You Can't Make This Up: Miracles, Memories, and the Perfect Marriage of Sports and Television (24 page)

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

O
N 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 1
976
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.”

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.”