by Al Michaels
CHAPTER 12
Roone, the Olympics, and the Fight Game
SEVERAL YEARS AGO, LIFE magazine named Roone Arledge one of the “100 Most Important Americans of 20th Century.” Not just in television. Not just in sports. Most important Americans, period. His influence was wide-ranging. And his mystique—a good part of which was self-orchestrated—added to his legend. Arledge was my boss for my first ten years at ABC. I didn’t see him or interact with him very much. But everything we did at ABC Sports—and a lot of what is still done today in television—originated from his philosophy.
For Roone, everything started with storytelling. Storytelling was the tool he used to transform coverage of sports on television. And storytelling was how he elevated ABC—“the third network in a two-and-a-half-network business,” as it was once referred to—into a powerhouse. Arledge was also always willing to take chances. Who else would have put demolition derby and motorcycles on ice on Wide World of Sports? And who else would have put the polarizing Howard Cosell in the broadcast booth of Monday Night Football? Half the audience seemed to love him, half the audience seemed to hate him, but it became must-see TV.
Roone was also the visionary who saw how popular and compelling the Olympics could become as a television event. In 1972 at Munich, under Arledge’s supervision, ABC’s coverage of the Israeli hostage crisis and tragedy helped to create a template for how breaking news would be covered in the years to come. The network would win multiple Emmy Awards for its coverage.
It was that kind of success that led the network to eventually name Arledge, who had been the president of ABC Sports since 1968, as the head of the news division as well—a move that took place around the time that I was hired by him. And for the ten years that Roone was my boss, he spent 95 percent with the news division. Or at least it seemed that way. Roone was notorious for not returning phone calls—not just calls from nobodies, but from anybody. Meanwhile, no matter what the event was, if it was being covered by ABC Sports, the biggest suite in the best hotel in town was reserved for Roone. Even if it was a Monday night “B” baseball game in Arlington, Texas. Several times I was the beneficiary of that excess. Roone would show up at less than 1 percent of the events. The first time I was assigned to cover the Grand Prix of Monaco, I spent five days getting lost in the eight-room presidential suite at the Hermitage Hotel in Monte Carlo. Roone’s secretary was a good pal, and the minute she knew that Roone couldn’t possibly make it to an event, she would call me and tell me to check into Roone’s room.
My occasional college football partner Lee Grosscup took it as an ironic point of pride that despite announcing close to one hundred games at ABC, he had never met Arledge, his ultimate boss. It became a running joke at the network and throughout college football circles—“Cupper” was going to write a book that would be titled I Never Met Roone.
Then in the late summer of 1983, the entire college football operation—producers, directors, announcers—was summoned to New York for a seminar in advance of the season. And Roone, we had understood, would be giving us a pep talk. Well, there goes Lee’s book. Lee joked that when Arledge came to speak to us, he would hide in a closet so the title could stay intact.
Then, when we arrived at ABC the morning of the seminar, Chuck Howard, the coordinating producer of college football, stood up and said something to the effect of “Roone apologizes, but something’s come up and he won’t be able to be here.” At which point everybody immediately looked over at Grosscup and starting laughing. He’s saved! His title still works!
Predictably, Roone was playing golf at Deepdale Golf Club on Long Island. It was quintessential Arledge. Fifty guys are flown in from all over the country to meet with him, and teeing it up with some pals took precedence. Don’t get me wrong. Roone Arledge is perhaps the most iconic figure in the history of sports television and deservedly so. But he relished his mystique. In fact, he made it an art form. He might as well have invented “Where’s Waldo?”
When your contract would come up, though, Roone would bring you into New York for an audience. You’d meet him at his favorite restaurant in Manhattan, show up at one o’clock in the afternoon, and then have to figure out a way to gracefully leave, because otherwise he’d keep you there until dinner. Even though he was very rarely accessible, when you were in his presence, he could make you feel like the most important person in the world.
As a manager, his approach was this: I’m going to pay my people well, and I’m going to treat them very well. I’m going to have them stay in the best hotels, and provide limousines whenever they’re on the road. But I’m going to expect them to do their jobs at the highest level. That way, there will be no excuses when it comes to creature comfort. You’d dine in the best places, you’d sleep in the best hotels, and all Roone wanted was for you to go out and do a great job.
