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

by Al Michaels

  The anticipation also came from Jackson’s massively hyped matchup with Brian Bosworth, the Seahawks’ brash linebacker, who promised before the game to “contain” Jackson. Well, at one point Bo and Boz collided on a short yardage handoff. Bo drove him into the end zone. Then the real highlight came when Bo ran left, quickly cut upfield, and sprinted ninety-one yards to the end zone. My call: “There goes Bo. And nobody catches Bo. Touchdown.” He disappeared into a tunnel. In thirty more seconds, he could have been in Tacoma. That night, his twenty-fifth birthday, he ran for 221 yards, then the Monday night record for rushing, as the Raiders won, 37–14.

  Another of my favorites was a game in the middle of October 1994—the Broncos and the Chiefs in Denver, John Elway against Joe Montana in what would be Montana’s final NFL season. It was a game that had just about everything from start to finish, going back and forth all night, finally decided on a late touchdown pass from Montana to Willie Davis. Dan Dierdorf’s line at the end of the game summed it up perfectly. “Lord, you can take me now—I’ve seen it all.” I’ll never forget walking through the Denver airport the next morning and overhearing virtually everyone I walked by talking excitedly about the game. It was the only topic of conversation—another reminder of how great Monday Night Football could be, and how popular the NFL was.

  The first Super Bowl that ABC broadcast during my tenure followed the 1987 season—Super Bowl XXII, the Washington Redskins against the Denver Broncos. Yes, I had already called a number of big events, from the Miracle on Ice to six World Series. But it was still a major rush to wake up that morning in San Diego and think to myself, I’m going to be calling the Super Bowl today. The game’s prominence had grown almost unimaginably in the twenty-one years since my brother and I had watched the Chiefs and Packers at the Los Angeles Coliseum.

  In a way, the Super Bowl is somewhat easier to call than a regular game because you’re really concentrating almost solely on the game itself. You don’t have to begin to tell the outside stories and work the periphery very much. In the weeks leading up to the game, most of the stories have been told—or frequently overtold—through practically every imaginable media outlet in the world. Fans get inundated with story lines during the buildup, which means there’s a different frame of reference than there would be for a regular season game, and even for other playoff games. That also means that one of the keys to broadcasting the Super Bowl is to find the really good stories that few, if any viewers have heard, or, alternatively, find a new context for familiar stories.

  On a Super Bowl telecast, one thing you want to do is to start the show cleanly. You want the starting gate to open up and to come out immediately in rhythm. Once you’ve done that, you’re doing what you’ve done your whole professional life. You come on the air and it’s easy to think to yourself, Holy cow. It’s the Super Bowl. But to me, when I look at the camera lens, all I’m looking into is a piece of glass. To the hundred million fans, I know you’re all back there, but, really, it’s just me talking to you, one-to-one.

  Super Bowl XXII had its moments but 95 percent of them came in the first half. It was John Elway and the Broncos, coached by Dan Reeves, against Doug Williams, the NFL’s only African-American starting quarterback at the time, and the Redskins, coached by Joe Gibbs. Denver led 10–0 after the first quarter. In the several years prior to this game, Super Bowls had been very one-sided—routs that didn’t live up to great expectations. And so at this point, all our crew was really hoping was that Denver wouldn’t win in a blowout—that Washington could keep it close.

  They did more than that. In the second quarter, the Redskins went wild, scoring thirty-five points. Williams threw touchdown passes to Ricky Sanders, Gary Clark, Sanders again, and Clint Didier. A rookie running back, Timmy Smith, would break off a 58-yard touchdown run, on his way to setting a Super Bowl rushing record of 204 yards. As we reached halftime, I remember Dierdorf and I looking at each other and thinking the same thought. What just happened? What the hell happened to our game?

  The second half was tough because there wasn’t much of a game left. Any strategy talk went out the window. Washington won, 42–10—another Super Bowl blowout—and Doug Williams was deservedly named MVP. He’d even come out of the game briefly early in the second quarter when he incurred what looked at the time to be a possibly game-ending leg injury, only to lead his team to those five touchdowns before the half.

