You Can't Make This Up: Miracles, Memories, and the Perfect Marriage of Sports and Television

by Al Michaels

  CHAPTER 8

  Wide, Wide World

  AT MY LUNCH WITH KHVH news director Don Rockwell in Hawaii in September 1970, he had been certain that Monday Night Football would be a failure. No sports fan he. Well, it was an instant hit—in fact, it was an instant phenomenon and a huge success for the NFL and ABC. Football fans were used to watching games on Sundays, and now Monday nights became a bonus—a wonderful way to end the first day of the workweek. And the audience extended well beyond a rabid fan base. Roone Arledge’s decision to go with a three-announcer booth—including the polarizing Howard Cosell—had made the show more than just a football game. It made it a national communal sports experience. After that first season, Arledge replaced Keith Jackson with Frank Gifford, creating—along with Don Meredith and Cosell—a booth with three disparate characters. The suave, good-looking former New York Giants icon. The folksy, likeable, witty ex–Dallas Cowboys quarterback. And the nasal, pontificating, nonpracticing lawyer from New York. All sitting there together in these hideous yellow blazers as a football game was being played out in front of them.

  By 1976, Monday Night Football had been on the air for six seasons, and Arledge would try to replicate its success in the spring and summer. So Monday Night Baseball was conceived. At that pre-cable time, there was only one nationally televised Game of the Week—Saturdays on NBC. If you lived in Denver or Phoenix or a market without a team, that was your only chance to watch a Major League Baseball game. So Monday Night Baseball—a second national baseball telecast—was a big deal. Even if it wasn’t going to draw ratings comparable to Monday Night Football, it would still be significant. And Roone Arledge’s plan was to pattern the baseball show after the football show: three diverse men in the booth—no classic “pure” analyst, but a play-by-play man, a former athlete with a good sense of humor, and a provocateur.

  In March, just as all the turmoil surrounding the San Francisco Giants ownership situation was transpiring, I got a call from Herb Granath, an executive at ABC Sports, asking me to come to New York to audition for Monday Night Baseball. I immediately went to my bosses at KSFO, Bert West and Herb Briggin, to run it by them, because if I got the job, I would have to miss ten to twelve Giants broadcasts during the season. They gave me the go-ahead, feeling it would be good for them, too, if their local announcer had national exposure.

  ABC’s plan was to televise two games each Monday. An “A” game would go to the majority of the country, and then a “B” game would be broadcast to 20–30 percent of the country—while also providing insurance that there would be a telecast if the “A” game got rained out. I was interviewing for the play-by-play role on the “B” game. The network had already decided that their No. 1 team would be Bob Prince, Bob Uecker, and Warner Wolf. Prince was the longtime voice of the Pittsburgh Pirates. Uecker was laugh-out-loud funny, a former player who had made a smooth transition to become part of the Milwaukee Brewers’ broadcast team. (Lots more on Uecker later.) And Wolf was a sports anchor in the Washington, D.C., market at the time. I later learned that Ben Bradlee, the longtime Washington Post executive editor, had grown smitten with Wolf and had called Roone Arledge, touting him as “the next Howard Cosell.” A talent scout Ben Bradlee was not!

  At my audition in New York, I went into a little audio booth with a monitor where they rolled a tape of a game and I did three or four “pretend” innings. It was a tough way to try to re-create what I’d normally be doing live. I thought my audition stunk. But everyone understood the deal and I was offered the job a few days later. My broadcast partners would be Norm Cash, the former Tiger All-Star first baseman, and Bob Gibson, the future Hall of Fame pitcher who had just retired from the Cardinals. That 1976 season—at least logistically for me—would be absolutely insane.

  Monday Night Baseball would debut on the first Monday of the season and run through late August, when Monday Night Football would take over the time slot. From Tuesdays through Sundays I would call the Giants’ games and then fly to the Monday night game. One time, the Giants played a Sunday afternoon doubleheader at Candlestick, and I caught a red-eye flight to New York. I arrived at JFK at dawn, checked into a hotel, slept a couple of hours, broadcast the Monday night game at Yankee Stadium, and then got back on a plane the next morning to call Giants games Tuesday night and Wednesday afternoon in San Francisco. Thursday, we left for a series in Montreal. And the next Monday Night Baseball game was back on the West Coast. Naturally, the Giants were still back east so the next morning it was back to thirty-seven thousand feet for another five hours. Sadly, these were before the days of frequent flier miles.

