TV Watch

Chris Mannix

September 24, 2007

IF YOU'RE convinced Michele Tafoya is sending secret messages in her sideline reports on Monday Night Football, you're not as crazy as your friends think. Two hours before kickoff each week, Tafoya (right) calls in to The Big Show, a sports talkfest on Los Angeles's KSPN-AM, so hosts Steve Mason and John Ireland can give her a word or phrase they want her to work into one of her on-air segments that night. On Sept. 10, when the Ravens and the oft-arrested Bengals were playing, the secret words were law and order; for a Cowboys game last year Tafoya had to say T.O. and the Big Tuna. If she succeeds, Mason or Ireland donates $100 to the Humane Society of Minnesota. "They make it sound so easy. 'Michele, just say it like this,'" she says. "But it's much harder when you're the sideline reporter than if you're doing play-by-play." Over the last three years Tafoya's covert communications have cost Mason and Ireland about $1,000 each, but she says she'll never compromise her reporting for the gag. How can non-KSPN listeners play along? "Listen for something that just seems a little unnecessary, a little unexpected, with a little smile behind it," Tafoya says. "And it's usually in the first or the last line of a report."