ESPN.com - Banish Cowboys, 'Skins -- forever

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Wednesday, October 17, 2001
Banish Cowboys, 'Skins -- forever

By Hunter S. Thompson
Page 2 columnist

Everything went downhill after the Green Bay-Baltimore game on Sunday. The games got worse as the day wore one, and the night games were horrible. The good games were excellent, but the bad ones lent new meaning to the word "sucked." Many words come to mind -- disappointing, disorienting, squalid, sneaky and dishonest are a few. We could also list sleazy, queer and corrupt, disgusting, damaging, evil and treacherous. The franchise owners will deny it, but all these ugly words are appropriate.

In a quick time span of 41 hours, I experienced loss, betrayal and fear and craziness.

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It will be many years before "Monday Night Football" completely recovers from the stinking, wretched spectacle that ABC tried to pass off as a football game. It was a reprehensible fraud that bordered on Criminal negligence, and left scum on the hands of every person who touched it. Both Dallas and Washington, D.C., should be banished from professional football, and both owners should be plunged into sheep-dip. All film of the game should be seized and destroyed, all references omitted, all memories scrubbed clean, and all profits confiscated. Showing that game on national TV was a crime against nature. I will hate the sight of Dennis Miller for the rest of my life.

The TV audience will tolerate almost any insult heaped on them. But not this one. Overnight numbers indicated that only six people watched it all the way to the end, and the other five are in prison. But I am, after all, a professional, and I have a column to write.


	Joey Galloway, left, outleaps Fred Smoot for the ball.

A man named Monk called me after the game and said it was the ugliest thing he had ever seen on television. "It was like watching a skunk trying to mate with a slow-moving bus," he muttered. "I will never again watch a Monday Night Football game."

"Me either," I said. "Unless it's a good game."

The worst thing about Monday night football is that there are no other games to switch off to, no way to get away from a hideous monstrosity like the Redskins-Cowboys debacle.

How difficult would it have been, for instance, to alter the TV schedule and show a hot-rod game like Green Bay-Baltimore on Monday? Maybe Daniel Snyder can explain it.

Dr. Hunter S. Thompson's books include Hell's Angels, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail '72, The Proud Highway, Better Than Sex and The Rum Diary. His new book, Fear and Loathing in America, has just been released. A regular contributor to various national and international publications, Thompson now lives in a fortified compound near Aspen, Colo. His column, "Hey, Rube," appears each Monday on Page 2.