Authors: Al Michaels,L. Jon Wertheim
You Can't Make This Up: Miracles, Memories, and the Perfect Marriage of Sports and Television (2 page)
But on this night, in 2012, I’m looking at the first time as the only time.
We go to the parking lot, and I think of Curt Gowdy.
Don’t ever get jaded.
I think also of the great Jim McKay, and his line from
Wide World of Sports
. “The human drama of athletic competition.” You just don’t know what’s going to happen. But so often, sports have the capacity to create these moments. The kinds of moments I’ve had the great fortune to broadcast throughout a career I dreamed of since I was six years old.
From minor-league baseball in Hawaii to the Miracle on Ice to
Monday Night Football
to
Sunday Night Football
and so much in between, if there’s such a thing as reincarnation, and if you believe in the law of averages, in my next life I’ll be working in a sulfur mine.
In Mongolia.
On the night shift.
I’m always remembering how lucky I’ve been. And I have this crazy, unscripted drama known as sports to thank for it all.
M
Y FIRST MEMORY IN
life is going to Ebbets Field in the summer of 1950.
I was almost six, and the ballpark was a twenty-minute walk from our second-story apartment in the Flatbush section of Brooklyn. We walked in on the first-base side of Ebbets Field, and more than sixty years later, I can still see the colors vividly in my mind’s eye. The grass was a stunning shade of green. The red-brown infield dirt. The uniforms that seemed almost too white to be real—what Vin Scully has described through the years as “wedding cake white.”
I remember everything about Ebbets Field. I remember the signage at the bottom of the right field wall. And I remember the faces of the players. Jackie Robinson, taking infield practice. Duke Snider and Pee Wee Reese, walking out from the dugout to the batting cage.
But there was another image I remember from that day, above the field. From time to time I would turn around and look at an enclosure that was just below and attached to the upper deck. My father told me that was the Dodgers’ broadcast booth.
The Dodgers were playing the Cardinals, and I really don’t remember if they won or lost. It didn’t matter. By the time we left, I was enthralled. I wanted to come back to Ebbets Field the next day, and the next day, and the day after that.
A few months later, my father took me to Madison Square Garden for a hockey game. It was a Saturday afternoon, and the New York Rovers of the Eastern Hockey League were playing the Atlantic City Seagulls. (I was too young to go to a Rangers game, since they only played on Sunday and Wednesday nights—school nights.) We got to the Garden early, before the teams had even come out to warm up. We took our seats in the corner of the lower part of the balcony, and again, just like when I walked into Ebbets Field, I was transfixed by the scene.
The combination of the lighting and the just-resurfaced rink made the ice shimmer. As was the case with my first baseball game, I don’t remember who won, but it was the ambience, the environment, the whole package—that’s what stuck with me.
More than sixty years later, it still does.
MY PARENTS WERE BOTH
teenagers when I was born. They met at Midwood High School in Brooklyn and got married before they graduated. Our apartment in Brooklyn had one bedroom. When I was four, my brother David was born. He and I shared the bedroom and my parents had a Castro Convertible sofa bed in the living room that they opened up every night. We lived in that apartment for the first twelve years of my life.
We didn’t have a lot of money but we never felt poor. Brooklyn was as vibrant, and as energetic, as any place in the world. Or so it seemed to me. Looking back, I can’t imagine having grown up anywhere else. I’ve lived on the West Coast for the better part of my life, but I still consider myself a New York kid. Brooklyn is my DNA.
My mother, Lila Michaels, was a character. She was Joan Rivers and Phyllis Diller rolled into one. She had a tremendous sense of humor, and was a big prankster. Maybe because she was so young when I was born, she was a lot more lenient than other moms, and a lot more mischievous as well. She might have even been too young to have read Dr. Spock. How many other moms never insisted that their kids eat vegetables? To this day, I’ve
never
eaten a vegetable.
My dad, Jay, worked for a talent agency in Manhattan called General Artists Corporation. (Many years later, it would be bought out by ICM, International Creative Management.) At that time, my father was still working his way up as an agent, and represented a bunch of fringe entertainers, like a singer few people would remember by the name of Joni James. Eventually, my father moved up and worked with more mainstream acts like Pat Boone, who burst onto the scene in the mid-fifties as a singer notable for wearing white buck shoes. A couple of years later, when we had moved to Long Island, one day Pat Boone came to our house. The neighbors were flabbergasted.