  One other memory stands out from that Super Bowl. The owner of the Redskins was none other than Jack Kent Cooke—the same Jack Kent Cooke who had used me as a sacrificial lamb and then fired me twenty years earlier when he owned the Lakers. In the days before the game, Cooke told a writer that he had provided the launching pad for my career. When I saw the story in print, I couldn’t resist calling the writer to set him straight. “Don’t for one second believe Cooke’s bullshit. That megalomaniac almost ended my career.”

  THREE YEARS LATER, THE next ABC Super Bowl broadcast—Super Bowl XXV, the Bills and the Giants—came under unusual, and even unnerving, circumstances. It was January 1991, barely a week after the Persian Gulf War—Operation Desert Storm—had been launched in Iraq. At Tampa Stadium, unprecedented security measures were being taken. It was the first time I’d ever seen big concrete barriers set up outside a stadium. ABC wasn’t allowed to fly a blimp overhead. Meanwhile, the backdrop also gave the pregame ceremonies some added energy—and Whitney Houston turned a memorable rendition of the National Anthem.

  Things could also be carried a little too far. We were told the night before the game that some SWAT team members and other security muckety-mucks were insisting that they had to meet with the broadcast crew. So Frank, Dan, and I are in a hotel room listening to instructions on how we needed to react if taken hostage during the game. I’m thinking: Stop it already. Terrorists are going to invade the broadcast booth and shepherd three announcers to some unknown location?? Puh-leeze! The meeting ends and when I get Gifford alone, I say, “Frank, you know why these guys were here? All they want is to get into the stadium for free and watch the game.” Frank laughed and said, “One hundred percent.”

  The Bills came into the game seven-point favorites. Marv Levy’s team had Jim Kelly, Thurman Thomas, and the K-Gun offense, with Bruce Smith anchoring a vaunted defense as well. The Giants had a strong defense as well, but their offense, with backup quarterback Jeff Hostetler filling in for an injured Phil Simms, wasn’t nearly as explosive. In our meetings that week with the coaching staffs, Bill Parcells told us that for his team to win, they had to play clock ball—keep the ball away from the Bills as much as possible. Parcells wasn’t above throwing curveballs at you—tell you one thing, then actually do something else in the game. In this Super Bowl, though, that’s exactly what the Giants did. They held the ball for more than forty minutes, and squeezed out a 20–19 victory when Bills kicker Scott Norwood missed a 47-yard field goal in the closing seconds wide right.

  Another thing about that Super Bowl: About ninety minutes before the game, I was down on the field talking with Phil Simms, who was dressed in street clothes. Phil’s year had ended with a foot injury late in the regular season. Parcells walks right by us and says hello to me—we chat for maybe thirty seconds—and completely ignores Simms. When he walks away, I laconically say to Phil, “Nice greeting.” Simms summed it up perfectly—“Hey, in Bill’s mind, if you’re not playing, you might as well be dead.”

  The Bills would return to the Super Bowl each of the next three years—and lose each time. They never got closer to a championship than those couple of feet wide right.

  WELL BEFORE I STARTED on Monday Night Football, dating back to my days on college football, I loved to “sneak” in quick references to the gambling line. It was just a way to let the savvy audience know that I understood all the reasons why they might be watching. There was also an assumption on the audience’s part that this was the type of thing that was verboten. When I make an allusion to the point spread, or the over/under, I know some people ca
tch it, and others don’t. And that’s fine—it’s just another way to have fun, and connect with the fans who do have money invested on the game. I’ve heard it many times through the years—“Michaels must have a lot of money riding on these games.” Let me forever set this straight. The primary reason I love sports is because of its unpredictability. Nobody knows who’s going to win. I have some otherwise very smart friends who shell out thousands of dollars to subscribe to tout sheets. I keep telling them they’re crazy. Or delusional. Very few people could be more wired into information than the broadcasters. We have access to both teams—coaches, players, owners, GMs, anyone who would know anything. And let me tell you that if I had to make my living betting on football, I’d be researching Chapter 11 covenants. I can’t remember the last time I bet on a sports event, horse racing excepted. I do love action, though. But I can get my jollies through the greatest game ever invented—Craps. Roll ’dem bones. But I digress . . .

