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

by Al Michaels

  A good part of what has made that game so enduring and so endearing was the context. The Cold War had been coming and going for years but was pretty frigid at that point. The Soviet Union had invaded Afghanistan. We were threatening—and would follow through on—a boycott of the 1980 Summer Olympics in Moscow. (As quid pro quo, the Soviets would boycott the 1984 Summer Olympics in Los Angeles). In the fall of 1979, you couldn’t turn on the news without hearing a menacing report about U.S.-Soviet relations and the possibility of a military confrontation.

  At present, it’s distinctly different. Among the lessons 9/11 taught us: it doesn’t take a country or a huge army to wreak havoc. You can have a small group of maniacal terrorists. Today, who could be our archenemy in an Olympic Games? It’s not as if al-Qaeda fields sports teams.

  Also of note in February 1980: fifty-two American citizens were being held hostage in Iran. That crisis had started three months before the Olympics and would last until January 1981. To millions of Americans and people around the world, our country looked inept; we were also in a recession and the prime rate was nearing 20 percent (how crazy does that sound today?); in some parts of the country, gasoline was being rationed and long lines at service stations were becoming the norm. All in all, it seemed as if there was a collective malaise from sea to shining sea.

  In addition, after the Vietnam War had ended and throughout the seventies, patriotism wasn’t considered particularly cool, especially among the younger generation. There was a genuine rift. During the 1976 baseball season, two fans, a father and son, ran onto the field at Dodger Stadium carrying an American flag that they then attempted to light on fire. Rick Monday—the same Rick Monday who was a year behind me at Arizona State, a former Marine Corps Reservist who was then with the Chicago Cubs—ran over and grabbed the flag before it could be ignited.

  I remember saying in an interview after Lake Placid that we went from attempts at burning flags to waving flags. That’s what Lake Placid did. I’m not alone in thinking that the hockey team, at that particular time, had a lot to do with how we felt about ourselves and our homeland.

  There was no way I could have predicted that decades later people would come up to me on the street and say, “I can’t tell you how excited I still get when I hear, Do you believe in miracles?” (I still often get asked to record messages for answering machines. Al, can you please say, “Do you believe Bob is away from his desk right now? Yes!!!”) When they made the film Miracle, the director, Gavin O’Connor, told me, “Thanks for giving us the title.”

  Over the years, I’ve stayed in touch with a number of the players. There have been dozens of corporate events where I’ve been brought in to moderate a discussion with some of the guys as part of a program that would often start with a highlight tape. The response from the audience is always terrific and never gets old. A few years ago, I ran into Dave Silk, who along with Mike Eruzione, Jim Craig, and Jack O’Callahan was one of the Boston University players on the team. Immediately before I said, “Do you believe in miracles,” I said “Morrow, up ahead to Silk, five seconds left in the game . . .” He told me, “Can’t thank you enough for getting my name in there. When people sometimes say, ‘You’re full of it, you never played on that team,’ I tell them, ‘Hey, listen—I’m that guy Silk, from ‘Morrow, up ahead to Silk!’ ”

  My favorite line, though, might be from the captain, Mike Eruzione. We’ve stayed close. I was talking to him a few years back and he said, “You know, when I sometimes get a little down, I just pop that tape in. And the greatest thing about it? Every time I shoot, the puck goes in.”

  CHAPTER 10

  Saturdays in the Fall

  WHEN I BEGAN WORKING for ABC full-time in 1977, the network had a virtual monopoly on big-time college football coverage. On most weekends from September through late November, college football was my primary assignment. And one of the things I most enjoyed was traveling to, in a manner of speaking, the hinterlands of America. Baseball had taken me to most major American cities. But this was a change of pace—with trips to Tuscaloosa, Alabama; Athens, Georgia; Laramie, Wyoming; and lots of other college towns. And the atmosphere on these autumn Saturdays, when the attendance at these big stadiums would often vastly outnumber the population of the entire town, was special.

