by Al Michaels
I collected baseball cards, too—didn’t just collect them, memorized them. I’d have other kids in the neighborhood quiz me. Batting averages, home runs, earned run averages, fielding averages, players’ birthplaces. My father would take my brother and me to Army football games at West Point, and on the way home, I’d go through the plays that had been run in each quarter. My parents would go to the night harness races at Roosevelt Raceway in Westbury, on Long Island. On occasional weekend afternoons, my father would take my brother and me to the track, where we could go to the barn area and meet some of the trainers and drivers. But that was all we could experience, because in those years, even if you were accompanied by an adult, the law didn’t allow a minor to go to the actual races. Still, I learned how to read the racing form, and really got into it. I even started my own tout sheet, which I titled Big Al at Westbury, and sold it to our neighbors for $1.50. One day I picked a horse named Algerine, who went off at odds of 75–1—and won. The next day, everyone in the neighborhood wanted to buy a copy of that night’s Big Al at Westbury.
Years later, my brother would call it my “manic intensity.” I still prefer to think of it more as passion combined with compulsion. Doing anything halfway, halfheartedly has never appealed to me. Or even three-quarters heartedly. Not getting something right has always been anathema to me.
I LOVED PLAYING SPORTS. But by the time I was a teenager, even though I had played little league baseball and some organized youth sports, and like any kid in Brooklyn in those years, punch ball, stickball, and a game only known inside the borough as ringolevio—I loved watching sports more. I would rather go to a Dodger game at Ebbets than play in a game in a park down the street. I just loved the big-time feel. It was thrilling.
In fourth, fifth, and sixth grades, our school, P.S. 139, because of overcrowding, was on a half-day schedule, and I was originally placed in the noon-to-four session. But that wasn’t going to work, because how could I go to Dodger games if I was going to school in the afternoon? (In those years, most major-league teams played the vast majority of their games in the daytime, including the Dodgers.) So my mother wrote a note to the school principal with some nonsensical, fabricated excuse to get me switched to the eight-to-noon session. It worked. And so when I was twelve, I was at more than 50 of the 77 Dodger home games.
At Ebbets Field, I’d glance occasionally at the broadcast booth. At that time, the Dodger announcers were Red Barber, Connie Desmond, and a very young Vin Scully. All I could think was that had to be the best job in the world. A job where you’d go to the ballpark every day, and get in for free. A job where you’d get to meet the players, travel with the team, and, I assumed, get paid. That’s what originally got me thinking about broadcasting. Most kids dream of playing Major League baseball. I dreamed of announcing Major League baseball.
In the summer of 1956, my father got a small raise, and we moved from Brooklyn to a modest tract house in North Bellmore, Long Island. My sister Susan would be born shortly thereafter. We now had a backyard, and I would practice calling games using the garden hose as a microphone. My brother David, then about nine years old, would pretend to be the athlete, and I’d announce whatever he was doing. I remember David picking up a large round rock and pretending he was Parry O’Brien, the Olympic champion and world record holder in the shot put. It was around the time of the 1956 Melbourne Olympic Games. So I called the reenactment in a backyard on Long Island.
We wouldn’t live there very much longer. In the summer of 1958, between the eighth and ninth grades, I went to a summer camp in the Poconos. The bus back home dropped us in Manhattan, and my father picked me up. He took me to his office and told me he’d gotten a promotion, and that in a couple of months we would be moving to California.
I was stunned. But this was just a few months after the Dodgers themselves had moved from Brooklyn to Los Angeles. That had broken the hearts of every Dodger fan in greater New York. But now the Michaels family would be following the team, and its stars, out west.
Gil Hodges, Duke Snider, Carl Furillo. The emerging superstars Drysdale and Koufax.
And, of course, Vin Scully.
