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

by Al Michaels

  At ABC, I did dozens of fights through the eighties, everywhere from Atlantic City to Sarajevo, Yugoslavia, to Caracas, Venezuela, to Dublin, Ireland. There was also a trip to Havana for amateur boxing, where I was told to prepare for a possible visit during the event from El Commandante himself, Fidel Castro. But he never showed up.

  And then there was a Saturday afternoon encounter in May 1987 in Port-of-Spain, Trinidad, between the veteran light-heavyweight Marvin Johnson, nearing the end of his career, and Leslie Stewart, who had grown up in Trinidad. Joining me on the air would be my best pal, Alex Wallau, who had made the transition from executive to producer to on-air commentator. Alex knew as much about boxing as anyone on the planet so finally, the ABC powers-that-be figured, why not, let’s try him on the air. He would be a perfect fit—he was superb. Years later, Alex would become the president of the ABC Television Network and his business card would be an all-timer: Alex Wallau—President ABC Television Network/Boxing Analyst. And along the way, he would beat stage 4 tongue cancer. Seriously.

  Anyway, we couldn’t have packed more into our two days in Trinidad. On Friday night, Alex and I walked to and from a restaurant about a half mile away. It was outstanding. When we got back to the hotel, we asked the desk clerk to recommend a restaurant for the next night. She suggested a spot that was actually next door to the place we’d just come from. And then she warned, “Don’t even think about walking there. It’s absolutely much too dangerous going through the park after dark.” Well, we’d actually unknowingly just walked through that park—the Queen’s Park Savannah. My Rolex and two thousand dollars in cash had survived.

  The following day, at an outdoor stadium, with the rain coming and going, Stewart wins the fight with an eighth-round TKO. The place goes bonkers. Hundreds of fans storm the ring to celebrate. I’m seated at ringside and get whacked in the back of the head before another guy uses me as a step stool to climb into the celebration. At this point, we’re in commercial as I scramble under the ring for safety. My headset is still on as I yell to our producer in the truck, “I’m gonna get killed. Get these animals away. Now!” At the time, even if you weren’t on the air, the satellite transmission would pick up everything. So anyone with a dish could hear every word. The next morning, Alex and I had a very early flight to New York and as we boarded, I caught a glimpse of the local newspaper. There I am on the front page under a humongous headline that blared: ABC REPORTER: GET THESE ANIMALS AWAY. That plane couldn’t get off the ground fast enough.

  That flight to JFK would stop in Barbados. Alex had “discovered” Howard Stern before Howard became the self-proclaimed “King of All Media.” At the time Stern was only on in New York and a couple of other East Coast cities, so Alex would tape every show and then send the cassettes to me in Los Angeles. We were his biggest fans. On this trip, Alex had brought along three or four of Howard’s most recent shows and we sat there on the plane with dual headsets on, laughing hysterically. On the stop in Barbados, with the Stern tapes still rolling, we notice a small entourage escorting a couple of people onto the plane. We weren’t paying much attention. Then we’re airborne again, and Alex and I might as well have been rolling in the aisle. We were listening to Stern at his funniest. One row in front of us and across the aisle, a man turns around to see what’s going on. We’re in convulsions when the man, in clerical garb, smiles. You could tell he was enjoying the fact that we were enjoying whatever it was we were listening to on our earphones. The man was Bishop Desmond Tutu. All Alex and I could think was, He should only know what we’re so hysterical about! Which, of course, only made us laugh twice as hard. Every ounce of my body ached when we got to New York.

  THEN THERE WAS ANOTHER unforgettable night. April 15, 1985. Thomas Hearns versus Marvelous Marvin Hagler. I called the fight with Al Bernstein. The fight was broadcast live on closed-circuit television, and would then air on tape on ABC several days later. With Mike Tyson’s career just beginning, boxing’s most compelling stars were the foursome of Sugar Ray Leonard, Roberto Duran, Marvin Hagler, and Tommy Hearns. There had been the Leonard-Duran no mas fight. Leonard and Hearns had also staged an epic battle. Hagler and Duran had gone the distance. You had this four-way rivalry and, whatever the combination, you usually had a terrific fight.

