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

by Al Michaels

  MY MOST UNFORGETTABLE WIDE World assignment of all came when I was dispatched to an event that been a longtime staple of Wide World of Sports: Motorcycles on Ice, in the small town of Inzell, nestled in the Bavarian Alps in what was then West Germany. It featured a large group of Europeans—Poles, Slavs, Austrians, Czechs, Soviets, and East and West Germans—who gathered to race motorcycles on what was basically an outdoor speed skating track. The bikes’ tires were outfitted with large spikes. The event started in the early evening but the crowd consisted primarily of fifteen thousand wild and woolly Germans and Austrians—Salzburg was an easy drive away—who had made their way to the site around lunchtime to start tailgating. At that moment, the parking lot had become the Schnapps capital of the planet.

  Our producer at that event, Geoff Mason, was always looking for different little twists. His idea on this night was simple: for the scene set, instead of my simply looking at the camera to welcome everybody, I would ride one of the motorcycles down a straightaway, stop at the finish line, take off my helmet, and say, “Hi, I’m Al Michaels and welcome to Inzell, West Germany, for Motorcycles on Ice.”

  As the new kid on the ABC Sports block, I was trying to make a favorable first impression. You want to be collegial and collaborative and a team player. So I concealed a potentially important piece of information from Mason: The only bike I had ever ridden was a Schwinn. I’d never been on a motorcycle, much less driven one, and I didn’t know how one worked or what I was supposed to do. And, oh, by the way, this is all supposed to happen on ice, on national television! But I was game.

  The first order of business was outfitting me in motorcycle leathers so I looked the part. Somebody on our crew found a Russian rider who hadn’t made the cut in the preliminary races and was willing to lend me his. The problem was that the guy was probably five six and weighed 145 pounds. I was five ten, 180. I felt like I was being poured into a straitjacket. Breathing became an issue.

  I was flanked by some of the other riders. There was Czech being spoken on one side of me, Russian on another, and German behind me. Of course, I couldn’t hear much of anything anyway, because I was wearing a helmet that was scrunched onto my noggin. I had no idea what I was doing—Is this the clutch? Do I turn it or twist it?—and there were thousands of tipsy spectators now watching.

  All I know is that at one point I started to rev the engine. Thinking back, I was beginning to let the clutch out, which would have launched me a hundred feet in the air, if not for one of the Soviets, who grabbed my hand and kept the clutch engaged so I couldn’t move—and clearly preventing me from taking off and either killing myself or just launching me into space, never to come back.

  At that point, Mason decided it was prudent to kill the idea. Thank you, God. There’s a problem, though. It’s 7:20 and the races would start at 7:30. And we needed a scene set, even if it was going to be less ambitious. Quickly it was decided that I’d change out of the leathers—no easy task—and just wear my yellow ABC parka, go over to the finish line, and tape the open.

  Except now there was another problem. Our audio crew was working to fix a technical glitch. And so as I stood there in my parka, waiting for the cue, an announcement came over the PA system, followed by whistling and shrieking. Whistling, of course, is the European form of booing. The next whistling sounds I heard were bottles being thrown past my head. I turned to my interpreter. “What the hell is going on?”

  He looked straight ahead. “Oh, they just announced that the race is going to start late because the American television production needs more time.” Mason had gotten the word to the PA announcer.

  “Are you out of your mind?” I yelled to Mason in the truck. He couldn’t even hear me. My mike still wasn’t working. So there I am, having barely avoided death on a motorcycle with protruding spikes revving up on a blanket of ice—and now I’m going to be sliced open by vodka bottles!

  Maybe it was time to go back to the Pro Bowlers Tour.

  In the end, as always, we got it done. I delivered my opening (standing, not riding), the races started, and the telecast went well. Somehow, someway, everything on Wide World of Sports would work out. Roone Arledge must have known some higher being.

  CHAPTER 9

  Do You Believe in Miracles?

