You Can't Make This Up: Miracles, Memories, and the Perfect Marriage of Sports and Television (19 page)

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.”

Meanwhile, somewhere in the south that day, ABC’s “A” game was being produced by Chuck Howard, with Keith Jackson doing the play-by-play. Chuck oversaw all of the network football coverage. About a half hour after our game was restarted, during a commercial break, my producer, Ken Wolfe, told me that Chuck had heard that the referee had died.

“How does Chuck know that?” I asked.

Apparently someone on Chuck’s crew had spoken to someone at the hospital.

“We can’t report that.”

Wolfe was in total agreement. How would we know whether this was fact or rumor? But even more important, what if McVay
had
died? Do we know if anyone had contacted his wife and family or next of kin? We certainly didn’t. And we knew that he was from Columbus, Ohio, and that this regional telecast would be on the air in his hometown.

Howard told Wolfe that he was instructing Keith Jackson to announce it on their game, which was airing in the South. And that we should do it as well. We refused. Our feeling was, who gives a damn about where an audience hears something first? Here was a man who might have died—or might not have—but there was nothing more important than absolute verification and direct notification of his family and certainly not from television.

It turned out that Richard McVay did die at the hospital. The news would be announced soon enough but certainly not by our crew until we were absolutely certain his family had been informed.

Again, I go back to the “you heard or read it here first” nonsense. The audience and readership doesn’t care. It’s nothing but a “look at me, look at me” vanity play on the part of broadcasters and newspapers.

That game marked the second time in 1982 I had gone to the Midwest and ended up reporting on a tragedy. In mid-May I’d gone to Indianapolis to cover the time trials for the upcoming Indianapolis 500. My broadcast partners were Jackie Stewart, the legendary Formula One champion; Sam Posey, a very accomplished racer himself; and Chris Economaki, who edited a popular racing newspaper, and had for years been covering the scene in the pits for ABC.

Among those trying to qualify that afternoon was Gordon Smiley, who was thirty-six years old and had finished 25th and 22nd in the “500” in appearances over the prior two years. Qualifying consists of running four laps by yourself around the Indianapolis Motor Speedway at speeds well in excess of 200 miles per hour.

Smiley went out to warm up and on his second warm-up lap, as he exited the long back straightaway and entered the third turn, his car began to oversteer. In a flash, a gradual left-hand turn became a violent right-hand turn, which sent him into the outside wall nose-first at nearly 200 mph.

The car virtually disintegrated and the fuel tank exploded. All you could do was say a prayer.

At that moment, we weren’t on the air live. We were taping some of the earlier qualifying runs and we were still an hour or so away from our live show. Our crew then scrambled to build a package about a man who had lost his life, and, among other things, choose which portions of the footage needed to be edited out because they were simply too graphic. I opened the broadcast, reported what had happened, and then brought in Stewart and Posey for their thoughts. Then we went to the pits. Chris Economaki interviewed one of Smiley’s crew members. His whole crew was in shock. Frankly, we all were. It was a horrible thing to witness. It took me several days to get some of the images out of my brain. Then it was time to resume our coverage of the qualifying, not that anyone could concentrate.

But I’ll never forget Jackie Stewart’s description. He said, “This is like an aircraft accident.” It was.

Sports are mostly a lot of fun and a diversion, but tragedy occasionally intrudes. And those moments present a large challenge for announcers and production crews. They’re almost always completely unexpected and there’s no “how-to” guide. I’ve found that the best way to handle these moments is to let my heart lead me. You’re looking at a man who may be dying? It’s not a time for acting. Be natural. If you express emotion, or trip on your words a bit, the viewers will understand. And never speculate. Just tell the viewer what you know, not what you think.

And then, if and when the action eventually resumes, echo the mood in the play-by-play. Don’t get excited about too much. Realize that the relevance of anything that subsequently takes place is pretty minimal. Just go on and get through it.

Oh, and something to always avoid—the phrase “This puts everything into perspective.” I detest that cliché. Everything—and certainly sports—should
always
be kept in perspective. We don’t need a tragedy or a disaster to remind us.