  So, that night in 1985, it was Hagler and Hearns’s turn, with the undisputed world middleweight title at stake. Bob Arum was the promoter, and there’d been a massive buildup. The night before the fight, I remember talking to Alex Wallau, who was producing the telecast, and we both felt Hagler because he wanted it more. Marvin had felt like he had gotten the least respect of the quartet—that he was the Ringo Starr of the Big Four. Sugar Ray was the lead character, Duran was the Latin idol, Hearns was the Hit Man from Detroit. Hagler, who hadn’t lost a fight in almost a decade, was from Brockton, Massachusetts, the working-class man with blue-collar appeal, the fighter who wanted to prove he was the best of them all.

  There was unbelievable electricity at Caesar’s Palace that night, with the outdoor arena erected in the parking lot. The crowd was already in a frenzy when the fighters entered the ring. In all sports—not just boxing—almost always, when there’s that kind of buildup, the actual event doesn’t equal the hype. Sometimes it doesn’t even come close. What still stands out to me about this fight: people couldn’t wait for the fight to start, and it totally eclipsed the hype. Some boxing fans felt it might have been the Fight of the Century. Indisputably, Round 1 was one of the great rounds, if not the greatest round, of the century.

  In most fights, the first round is generally a feeling-out process. One guy might try to sneak in a punch, but it’s usually a starter course before the main dish. Not this night. The bell rang and Hagler and Hearns quickly met in the center of the ring and just started whaling on each other. No strategy, no defense, no parrying, no feeling-out process. Just bombs and haymakers.

  Am I really seeing this? Fights don’t start like this. They were trying to kill each other. This was the purest of back-alley brawls. It took me a good twenty seconds just to wrap my head around what I was witnessing.

  And it didn’t stop. They kept pounding away. And that night, I saw certain things with the naked eye that were not discernible when I looked at the tape later on. In boxing, sometimes television can’t do complete justice to what the naked eye can observe from ringside. Television just can’t take you there.

  At one point, they were both directly above me. Hearns is on my left, Hagler is on my right. Hearns throws a straight right hand into the left side of Hagler’s face. As if in super-slow motion, Hagler’s face compresses and contorts and for a split second, I think it’s going to cave in. His cheek has become totally concave. The thought flashes through my brain: He’s killed him. He hit him so hard that it looked like Hagler’s whole face would implode.

  But then, as in a cartoon, Hagler’s cheek popped back into its regular shape, as if nothing had happened. And then Hagler jumped right back on Hearns. I couldn’t believe what I was seeing. No one could have absorbed that punch and still be alive, much less go back on the offensive. The round ended and my heart—and fifteen thousand other hearts—was beating furiously. I’d just witnessed three insanely exhilarating minutes. Hearns’s trainer, Emanuel Steward, couldn’t have summed it up better than when he later said that his man “fought twelve rounds in one.”

  In the second round, which couldn’t compare to the first (then again, what could?) but was still a compelling three minutes, Hagler started to bleed badly. As his cornermen worked on the cut after the bell, it became clear that there was a real possibility this fight would soon have to be stopped. If that had happened, the result would have been a technical draw. So Hagler, who in my mind had slightly gotten the better of Hearns so far, knew he needed to finish him off quickly. He moved in for the kill, landed some shots, and Hearns went rubber-legged. At that point, two minutes into the third round, referee Richard Steele stepped in and stopped the fight, and Marvin Hagler had defended his mi
ddleweight crown.

  I still occasionally look at that fight. This was a case where you had to have the excitement of your voice match the excitement of what you were seeing. But this was a fight that overwhelmed anything anybody had to say. The following week, Sports Illustrated featured the fight on the cover. The headline was “Eight Minutes of Fury.” A perfect description. Eight minutes no one who was there would ever forget.