He also let his managers manage. The producers, directors, and production personnel weren’t directly under his thumb. He also wasn’t opposed to a little office infighting. Sometimes it was unclear whose territory was whose. Then, when a turf war would break out, Roone was usually nowhere to be seen.
Philosophically, he felt this way about sports: A game is a game is a game. But what distinguishes one game from another are the people involved. The players, the coaches, the owners, even the fans. Make the audience care about them. Make the viewer have some sort of emotional attachment to them. That theory still holds up well today.
Dick Ebersol and Don Ohlmeyer were protégés of Arledge. But their styles varied from his. They are hands-on guys. By the time I got to ABC, Roone was not. Yes, in his early years, he was probably the best live producer in the business. But by the time I arrived in the mid-seventies, Roone had become a stranger to the production truck. His limited involvement in sports was exclusively on the business end. The only exception was his first love, the Olympics, where he still “line produced”—meaning that he was the central figure in the broadcast center, and was in the middle of every decision made on the fly. But in 1984, at the Los Angeles Summer Games, I saw firsthand that in live television, even legends can’t just parachute in and recapture the magic touch.
The United States had boycotted the 1980 Olympics in Moscow. Now, in 1984, the Soviets and the Eastern Bloc countries were boycotting the Los Angeles Games. Still, there was a lot of excitement in the city where I’d spent my high school years. My primary assignment was a plum—track and field. But the track and field events didn’t begin until the second week of the Olympics. So on the opening day of competition, the day after the Opening Ceremony, my assignment was the road cycling races for the men and women.
On each Olympic telecast, Roone would have access to what was known as the “override” button. Each individual sport, like road cycling, had an on-site producer. But with that button, if Roone wanted to talk directly to an announcer, he could override anyone else who had the ability to speak to you in your headset. On that first day of competition, we were live with cycling from Mission Viejo, and there were a number of other events taking place simultaneously—including swimming. One of the featured stars of the Games, the West German Michael (pronounced meek-HILE) Gross, was competing in the 200-meter freestyle, and the plan for our coverage was to show Gross’s event on tape in prime time that night. When Gross won the race while cycling was on the air, Roone hit me on the override. “Al, Michael Gross just won his first race. Announce that he’s won, and tell the viewers they can see the race in prime time.” I didn’t say anything—I just continued calling the road race.
Roone then said it to me again—as if he thought I didn’t hear him the first time. Again I ignored him. At this point, I was just hoping that Roone was thinking this was a technical issue, and not a case of insubordination. We made it to commercial, and then I hit the talk-back button to respond. “Roone, are you sure about this?” I asked him. “Do we really want to give away the swimming results right now? Don’t we want people to tune in in prime time to see the race without knowing
who won?”
“You’re right!” says Roone. “Great idea.”
I’m thinking: Great idea? Actually, it’s pretty fundamental. And since when did Roone Arledge need producing lessons from me?
The story has always stuck with me. In his prime, Arledge was the best event producer in television, bar none. But apart from the Olympics, Roone had done almost no line producing since the late 1960s. In television, like in most anything else, it’s easy to lose your fastball.
A WEEK LATER, TRACK and field got under way, and I was busy around the clock. On the next to last day of competition, I called the women’s 3,000 meters along with Marty Liquori, the former middle-distance champion and Olympic runner. This would be the famous Mary Decker/Zola Budd race. Decker, who was perhaps the most famous American female athlete at those Games, and was favored to win, took the lead. Then, about four laps in, Budd, a South African who ran barefoot, and who’d been granted British citizenship to get into the Olympics (remember, South Africa was barred at this point for its apartheid policies), made a move and got to the front of the small lead pack. Decker then made a move to the inside to try to overtake Budd. They clipped heels, got tangled, and in a flash, Decker fell into the infield. She was out of the race, her Olympic dream over, and on the ground crying in agony. Budd kept running, and boos washed over the Coliseum—all aimed at the barefoot eighteen-year-old. She’d become an instant villain.
On the air, Marty Liquori then placed all of the blame on Zola Budd.
