by Al Michaels
Coming down to the last day, our guy, Llenas, and their guy, Valentine, were in a virtual tie. I was now back in Honolulu, again re-creating the final regular season games that had no impact on the standings. On the very last day of the season, we had heard from Spokane—and remember, this is through rudimentary communication—that Valentine had gotten two hits with the help of very liberal hometown official scoring. When I heard about this, I made a big deal of it during our re-creation. “Llenas should have won the batting title, but because of some local-yokel scoring decisions, Valentine has won the batting title!” So to everyone listening in Hawaii, I had helped turn Valentine into a major villain.
A couple of days later, in the championship series to decide the Pacific Coast League title, the Islanders opened in Spokane, and we were televising the games back to Hawaii. The production was so cheap that we had only four cameras, and two of them went caput early in the game. Apollo 11 had sent better-looking pictures back from the moon fourteen months earlier. We lost both games, 5–3 and 12–4.
So the Islanders headed back to Hawaii, down two games to none. The fans were already upset and booed Valentine vigorously every time he came up to bat. Spokane won Game 3, 5–0. Now the bloom was almost entirely off the rose and the Islanders, this team that was so good during the regular season, were about to get swept. And who leads off in Game 4? Bobby Valentine. The crowd continued to take all of its frustrations out on him. We had a pitcher, Greg Washburn, who had appeared in a few games for the California Angels the year before. On the first pitch of the game, Washburn threw a fastball and hit Valentine squarely in the face. To this day, I can still hear that sound in my mind’s ear—it was just sickening. Valentine was splayed in the batter’s box and ended up in a local hospital for several days.
I remember trying to tell myself, I didn’t create this. But I felt an overwhelming sense of guilt. I had helped make Bobby Valentine this monster. And now he was laid out in the dirt. Fans would always talk about Bobby’s star-crossed career, and the injuries that cost him the chance to become the player most people thought he would be. This was the start of that. He was twenty years old at the time. I was twenty-four. It made me think about getting everything I would say on the air exactly right. It’s so much easier today to collect and validate facts. I had based an assumption on hearsay—there was no video (or other proof) that the official scorer in Spokane had really done anything odious. I had embellished without verifying. It would turn out to be a career lesson for me. Get it right.
ON THURSDAY, FEBRUARY 12, 1970, I had a very nervous wife. Linda was pregnant and though she was three weeks short of her due date, she felt like she was ready to go into labor. She was also superstitious. She either wanted to give birth right then, or hold off until Saturday. She didn’t want to have her baby born on Friday the Thirteenth. But nature ran its course and Steven Scott Michaels—I wanted a Hawaiian middle name, Linda didn’t; as any husband knows, you pick your battles—was born on Friday, February 13, 1970, at Kapi’olani Hospital in Honolulu, the same hospital where Barack Obama had been born about a decade earlier. (Whenever the Obama “birther” debate arises, I remind Steven that we do have his birth certificate.)
Becoming a father for the first time was incredible. I’d come home and just stare at this infant in the crib. In April, after the baseball season had started, I invited my boss, Jack Quinn, and Chuck Tanner, the Islanders’ manager, to the apartment for dinner. I can still see Chuck, who at that time was forty-one years old, had played in the majors for eight years, and would go on to manage the “We Are Family” 1979 world champion Pirates, cuchee-cooing Steven. We took the baby to the ballpark as well. It’s ironic to realize how much fatherhood and parental norms have changed. If a ballplayer was on the road in those years, and his wife went into labor, the player almost always stayed on the road. Steven was born at 8:30 A.M. that Friday, and ten hours later, I called a high school basketball game. Thank God I wasn’t away. My daughter’s birth, however, would turn out to be a different tale—more on that later.
Then, as now, to make it in broadcasting it was important to get “reps”—to get on the air as much as possible. It’s like a baseball player getting at bats. Simulated games aren’t the same as real games. The more you’re out there—under the lights, in real game situations—the more comfortable you get, the more nuances of the trade you learn, the more skilled you get at handling curveballs—literally for a ballplayer, and figuratively for a broadcaster.