  HAGLER-HEARNS TOOK PLACE ABOUT a month after Capital Cities bought the ABC network in a surprise deal. One of the first moves the new regime made when they got the keys to the house a little over a year later was to remove Roone Arledge as the head of ABC Sports—he would now hold only one title, President of ABC News (though Roone would negotiate to continue producing the Olympics). In 1986, I was in the first year of a four-year deal. I didn’t know exactly what was going to happen, but I wasn’t too worried beyond the basic level of anxiety that comes with having a new boss.

  Meanwhile, in late 1985, Linda and I decided we would move from the Bay Area to Los Angeles. We had each lost a parent—my father, her mother—in recent years. We wanted to be close to our surviving parents and close to our siblings, and we were both around forty and wanted a midlife change. So we decided to return to Southern California.

  Boy, did we pick a hell of a week to make the move. In late January 1986, we moved south, uprooting our teenage son and eleven-year-old daughter in the middle of a school year. In a pouring rainstorm, the moving van arrived twenty-four hours after the Space Shuttle Challenger disaster. And then, just as the truck pulled up to our new home in Los Angeles, I discovered that my new boss at ABC Sports would be a man named Dennis Swanson. Dennis had been running WLS, the ABC affiliate in Chicago, where he’d given Oprah Winfrey her first daytime talk show. Swanson was a former officer in the Marine Corps and had a reputation for being very aggressive—a bull in a china shop kind of guy. So there was a sense that he wasn’t going to pay homage to Roone by taking things slowly or being hesitant to shake things up. Still, what came next was a huge surprise.

  I’m in my new home in Los Angeles, helping to unpack boxes, when Ken Wolfe, the young producer whom I’d worked with frequently, calls me up. Kenny sounded very excited. “Do you have any idea what’s going on here?” he said.

  “No.”

  “Sit down,” he said. “You know who is going to do Monday Night Football?”

  “No. Who?”

  “You and me.”

  “What?”

  “I’m going to produce, and you’re going to do the play-by-play. You didn’t hear it from me—but it’s happening.”

  I was stunned. Howard Cosell had left the show after the 1983 season. Frank Gifford had just completed his fifteenth season as the play-by-play announcer. Joe Namath and O. J. Simpson were the analysts. Was Swanson really going to do this?

  What I later learned was this: Swanson was a rabid college football fan. He watched games every weekend. One Saturday in 1985, he was watching the “A” game on ABC. The game became one-sided in the second half. So the network switched the game that I was doing to much of the country, including Chicago, where Swanson lived. Swanson later told me he loved the burst of energy and, in his mind, the way I was engaging the audience.

  At that point, Swanson knew that down the line, he’d get Roone Arledge’s job, and he later told me that then and there he decided that when he moved into that role, he was going to make me his play-by-play man for Monday Night Football. If the “A” game had been exciting that day, ABC would never have switched its coverage. Sometimes a little luck goes a long way.

  Sure enough, the day after Ken Wolfe’s call, I got another call, this one from Dennis Lewin, who was then the head of production. Lewin wanted to come out to Los Angeles the next day to talk with me. We met for dinner. I knew what he was going to tell me, but I had to play dumb. Now it’s official. O. J. Simpson and Joe Namath were out. Frank Gifford was being offered the role of analyst, and I would be doing the play-by-play on Monday Night Football. That was it. It would be a two-man booth, not a three-man booth.

  And away I would go—to what at that time was the most iconic show in sports television history.

  CHAPTER 13

  Monday Nights

  ON MONDAY MORNING, SEPTEMBER 8, 1986, I opened the door of my hotel room in Dallas, Texas, and picked up a local newspaper sitting just outside the door. I pulled out the sports section and found myself staring at a picture of my face. “Can Monday Night Football Be Saved?” read the headline. I laugh at the memory now—that story’s been written too many times to count. But back then there was a certain element of truth to it. The ratings had been steadily going down and the perception was that the franchise was sagging. I was supposed to be the savior?

  A few things had happened since I’d gotten the job seven months earlier. Initially, Frank Gifford resisted the change and made noises about leaving ABC, contending that he could go to CBS and become the co-anchor on the CBS Morning News. (At least, his agent did.) I think that Frank considered the switch to the analyst role a demotion. But Dennis Swanson wasn’t the kind of person to be held up. In effect, he responded by telling Frank’s agent, If Frank wants to do that, good luck at CBS. We’ll find someone else. Frank eventually agreed to the switch and began his sixteenth year on Monday Night Football.

