the abbreviated reign of “neon” leon spinks

DON’T MESS WITH SUCCESS 213
While the league’s visionaries were clearly making things up as
they went along, the NFL nonetheless watched it all with growing con-
cern. In a preemptive move, ABC installed comedian Dennis Miller in the
broadcast booth of Monday Night Football in the fall of 2001 to contribute
smirking commentary and obscure cultural references to its telecast, and
Fox added Jimmy Kimmel, the founding host of The Man Show, to add a
bit of juvenilia to its NFL pregame show. The fight was joined, but as it
turned out, it was a really short fi ght.
They Came, They Saw, They Surfed
From the beginning, little went right. The first-game broadcast, a
one-sided snoozer featuring the Las Vegas Outlaws and the New York/
New Jersey Hitmen, was a comedy of technical errors, uninspired football,
and Ventura’s bellowed tripe from the broadcast booth that was intended
to establish the league as edgy and full of attitude. The problem
with that approach, ESPN pundit Dan Patrick noted later, is that “you
can’t force being ‘edgy.’ You either are or you’re not. It’s not something
you announce or declare about yourself.”
True, the audience saw and overheard some amazing and innovative
things during the broadcast: unpre ce dented camera perspectives, including
from overhead and inside the huddle; plays radioed from the
coach to the quarterback; wide shots in which camera operators “ran in
and out of the picture like drunks on a dare,” wrote Forrest. But they also
saw and heard things that suggested the XFL was launched a wee bit prematurely.
Lead commentator Jesse Ventura took every opportunity to
hype the league rather than describe the action, giving the broadcast the
desperate air of a doorstep sales pitch. His exchanges with co-commentator
Matt Vasgersian came across, at best, as unhelpful, and at worst as chummy
frat-boy innuendo. (“Lot of heavy breathing out there,” Vasgersian said
as the field mikes transmitted the sound of the players huffing and puffing.
“Sounds like a prank call.”) McMahon and Ebersol had identifi ed
Outlaws coach Rusty Tillman as potentially volatile on the sidelines, and