In Hawaii, I got plenty of reps on radio and television. The Islanders played seventy-three home games each season. I did five high school and/or University of Hawaii football games a weekend for three months in each of my three years there. That’s around 180 games. If you were working for an NFL team, that’s a decade’s worth of work. And when you factor in high school, University of Hawaii, and Armed Forces League contests, I called roughly seventy-five basketball games a year as well. I often worked by myself, but worked from time to time with a popular figure in Honolulu, Chuck Leahey.
There were times I would call four straight games during the Hawaii state high school basketball tournament. We would stay on the air between games and during halftimes, so when I was on my own, I would yack for ten straight hours. Invariably, Ephraim “Red” Rocha, the University of Hawaii head basketball coach, would be at the games, scouting local prospects. He was a former NBA player whom I remembered watching when he was on the Syracuse Nationals (who in 1963 became the Philadelphia 76ers). He was also a nonstop talker who could give a woodpecker a headache. So when I needed a bathroom break or wanted to get a hot dog, I would grab Red, have him put on a headset, and tell him to keep talking until I came back to the table. Couldn’t have done it without him.
One night in 1969, Long Beach State was in town to play the University of Hawaii and they had a young coach on the rise. Before the game, the coach came up to me and introduced himself. “You’re doing a great job,” he said. I was thrilled, but wondered how he had any idea. How did he know about me? It turned out he had been driving around the island the night before and happened to tune in to a high school game on the car radio. It was a reminder—you never know who is listening or watching. The coach’s name: Jerry Tarkanian.
I was also working at a local television station, KHVH, the ABC affiliate in Honolulu, delivering the sports report on the six and ten o’clock news every night. I would do the six o’clock show, race to the stadium or arena, depending on the time of year, to do baseball, football, or basketball, and then head back to the studio for the late news.
Hawaii natives have an expression for Californians, “dumb coast haole” (HOW-lee), which basically translates to “outsider.” I didn’t want that to be me. One thing I did to win favor with the locals: I went to great lengths to pronounce every name correctly. You lose credibility with the audience if you call LeBron James Lee Bron, or Robert Griffin III Robert Griffith III. But lots of Samoan or Filipino or native Hawaiian names aren’t that easy or obvious to pronounce correctly. So I’d often call a parent of a high school player to have them pronounce the name for me. When you’re doing a McKinley High School basketball game, with turnovers galore and possessions changing every few seconds, and you can identify five Samoan players running a fast break—and get it right—it’s a beautiful melody. What I learned was if you screwed it up, you’d often hear from the family. On the flip side, they would really appreciate that you took the extra effort to get it right.
Looking back on my work schedule in Hawaii, it was crazy, and should have been exhausting. But I loved every minute of it. I got reps. I got experience. I was getting a nice reputation. I got better. And while talent is important, it helps to have good fortune. I thought the job with the Lakers was my Big Break. It turned out to be a mini-disaster. But ultimately, I wound up in the right place at the right time. One call from Hawaii and next thing I knew, I was not only with Islanders and working for a great boss, Jack Quinn, but also announcing dozens of other baske
tball and football games and appearing on television twice a day. I was getting the equivalent of five years’ experience for every one year on the calendar.
Some other opportunities came my way, too. In 1969 the show Hawaii Five-O was in its second season and starting to gain widespread popularity. The exteriors were filmed all over Oahu and many of the interior scenes shot at Diamond Head Studios. CBS had to consider the expense of flying cast members back and forth between Hawaii and the mainland. Jack Lord and James MacArthur were in Hawaii the majority of the time. To fill other small roles, though, they would often “borrow” members of the local media.
One day I got a call from someone involved in the production of the show. They were asking if I would be in an upcoming episode, playing the role of a young public defender. A number of my colleagues at KHVH had played bit roles and they had fun. “Sure,” I told them.
