You Can't Make This Up: Miracles, Memories, and the Perfect Marriage of Sports and Television (27 page)

The Red Sox were on to the World Series, where there’d be more unimaginable drama—and ultimately heartbreak—ahead. And where in Game 6, McNamara wouldn’t take Buckner out in the bottom of the tenth inning with a two-run lead, even though he’d made that move throughout the ALCS and late in the season in similar circumstances. Remember, Buckner had been playing on a bum ankle with a hairline fracture and was playing with a special shoe. In the years after Buckner’s infamous error on Mookie Wilson’s grounder, McNamara always took umbrage and got his back up when someone would suggest that he just wanted Buckner to be on the field when the Sox won their first championship since Woodrow Wilson was in the White House. Even if that appeared to be the case.

And then there was Donnie Moore, whose career would never be the same. He pitched in great pain in that series—cortisone shots were his regular friend—but he pitched through it and paid a price. His last major-league appearance would be in August 1988 for the Angels. Not quite a year later, at his home in Anaheim, he shot and wounded his wife, and then took his own life as one of his sons looked on. Some would link it to that Game 5 in 1986. How could anyone possibly know? All I know is it was tragic.

As for Gene Mauch, he’d manage just one more season and then retire. He died in 2005. His
New York Times
obituary read, “Gene Mauch, Manager of Near Misses.” He was a very good man and a very good manager. I loved talking baseball with him. He deserved better.

THE CARDINALS GOT BACK
to the World Series in 1987 but lost in seven games to the Minnesota Twins in a Series in which the home team won every game. Games 1, 2, 6, and 7 were in Minnesota, and I remember how earsplittingly loud the crowd was. It was like standing next to an airport runway. Later, we’d learn that they’d pumped the sound of the crowd back through the stadium’s audio system. Management denied it but they were full of it. The fans screamed all game, every game. As the columnist Scott Ostler put it that week, “the Twins beat the Cardinals before a crowd of 55,245 Scandinavian James Browns.”

In 1988, McCarver, Palmer, and I announced the NLCS, when the Dodgers beat the Mets in seven games. That was the Orel Hershiser series—in which the Cy Young winner, who ended the regular season with a record 59 consecutive scoreless innings, started three games, and came in to save another. Then Kirk Gibson’s World Series Game 1 heroics would come days later on NBC, sending Tommy Lasorda’s team on its way to beating the A’s. Oakland, though, would be right back in the World Series the next year on ABC—a series on familiar turf for me.

It was an all–Bay Area affair—the San Francisco Giants and the Oakland A’s. The A’s were favored, with a potent offense led by Jose Canseco and Mark McGwire, as well as a tremendous pitching staff. The Giants were led by Will Clark and Kevin Mitchell. In my three seasons with the Giants, the
best
team I covered finished 27½ games out of first place. A World Series at Candlestick Park seemed a century away.

The teams’ stadiums were about eight miles from one another as the seagulls fly. There would be no flights between any of the games. I could check into one hotel for the duration. But little did I know—I’d be spending seventeen nights there. And this World Series would turn out to be the most unusual ever.

Game 1 in Oakland was played on Saturday night, October 14, with the A’s winning, 5–0. Bart Giamatti, the baseball commissioner and former president of Yale University, had just died a month earlier. At the end of the game, I said: “Appropriately, in a World Series dedicated to a late scholar, the first game is all A’s.”

Oakland won again on Sunday, 5–1, to take a 2–0 lead in the series. Monday was an off day. To Palmer, McCarver, and me, it was feeling like a sweep. The Series resumed Tuesday in San Francisco and, to accommodate prime time in the East, Game 3 was scheduled for 5:30
P
.
M
. local time at Candlestick Park. We would come on the air with the pregame show at five. It was a gorgeous fall day in the Bay Area, ice-blue sky, soft light breezes, 68 degrees. When we came on the air, I made some opening remarks and then brought in Tim McCarver.

In our introduction, we wanted to make the point that although Oakland had won the first two games by lopsided scores, the games had come down to a couple of key plays and misplays. And that set up McCarver to talk through one of those moments from the previous game. As Tim was talking over video of a Dave Parker double in Game 2 that scored Jose Canseco, the broadcast booth shook. It kept shaking. And then there was this thrust that made me wonder if we weren’t about to get pitched from the mezzanine into the lower deck. McCarver put a death grip on my left leg with his right hand. (To this day, Tim remembers it the other way around, but I’m sticking to my story. I recall needing three Advil the next morning.)