  By this point in my career, I’d called more than a thousand games. I know little about playing music, but I was still perfecting how to use my voice as an instrument. You always want to match the crowd. You don’t want to be shouting while the crowd is quiet, and you don’t want to be whispering when the crowd is screaming. I always try to be in sync with the action, and in the more dramatic moments, it’s particularly important to be in lockstep with the game. The game is the melody and the announcer provides the lyrics. When it all flows as one, it’s wonderful. But if you’re off-key, to the audience, it’s cacophony.

  When I anticipate something very important or particularly relevant to the game is about to happen, I will try through my inflection to let the audience know that. Pay close attention, because this is something that could truly determine the outcome of the game. It may only be the third inning or the second quarter, but you know what, folks? This is an important juncture.

  Crowds also differ. For instance, the New York crowds and the Philadelphia crowds have always been very sophisticated in terms of understanding nuances and subtleties. When an outfielder throws to the wrong base, they know it—collectively, you can hear a throaty groan, and a moment later, the booing starts. In Chicago, the fans can often be that way, too. In other cities, generally those with expansion or relocated franchises, the fans might not be as attuned to the finer points of the game. As a broadcaster, I’m always conscious of this.

  I spent that whole 1976 season crisscrossing the country. Bill Rigney, John “the Count” Montefusco, and Giants six days a week, and the ABC telecast on Monday. I was the King of the Redeye. But I was young and my body could take it and I was thrilled for the opportunity. I couldn’t have done this without Linda Michaels. Linda and I had two young children at home, and while I was on the road, which was often, she held down the fort. There was a nice payoff as the calendar year wound down—ABC offered me a full-time network job.

  AS WITH THE REDS, I felt I could have stayed with the Giants for a long time. We loved the Bay Area and the team finally seemed to be heading in the right direction with Bob Lurie as the owner. But the ABC offer came very close to mirroring what I had in mind when I first dreamed of becoming a sportscaster. I’d continue to do baseball, and then get to do all sorts of other events—from college football to the Olympics to Wide World of Sports. And I could remain in the Bay Area, where our family was very comfortable. After what felt like a series of early career milestones—getting the Reds job, doing the World Series and Olympics in 1972, doing regional NFL football and the “B” game on Monday Night Baseball—this would be the capstone. So at the end of December 1976, I parted ways with KSFO and the Giants and started full-time at ABC.

  At ABC, I was the new kid in town. It was like becoming a junior partner at a prestigious law firm and looking up to the titans of your profession. When I arrived, ABC had a murderers’ row of talent: Howard Cosell, Jim McKay, Frank Gifford, Chris Schenkel, Keith Jackson. The network was pegging me as their up-and-comer. I wanted to be that guy a little faster than they did. It wouldn’t be a straight line to my goal of reaching the apex. There were some bumps and bruises along the way. For example, I now had an agent—the high-powered Ed Hookstratten. There was little question that when I was signing full-time that I’d be elevated to the Monday Night Baseball “A” game. Bob Prince had been fired in August. It wasn’t specific
ally written into the deal but Hookstratten said don’t worry—it was obvious. Along the way, at some point in the negotiations, Hookstratten had gotten into a hissing contest with Arledge. I didn’t find out about it until months later when the production schedule came out and I was still on the “B” game and Keith Jackson would be doing the “A” game. I was beside myself. It would be a great life lesson. Pay strict attention to every detail when it involves a contract or prepare to get blindsided. Shortly after that, I hired a new agent.

  Overall, though, in the grand scheme of things at ABC, it was still very, very exciting. In my first year, I would continue to do baseball; college football, which at the time, was monopolized by ABC; and a potpourri of events for Wide World of Sports. Wide World was as much travelogue as sports programming. It really did “span the globe to bring you the constant variety of sport,” as Jim McKay said each week in the introduction, with images of everything from weight lifting to rodeo to figure skating to a demolition derby flashing on the screen.