  ROONE ARLEDGE ALWAYS TOOK his time and made announcing assignments later than any of us preferred. So in the fall of 1979, I knew that in February I’d be covering the 1980 Winter Olympics in Lake Placid, New York—but not which events. Figure skating was the domain of Jim McKay and Dick Button, so I could cross that one off the list. Frank Gifford and Bob Beattie were certain to be assigned to alpine skiing. Those characters couldn’t get enough of the après-ski scene and Roone, as one of Frank’s best friends, was happy to oblige. Speed skating would be a plum assignment because Eric Heiden, a 21-year-old from Wisconsin, was favored to win five gold medals. If a megastar would come out of these Games, it was Heiden. Ski jumping, cross-country skiing, and biathlon held little appeal. As far as hockey was concerned, I thought it would provide a decent story but the Soviets had won the gold medal at every Olympics dating back to 1964, and would be the heavy favorites again in Lake Placid.

  When the assignments finally came out a few weeks before the Games, sure enough, I’d been given hockey. Why? Because Dennis Lewin, one of our producers, recalled that I had called the gold medal game on NBC at the 1972 Games. In addition, Howard Cosell had never called a hockey game. Neither had Keith Jackson, nor Chris Schenkel, nor Jim McKay, nor Bill Flemming, nor anyone else on the staff. So I had more hockey experience than any of the other guys. Sixty minutes worth! And I could explain icing and offside.

  I felt good about the assignment—in the Winter Olympics, an indoor role is always good—and the more I learned about the U.S. team, the better I felt. It looked like they would have a decent shot at a bronze medal. I felt better still when I found out my partner would be Ken Dryden, the former Montreal Canadiens goalie whom, almost a decade earlier, I’d watched from the balcony at the Montreal Forum along with Pete Rose, Johnny Bench, and a couple of other Cincinnati Reds. Dryden had just retired at the age of thirty-one, and was just getting started on what has been an eclectic career as a writer, scholar, lawyer, broadcaster, businessman, and politician. As Lake Placid approached, Art Kaminsky, Ken’s agent and old friend from Cornell, had pushed ABC to hire Dryden as the hockey analyst for the Olympics. Dryden had always followed all sports, and when the ABC execs asked him whom he might like to work with, he had said, “How about Al Michaels?” They replied, “Great—that’s exactly who we were thinking about.”

  By December 1979, we were ramping up our prep work. In the middle of the month, an event called the Izvestia Tournament, named for the newspaper that sponsored it and featuring the national hockey teams from several countries, would be held in Moscow. Ken and I flew there to watch Finland, Sweden, Canada, Czechoslovakia, and the Soviet Union itself in action. We would be there four days and get to watch somewhere around a dozen games. Dryden flew in from Montreal, I flew in from the Bay Area, and we met at the hotel in Moscow and had dinner the night before the tournament started. We hit it off immediately. Ken was extremely smart, impeccably articulate, and very measured. (To this day, I contend that he should have been the prime minister of Canada.) At the end of the meal, after the table had been cleared, we sat there talking about the difference between the styles of play in the NHL and international hockey. Ken explained the impact of the wider rink in international play, and how the different geometry affected strategy. I found it fascinating, superbly well considered, and brilliantly summarized. After about this ten-minute dissertation, he says to me, “So, do you think this is the type of thing that will interest our audience?”

  “Yes. Yes I do,” I responded. “But Ken, let me introduce you to the world of television. Can you get it down to eight seconds?”

  AGAIN, THE EXPECTATIONS FOR the U.S. team were modest. A bronze medal would be considered a decent achievement. A
nd there was no question about who would win the gold. Dryden had played against the Soviets in the seventies and he and I saw the Soviet team play six or seven games before the Olympics. They toyed with the competition. Three days before the Olympics began, the Soviet team played an exhibition game against the U.S. team at Madison Square Garden. The final score was 10–3, Soviets. It looked more like 20–0.