As Marty continued, I thought to myself, He must have seen something that I didn’t see. But Marty has had years of international experience. Maybe there’s a nuance or arcane rule I’m not aware of. Still, from my perspective, it didn’t appear to be Zola Budd’s fault. It looked to me that when Mary Decker came on the inside, Budd had position, and the contact was more incidental than anything. But I regret not pressing Liquori about it on the air. I let it go when I should have been more assertive.
The Decker/Budd rivalry was one of the big story lines before the Olympics. And at this moment, it became the story of the Olympics. Decker on the ground after four laps, Budd taking the lead, but then fading to seventh place, overtaken by the emotion of the moment, clearing the way for Romania’s Maricica Puica to win the race.
The following day guaranteed even more drama at Los Angeles Coliseum on the final day of track and field competition. Headlining the program would be the men’s 4x100 meter relay, with Carl Lewis going for a fourth gold medal of these Olympics to tie Jesse Owens’s long-standing record. Meanwhile, Marty Liquori had wound up in the crosshairs of the track and field community. Most track and field aficionados did not see the Decker/Budd incident in the way Liquori did. Marty was taking a lot of heat, and so when he got to the Coliseum early that afternoon, he went to Chuck Howard, who was producing track and field, and said that it would be important for us to at some point during our coverage that day take a look back at what had happened the prior night, and allow him to then go through it and provide a better assessment of what had taken place. Chuck agreed.
We were going on the air live at 4 P.M. Pacific Time, with the Carl Lewis race scheduled live for 4:45, or 7:45 P.M. on the East Coast. Every Olympic telecast was always very tightly formatted—there would be coverage of other sports mixed in with track and field, which would also feature the women’s 4x100 meter relay, and include a segment previewing the Lewis race, which I would do with O. J. Simpson, our analyst for the men’s sprints.
We have a smooth opening to the broadcast. Then, at about 4:10, I do the segment with Marty, and tee him up for his “re-analysis.”
Marty was clearly seeing it differently in retrospect, had been able to think about it, and delivered a more cogent and thoughtful analysis about what had taken place the night before. It was a good segment.
But there was a problem that was developing on our end. There was miscommunication somewhere along the line. We had a separate unit at the Coliseum for the track and field production and were feeding everything back into the ABC Broadcast Center in Hollywood, manned by Roone Arledge. The broadcast center was responsible for the overarching format—the responsibility for the flow of the show and the timings being correct. When we had put this extra segment in, there was an assumption that it was being communicated to the broadcast center. Because when we added a four- or five-minute segment, somewhere along the line, before the Lewis race, the broadcast had to drop four or five minutes somewhere else. But for reasons unbeknownst to me to this day, nothing was ever dropped. Either the track and field unit hadn’t told Roone that we were adding this apology segment for Marty, or there had been a communication mix-up back at master control. Whatever the case was, as I looked in my “off-air” monitor—the monitor in front of me in the booth that showed me what was on the network—and saw our diving coverage starting on the broadcast, it was becoming clearer and clearer to me that there was a problem arising.
As we moved along, there was another live race we were going to cover—the women’s relay at 4:20. I was going to call it with our female sprint analyst, the former champion Wilma Rudolph. She was nowhere to be found.
“Where’s Wilma?” I say to the truck.
Nobody knows.
Later we would learn that she hadn’t paid attention to the production schedule. She had thought the race was sometime after five o’clock. Whatever. Wilma Rudolph was nowhere to be seen.
“What do you want me to do?” I called down to Chuck Howard.
“Get O.J. in there!” he yelled.
So O. J. Simpson came to the rescue. He hustled into the booth, sat down next to me, put on a headset, and called a race he’d hadn’t prepared for. It was chaos behind the scenes but no one watching at home knew, which was what was most important. So we got through that race, but now, I was back to the growing concern over the time schedule.
I’m now looking at my off-air monitor—it’s about 4:37ish . . . we’re about eight minutes away from the Lewis race. And obviously we’re going to need about a four-minute setup to it—to really build it up. I look down at my off-air monitor—and I see it’s still the men’s 10-meter platform diving preliminaries. We’ll never get out of it in time to get back to track. 4:38, 4:39, 4:40.