I got a copy of the script and, being the perfectionist I am, I made sure I had every line right, every nuance down impeccably. I practiced in front of a mirror. I practiced in front of Linda a hundred times. On the day of the shoot, I checked in at Diamond Head Studios. (I thought nothing of it at the time, but another guest star on the episode was a young actor named Christopher Walken.) Jack Lord was going to be in my scene but I didn’t see him when I arrived. A production assistant greeted me. They put some makeup on me, and I went onto the set. My scene was going to take place inside a jail cell. As local public defender Dave Bronstein, I was going to visit my client, the inmate, who was charged with murder.
Finally, Lord appeared. He was a big man physically, with a larger-than-life persona. He didn’t so much as acknowledge me. He said something to the cameraman. He said something to the director. I might as well have been invisible. No “hello,” no “aloha,” no “welcome,” no nothing.
Then it was lights-camera-action, the scene began, and I had the first lines. I said about five words and all of a sudden, Lord looked toward the camera and in this booming voice, he yelled, “Cut!”
I was panicked. I must have screwed up. What did I do? How did I piss Jack Lord off so quickly? I tried to figure out what I had done wrong. Then Lord spoke again. Glaring at a production assistant behind the camera, he barked, “I need more hand makeup!”
What the . . . ? Hand makeup?? How could he even know he needed hand makeup?
Lord got his hand makeup in a flash. We then did the scene in about five takes. Then I left, still without a shred of off-the-set interaction with Lord. The episode ran a few months later. (You can check it out on the Internet—the episode is from season two and aired January 14, 1970, titled “Run, Johnny Run.”) I got paid scale—in those days, as I recall, around eighty-five dollars. Hooray for Hollywood.
THE HAWAII ISLANDERS WERE located more than twenty-five hundred miles from the closest major-league market. When I arrived in 1968, the team was the Triple-A farm club of the Chicago White Sox. Then, in 1969, Jack Quinn made a deal to become the California Angels’ Triple-A affiliate, and also decided to change the business model. There would still be young Angels prospects on the roster, but he was going to surround them with veteran players—former big leaguers at the tail end of their careers. As a fan, and a senior in high school, I saw Bo Belinsky pitch a no-hitter for the Angels on May 5, 1962, against the Orioles at just-opened Dodger Stadium. Bo wound up with the Islanders while I was there, and I called a no-hitter he pitched for Hawaii against Tacoma.
We signed a pitcher who had appeared in three World Series for the Yankees, Jim Coates. We signed Dennis Bennett, who was then in his thirties, and had had some productive years for the Phillies and Red Sox. Bennett would win eighteen games in 1970 for the Islanders. Elroy Face, a pitcher who was approaching his fortieth birthday, but who in 1959 had been an astonishing 18-1 as a reliever for the Pittsburgh Pirates, became a Hawaii Islander. Quinn also bought the contract of former All-Star Juan Pizarro, who went 9-0 in nine starts for Hawaii in 1970 and then was sold to the Cubs.
We had some promising prospects from the Angels organization as well. Marty Perez was the Islanders’ shortstop in 1970, and then was traded to the Braves in 1971, and spent most of his six seasons in Atlanta as a starter. We had a young second baseman, Doug Griffin, who’d wind up winning a Gold Glove in Boston in 1972. Overall, we had a number of players with some name recognition—but not as many up-and-coming prospects as the Angels would have liked. It was more important to the parent team that we developed young talent. But it was more important to Quinn to draw fans, win games, and make money.
Despite this push and pull with the parent club, around the baseball industry the Islanders were seen as a model for what a minor-league team could be. Outstanding attendance (approximately 450,000 fans in 1970—a huge number in those days), good management, an entertaining product on the field. When that happens, a lot of people in the organization benefit by association. It happens in all sports, and is still the case today. If you work for the San Antonio Spurs or the St. Louis Cardinals, that’s a good connection. And in Hawaii, I knew that my name was getting out there and circulating among major-league teams—at least in part because I was with the Islanders.