  ABC’s coverage in those days might include, on any given weekend, a national telecast as the second half of a doubleheader with Keith Jackson calling the play-by-play, along with a slate of regional games that would precede it. In 1977, I was normally assigned to the third or fourth most important regional game. Beginning in 1978, I was elevated to the “lead regional,” or second most important matchup of the day. But the network didn’t want to make an “A” and “B” designation between their two main analysts, so they rotated them each week. That meant that one week my partner might be Ara Parseghian, the fabled former Notre Dame coach, and the next week it might be the iconic former Arkansas coach Frank Broyles, who had remained at the school as its athletic director. I’d also work a couple of games each season with other analysts, including the 1959 New York Giants’ number-one draft choice, Lee Grosscup.

  In mid-October 1978, I was assigned to do a game that would be played about four miles from our home in Menlo Park. The University of Washington Huskies were coming down to Palo Alto to take on Stanford. My broadcast partner for this one was Frank Broyles. Frank flew into San Francisco the day before the game and we met at about noon at the athletic department office on the Stanford campus. We would have a meeting with the head coach, watch a little film, say hello to a few players, watch part of practice, and then head to our production meeting. Standard procedure would be to have the meeting at the crew hotel but, in this case, since it was a home game for me, I was happy to host the meeting at our house. When our crew of about ten people was ready to leave the campus and head to our home, I told Frank to hop into my car for the ten-minute drive.

  For the first five minutes of the trip, we talked about our meeting with the head coach. Broyles, who was one of the most revered coaches in the history of college football, said, “I have never met a more impressive young coach in my life. He is very, very special. What a brilliant mind. He will go on to achieve great things. I just loved listening to what he had to say.”

  Frank had never before met the coach, whom I’d actually gotten to know a little bit back in Cincinnati. When I was announcing the Reds’ games, from time to time the Bengals would have a short afternoon practice at Riverfront Stadium and then vacate the field in time for the Reds, who’d be playing a night game, to come out for batting practice. On a few of those occasions, this coach, then an assistant under Paul Brown, would stick around to watch Rose, Bench, Perez, and company take their swings. He loved baseball. I had three or four conversations with him around the batting cage in Cincinnati.

  Now here it was, a few short years later, and he was the head football coach at Stanford—the same man who had just, with his intellect, blown away Frank Broyles. His name, of course, was Bill Walsh—and you know the rest. The following year, he’d be hired by the San Francisco 49ers and would go on to win three Super Bowls over a ten-year run, eventually get inducted into the Pro Football Hall of Fame, and inarguably go down as an innovative genius and one of the great football coaches in history. It had taken Frank Broyles all of about forty-five minutes to figure it out.

  So, after Frank had raved about Bill Walsh for half the short ride to my home that afternoon, for some reason—and I can’t remember why—our conversation drifted to politics. “You know,” he said, “we have this attorney general back in Arkansas who next month will be running for governor, a very bright young man who is something special. I know this may sound kind of crazy but I truly feel that one day he could become president of the United States.” That’s right. Before he’d even been elected governor of Arkansas (then voted out, and voted back in), Frank Broyles had already turned in his scouting report on Bill Clinton.

  A postscript to that story: Fast-
forward fourteen years, to 1992. I hadn’t spoken with Frank for several years—he had long since left ABC and was still in Fayetteville as Arkansas’s athletic director. I was eight seasons into Monday Night Football. It was the morning after Election Day and William Jefferson Clinton had just been elected as the next president of the United States. I had to get Frank Broyles on the phone.

  “Frank,” I said when I reached him late that afternoon, “do you remember in 1978 when you told me that Bill Walsh was the most impressive young coach you’d ever met?”

  “Did I?” he replied modestly.

  “And then you told me how impressed you were with that young attorney general in Arkansas, a guy named Bill Clinton?”

  “Well, I remember thinking highly of him,” he responded, still trying to play it down.

  “Yes, you did,” I reminded him. “So Frank, now that Walsh is headed to the Hall of Fame, and Clinton is headed to the White House, I’m calling you for only one reason.

  “Who do you like in the fifth tomorrow at Santa Anita?”