CHAPTER 2
California Kid
WE MOVED TO CALIFORNIA in October 1958. I was almost fourteen. We were too late for the Dodgers, but a week after we arrived, my dad took me to see the Los Angeles Rams play the Chicago Bears at the Los Angeles Coliseum. “Jaguar” Jon Arnett, who had played college football at the University of Southern California, had a monster performance, running the ball, catching passes coming out of the backfield, and returning kicks. The Rams won, 41–35. The crowd that day? 100,470. So many years later, with the NFL absent from the country’s second-largest market, I hear the argument that Los Angeles wouldn’t support a team anyway. Well, with the Los Angeles metropolitan area at that time 40 percent of the size it is now, more than 100,000 showed up for a game at the Coliseum. You really think you couldn’t fill a 70,000-seat stadium today on a regular basis? Don’t be ridiculous.
We lived on the west side of Los Angeles, in Cheviot Hills. I went to Alexander Hamilton High School, and as in Brooklyn, I was going to forty to fifty Dodger games each season. The team played in the Coliseum until 1962. The tickets ranged from $1.50 for a bleacher seat to $3.50 for the best seat in the house. I was there—along with 93,102 other fans—when Roy Campanella, who’d been the Dodgers’ regular catcher in Brooklyn, and had been paralyzed in an automobile accident in January 1958—was honored on May 7, 1959. They wheeled him out as they dimmed the stadium lights, and almost everyone in the stands lit a lighter or a match in tribute. A few months later, I was at the 1959 World Series when the Dodgers beat the Chicago White Sox in six games. Games 3, 4, and 5 were at the Coliseum. The crowds each day were 92,000 and change.
Meanwhile, when I wasn’t at a game, Vin Scully was still taking me there on the radio. Scully was just twenty-two years old when he’d joined Red Barber in 1950, and then came with the team to Los Angeles, where he’d quickly become extremely popular in the land of the car—and the car radio. Now that I was a little older, I was paying closer attention to what made Vin different from all other broadcasters. I guess the best way to summarize it would be that at the time, a lot of announcing was black-and-white—here’s what happened, and here’s what happened next. Vin, though, was full-blown color, breathing life and detail into virtually every moment of every game.
When the Dodgers moved to California, owner Walter O’Malley had feared that putting the games on television—giving them away for free—would hurt them at the gate. Today teams make much more money on television contracts than ticket sales, but in the late 1950s, the thinking—and the economics—were different. In any event, no TV meant that my experience with Scully came almost entirely on the radio. I couldn’t see the game, so he’d form the images in my mind.
I loved the Dodgers. I loved the Los Angeles Rams. Eventually, years later, I’d switch my NHL allegiance from the Rangers to the Kings, who started play as an expansion team in 1967. And when my teams weren’t involved, I still watched every sports event I could on television—not necessarily to root, but instead to see what stories would emerge. I was fascinated by the competition. I was rooting for drama, a close game—and excitement. I loved the ebb and flow. I wanted extra innings. I wanted overtime. I wanted controversy, strategy, anything you could talk about with your friends for days afterward.
When I was seventeen, ABC launched a new show on Saturdays, Wide World of Sports. Years later, I’d become a regular on Wide World. There was Jim McKay’s famous line, “the thrill of victory and the agony of defeat,” as the ski jumper—a Slovenian by the name of Vinko Bogataj—careened down and then fell off the side of the jumping hill. It looked catastrophic. What you didn’t see was that thirty seconds later, he walked away with only minor injuries. Still, I always found the next line to be even more poignant. “The human drama of athletic competition.” That’s what I could never get enough of.
Even
now, when I’m in my car in Los Angeles, I’ll turn on a Dodger game and still know I’m going to hear Vin Scully, well into his eighties, describe some of that drama. I used to dream about replacing Scully and becoming the voice of the Dodgers at some point in my life. That ship, of course, has sailed. A couple of years ago, I was at an awards luncheon with Vin and said to him, “Let me get this straight. How is it that I’m going to retire before you?”
We shared a wonderful laugh.
BY THE TIME I reached the end of high school, I may not have been talking into a rubber hose in the backyard anymore, but my dream of becoming a sportscaster had not wavered one iota. So as graduation approached, and I got set to choose a college, I had two criteria above all others: to stay on the West Coast, and to find a school with a radio and television program as well as a campus radio station (and maybe even a TV station) that allowed students to broadcast sports.