My father was also a huge sports fan. He taught me the rules, the nuances, the history of sports—everything. I was immersed. I couldn’t get enough.
At the time, there were sixteen big league baseball teams, with three of them in New York—the Dodgers in Brooklyn, the Giants in Manhattan, and the Yankees in the Bronx. So I was that kid, like so many others, lying in bed, tilting the transistor radio to just the right angle to hear the games. I would get transported to cities across the country. One night I’d be in Chicago, the next night St. Louis, another night Detroit. Listening to a game unfold through the words of the broadcaster. Red Barber. Russ Hodges. Mel Allen. Jack Brickhouse. Curt Gowdy. Every play, every anecdote, every insight.
There was also that magical box that sat in our living room around the time my dad started taking me to Ebbets Field and Madison Square Garden. Even if sports coverage on television back then was normally just a three-or-four-camera, black-and-white presentation, it was the next best thing to being there.
And it wasn’t only baseball that absorbed me. I loved hockey and basketball and football, even though the NFL bore no resemblance to what it would become. I was an easy kid to shop for. When I was nine or ten, my grandparents bought me a gold-leafed book about the history of the Olympics. The history at that time included the most recent Olympics, 1952 Helsinki Summer Games. It must have been three hundred pages, but I remember going through every one of them, immersing myself in the stories.
I collected baseball cards, too—didn’t just collect them, memorized them. I’d have other kids in the neighborhood quiz me. Batting averages, home runs, earned run averages, fielding averages, players’ birthplaces. My father would take my brother and me to Army football games at West Point, and on the way home, I’d go through the plays that had been run in each quarter. My parents would go to the night harness races at Roosevelt Raceway in Westbury, on Long Island. On occasional weekend afternoons, my father would take my brother and me to the track, where we could go to the barn area and meet some of the trainers and drivers. But that was all we could experience, because in those years, even if you were accompanied by an adult, the law didn’t allow a minor to go to the actual races. Still, I learned how to read the racing form, and really got into it. I even started my own tout sheet, which I titled
Big Al at Westbury
, and sold it to our neighbors for $1.50. One day I picked a horse named Algerine, who went off at odds of 75–1—and won. The next day, everyone in the neighborhood wanted to buy a copy of that night’s
Big Al at Westbury
.
Years later, my brother would call it my “manic intensity.” I still prefer to think of it more as passion combined with compulsion. Doing anything halfway, halfheartedly has never appealed to me. Or even three-quarters heartedly. Not getting something right has always been anathema to me.
I LOVED PLAYING SPORTS.
But by the time I was a teenager, even though I had played little league baseball and some organized youth sports, and like any kid in Brooklyn in those years, punch ball, stickball, and a game only known inside the borough as ringolevio—I loved watching sports more. I would rather go to a Dodger game at Ebbets than play in a game in a park down the street. I just loved the big-time feel. It was thrilling.
In fourth, fifth, and sixth grades, our school, P.S. 139, because of overcrowding, was on a half-day schedule, and I was originally placed in the noon-to-four session. But that wasn’t going to work, because how could I go to Dodger games if I was going to school in the afternoon? (In those years, most major-league teams played the vast majority of their games in the daytime, including the Dodgers.) So my mother wrote a note to the school principal with some nonsensical, fabricated excuse to get me switched to the eight-to-noon session. It worked. And so when I was twelve, I was at more than 50 of the 77 Dodger home games.
At Ebbets Field, I’d glance occasionally at the broadcast booth. At that time, the Dodger announcers were Red Barber, Connie Desmond, and a very young Vin Scully. All I could think was that had to be the best job in the world. A job where you’d go to the ballpark every day, and get in for free. A job where you’d get to meet the players, travel with the team, and, I assumed, get paid. That’s what originally got me thinking about broadcasting. Most kids dream of playing Major League baseball. I dreamed of announcing Major League baseball.