Having lived in California for many years, I knew immediately what was going on. This was an earthquake. I said on the air, “I’ll tell you what, we’re having an earthq—” But just as the audience heard the
q,
if not the
u,
we lost power. If you had asked me at the moment how long the quake lasted, I would have said about a minute. When you can’t wait for an earthquake to stop, time seems to stand still. In reality, it was finished in fifteen seconds.

When the tremors finally stopped, all we heard was this collective “ooooh” sound from the crowd. There was still plenty of sunlight but all the stadium lights were out. And we had lost all communication with the truck. We knew nothing. Was there damage? Where was the earthquake centered? Live through an earthquake, and you think you’re at the epicenter—that
you
are sitting right on top of it. It turns out we were seventy miles north of the epicenter. That’s how strong it was.

I didn’t know if we were still on the air but I couldn’t just throw down the microphone and make a run for it. Once our communication with the truck began to come back intermittently, my monitor showed a graphic that just said “World Series.” We still had no idea if we were on the air or not. It turned out we were, for at least a few seconds, and I said, “Well, folks, that’s the greatest open in the history of television, bar none. We’re still here. We are still—as far as we can tell—on the air and I guess you’re hearing us, even though we have no picture and no return audio. And we will be back, we
hope,
from San Francisco in just a moment.”

In the booth, McCarver, Palmer (who hadn’t even gotten on the air yet), and I were waiting to find out what we would need to do next. There was a phone in the booth and when I picked it up, to my great surprise there was a dial tone. I wound up calling the office of Bob Iger, who had started and worked with me for many years in sports and had just taken over as the head of entertainment for ABC in Los Angeles. “You all right?” he asked me immediately. “Yeah, I’m fine—what do you know?” I asked.

Bob knew more than I did—though ABC had switched, believe it or not, to
Roseanne
(that was their backup programming), Iger was getting his information from the news division and had learned the basic details of the earthquake. As we talked and Bob kept filling me in on what he was learning on the fly, much of the crowd at Candlestick, now over the initial shock and getting restless, started chanting “Play ball, play ball!” They had no idea that a section of the Bay Bridge had collapsed, the double-decker Cypress Freeway in Oakland had pancaked, and that there was a huge, several-alarm fire in the Marina district of San Francisco. On the field, meanwhile, players were milling about, some comforting shaken family members who’d been in the stands. Eventually, after about fifteen or twenty minutes, we were able to get total communication back with the truck. Curt Gowdy Jr., our producer, had me come down to the production compound. Clearly, there’d be no game played on this night. And it would be easier for me to eventually communicate with Peter Jennings and Ted Koppel, who were in New York and Washington, respectively, for any reporting from a location just outside Candlestick Park.

Having lived in Menlo Park for twelve years, I knew the region well. And I’d always loved geography and aerial photography. I could never get enough of those “Above” books—
Above Paris, Above New York, Above San Francisco.
That would come in handy on this night. Our audio guys rigged up a handheld microphone that looked like the kind Sinatra would carry onstage if he were performing in a club—silver and shiny—and I would spend the next eight hours reporting from outside the ballpark. We had a blimp airborne for the game—now it would prove invaluable in allowing me to see what was going on in the area. Through our liaison in the truck, I could ask the blimp pilot to maneuver while I narrated.
We have a fire in the marina
. . . .
Now we’re over the Embarcadero. . . .

As I spoke, it was striking how irregular the patterns of damage were. Some areas looked normal, while nearby, others were devastated. The freeway in Oakland—where the second deck buckled and collapsed onto the first—was where 42 of the 63 deaths caused by the quake occurred. Then, two blocks away, everything looked fine.

Dusk turned to darkness, and I was very careful that night not to say anything I wasn’t certain of. In these breaking crisis situations, there could be temptation to speculate or advance the story. But that’s how people get into trouble. At one point someone in the truck said, “Hey, one of the other networks just reported that the Golden Gate Bridge has collapsed.” We had already seen a portion of the cantilevered section of the Bay Bridge that had tilted down, but we had seen nothing indicating any problems from the Golden Gate Bridge.

