Turn out the lights

A casket bearing the bombastic pundit who revolutionized television sports broadcasting and helped alter American pop culture with his provocative role on ABC's ''Monday Night Football" rests in a New York cemetery beneath a headstone etched with a passage from the poem, ''Ode to a Nightingale."

''My heart aches, and a drowsy numbness pains my sense," reads Howard Cosell's epitaph.

Cosell recited the line during a ''Monday Night Football" game 25 years ago as he broke the news of John Lennon's murder and helped the nation confront its grief.

Sometime late tonight, ABC's ''Monday Night Football" also shall pass. After 36 seasons as one of the brightest stars in the galaxy of sports broadcasting -- a reign rich in innovation, inanity, and indelible memories -- the second-longest-running program in prime-time history will expire moments after the scoreboard clock at Giants Stadium runs out on a game between the Patriots and New York Jets.

Cause of death: Sagging ratings, financial losses, and a drowsy numbness that has seeped into the broadcast since Cosell's heyday in the announcer's booth with Frank Gifford and ''Dandy" Don Meredith. The program, eclipsed in prime-time longevity only by CBS's ''60 Minutes," is scheduled to begin a new incarnation next year before a smaller audience on ESPN.

''It was an event that defined a country's culture," said former Patriot Russ Francis, whose fame the Monday night broadcast wildly enhanced. ''Wherever I go in the world -- Morocco, Korea, Germany -- when people find out I played American football, they say, 'Monday Night Football.' It will be sad to see it go."

When the show debuted in 1970, television viewers had never seen anything like it. NFL games became a springboard for such a wacky celebration of sport and society that when the Patriots hosted their first Monday night contest, they hired a stuntman, Jumpin' Joe Gerlach, to plunge out of a hot air balloon.

''I thought, 'This is 'Monday Night Football,' if I ever saw it,' " said Upton Bell, then the Patriots' general manager. ''The show was more than a game. It was an entertainment product. The only thing missing was Cecil B. DeMille."

Gerlach, a former Olympic high diver, plummeted through a strong crosswind toward a small mat in Schaefer Stadium Nov. 6, 1972, as the Patriots and Colts prepared to open the second half. On impact, Gerlach ignited an explosive device, then lay motionless for several seconds amid a cloud of smoke and an eerie silence. Finally, he sprang to his feet.

''It was the highlight of the game," Bell said. ''They kept showing replays, with Cosell asking Meredith, 'What do you think of that, Danderoo?' "

At first, the broadcast venture itself seemed as risky as Gerlach's dive. ABC reluctantly agreed to air the show only after CBS opted to stick with its Monday night hits, ''The Doris Day Show" and ''Here's Lucy," and NBC chose to continue riding its ratings bonanza, ''Rowan & Martin's Laugh-In."

Yet ABC concocted a formula for the show that both pioneered regular sports programming in prime time and created a ratings juggernaut. The trick was pairing Cosell, a brash, ''tell-it-like-it-is" commentator, with Meredith, a quick-witted, twangy Texan and former Pro Bowl quarterback. Meredith's musings (''Isn't Fair Hooker a great name?" he wondered aloud of a Cleveland receiver) balanced Cosell's biting monologues, while Gifford provided the play-by-play -- and a calming influence.

''People remember Don being a country bumpkin, which he wasn't, and Howard being a pain in the [butt], which he was," Gifford said. ''I was the law and order."

The television universe in 1970 was limited to little more than three major networks. Only 7 percent of American homes received basic cable, and nine years would pass before ESPN hit the airwaves. So, when ABC rolled out a slickly produced, prime-time football show with a trio of announcers who broke the mold of their traditionally reverential predecessors, male viewers led the stampede to the program.

'' 'Monday Night Football' served as an ambassador for the sport, bringing in a lot of nonfootball fans and helping the league leapfrog the other sports on television," said Randy Vataha, a Patriots receiver in the 1970s who now serves as president of Boston-based Game Plan LLC. ''It was the best marketing tool the NFL ever had."

The show became a celebrity magnet for the likes of Arnold Schwarzenegger, Placido Domingo, Burt Reynolds, John Denver . . . and Kermit the Frog.

The most fascinating episode, however, involved Lennon and President Ronald Reagan, then governor of California. Each figure embodied part of the cultural divide of the time, Lennon the protesting pacifist pop star, Reagan the hard-line conservative leader. Gifford had invited them to appear on the same show in the early '70s, assuming Lennon would be a no-show.

To Gifford's surprise, he looked over his shoulder during the broadcast and spotted the two waiting together.

''Governor Reagan had his arm around John Lennon and he was explaining American football to him," Gifford said. ''Only on 'Monday Night Football' would you get those two guys, who were poles apart, united."

Their appearance prompted some swift maneuvering by Cosell, who initially planned to interview Reagan but anticipated the audience's keener interest in Lennon.

''Giffer," Gifford recalled Cosell abruptly stating, ''you take the governor and I'll take the Beatle."

Meredith, who was not available for an interview, described the program in those days as ''Mother Love's Traveling Freak Show." He had started a broadcast in Denver by saying, ''Welcome to the Mile High City, and I really am." And he projected a similar image near the end of most lopsided contests when he crooned, ''Turn out the lights, the party's over."

Wherever they went, Cosell and crew were treated like rock stars. Mayors doled out keys to their cities. Autograph-seekers swarmed them. Newspapers and television stations reported on their arrivals, their itineraries, their performances.

''They were the Mick Jagger and U2 of their time," Bell said.

Until the end, Cosell was a lightning rod, revered by countless viewers, reviled by countless others. His grandson, Colin Cosell, said Cosell's daughter, Jill, sometimes watched until the final minute of every broadcast to be sure no one tried to carry out one of the numerous threats on her father's life.