My father helped me research it, and we narrowed the choice down to two schools, the University of Southern California and Arizona State. And since another criteria was going away to college, and USC was a fifteen-minute drive from our house, the decision was pretty much made for me.
So, in September 1962, I flew to ASU in Tempe and registered for classes. Standing in a long line, I ended up talking with a kid standing behind me. He was from Wisconsin, and he was there on a baseball scholarship. Not long after that, we’d run into each other again—him playing on the freshman team, and me calling games on the campus radio station for the varsity. And ten years after that, we’d find ourselves in the same place again—the visitors’ clubhouse the day before Game 1 of the 1972 World Series. The kid’s name was Sal Bando. And unbelievably, long before he was a four-time All-Star with the Oakland Athletics, and before anyone knew my name, there we were together, standing in line to register for classes at ASU.
Long before reality exceeded the dream, I discovered that Arizona State was the perfect school for me. The Sun Devils baseball team played about forty home games, and I called the majority of them for the campus radio station. The team was coached by Bobby Winkles, who would later go on to manage the Angels and A’s. Our broadcasts were live, and I also recorded some of them on reel-to-reel tape so that at some point I’d have a compilation for future auditions. I called most of the games by myself, but every now and then another kid would show up and work a few innings, but only if he didn’t have a class conflicting with the game. For me, though, calling the games was the priority. Even if the campus radio station could only be picked up within a radius of seven blocks, I loved it.
By my junior year, Bando had become a standout third baseman on the varsity, but the biggest star was a sophomore outfielder named Rick Monday. There was also an outfielder on the freshman team. The following September, he was a cornerback on the football team, and then when the baseball season began, he was the starting right fielder. There was nothing to indicate any outsize personality—he was just another one of the guys on the team. His name? Reggie Jackson. And let me tell you something—had he chosen football, I think Reggie would have been good enough to play in the NFL.
By the time I finished my four years at ASU, I had called at least 150 baseball games. I was the sports editor for the school newspaper and wrote a column called “The Hot Spot.” Year-round, I also announced football, basketball, and some track meets as well. I would walk across campus from one class to another and dream of doing the World Series and the Olympics. The dreams were as big as they could be.
Back then, Arizona State was in the Western Athletic Conference, playing the vast majority of its football games at night and in the Mountain Time Zone. The teams were usually very good, but because the games would end past the deadlines of eastern newspapers, not much national attention was paid to the program. My sophomore year, the fall of 1963, the Sun Devils were supposed to play a ten-game schedule. But we ended up playing only nine, because on November 22, President Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas. Our game against Idaho the next night, one in which ASU would have been a huge favorite, was canceled.
As it turned out, Arizona State only lost one game that season: their opener at home against Wichita State. ASU took a 13–0 lead, but then Wichita ran off thirty-three unanswered points and won the game in a stunning upset. One of the Wichita State starters? A linebacker named Bill Parcells.
Sun Devil Stadium had just opened up, and the locker rooms hadn’t been completed, so the team dressed at the old venue, Goodwin Stadium, about a half mile away, and then bused up to the new place. Well, after that game, I went back down to Goodwin to interview the players. Except that when I walked inside the locker room, no one was there. Where was everyone? Well, Frank Kush, who would coach the team for twenty-two seasons before a brief run with the Colts in the NFL, was the classic drill sergeant. Most of the players feared him—a few even despised him. Losing a game to Wichita State, to say the least, did not sit well with Kush, so when the team got off the bus at the old stadium, he had the field lights turned on. “Don’t even think about changing clothes,” he told the players. “You didn’t play at Sun Devil Stadium, so you’re going to play now.” And the team stayed in their full uniforms and went through a full-contact scrimmage that didn’t end until almost midnight.
Years later, in one of my dozens of meeting with Bill Parcells before a Monday or Sunday night game, I reminded him of that night. Bill has a steel trap for a memory and remembered everything about the game. “Well, here’s something you probably don’t know,” I said. “While your team got dressed and out of there, Frank Kush had the whole ASU team stay out on the practice field in their uniforms for a full-contact scrimmage.”