  The premise of the show worked extremely well at that time. Viewers had never seen cliff diving from Acapulco or wrist wrestling from Petaluma, California. These might have been oddball sports, but there would be a certain curiosity. At that time, obviously, the Internet didn’t exist, and satellite technology was in its infancy. Satellite time was so prohibitively expensive that very few events had been broadcast from outside the United States. This was a groundbreaking show. Wide World took you to places you’d never seen before. It went behind the Iron Curtain often. And the viewer would get pulled in—and start caring about the competitors and the competition.

  In the pre-computer age, every three months, the ABC announcers would receive in the mail a three-page list of assignments—one for each month. From the beginning, when my list came in the mail, I would sit down at the kitchen table and sneak up on it. I would cover up everything on the sheet except the announcer column, and when I’d come upon my name, I’d slowly pull back the paper that was covering the event column to see what my assignment would be. It would vary from A to Z, and could take you anyplace on the globe.

  All that said, my first ever staff assignment for ABC was—drum roll, please—the World Barrel Jumping Championships in the Chicago suburb of Northbrook, Illinois. A week later, Chris Schenkel would be covering skiing in Kitzbuhel, Austria, so I would be filling in for Chris—at a Pro Bowlers Tour stop in Florissant, Missouri, just outside St. Louis. I remember thinking as I was going down that first list: What? I’d already been to Chicago and St. Louis several times. But then I sneaked up on at my third event on the list—and voila! I would be covering the World Cresta Run Championships in St. Moritz, Switzerland, in mid-February. Now we’re talking.

  For as much travel as I’d done in the United States, I’d never been to Europe. It was exhilarating to get on the plane in San Francisco, connect in New York, and then head over the Atlantic Ocean. I couldn’t sleep on the New York to Zurich portion of the flight because I was filled with anticipation. On descent, I couldn’t wait until we broke out of the clouds and I could see Europe for the first time.

  It was a foggy day in Zurich. I collected my luggage, and went straight to the railway station, where I boarded a train for the two-and-a-half-hour ride to St. Moritz. What was the Cresta Run? It was basically a bobsled course traversed by individuals going downhill face-first on small sleds. It’s similar to the skeleton competition in today’s Winter Olympics. What made it unique was that there were no Cresta Run professionals. Going down this dangerous, icy course were millionaires, royalty, and other men of great wealth. These guys were either rich enough to have winter homes in the area or stay in the ritzy hotels in one of the most exclusive resort cities in the world. It was high society getting its kicks through a life-threatening stunt. At the end of the competition, there was none of the normal beer- or champagne-spraying that you’d see in an American locker room. Instead, these characters, along with their spectacularly bejeweled wives and/or girlfriends (and in some cases, both), would head into town to eat several ounces of Beluga caviar and wash it down with Dom Perignon.

  The following weekend, I would go to Norway for the World Ski Flying Championships. Ski flying is basically ski jumping on a larger hill. For the five days between St. Moritz and Scandinavia, I headed to London, where the Cresta Run show would be edited and prepared for my voiceover. Then it was off to Oslo, and an hour’s drive to a small town called Vikersund. The ski flying event would take place on that Saturday morning. I had no idea what the actual temperature was. All I knew is that I could not feel a single extremity. Diamond Head was four universes away. It was so insanely frigid that when we were taping the scene set at the foot of the jump, my mouth wouldn’t move. Literally. Someone pumped some hot chocolate into me and put some balm on my face, and we barely got the opening done.

  Wide World was often a very difficult logistical challenge. Much of what we covered in Europe would be taped and aired on Wide World a week or two later (like that Cresta Run show), but there was also the occasional live transmission, and, in other instances, shows that would be taped early in the day to air that afternoon in the States—“same-day coverage,” we called it. In those years, satellite time to beam live or same-day coverage of events back to the States for broadcast was very expensive. Live events were ultimately simple—they’d be transmitted as they took place—but for same-day coverage, the network would reserve a finite window of time, and there was a lot of pressure to get the show fully edited to “feed” back to New York during that interval.

