I saw this AM that today is the 55th anniversary of Monday Night Football, and it reminded me of a time when you could walk into any bar in the country and find a betting board with a grid of 100 squares with one team on the vertical axis and the other on the horizontal. You could buy a square, usually for $1-5, and put your name in the square. Once the board was filled out, numbers 0-9 were drawn and assigned to the 10 spots on each axis. Most of the payouts went by the last digit in the score for each team at the end of the quarter, so if the score was 21-10, whoever's square lined up with the 1 and 0 won 1/4 of the pot. But at work, we used to play a game called "score change" where there was a payout for each post-PAT score up to a maximum of 10 scores. Every bar you went into had at least one game that they'd run, mostly for MNF as it was the premier football game of the week.
I guess fantasy football and expanded gambling has caused these boards to disappear, but they were an interesting side attraction that gave you an interest in an otherwise boring game.
The other thing I remember about MNF is this bar, I think in Denver, that used to acquire an old TV set, set it up in the middle of the bar so everyone could see it, then they'd raffle off a brick. They'd have a drawing at the beginning of the game, and the winner of the raffle would get the brick with instructions that he had to wait until Howard Cosell said something stupid and he could chuck the brick through the TV. They said that it was a fantastic promotion. You can imagine Cosell saying something and the crowd yelling "throw the brick!"
Anyone have any MNF stories to share?
I guess fantasy football and expanded gambling has caused these boards to disappear, but they were an interesting side attraction that gave you an interest in an otherwise boring game.
The other thing I remember about MNF is this bar, I think in Denver, that used to acquire an old TV set, set it up in the middle of the bar so everyone could see it, then they'd raffle off a brick. They'd have a drawing at the beginning of the game, and the winner of the raffle would get the brick with instructions that he had to wait until Howard Cosell said something stupid and he could chuck the brick through the TV. They said that it was a fantastic promotion. You can imagine Cosell saying something and the crowd yelling "throw the brick!"
Anyone have any MNF stories to share?