At 4:42—while O.J. and I were supposed to be setting up this big Carl Lewis attempt to win a fourth gold medal—people at home were still watching diving. Is this real? Am I dreaming? What? The race was going to start at 4:45. And this was the Olympics, run like a Swiss watch. This was not spring training with the Reds, where Harry Caray could yell down to the field at the umpires to hold up the game.
Now it’s less than a minute before the race and Chuck Howard is screaming.
“Start! Start! Start!” he yells in my ear.
“Start what?”
“Just start talking! We’ll tape the race.”
You’ll tape it? Carl Lewis trying to win a fourth gold medal? We’re going to tape it? This is nuts.
So thirty seconds before the race, O.J. and I start talking. Here we are with Carl Lewis, going for another gold medal. The race starts. We call it. The Americans win in world-record time. And it airs on ABC—fifteen minutes later. This is one of the most anticipated events of the entire Olympics—and it doesn’t air live. Today, social media would be all over it instantly. But in 1984, only a few viewers could have figured out that ABC had screwed it up.
It had all started with Marty Liquori’s impetuous analysis from the night before. Having to look back at it that afternoon, which added an extra segment to the format, and having it fall through the cracks. Just another story you couldn’t make up.
ONE MORE ENDURING MEMORY of the Los Angeles Games came from the first-ever Olympic women’s marathon. I covered the race with Liquori and Kathrine Switzer, who’d been the first woman ever to run the Boston Marathon. The race concluded inside the Coliseum—the competitors entering through a tunnel and a little more than a lap before a crowd that numbered in excess of eighty thousand. But
because the race spanned 26.2 miles around the city, the best place for us to call a race was from the broadcast center, where we could follow all the action on numerous monitors.
Joan Benoit of the United States, then twenty-seven, won the gold medal. Grete Waitz of Norway took the silver. Then, around twenty minutes later, a Swiss runner, Gabriela Andersen-Scheiss, entered the Coliseum clearly in distress. Beyond exhausted, she was teetering, practically at a 45-degree angle, weaving in and out of the lanes on the track, a baseball cap pulled down low over her face. The fans were going wild, imploring her to finish. Every few seconds, she looked as if she was going to topple over and collapse. This was two years after I’d covered the death of Gordon Smiley, the Indy 500 driver, and Richard McVay, the referee at the Illinois football game. The notion that this woman might die was in the forefront of my mind.
At that point, some security people and several coaches were on the track with her. But if anyone had touched her or assisted her in any way, she would be disqualified. It was a chilling scene—and a real dilemma for the people in close proximity to her.
Meanwhile, we were in the broadcast center, watching this unfold. The pictures were so poignant, there wasn’t much to add. The second—and I mean the split second—she crossed the finish line, she was swooped up by personnel and rushed to medical treatment. Fortunately, it all ended up being a heroic moment. And, within minutes, Gabriela was just fine. But it definitely was a challenge to call it live.
AT ITS HEIGHT, ABC’S assemblage of sports was incredibly vast. And once Howard Cosell quit calling boxing around the same time as he gave up Monday Night Football, much of our boxing coverage fell into my portfolio.
Boxing has always held a certain fascination for me. There’s nothing more raw and basic in sports than two guys entering a ring with nothing but a pair of trunks, a pair of shoes, and a pair of gloves. No teammates. Nowhere to hide. Nowhere to run.
In the eleventh grade, I got into my only lifetime fistfight. I don’t even know how it started but it was out on the lunch court at Hamilton High in Los Angeles. If odds had been posted, the other guy would have been a 5-to-1 favorite. But I surprised my opponent with a quick straight left hand to the cheek, and will never forget the feeling of teeth crunching. I scared the hell out of myself—and I also ended up causing a five-thousand-dollar dental bill. For a while after that, my friends kiddingly called me the Toonderbolt (a punch then–heavyweight champion Ingemar Johansson of Sweden had made famous). I soon joked that I would retire undefeated. But it wasn’t funny at the time. And that record would have gone down the drain if they’d been scoring my sparring session with Jesus Pimentel a few years later.