  I ALSO LOVED WORKING with Ara Parseghian—even if I came into the experience primed for the opposite. In the autumn after I’d graduated from college, in 1966, Michigan State played Notre Dame in another one of those “Games of the Century.” Notre Dame was No. 1 in the nation and undefeated; Michigan State was No. 2 and undefeated. It was 10–10 late in the fourth quarter, and on Notre Dame’s last drive, Parseghian played it very conservatively and the teams finished in a tie. Each school wound up the season, 9-0-1. (Dan Jenkins of Sports Illustrated wrote that Parseghian chose to “tie one for the Gipper.”) Watching on television, I hated what I had seen. What kind of coach plays for a tie? So for years after that, I relished watching Parseghian’s teams get beat—including one particularly memorable instance in 1972, when USC crushed Notre Dame 45–23, with Anthony Davis, then a sophomore, scoring six touchdowns, including two on kickoff returns. (The Los Angeles Times headline the next day: “Davis! Davis! Davis! Davis! Davis! Davis!”)

  Well, barely more than a decade later, we were paired together in the broadcast booth—and Ara turned out to be one of my all-time favorite partners. Eventually I got around to telling him my feelings when we first had met about what he’d done in that Michigan State game and we laughed about it. Ara gave me the same explanation he gave countless other times—that he didn’t think his injury-riddled team could move the ball against the Spartans, and he didn’t want to risk giving them the ball back. And that he “didn’t go for the tie—the game ended in a tie.”

  One of the great things about this decorated coach who’d won two national championships at Notre Dame was that he had a terrific sense of humor—and that very much included about himself. One time—I believe it was in Ann Arbor, before a Michigan game—we were asked to show up for a dinner the night before the game to shake hands with a bunch of Michigan boosters and ABC sponsors. This was something we were asked to do with some frequency, and we were always happy to help out our sales department. On this particular occasion, I was asked to introduce my broadcast partner. So I took the mike and said, “Ladies and gentlemen, it’s a pleasure to introduce my partner, a man who, in the history of college football has few, if any, equals. His record speaks for itself. Nowadays, the term genius is tossed around much too often and easily. But when it comes to Ara Parseghian, the genius label is a perfect fit. After all, can you think of a coach—any coach—who could possibly limit Anthony Davis to six touchdowns in one afternoon?”

  Ara laughed harder than anyone.

  OVER THE YEARS, I was also paired many times with Lee Grosscup, who, like Ara, was a fabulous partner. Grosscup had been the first-round pick of the New York Giants in 1959, which is a story unto itself. A quarterback at the University of Utah in the late 1950s, Grosscup utilized the shovel pass—basically a short flip two or three yards forward—in an offense that was advanced for its time. It was a heckuva way to build up your passing statistics. The Utah games, though, were rarely televised then, and NFL teams didn’t exactly have intricate scouting networks—plus there was no NFL combine at that time where, as is the case today, every prospect’s time in the shuttle run and performance in the bench press would be scrutinized ad nauseam.

  In the fall of 1957, Utah played Army at West Point and “Cupper,” as everyone still calls him, had a fantastic day. I actually was there that afternoon—my brother and I had ridden up with our father. Utah lost, 39–33, but the next day the New York Times had a big, glowing tribute to Grosscup in its game story and in 1959, essentially on the basis of that performance, the Giants drafted Grosscup in the first round. Unfortunately, while he was extremely well liked by his teammates, as Frank Gifford would later recount to me, Lee never would replicate his college success in the pros and wound up playing for teams like the Hartford Charter Oaks of the Continental Football League and the Saskatchewan Roughriders of the Canadian Football League. By the time his playing career was over, he had played for seven teams in four leagues. In Hartford, Lee was a player-coach, and once said that he knew it was time to leave when people couldn’t decide if they hated him more as a player or as a coach.

  When his career ended, he became an analyst and had a wonderful way with words, supplemented by a phenomenal memory. Lee was my partner for the first college football game I ever worked for ABC—San Diego State at Arizona in Tucson.