In the late summer of 1970, the Angels’ farm director, Roland Hemond, whom I’d gotten to know well, and who was Jack Quinn’s brother-in-law, was going to be named the Chicago White Sox’ new general manager. And as soon as the PCL playoffs were over, he was going to hire Chuck Tanner to be the White Sox manager. Roland told me he wanted to bring me to Chicago to be the number-one announcer for the White Sox, and that he and Chuck would begin to lobby for me as soon as they got to Chicago. He thought he could get the deal done, and just needed to convince the White Sox owner, John Allyn.
I was over the moon. The big leagues were looming. The Islanders’ season ended and I waited about six weeks. “It’s coming along, we’re working on it,” Hemond kept telling me. The job was open. Then, in late October, I picked up the phone and I could tell from Roland’s voice it wasn’t good news. “Allyn loves your tape and feels you have a great future,” he said. “But he just can’t bring himself to hire someone in his mid-twenties and bring him into a market as big as Chicago as the number-one announcer.”
Too young for a big job again?
The White Sox wound up hiring Harry Caray, who’d been a popular figure in St. Louis broadcasting Cardinal games before getting fired, and then had spent a year in Oakland. He’d wind up spending eleven seasons as the White Sox announcer, and then of course move across town in 1982 to finish his iconic career with the Cubs.
ON SEPTEMBER 21, 1970, I had lunch with Don Rockwell, the news director of KHVH. I remember the date because we talked about a show that the ABC network was debuting that night: Monday Night Football.
The show was in good measure the brainchild of Roone Arledge, the president of ABC Sports. In the late 1960s, the NFL had played a handful of random games on Monday nights. The ratings were ho-hum. NFL games were as much a part of Sunday as going to church, so pushing the last game of the week to prime time on Monday was a gamble. Pete Rozelle was the commissioner, and had experience with night football games when he was the publicity director of the Los Angeles Rams in the late fifties. The Rams had played some night games when he was there, and he believed that televising a game every Monday night could work.
ABC was a distant third behind CBS and NBC in a three-network universe. So ABC had the least to lose by doing this.
Arledge knew that. But Rozelle preferred that the games not necessarily be on the (distant) third-place network in a three-way race. Rozelle asked the others first. NBC passed, fearful of letting football supplant its popular Movie of the Week program. CBS passed, too. They weren’t going to bump their Monday night hit Mayberry R.F.D. So almost by default, the slate of Monday night football games went to ABC, which replaced two shows—The Survivors and Love, American Style—to make room in the lineup.
When the rights went to ABC, Arledge felt it was very important to pick his own announcers. Thi
s was uncommon. In those days, if a league didn’t actually handpick the broadcasters, they had a strong influence on whom the networks could use on the games.
What’s more, for the Monday Night Football games, Arledge didn’t want to utilize just two announcers on the telecast, as was customary. He wanted a three-man booth. And one ofthe hires he had in mind was a former lawyer turned boxing analyst, an iconoclast who used words like supercilious and bellicosity on the air. That, of course, was Howard Cosell.
The NFL agreed. The New York Jets played the Cleveland Browns in the first Monday night game in 1970. Keith Jackson was the play-by-play announcer/straight man. And Cosell and Don Meredith, the folksy, recently retired Cowboys quarterback, were the color commentators. Don Rockwell, the news director, who was not a sports fan, said the network was making a disastrous decision and that the ratings would be embarrassing. I, on the other hand, thought it would be a phenomenal success, which was mainly due to my wishful thinking. Network sports in prime time? Yeah!
Meanwhile, in mid-November, while I was still getting over the rejection from the White Sox, came a call from the Cincinnati Reds. They were looking for a new radio play-by-play man. Would I fly to Cincinnati for an interview? Of course.
After another weekend of doing five football games—two Friday night high school games, two Saturday high school games, and a University of Hawaii game—I went to the airport to take a red-eye flight to Cincinnati with a connection in Los Angeles, where my mother met me at the airport to bring me my father’s overcoat and scarf so I’d have something to wear in Cincinnati, where I arrived early Sunday evening.