CHAPTER 11

The One and Only

T
HE FIRST TIME
I met Howard Cosell, I wound up replacing him. It was in San Antonio in March 1977, at an event called the United States Boxing Championships. ABC had made a deal with promoter Don King and
Ring
magazine to stage a tournament to determine the best American fighter in each weight division. But in fact, after the tournament had gotten under way, signs of improprieties and shady dealings were emerging. (In a Don King enterprise?
Really?
) Sooner than later, it would be determined—in part thanks to the investigative work of Alex Wallau, an ABC executive who would become my best friend not long after, and to this day still is—that King was using the tournament, and the money and exposure coming from it, to sign the best fighters to exclusive contracts. Furthermore,
Ring
magazine was falsifying records and inflating rankings to get a number of fighters into the tournament for King. Word was circulating that the United States Congress (!) was about to launch its own investigation. The night before the next installment of the event in San Antonio, no one was sure of anything, but ABC was leaning toward keeping its best-known boxing commentator—a man who prided himself on a scrupulous set of morals when it came to sports—off the coverage. That announcer, of course, was one Howard Cosell. And so I was flown in at the last moment as the potential replacement. Howard was already in San Antonio.

When I arrived in Texas that evening, I had dinner with Howard and the production crew. It wasn’t my first experience in boxing—back in Hawaii, I had announced some small cards put on by a local promoter with the unforgettable name of Sam Ichinose (pronounced “itchy-NOSE-ee”), as well as some cards promoted by Harry Kabakoff, a real showman from the mainland. To help promote one of those shows, Kabakoff suggested to me a week before the event that I get into the ring to spar with Jesus Pimentel, the Mexican bantamweight who once fought for a world title. The sparring session was going to be part of a goofy feature piece for my sports report on the six o’clock news. So there I was, climbing into the ring, ready to spar a couple of rounds. At the time, in my mid-twenties, I felt I was in really good shape. This would be fun. Then, after forty-five seconds of dancing with Pimentel, giving and taking some light, gentle jabs, my tongue was hanging out of my mouth, and I was completely out of breath. It became my own version of “No Mas.”

Years later, at this dinner in San Antonio, Howard Cosell was very friendly. I was the brand-new kid on the block and it was readily apparent that he’d had enough of his other ABC colleagues. With me, though, there hadn’t been time for familiarity to breed contempt. Sure enough, the next day, it was decided by the ABC brass that Howard should be kept off the telecast—things were getting too dicey with Congress at bay—and thus, I would be ringside calling the action.

Howard had left a law career in the 1950s to get into broadcasting, initially on ABC radio. Later, he’d risen to fame on
Wide World of Sports
with his frequent interviews with Muhammad Ali
.
But it was on
Monday Night Football
where he became a full-fledged megacelebrity, possessing a much larger profile than many of the athletes he covered. And then working with him from 1977 through 1985, I learned what a charming, brilliant, bitter, confounding, complex, and maddening figure he could be—sometimes, it seemed, all at once.

Howard never held most of his colleagues in high regard. He would always mock Jim McKay. When the Munich massacre began unfolding at the 1972 Olympic Games, with the hostage-taking of the Israeli contingent of coaches and athletes, Roone Arledge selected McKay for the anchor seat for ABC’s coverage. Cosell always deeply resented that he wasn’t the chosen one, and he
never
let it go. He’d refer to McKay behind his back as “the diminutive one” and “the one who shouldn’t have been there.” McKay, meanwhile, would wind up winning an Emmy—for news!

Howard thought that Keith Jackson was bombastic, an announcer of little substance whose legacy was nothing more than terms like “big uglies in the trenches.” He had little regard for Chris Schenkel, as fine as gentleman as you could meet. And he basically loathed his longtime
Monday Night Football
partner Frank Gifford. “The human mannequin” was one Cosell description of Frank. He resented everything about him, especially his close friendship with the boss. “Roone’s bobo,” he’d call Gifford.

While Howard spent a good deal of time excoriating the other ABC announcers, he was okay with me at the time. I think he recognized the Rascal. He saw that I was willing to question authority, and that I wasn’t reluctant to offer opinions, even if they sometimes went against the company line. We would wind up having some great times together. I enjoyed his company for the most part, especially in the earlier years. I liked his wife, Emmy. And while Howard irritated plenty of broadcast partners by smoking cigars in the booth, it never bothered me—and eventually I finally figured out why. When my father had taken me to Ebbets Field and Madison Square Garden decades earlier, the air had always been filled with cigar smoke. So that smell took my brain back to my childhood.

When Cosell was on the road, he usually brought only one jacket with him: the Tweety Bird yellow blazer that ABC Sports inexplicably decided would be the signature piece of our on-air wardrobe. And he’d wear it everywhere. Here was one of the most recognizable men in America at the time, going around town with a blazer you could see from the next state over. He’d complain that he couldn’t go
anywhere
without being recognized but,
really,
that was the way he wanted it.