In the summer of 1956, my father got a small raise, and we moved from Brooklyn to a modest tract house in North Bellmore, Long Island. My sister Susan would be born shortly thereafter. We now had a backyard, and I would practice calling games using the garden hose as a microphone. My brother David, then about nine years old, would pretend to be the athlete, and I’d announce whatever he was doing. I remember David picking up a large round rock and pretending he was Parry O’Brien, the Olympic champion and world record holder in the shot put. It was around the time of the 1956 Melbourne Olympic Games. So I called the reenactment in a backyard on Long Island.
We wouldn’t live there very much longer. In the summer of 1958, between the eighth and ninth grades, I went to a summer camp in the Poconos. The bus back home dropped us in Manhattan, and my father picked me up. He took me to his office and told me he’d gotten a promotion, and that in a couple of months we would be moving to California.
I was stunned. But this was just a few months after the Dodgers themselves had moved from Brooklyn to Los Angeles. That had broken the hearts of every Dodger fan in greater New York. But now the Michaels family would be following the team, and its stars, out west.
Gil Hodges, Duke Snider, Carl Furillo. The emerging superstars Drysdale and Koufax.
And, of course, Vin Scully.
W
E MOVED TO CALIFORNIA
in October 1958. I was almost fourteen. We were too late for the Dodgers, but a week after we arrived, my dad took me to see the Los Angeles Rams play the Chicago Bears at the Los Angeles Coliseum. “Jaguar” Jon Arnett, who had played college football at the University of Southern California, had a monster performance, running the ball, catching passes coming out of the backfield, and returning kicks. The Rams won, 41–35. The crowd that day? 100,470. So many years later, with the NFL absent from the country’s second-largest market, I hear the argument that Los Angeles wouldn’t support a team anyway. Well, with the Los Angeles metropolitan area at that time 40 percent of the size it is now, more than 100,000 showed up for a game at the Coliseum. You really think you couldn’t fill a 70,000-seat stadium today on a regular basis? Don’t be ridiculous.
We lived on the west side of Los Angeles, in Cheviot Hills. I went to Alexander Hamilton High School, and as in Brooklyn, I was going to forty to fifty Dodger games each season. The team played in the Coliseum until 1962. The tickets ranged from $1.50 for a bleacher seat to $3.50 for the best seat in the house. I was there—along with 93,102 other fans—when Roy Campanella, who’d been the Dodgers’ regular catcher in Brooklyn, and had been paralyzed in an automobile accident in January 1958—was honored on May 7, 1959. They wheeled him out as they dimmed the stadium lights, and almost everyone in the stands lit a lighter or a match in tribute. A few months later, I was at the 1959 World Series when the Dodgers beat the Chicago White Sox in six games. Games 3, 4, and 5 were at the Coliseum. The crowds each day were 92,000 and change.
Meanwhile, when I wasn’t at a game, Vin Scully was still taking me there on the radio. Scully was just twenty-two years old when he’d joined Red Barber in 1950, and then came with the team to Los Angeles, where he’d quickly become extremely popular in the land of the car—and the car radio. Now that I was a little older, I was paying closer attention to what made Vin different from all other broadcasters. I guess the best way to summarize it would be that at the time, a lot of announcing was black-and-white—here’s what happened, and here’s what happened next. Vin, though, was full-blown color, breathing life and detail into virtually every moment of every game.
When the Dodgers moved to California, owner Walter O’Malley had feared that putting the games on television—giving them away for free—would hurt them at the gate. Today teams make much more money on television contracts than ticket sales, but in the late 1950s, the thinking—and the economics—were different. In any event, no TV meant that my experience with Scully came almost entirely on the radio. I couldn’t see the game, so he’d form the images in my mind.
I loved the Dodgers. I loved the Los Angeles Rams. Eventually, years later, I’d switch my NHL allegiance from the Rangers to the Kings, who started play as an expansion team in 1967. And when my teams weren’t involved, I still watched every sports event I could on television—not necessarily to root, but instead to see what stories would emerge. I was fascinated by the competition. I was rooting for drama, a close game—and excitement. I loved the ebb and flow. I wanted extra innings. I wanted overtime. I wanted controversy, strategy, anything you could talk about with your friends for days afterward.