  So in January 1995, along came Super Bowl XXIX—the San Francisco 49ers and the San Diego Chargers meeting in Miami. The game featured the biggest point spread in Super Bowl history—early in the week, San Francisco had been favored to win by 19 points, and the spread was 18 to 18½ points on the day of the game.

  That Super Bowl marked the only time I was ever asked specifically by a boss to stay away from any gambling references. “Look,” Dennis Swanson said to me. “The league is really sensitive about the point spread, and the disparity in this one, so if you can just avoid any of that, that would be great.” Very occasionally, the league will reach out in that way to a network. We’re independent, not the NFL’s public relations arm, and we are not restricted to the degree many people think we are. On the other hand, it is a partnership, there’s a ton of money in play, and you want to accommodate each other when possible. It can be a fine line—you don’t want to hurt the product, but you want to stay independent and maintain your integrity.

  Either way, on that Super Bowl Sunday, the Rascal could only be held in check so long.

  The 49ers received the opening kickoff. Three plays later, from the Chargers’ 44, Steve Young threw a touchdown pass to Jerry Rice. Referring to the Chargers’ other designation, I said, “the Lightning Bolts just got struck by one.” And the rout was on. It was the first of six touchdown passes Young would throw that day.

  As the game wound down, the score—with that 18½-point spread, mind you—was 49 to 26. Meaning that a Chargers’ touchdown could make it a 16-point game. And with just enough time for one final play, the Chargers had the ball near the San Francisco 35-yard line. Stan Humphries was the Chargers quarterback, and he dropped back to pass, looking deep downfield for Shawn Jefferson. “Humphries back to pass,” I said, “and all over America hearts are beating furiously as he launches one to the end zone. Incomplete!”

  I couldn’t help myself.

  And everyone across the country who’d bet on the Niners exhaled.

  WHEN I WAS IN high school and my father was involved in the first AFL television negotiations, he took me with him one morning to the then–Los Angeles Chargers’ training camp. I was introduced to a young assistant coach by the name of Al Davis. This was 1960. I remember Davis asking my dad a lot of questions about the television deal. Davis couldn’t soak in enough information about everything, not just X’s and O’s. Of course, he’d go on to become the head coach and eventually controlling owner of the Oakland Raiders. And in the mid-sixties, he would briefly become commissioner of the American Football League and help to facilitate the merger between the AFL and the NFL. Many years later, when I was living in the Bay Area, I would run into him from time to time. In the late seventies, I was broadcasting a baseball game in Detroit for ABC on the same Sunday afternoon the Raiders had a game in Pontiac against the Lions. Davis invited me to fly back home with the Raiders on the team plane.

  Eventually, the Raiders moved to Los Angeles—and not long after, the Michaels family did, too. So I would run into Davis there as well. When the Raiders would be preparing for a game on Monday Night Football, I’d show up at their practice facility and get treated like gold. Davis would give me a thirty-minute private audience on the sideline. On the one hand, this was contrary to everything you would hear about the secretive, inhospitable, paranoid Al Davis Raiders. On the other hand, it made sense—Davis thrived on being unpredictable.

  In 1991, I got Davis to agree to tape a rare interview that we would play during halftime of a Monday night game in Kansas City. At one point, Davis said, “I want to be known as a maverick.” When we came out of the tape, on the air now with Gifford and Dierdorf, I talked about Davis’s chances for the Pro Football Hall of Fame. From serving as AFL commissioner and helping to formulate the NFL merger to hiring John Madden to “Just Win, Baby” to winning multiple Super Bowls, Al Davis’s football résumé was overflowing. I then said, “I’m hearing that one reason he might not be voted to the Hall was that some voters, mainly sportswriters, had enough of a personal dislike of him to keep him out of Canton.” (Plenty of those guys had crossed swords with him over the years.) I concluded by saying if that was true, it was a denigration of the entire process.

  Well, Davis got voted in and was enshrined the following year. When he learned that he’d be voted to the Class of 1992, he called me at home. “I just want to thank you. It wouldn’t have happened without what you did.”