“Don’t know it?” Parcells said, laughing. “Listen. We got dressed that night and headed to the airport in a bunch of school buses. We looked out and the lights were on at the stadium. So when we drove by the field, we pushed down those half windows, all screaming at the team we just beat, ‘Screw you!’ ”
Classic Parcells.
CHAPTER 3
The Rascal
WHEN I WAS GROWING up, Vin Scully and my father were my two most important broadcasting mentors. Vin, through all the listening I did on the radio. And my father, through advice, guidance, and encouragement along the way.
By this time, my dad was becoming quite successful in his own work. Not long after we’d moved to Los Angeles, he’d switched to another agency, MCA, and they’d asked him to start a sports division, brokering deals and buying rights to sporting events. My father was instrumental in writing the original American Football League television contract with ABC—parts of which were drafted on my kitchen table in 1959. The league started in 1960, and as a high school kid, I met Lamar Hunt, Ralph Wilson, and Bud Adams, all original owners, as well as Barron Hilton, who was the original owner of the Chargers, when they started in Los Angeles. (Barron was the son of the legendary Conrad Hilton, but is probably best known today as the grandfather of Paris Hilton.)
Around that same time, my father, on behalf of MCA, began to make deals with a Cleveland sports entrepreneur by the name of Mark McCormack. McCormack was representing the then-emerging young golf stars Arnold Palmer, Jack Nicklaus, and Gary Player, and my father was involved in the deals for Shell’s Wonderful World of Golf, Big Three Golf, and other golf television specials. He and McCormack were in frequent negotiations. By the mid-sixties, as McCormack’s management company, International Management Group (IMG), was growing, he asked my father to join with him. McCormack’s idea was to take out the middleman and develop and produce his own programming. And that’s how the man who represented Joni James, and moved his family to Long Island after a nominal raise, ended up founding and running Trans World International (TWI), the television arm of IMG, which is still around today (it’s now called IMG Productions). My dad always recognized the enormous potential of sports on television, and he was very excited that my dream was to get into the business.
My father crossed paths with all kinds of sports figures, and
at one point, he met Curt Gowdy, already a broadcasting legend, then the voice of the Boston Red Sox. The Red Sox were in Scottsdale, Arizona, for spring training—about five miles from the ASU campus. My father had mentioned to Gowdy that he had a son at Arizona State who wanted to be a sports broadcaster. Gowdy told my dad to have me give him a call, and that he’d be happy to listen to a tape.
So when I called Curt, he invited me to the ballpark. I brought my tape recorder, and suddenly there I was, nineteen years old, sitting next to Curt Gowdy in some little room adjacent to the Red Sox clubhouse underneath Scottsdale Stadium, as he listened to my tape. Curt gave me some advice and some tips and a good deal of encouragement. Over the years to follow, our paths would cross and crisscross in all sorts of ways. But I’d never forget that first meeting, and that first act of kindness.
At ASU, broadcasting games was at the center of my college experience, but of course there was also time for fun. I had a journalism professor, Gordon Jones, who was a horse racing aficionado—believe it or not, he eventually became the racing writer/handicapper for the Los Angeles Herald Examiner. I’d show up for class ten minutes early, before the other students filed in, and he and I would talk about that day’s races, going over potential daily double bets. If there was a combination we liked, Professor Jones wasn’t above wrapping up class twenty minutes early so he and I could drive the thirty miles to Turf Paradise in northwest Phoenix in time to get a bet down on the first race.
Gordon Jones—first ballot, unanimous choice for the Professor Hall of Fame.
In another journalism class, on the first day of school in my sophomore year, a few buddies and I were sitting in the back, and, nineteen-year-old boys being nineteen-year-old boys, we ranked the fifteen girls in the class, 1 through 15 in terms of who we wanted to ask out on a date most. This was our own goofball version of the NFL Draft. Well, talk about a jaw-dropping moment: fast-forward to the following September, and get this—our consensus number-four pick in a classroom with fifteen girls at Arizona State University is walking down the ramp wearing a tiara with Bert Parks singing “There she is, Miss America.” What? Her name was Vonda Kay Van Dyke, and she had blown the judges away in the talent portion because she was a tremendously skilled ventriloquist. Her dummy’s name was Kurley-Q.