  This, of course, was before the International Olympic Committee allowed professionals to compete. So, in theory, the Olympics were an amateur competition, and the U.S. team was mainly composed of kids in college or those who had recently graduated. Several players were from the University of Minnesota, because Herb Brooks, the American coach, had been the Golden Gophers’ head coach. Four players—including Mike Eruzione, the captain, and Jim Craig, the goalie—were from Boston University. A couple of guys were from Minnesota-Duluth, Mark Johnson was from Wisconsin, and Ken Morrow was from Bowling Green. The average age was 22. One player, Mike Ramsey, had just turned nineteen. The grizzled veteran was twenty-six-year-old Buzz Schneider, who had been a member of the U.S. hockey team at the 1976 Winter Olympics in Innsbruck, Austria. Buzz had played some minor-league hockey, but had then regained his amateur status in time for Lake Placid.

  Meanwhile, the Soviet “amateur” hockey players were mostly in their late twenties. I’d always laugh when I saw that their biographies would list them as either students or soldiers. In the Soviet Union, that was an alias for professional hockey player. And this would become all the more apparent in the late eighties, when the Soviets began playing in the National Hockey League and we got to see just how great these players were. Now heading into the Olympics, our relations with the Soviets on the global political stage were tense. They had invaded Afghanistan a few months earlier and we were threatening to boycott the 1980 Summer Games in Moscow (which we wound up doing). But no one was sensing that ice hockey would offer any symbolic battle between the two countries. We just weren’t in their league.

  The hockey tournament in Lake Placid actually began the night before the Opening Ceremony, with the United States taking on Sweden. The American team was trailing, 2–1, when, with the clock winding down in the third period, Brooks pulled Jim Craig for the extra attacker and Bill Baker scored the tying goal with twenty-seven seconds remaining. There was no overtime, so that was that. The Americans—an underdog in that game—had earned a tie, and gotten a point in the standings. Already we’d had a dose of drama.

  What’s more, it had already become apparent that because Herb Brooks knew and respected Dryden, we were going to have special access. Brooks had cut off most of the rest of the media to build a wall around his players. His thinking: If I’m going to deal with one media entity, it’ll be the national television broadcaster. Which, of course, was fine by us. Ken and I had four or five private sessions with Brooks over the course of the Games. Invaluable.

  During the Opening Ceremony show, hosted by Jim McKay the next day, I joined Jim to narrate an extensive recap of the action from the night before. I was already getting more airtime than originally thought.

  The next night, a Thursday, the U.S. team played its second game. Czechoslovakia, easily the second-best team in the world and likely to win the silver medal, was the opponent. Stunningly, it was the Americans who dominated from start to finish, winning 7–3. And now it was like—whoa, what’s happening here? A last-minute tie against favored Sweden and a rout of heavily favored Czechoslovakia? And late in the game, there was a moment that epitomized the team and its coach as much as anything. A Czech player leveled Mark Johnson in the open ice, nowhere near the puck, forcing a stoppage as Johnson was attended to. As our camera focused in on Brooks, a microphone picked up Herb’s voice. “We’ll bury that goddamn shit right in your throat, [Number] Three,” he barked. “You’re gonna eat that goddamn Koho [hockey stick], Three!” Today, as the saying goes, Twitter would have blown up and the network would conceivably get a fine or at least a scolding from the Federal Communications Commission. That night, though, it just served to paint to the country the quintessential portrait of this intense, no-nonsense coach who was convincing his players that they were as good—and tough—as any hockey team in the world.

  Also at that game, a group of fans began to chant U-S-A, U-S-A. Years later, I received a letter from a man claiming that he and his friends were in Lake Placid, and that they were the first ones to ever start that mantra. This might sound like one of those unverifiable claims on the order of “I started the wave.” But let the record reflect—the USA-Czechoslovakia game was the first time I’d ever heard it. And it would become ubiquitous by the end of the Games.

  FROM THE START, KEN Dryden and I had a good thing going. It was a very comfortable blend—and Ken had quickly found a way to make relevant, incisive points in eight seconds or less. In football, the analyst can speak for thirty seconds after the play-by-play announcer finishes calling a play in four or five. In hockey, the action is so continuous, it’s the reverse. The analyst has to speak in quick bites, get in, and get out, because of the nonstop action that has to be covered. And Ken Dryden understood that immediately.