  Meanwhile, if moving to Monday Night Football was good news, the word was that the not-so-good news was that Swanson was a bottom-line executive who was going to be instituting significant cutbacks being demanded by the new regime. It was made clear that the champagne-and-caviar days under Roone Arledge were history. Monday Night Football would not be an exception. Good-bye limos and private planes and hotel suites. Hello, the rumors went, to compact Toyota rental cars and the Embassy Suites. “Congratulations,” my friend Alex Wallau said to me. “You got invited to the orgy after the girls went home.”

  It wasn’t quite that severe. Yes, some of the excesses under Roone came to an end, but there was nothing much to complain about. This was Monday Night Football. It had been several years since I’d broadcast a few NFL games, so I’d spent a lot of the spring boning up on pro football. In some ways, it’s the most challenging sport to stay on top of. In the NBA, there are just a dozen or so players on a roster. In baseball, there are twice as many, but the rhythm of the sport is different. With football, you have fifty-three players on the roster, and, with shorter playing careers, there are more players cycling in and out. (It’s not rare for a team to have at least ten or more first-year players on its roster.)

  I wasn’t exactly starting from scratch. I was a big NFL fan, and I’d been covering college football for years. And this was pre-Internet, pre–NFL Network, pre–Fantasy Football. Fans didn’t know as much as they do today, and information and data weren’t as easily accessible to them. There weren’t wall-to-wall pregame and midweek shows. So the gap between the knowledge of a fan and the knowledge of a broadcaster was much larger than it is today. In any event, by the time the season came around, I felt ready.

  Here we go. My opening regular season Monday night broadcast was the New York Giants at Dallas. Tom Landry on one sideline, Bill Parcells on the other. Phil Simms. Danny White. Tony Dorsett. Lawrence Taylor. Mark Bavaro. Herschel Walker making his Cowboys debut. Texas Stadium. Was I nervous? Well, I started out by welcoming the viewers to the 1976 season, not 1986. On the air, I said to Frank, “It’s already been a long year.” But then, everything settled down. Dallas won the game, 31–28, with Walker scoring the winning touchdown.

  All in all, the season was a lot of fun. Frank and I got along great (Frank even got married in the middle of the season to Kathie Lee). I became more and more comfortable as the year progressed. I thought that the show had regained some cachet—at least the drumbeat of articles about “saving” the show had begun to fade away.

  After the season, Swanson decided that we should go back to a three-man booth—that we really needed someone only fairly recently retired to come aboard
to provide additional analysis. So we brought in Dan Dierdorf, the six-time Pro Bowl offensive tackle for the St. Louis Cardinals. Frank would remain in the same role but could hopefully share a different perspective. Having worked on Monday Night Baseball for a decade, the “adjustment” for me to a three-man booth was fairly simple. Frank, Dan, and I would go on to work together for eleven consecutive years—in this business, a near eternity. Those were very good times.

  OVER THE COURSE OF that run, we’d have lots of memorable Monday nights. One of the seminal games came in my second season, on November 30, 1987. The Seattle Seahawks were home in the Kingdome to the Los Angeles Raiders, whose new star was their dynamic running back, Bo Jackson. I had covered Jackson in college at Auburn and his football talent was obvious. His baseball prowess wasn’t too bad either—in 1989, he’d be the MVP of the All-Star Game. There have been a handful of athletes who have played multiple sports professionally, including Deion Sanders, who won a Super Bowl ring with the Cowboys and came close to a World Series ring with the Atlanta Braves. But few, if any, played two sports at Jackson’s level. Bo was just a freak of nature.

  That spring and summer, Jackson had been the starting left fielder for the Kansas City Royals, and then in the fall, had joined future Hall of Famer Marcus Allen in the Raiders backfield. Bo was electric. As I said during the game, “Every time he gets the ball, there’s a great sense of anticipation.”