  “Wow, congratulations,” I said. “That’s great. But you did it, not me.”

  “You’re the second call I made,” he said.

  He said the first call was to his wife. I had no idea if he was telling the truth. All I knew was what he was telling me.

  But then came the subsequent season. In 1992, the Raiders’ star running back—a certain future Hall of Famer in his own right, Marcus Allen—wasn’t getting much playing time. Bo Jackson had suffered a football-career-ending injury in the 1990 playoffs, then the Raiders had signed Roger Craig in 1991. In ’92 they would bring in Eric Dickerson to do the heavy lifting. It was a mystery as to why Allen was falling down the depth chart and rotting on the bench. It was apparent that this decision went beyond his football skills and that it was being made—for whatever reason—at the top, by Al Davis.

  Allen hadn’t spoken out publicly about his reduced playing time. But I knew him well, and reached out to ask if he’d do an interview for a Monday night game the Raiders had coming up in Miami a couple of weeks hence. There couldn’t be a better platform than Monday Night Football to get his side of the story out there. And Marcus agreed. By this point he had had enough of the Raiders.

  We taped the interview in Los Angeles—in the family room of my home, actually—forty-eight hours before the game in Miami. And he had plenty to say about Al Davis—accusing the Raiders owner of trying to ruin his career, and stop him from going to the Hall of Fame. And he asserted that the Raiders coach, Art Shell, had told him that the situation was out of his hands. Was Davis holding a personal vendetta against Allen, I asked him? “No question about it” was the answer. “He told me he was going to get me.”

  We kept the interview tightly under wraps until it aired. We knew there would be a firestorm if the content got out before kickoff. We also knew there would be a firestorm once it was broadcast. The Raiders chartered to Miami on Sunday and there wasn’t a peep. I got to Florida that afternoon. The following day—game day—I called Davis in his hotel room around noon. Kickoff would be at 9 P.M.

  “Al, you’re probably not going to be happy, but I’ve done an interview with Marcus Allen that we taped on Saturday. I want to read to you a transcript of what will be on the air tonight. Then I want to read you the outtakes, so you know exactly what was said, what we’re using, and what we’re not using. And we’ll give you equal time. We gave Marcus three and a half minutes. You can have three and a half minutes. If you want to respond to this, we can tape something this afternoon. Or we could do it at the stadium. Or we can do it live during the game. Or you can do nothing.”

  I
read Allen’s quotes to Davis and asked him what he wanted to do. He said he’d call me back. At around three thirty, he called and read to me a statement that said, in effect, that Marcus was full of shit and a bad guy. I listened to it. I wrote it all down. Then he said, “You have to talk to Art Shell about this, too.”

  I said, “Why? He’s coaching a big game tonight. I don’t want to go to Art Shell on the field before the game and have him deal with this. You can deal with Art and broach it with him. I’ll report whatever he says.” Davis didn’t respond to that.

  On the field before the game, Art Shell comes over to me. “Al told me what’s going on.” He was shrugging his shoulders like it wasn’t that big a deal.

  Then at halftime, the interview aired. Even without the Internet to fan the flames, it was the biggest sports story in the country the next day—far bigger than the game, which Oakland lost. Headlines in every newspaper in the country. Raiders’ Allen Airs Out Feud with Davis. Allen Says Team Owner Is Ruining His Career. Of course, it completely blew up my relationship with Al Davis.

  To Davis, a television partner of the NFL—particularly Monday Night Football—shouldn’t have been stirring this pot. But again, the show was not a mouthpiece for the league or for his organization. This was a big story and we weren’t going to tiptoe around it. People wanted to know what was happening in this wacky scenario, how Marcus Allen felt about it—and we were going to tell them.

  Davis never forgave me. I was the enemy now. And he let me know it in typical Al Davis manner. I would cover the Raiders many more times through the years, including a Super Bowl appearance against the Buccaneers. In Denver, a year or two after the Allen interview, I was out on the field an hour before the game and I saw Al glaring at me. I’m maybe fifteen yards away and I could hear him muttering. “I’m gonna get you. I’m gonna get you.”