  By the first Saturday of the Games, everything was heating up. Eric Heiden had won his first gold medal. Alpine skiing and figure skating were under way. And hockey was generating this buzz. That afternoon, the United States took on Norway at the field house adjacent to the main arena that had been built for the 1932 Lake Placid Olympics. The venue had the feeling of a high school rink. But it was the Olympics, and in front of a capacity crowd of about two thousand fans (not a misprint), the United States won again, 5–1. And two days after that, they won again, 7–2, over Romania. The Americans were 3-0-1 and in good position to reach the medal round, which would include the top two teams from each six-team bracket.

  We were staying at the newly opened Lake Placid Hilton. Dryden had the room next to mine and the late Art Kaminsky, his agent, a terrific guy but a man who took the term penurious to new heights (depths?), moved in as his roommate. Art never wanted to look a hotel bill in the eye if it wasn’t necessary.

  Kaminsky had brought with him one of those push-and-pull table hockey games. You controlled the forwards and defensemen with rods that would go in and out and the goalie with a lever that would move side to side. It was similar to foosball. We played the game for close to an hour every day—Dryden, Kaminsky, and yours truly, as well as anyone else who would wander in. It felt like a college frat house. This entire time—starting with that first night we met in Moscow—Dryden had been schooling me on the wonders of international hockey and its beautiful, elegant cross-ice passing. Now facing me on the other side of the table, with his oversize glasses and looking like a college professor from central casting, all he was doing was jamming the rods in as hard as he could, trying to knock my players off their springs. I was stupefied. “Hey, Kenny, you’ve taught me this beautiful form of hockey and now you’re playing this muck-muck crap. When did you turn into a goon? You’ve become a goon!”

  He just laughed.

  On Wednesday, February 20, the U.S. team took on West Germany. At the start of the tournament, it appeared the two teams were evenly matched. As they had in every game apart from the one against Romania, the Americans fell behind early and trailed, 2–0, before scoring four unanswered goals over the last two periods to win, 4–2, and clinch a berth in the medal round. It would be the United States and Sweden from the Blue Division, and the Soviet Union and Finland from the Red Division advancing to medal round over the weekend. The Soviets wound up undefeated in group play with a 51–11 goal differential.

  But first, Dryden had some business to take care of. Right after the conclusion of the West Germany game, he got into a car and was driven across the Canadian border to Ottawa, three hundred miles from Lake Placid. Why? He had to take his bar exam the next morning. He would pass with flying colors. That was Dryden. In between the game against West Germany and the Friday contest with the Soviets, he passed the bar. I bega
n to think this guy could rescue people from a burning building for three straight days on his lunch break.

  WHILE DRYDEN WAS IN Ottawa, a controversy developed over the starting time of Friday’s game between the United States and the USSR. The U.S. team would meet the Soviets, and Finland would face Sweden on Friday, the twenty-second, and then on Sunday, the twenty-fourth, the United States would conclude play against Finland with the Soviets matched up with Sweden. The team that accumulated the most points (including those already earned against teams that had qualified for the medal round) would win the gold medal. According to the schedule that was released before the Olympics, the 5 P.M. game on February 22 would match up the second-place team from the Blue Group (which turned out to be the United States) against the first-place team from the Red Group (the Soviets). There would then be an 8 P.M. game that would feature the Blue Group winner (which turned out to be Sweden) against the Red Group runner-up (Finland).

  Now what? Clearly, Roone Arledge and ABC obviously preferred that the U.S.-Soviet game be played in prime time in the Eastern Time Zone, 8 P.M., with the Sweden-Finland game then moved back to 5 P.M. So Roone and one of his top deputies, John Martin, along with a young programming executive named Bob Iger, worked to get the games switched. Roone had a lot of juice with the International Olympic Committee and the Lake Placid organizers and just about every other Olympic muckety-muck, but this was a change that would have to be approved by the Soviet Hockey Federation. And even though remuneration was put on the table, the Soviets put up a stone wall and refused. Time was of the essence and the negotiations ended.

  So the marquee matchup of the Olympics would start at 5 P.M. on a Friday afternoon. Arledge made the decision to tape-delay the game until eight o’clock.