Ray Scott, why was he fired?

My all-time favorite football play-by-play man, what happened to him in 1974?

 

This thread is right up D_B's alley.

 

Starr .... Dowler ... touchdown.

 

From all I could gather, CBS just thought it was time to make Summerall the lead guy. He was the color guy to Scott before being elevated to lead play-by-play.

 

I'm not old enough to have heard Scott live, but my dad and others who are old enough to know said Scott was boring. Dependable, but boring.

 

Scott always held the belief that a play-by-play guy on TV should just be nothing more than a glorified PA announcer.

 

Scott gave the facts, just the facts. In the "if we don't have schtick, we don't have shit and our ratings are in panic mode tomorrow" mentality of the network heads, he'd never, never made it.
But he was great.

 

That was right around the time that MNF was huge and networks thought you needed big personalities in the booth. Scott was from the old school where the announcers never intruded on the game. He didn't call a lot of attention to himself and he didn't think it was his job to banter off-topic with the analysts.

The networks hired a lot of unfunny drawlers looking for the next Don Meredith.

 

My father hated watching football on TV in the 1960s because it always featured A) The Green Bay Packers and B) Ray Scott.

It is appropriate to this story that my father grew up in the Boston area as a Giants fan (no Pats yet), and married a woman from Upper Michigan whose whole family were rabid Packer fans. One of my dad's prouder moments was being in Green Bay, around his in-laws, seeing Bart Starr at a shopping center, and yelling, "Hey, it's Y.A. Tittle!"

 

When I was in college, I wanted to do radio play-by-play. So my Dad sent me a newspaper story about Ray Scott and scrawled on the clipping, "This guy doesn't even make a dollar a mile!"

It was then I made the economically wise decision to stick to sportswriting.

 

Spent a couple of hours with him once around 1990 or so when I was on assignment in the Twin Cities. He had all kinds of great stories ... I think he was in the MNF booth when a drunken Howard Cosell threw up on his shoes.

 

Was at an NFL game in the mid-60s as a fan and remember looking up at the pressbox where he was working. It was like the CBS booth was on fire with all the cigarette smoke pouring out. You could barely see his outline, with a cigarette hanging out the side of his mouth.