  In 1981, I would be back again at the World Ski Flying Championships—this time being held in Oberstdorf, West Germany. The event took place in the morning—approximately 10 A.M. to 12:30 P.M. local time—and was scheduled to air on Wide World of Sports later that day—4:30 P.M. on the East Coast. The plan was to edit the two-and-a-half-hour event into a half hour of television content—basically, just feature the top competitors, tell their stories, and show their jumps. It was the kind of condensed storytelling coverage that Roone Arledge, the president of ABC Sports, had pioneered on Olympic coverage and Wide World. But with quick turnarounds, it wasn’t easy.

  The producer in Oberstdorf was Doug Wilson. Doug was a very talented and artistic producer who was renowned at ABC for his keen eye and skill at putting together taped shows. On many of those, he typically had days or weeks to edit. In Oberstdorf, Doug only had about seven hours between the end of the event and the window of satellite time that had been booked. Typically, a 60–90 minute window would be reserved to feed a half-hour segment (really closer to twenty minutes when you factor in commercial breaks) from Europe to the United States.

  My broadcast partner that day was Art Devlin, a former ski jumper from Lake Placid, New York, who’d competed in the 1952 and 1956 Olympics. Art was ABC’s Nordic sports analyst—which meant he worked ski jumping events, cross-country skiing events, and of course, ski flying events for Wide World of Sports. I’d first met Art in Sapporo, Japan, in 1972 when I’d made my Olympic broadcasting debut. Art, like me, was one of the nine total announcers NBC had sent over for those Winter Games.

  Art and I recorded a good portion of the broadcast “live-to-tape”—as the event was actually taking place. Before the competition began, we recorded our introduction—“the scene set,” in television parlance—and right after the event concluded, we did an on-camera close. Whatever we didn’t cover from the site we would voice later that evening, once the editing was complete. And the result would (hopefully) be a seamless half hour of network television.

  When the competition ended, Art and I went back to our hotel to take a break while the crew, led by Doug Wilson, hunkered down in the edit rooms (which were actually tiny vestibules in trailers near the site). We returned a few hours later to learn that Doug and his gang were behind schedule, still working feverishly with the satellite window fast approaching. The atmosphere was tense—if the show wasn’t fed by the end of the satellite window, it would c
ost the network many thousands of dollars to extend the window, and draw the ire of executives back in New York. And then, of course, there was the additional risk of not getting the show fed to New York in time for the actual broadcast, which would be a total disaster.

  Art and I soon got started and voiced over—or “laid down”—most of our commentary. But the satellite clock was ticking. There were still the last couple of minutes of the show to voice over—the final two jumps that would determine the winner. Now there was less than ten minutes of satellite time remaining. Art and I sat in the booth, waiting to get the cue from Doug to resume and finish up. Now there were seven minutes left in the window. Six minutes. Finally, with five minutes to go—and about two minutes of content to record—we were ready to call the next-to-last jumper of the day. I think it was Armin Kogler of Austria, who was in second or third place and needed one more good jump to secure a medal, perhaps even gold.

  The tape rolls and as Kogler becomes airborne, Art excitedly shouts, “Oh, it’s a tremendous jump and he’s well out over the tips of his skis!” Not two seconds after Kogler has left the lip of the ramp, our monitor goes blank. Now we have a technical issue.

  In our headsets, Wilson says, “Hang on—it’ll be fixed in a minute.”

  Art took his headset off and opened the door for some fresh air as I waited nervously. Now we’re totally up against the gun. Then Art puts his headset back on and we’re ready to resume. The tape rolls.

  “Oh, it’s a terrible jump!” Art bellowed.

  Wilson yells, “Stop!”

  “Art—it’s a great jump, what are you doing?”

  We were all so exhausted at that point that Devlin thought we were rolling in the next jump by another guy.

  “Oh, that’s Kogler again? Sorry.”

  Somehow, someway, we got it all done with thirty seconds of satellite time on the clock. The whole show had been successfully fed. And America got to see Armin Kogler win a silver medal with a final leap that walked a fine line between tremendous and terrible.