''He constantly received death threats, either because he was Jewish or people disagreed with his opinions or just got fed up with his nasally voice," said Colin, whose birth Cosell announced on the show in 1979. ''But, for all his faults, he stuck to his guns and told it like it was."

Francis once irked Cosell by asking him to drop the nickname Cosell had created and had helped make Francis famous: ''All-World." Francis tried telling Cosell his football brethren, including his teammates, so resented the nickname they ''wanted me dead."

''Listen to me and listen to me carefully, No. 81," Francis recalled an angry Cosell saying. ''Get tough or get out -- quick."

Cosell later asked Francis to baby-sit his grandchildren at a hotel pool while Cosell attended a pregame production meeting. The request led to trouble when Cosell returned so late that Francis missed a Patriots meeting, incurring the wrath of coach Chuck Fairbanks.

''What are you doing splashing around in the pool with these critters?" Fairbanks barked, according to Francis. ''Get your fanny in the meeting now."

Not until Cosell's funeral in 1995 did Francis learn that Cosell had paid the fine Fairbanks planned to impose on Francis.

''People talk about what a blowhard he was," Francis said, ''but he was a fine gentleman."

In one of the most poignant moments on ''Monday Night Football," Cosell helped pay tribute in 1979 to Francis's former roommate, Darryl Stingley, when Stingley returned for the first time to Foxborough after Raiders safety Jack Tatum rocked him a year earlier in Oakland, leaving him a quadriplegic. The crowd gave Stingley a seven-minute ovation, twice preventing the game from resuming.

''I spent a lot of time before then dealing with the demons -- the whys and what-fors," Stingley said in a phone interview from Chicago. ''But the people were so overwhelming in their support that night, it was truly the launching pad that sent me back out into the world."

As for Cosell, Stingley said, ''I had heard so many negative things about him, but I found him to be genuine in his compassion. I'll never forget him for that."

In an ironic twist, Cosell's reign on Monday nights ended not long after he described a play involving Redskins receiver Alvin Garrett in 1983 by saying, ''Look at that little monkey go."

An outspoken supporter of civil rights, Cosell said he would have used the same term to describe a white player. Many black leaders also defended him. But Cosell did not return for the '84 season, and the program never reclaimed its ratings dominance, despite consistently ranking among the top network programs through this season.

''It's still part of American culture, but back in those days it was a prime-time spectacular," said Bill Fine, president and general manager of Channel 5, Boston's ABC affiliate. ''Back then, it was much more of an event for the nation."

Meredith lasted one season after Cosell's departure. Gifford stayed until 1997, a 27-year run in which he worked with 11 on-air personalities, including Al Michaels, O.J. Simpson, Joe Namath, and Lesley Visser, the former Boston Globe sportswriter who became the first of five women sideline reporters on ''Monday Night Football."

While the program lost much of its original pizzazz -- particularly when the curtain fell on the halftime highlights Cosell narrated as if they were footage from a battlefront -- the crews that followed Cosell and Meredith managed to mix some humor with their weekly football feast. Visser, for example, once teased Michaels about his obsession with special prosecutor Kenneth Starr's inquiry into President Bill Clinton's relationship with Monica Lewinsky.

After interviewing former Packer great Bart Starr during a game in Green Bay, Visser threw the broadcast back to Michaels by saying, ''There you have it, Al, the Starr report."

By the mid-1980s, ''Monday Night Football" began to steadily decline in the ratings, ultimately prompting ABC to take another risk in 2000 by tossing comedian Dennis Miller into the booth with Michaels and retired quarterback Dan Fouts. Miller and Fouts lasted only two seasons before ABC pared its three-man crew in the booth to two, Michaels and John Madden.

''The show became a game of musical chairs, with a lot of failed on-air experiments," Colin Cosell said.

In recent years, the once-mighty broadcast continued to rank among the top 10 prime-time programs but began lagging behind a head-to-head competitor, ''Everybody Loves Raymond." Cable television's array of viewing options increasingly sapped the show of its ratings clout, and even Gifford stopped watching every game (he said he missed last Monday's).

''MNF is like virtually everything in traditional media, weakened by the explosion of technology and the fractionalization of the media landscape," said Tim Spengler, executive vice president and director of national broadcast for Initiative, one of the nation's top ad-buying firms.

Gifford, who plans to attend tonight's game, said he initially persuaded Meredith to join him. But Meredith, who cherishes his privacy, reneged, instead agreeing to appear in taped segments from his home in New Mexico.

''I told him to take off the freaking cowboy hat and the dark glasses and nobody would recognize him," Gifford said. ''But I guess he feels less of an obligation to be there than I do."

Michaels and Madden will work the broadcast together for the last time, as Michaels prepares to move to ESPN with the Monday night crew and Madden joins NBC for a new Sunday night football game. (Joe Theismann, the former Redskins quarterback who suffered a memorable career-ending injury on ''Monday Night Football" in 1985, will replace Madden on Monday nights.)

Disney, which owns both ABC and ESPN, has scheduled a party at 2 a.m., after tonight's broadcast. Revelers will toast one of the craziest adventures in sports broadcasting, a national phenomenon that began when the (Boston) Patriots played their home games at Harvard Stadium, Bill Belichick was an 18-year-old senior at Phillips Academy in Andover, and gas was 36 cents a gallon.

The Disney execs still believe so deeply in Monday night football that they paid the NFL $1.1 billion a year over the next eight years to broadcast the games on ESPN, double the price of ABC's final contract. But no one expects either the new ESPN or NBC broadcast to generate the buzz Cosell and Co. once created.

''Unless your team is playing in it, it may be just another game," said Jason Mittell, a professor of media studies at Middlebury College. ''I have a hard time imagining it will become as iconic as [ABC's] 'Monday Night Football.' "