“Remember, this is just a football game, no matter who wins or loses.”
Those were the words of sports journalist and color analyst for Monday Night Football, Howard Cosell spoke as a prelude to the tragic breaking news that had made it to the broadcast booth during the broadcast of a Monday night game between the New England Patriots and the Miami Dolphins.
Howard Cosell - a popular, but very controversial figure in the world of
sports continued: “An unspeakable tragedy confirmed to us by ABC News in New York City. John Lennon, outside of his apartment building on the West Side of New York City. The most famous perhaps, of all of The Beatles, shot twice in the back, rushed to Roosevelt Hospital. Dead on arrival.” Obviously shaken from the burden of delivering news of the murder of John Lennon, Cosell lamented that it was hard to get back to a game in the shadow of the tragic news.
On the night of December 8, 1980, a young and obsessed gunman, Mark
Chapman, traveled from Hawaii to New York for the sole purpose of killing John Lennon and the news broke during the live broadcast of Monday Night Football with Frank Gifford, Don Meredith and Howard Cosell in the ABC broadcast booth.
If you were watching that night, I know your first reaction to the tragedy is easy to recall even now, 42 years later.
I was doing the morning show on an FM music station in New Orleans. I had gone to bed early and was not watching Monday Night Football when Cosell broke the news about the death of John Lennon. This was 1980; and there was no Internet, no cellphones, no social media. News did not travel instantly like it does today. Every morning after parking my car and walking to the radio station, I would stop at a newspaper dispenser and buy the morning newspaper.
Unaware of the tragic news that John Lennon had been killed the night before - I stood alone on an empty downtown street. When I pulled the newspaper from the machine, I was hit with a picture of John Lennon on the front page with the headline revealing that he was dead.
As I stood alone on that downtown street with the news that John Lennon was dead - I knew this would dominate my radio show. I was doing the morning show on a music station - but I was known for talking about events and issues. I knew this was a moment that would send shock waves through the Boomer generation.
I realized that I would be delivering tragic news to people who were waking up, unaware of what had happened the night before. I always accepted
that role with a great amount of responsibility. What I said and how I said it
would become part of the lasting memory of so many people who would learn from me that Beatle John Lennon had been murdered.
One of the first things I felt was a powerful sense of finality to my youth. Up to
1980 there was considerable talk about The Beatles reuniting, and America’s
dominant generation lived with that possibility. Lorne Michaels, the executive
producer of Saturday Night Live reportedly offered The Beatles $1 million to
reunite one night as the musical guest on SNL. In 1980, $1 million was a lot of
money!
But it was the hope that part of my youth would return in the form of a Beatles reunion. The sudden death of John Lennon signaled the death of that possibility.
And at that moment I knew a significant part of my youth had forever
faded from reality. There was something final about that moment and maybe I
even felt a greater sense of moving forward and not looking back for things that were gone.
What seemed so unthinkable about John Lennon being shot twice in the back was the idea that John Lennon - one of The Beatles - was out alone at night and returning to his apartment building in New York City. Unfathomable was the thought that John Lennon could be approached by a stranger in the archway of his apartment building.
Mark Chapman, who remains in prison, was an avid Beatles fan; but he became obsessed with a 1966 comment Lennon made saying that The Beatles were “more popular than Jesus.” Chapman had also had grown enraged by the lyrics of Lennon’s song “Imagine.”
Chapman had apparently begun to model his life after Holden Caulfield, a character in J. D. Salinger’s classic novel, “The Catcher in the Rye.” Caulfield was the protagonist in the story and was cynical. The character dealt with some mental instability and was quick to notice the people in the world who were phony.
This is the character Lennon’s killer saw himself as and he believed that some of John Lennon’s lyrics showed that he was phony. Chapman thought that he would become somebody by killing someone as famous as John Lennon.
In September of 2020 when his parole was denied for the 11th time, Mark
Chapman admitted that he killed John Lennon for the glory of it and said he
deserved the death penalty. Chapman also described what he did 42 years ago as a “despicable act” and accepts his sentence of life in prison. He even
apologized to Lennon’s widow, Yoko Ono.
In an ironic turn of events, John Lennon was told in July of 1974 to leave the country or face deportation. President Richard Nixon believed that Lennon’s anti-Vietnam War views and peace movement could hurt his chances for re-election and the Nixon administration became obsessed with deporting the former Beatle, believing he was a threat to America’s national security.
Lennon appealed; and, before the appeals process was over, President Nixon had resigned in disgrace in the wake of the Watergate investigation. Nixon’s vice president Gerald Ford became president and showed no interest in the campaign to deport Lennon, so John Lennon remained in the United States.
The tragic irony is that John Lennon fought to remain in America where he
was murdered. What if John Lennon had been deported - would he
still be alive today?