exclamations, such as, "Perhaps the referees were not really penalizing Denver for delay of game, but in fact were trying to let Paris know that Conde-sur-l'Escaut had been captured from the Austrians."

L'huh?

Ohlmeyer maintains that Miller was a success -- he said the games' ratings among young male viewers grew about 10 percent during Miller time -- and that Kornheiser will succeed, too, but for a different reason.

"The press will love Tony because he's one of them," Ohlmeyer said. "Every newspaperman in America, every sportswriter, is hoping he'll be a magnificent success, because he's opening doors for them in broadcasting. It was just the opposite with Dennis. He was the guy who they thought shouldn't have been there in the first place."

Kornheiser isn't the only thing new about "Monday Night Football." The aging institution -- and we're referring here to the show, not the 58-year-old Kornheiser -- has moved to cable's ESPN from its Disney-owned sister network, ABC (which revolutionized sports television in 1970 by putting NFL games on Mondays in prime time). The switch to ESPN could ease Kornheiser's transition, since he's a familiar face to so much of the network's audience.

The move to cable -- the result of slipping ratings on the broadcast channel -- also ensures an even smaller audience for "Monday Night Football" and potentially a different one, too. ESPN viewers tend to be hard-core sports fans, more knowledgeable about the game than the largely casual audience that ABC attracted.

It would be a mistake, though, if Kornheiser gets wonked out about coverage packages and defensive-line stunts, says John Riggins, the former Redskin-turned-radio broadcaster (on Redskins owner Dan Snyder's new stations) who has known Kornheiser for years.

"It's about entertainment," Riggins said. "You can't take it too seriously. That's the beauty of Tony -- he won't make that mistake. That was Miller's problem."

Riggins sees an opportunity for Kornheiser to mix it up with his booth mates, particularly Theismann, an opinionated, sometimes abrasive analyst whom Kornheiser covered during the quarterback's playing days.

"I can only hope he gives a lot of [grief] to Theismann," Riggins said. "I hope Tony has the usual scorn that he has for everyone on this earth. They're really an odd couple. I really don't see Tony and Joe as great drinking buddies."

Theismann is a little more diplomatic about it. In a panel discussion with the nation's TV critics in Pasadena, Calif., last month, he said: "I'm really looking forward to being with Tony Kornheiser. And I say being with him because I have absolutely no preconceived notion of what it's going to look like. . . . We're going to fly by the seat of our pants a little bit. It's going to be unique. It's going to be different. It's going to be irreverent probably at times."

Added Theismann: "Tony has certainly taken me to task, as a writer. He's -- you know, he's very candid in what he says. He's very cynical as an individual, and he likes being a cynic."

Theismann points out that Kornheiser will be in a different realm on "Monday Night Football." He won't have the relatively luxurious deadlines he has as a newspaper columnist, and won't be able to tape the show, as he does with "Pardon the Interruption." Nor will he have time for extended opinionated monologues, as he did on his daily radio program, heard until recently on WTEM-AM.

"We're all going to find out where we fit in," Theismann said, "and that's, I think, part of the excitement of what I'm looking forward to. . . . I understand my role as the football guy. But how Mike holds this thing together and what Tony does, we all have to see."