NYT: Don Meredith, Cowboys Quarterback and Cosell’s

[dcpony]

Broadcast Foil Dies at 72.

The Times' exetensive obit.

Don Meredith, a former star quarterback for the Dallas Cowboys who helped change the perception of professional football with the easy Texas charm and provocative wit he brought to its first prime-time telecasts on Monday nights, died on Sunday in Santa Fe, N.M. He was 72.

The cause was a brain hemorrhage, his lawyer, Lisa Fine Moses, said.

Mr. Meredith always thought of himself as the small-town kid from Mount Vernon, Tex., where his parents, Jeff and Hazel, owned a dry goods store and where his mother swung a tire so he could practice throwing a football at a moving target. He spent much of his life backing away from the nickname Dandy Don, particularly during his secluded later decades in New Mexico.

As a boy, Mr. Meredith dreamed of playing in the Cotton Bowl, 100 miles to the southwest in Dallas, and that was where he played many home games in high school, at Southern Methodist University in Dallas and in the pros. He set passing records for the Cowboys that still stand, including the one for most yards in a game, 460, set on Nov. 10, 1963, against San Francisco.

But it was his sparkling, fun-loving personality that seemed to define him. As a quarterback he sometimes irked the buttoned-down Cowboys coach, Tom Landry, by breaking into a country tune in the huddle, and as one of the first two color commentator on ABC’s “Monday Night Football” he made his down-home ribbing of the loquacious Howard Cosell, one of his two ....

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/07/sport ... h.html?hpw

[PK]

Nicely done.