  Lee also rolled with the punches. On a trip to Jacksonville for a Georgia-Florida game, he and I were asked to speak at a booster dinner the night before the game. The emcee went into a long, detailed, adulatory introduction for Lee, mentioning all of his achievements and honors. And then, the big finish. “Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome . . . Lou Crosscut!” Lee didn’t miss a beat as he took the microphone.

  Grosscup has a tremendous sense of humor, and we constantly made each other laugh. We had our own code phrases and sometimes dropped references into our broadcasts that only we understood. One Saturday, we worked a UCLA–Washington State regional telecast in Pullman. Washington State is located in what is known as the Palouse, a region of eastern Washington. The name itself can make you laugh.

  We decided to ask some locals if they explain what the Palouse was.

  “Sure, there’s the Palouse River and the Palouse apples and . . .”

  “Right, but do you know what it means?”

  We asked eight or nine people at a restaurant the night before the game. No one knew. Turns out it’s an Indian word meaning gentle, rolling hills.

  Well, as the broadcast started with a sweeping view of the stadium and surrounding landscape, I couldn’t resist, fortunately not while on camera, opening with, “I’m Al Michaels and we are in Palouse Country. . . .”

  Lee immediately started laughing. And when he started laughing, I started laughing. It went downhill from there. We were laughing so hard that we both had to hit our “cough” buttons—muting our microphones—so the audience couldn’t hear us. I tried to start thinking of the worst events in world history to get myself to stop laughing.

  Then, just as we were about to recover and get back to the game, our producer in the truck barked into our headsets, “What the hell is going on up there?” Which only made us more hysterical. We eventually got through it. Barely. Here we were—two grown men who might as well have been sitting in the back of a tenth-grade classroom—with the adolescent giggles. Everyone needs one friend like that.

  I GOT TO COVER some sensational college football games, including a rivalry game, Georgia versus Florida, played annually in Jacksonville, that due to its legendary tailgating scene is known as the “World’s Largest Outdoor Cocktail Party.” In 1980, Georgia’s big star was freshman running back Herschel Walker. Florida had a senior wide receiver, Cris Collinsworth, whom I’d get to know pretty well, you might say, some three decades later. Walker carried the ball 37 times that day for 238 yards, and the Bulldogs won, 26–21, thanks to a Lindsay Scott 93-yard catch-and-run touchdown with just over a minute remaining. The Bulldogs
would go on to win the national title.

  There were also a few stinkers. In 1985, I was in Ames, Iowa, home of Iowa State University, for a game between Iowa and Iowa State. Though the two schools were in different conferences, it was a natural in-state rivalry. The visiting Hawkeyes had a great team and were ranked in the top five in the country. It was a monstrous blowout—the final score was Iowa 57, Iowa State 3. On top of that, though the game was in late September, it was a raw, cold, nasty day, and by the third quarter almost everyone had left the stadium. Our sideline reporter was Al Trautwig, who’s always had a great sense of humor. With less than a minute left in the game, I sent it over to Trautwig for his final report and he was sitting in the top row of the stadium, in the end zone. The camera started on a close-up of Al and then pulled back so you could see that he was sitting directly underneath the scoreboard.

  “You might be wondering what I’m doing here, Al, sitting right beneath the scoreboard,” Trautwig said. Then he looks over his shoulder straight at the clock and says, “Well, I just want to be the first person in the stadium to know when this game is over.” Classic!

  On the flip side, there was a game in September 1982 that I called between Michigan State and Illinois at Memorial Stadium in Champaign, Illinois. Early in the second quarter, the referee, a Big Ten official by the name of Richard McVay, suddenly fell on the field and lay there motionless. McVay was fifty-five, had recently lost seventeen pounds, and had passed a preseason physical. He’d suffered a massive heart attack. The crowd remained silent as the game was delayed for almost twenty minutes while he was attended to. Then, an ambulance drove out to the middle of the field and McVay was taken to a local hospital. On the air, I had to remain very careful. There would be no speculation. There would be no secondhand information. Minutes later, the game would resume. I said something to the effect of “Well, I don’t know how anybody—the players, the coaches, the fans, the rest of the officiating crew, anybody—can concentrate on the rest of this game. But it’s going to start again.”