In that scenario, it could be a knee-jerk reaction to say, “So-and-so is reporting that . . .” Or, more likely when people are reluctant to acknowledge the competition by name, “We’re hearing reports that . . . the Golden Gate Bridge has collapsed.” I said nothing. Then I asked our liaison to ask the blimp pilot to maneuver toward the Golden Gate Bridge. When I could see the shot, sure enough it was clear that the bridge was in good shape, at least to the naked eye. Cars were even traversing it. This was clearly a case of some nonlocal not knowing the Bay Bridge from the Golden Gate Bridge, something every resident of the Bay Area had put up with for years. We got another report that the scoreboard had collapsed at the Oakland Coliseum, where the A’s played. That, too, was a false rumor. Misinformation was flying fast and furiously. It’s the bane of the news and sports businesses, both electronic and print—“You heard it here first!” Who cares? That’s nothing but a vanity play. If it’s not right, it’s garbage.

Years earlier, in Hawaii, I’d gone through that whole thing about Bobby Valentine getting some cheap hits courtesy of a local official scorer that led to his winning a batting title, when in reality all I had was a little secondhand information. Days later, Valentine had ended up in the hospital for a week with a broken jaw after getting beaned. I hadn’t forgotten my sense of guilt for even playing a tiny role in that deal. Now it was a very different scenario—a breaking and developing news story about a natural disaster. But the lesson still held.
Let me see everything I can see and I’ll walk you through it. But we’re not going to speculate here
. Jennings and Koppel, in my mind, were always the best of the best to begin with. We played it conservatively, and there was no doubt in any critic’s mind that ABC had the best coverage of any network that night.

There was a lot of nice press coverage for my work—and I even received an Emmy nomination for news. But I remember thinking how surprised I was by the reaction.
Isn’t it understood that just because you’re broadcasting sports, you’re not blind to the rest of the world?
I’d like to think—in fact, I
know
that many of my brethren see a world that consists of more than explaining holding or pass interference. The same basic principles apply to both sports and news. It’s tenth-grade journalism: who, what, when, where, why, how? It’s that simple. Reporting is reporting, and many of my colleagues would have been just as prepared to do what I did that day. As I’d later tell an interviewer, “Do they think we’re so insular that we know nothing beside ‘hit behind the runner’ and ‘watch for the blitz on third-and-seven’?”

I stayed at Candlestick all night and through an early segment for
Good Morning America
. Finally, at about 6
A
.
M
., I left the stadium exhausted. It was dark, quiet, and eerie on the ride back to downtown—with the electricity still out and debris in the streets. San Francisco looked broken. This most beautiful of American cities had been hit over the head with a lead pipe. When I got to the hotel, there was no power. Linda was with me and we walked up thirteen flights of stairs to our room.

Even though I’d been staring at these images of devastation for hours, there was still so much we didn’t know. Like how many people had died. For all we knew, the death toll could be in the thousands. A lot of information was still sketchy. The toll would end up much lower, but I didn’t know it then. In the hotel room, after a sleepless night, the sun was coming up over this city, this area I love, and I started thinking about all the husbands and wives and sons and daughters who must have been waiting up all night for loved ones who weren’t going to ever come home. It hit me all at once, and after being in reporter mode all night long, I remember suddenly feeling sad and very melancholy. Eventually, I fell asleep for about an hour.

THEY WERE STILL CLEARING
the rubble when the predictable drumbeat started, led by columnists from around the country. “Cancel this World Series. The area needs to recover.” (I think they just wanted to go home.) I appeared on ABC News and said just the opposite. “Most people in this region want the World Series to resume. People here are resilient. They want to show that they can get up off the canvas and slowly but surely return to normalcy.”

I thought Commissioner Fay Vincent came up with the right solution. There would be a seven-day delay between games. It would wind up getting extended to ten days. And while workers made sure the stadiums were safe and that the roads could handle the traffic and that most things were back in satisfactory working order, the teams went to Arizona for a couple of days to work out. I stayed in San Francisco to contribute reports to
World News Tonight
and
Good Morning America
.