You Can't Make This Up: Miracles, Memories, and the Perfect Marriage of Sports and Television (31 page)

Meanwhile, at Santa Anita that day in 1998, Baffert had a horse in the race, and there was an unlikely connection. He sat down at the table for a minute and said, “I’ll tell you a funny story. When we were buying him at the two-year-old sale, I’m looking at the bloodlines and I see that his first cousin was Barraq. And I remembered that that was Al Michaels’s horse and he had some talent. It wasn’t the reason I bought him but it was a positive.”

The horse’s name was Real Quiet. And Real Quiet finished second in the San Felipe that day. Then he went on to the Santa Anita Derby three weeks later and finished second again. And then Baffert takes the horse to Louisville.

At Churchill Downs, on that first Saturday of May, Real Quiet goes off at 9–1. And with Kent Desormeaux in the saddle—
Real Quiet wins the 124th running of the Kentucky Derby!
At the Preakness, Real Quiet goes off as the favorite—and wins that race, too. So this horse—a first cousin of my Barraq—was now going for the Triple Crown at the 1998 Belmont Stakes. No horse had won the Triple Crown since Affirmed, twenty years earlier.

Baffert’s Silver Charm had come up just short a year earlier. Now Real Quiet was going to try to make history in New York. He came out of the gate alertly and settled nicely, conserving energy for the mile-and-a-half marathon. With a sixteenth of a mile to go—110 yards—he had a four-length lead. Belmont Park is going wild. Until, in a flash, Victory Gallop, the second-place finisher in the Derby and Preakness, comes roaring to the finish line. It was a photo finish—and the photo revealed that Victory Gallop had won by a nose. Once again, there would be no Triple Crown.

Meanwhile, I was thinking about Barraq. We had gelded him, and he’d been put to rest, but he was still the first cousin of a near–Triple Crown winner. Earlier that week, I’d told Bob Raissman of the New York
Daily News
that I was thinking of pulling a “Zachary Taylor.” Taylor was the twelfth president of the United States, who died in 1850 and whose body was exhumed some 140 years later to determine if he had indeed been fatally poisoned by arsenic. If I could only get Barraq’s body out of the ground for a few minutes, extract a little DNA, and . . . who knows? I was kidding.

Sort of.

EARLIER THAT SPRING, I’D
gotten a call from an agent friend who’d been asked to contact me about playing a role in a sports comedy film that was created by Trey Parker and Matt Stone of
South Park
fame and would be directed by David Zucker, the man behind
Airplane
and
The Naked Gun.
Eight or nine other sportscasters—Dan Patrick, Jim Lampley, and Kenny Mayne among them—would also be playing various roles. And the idea was to have Bob Costas and me do the play-by-play for the “championship” game. The deal that was being offered was what’s known as “favored nations”—all of us, no matter how large or small the role, would receive $10,000. No negotiations. A couple of years before, Frank Gifford, Dan Dierdorf, and I had played ourselves in
Jerry Maguire
—we’d had a fairly extensive role—and the studio had offered us “scale,” or a few hundred bucks. I told Frank and Dan the movie would have a budget of $50 million and there was no freaking way we were doing it for scale. We wound up doing it against my better judgment for $5,000 apiece. Frank and Dan just wanted to have some fun and I had to be a team player.
Jerry Maguire
did $273 million at the box office. Glad we didn’t bust their budget.

They sent over the script. The movie was called
BASEketball
and it was a goofy comedy about a made-up sport. I decided to pass on the offer. For whatever reason, it just didn’t feel right. Then I got a call from Costas. “I hear you don’t want to do this movie,” he said. “Come on, we’ll have some fun.”

I told him I’d think about it. Then I called the agent and said, “They’re paying all of us ten thousand dollars. But they’re flying in everyone else. I can drive to the location from my house. And Costas and I have far larger roles than any of the other guys.” I was still thinking about the
Jerry Maguire
deal and how Frank, Dan, and I had been played as turnip-truck bumpkins by the studio execs. That wasn’t going to happen again. I knew the budget for
BASEketball
would be around $25 million. “Get me another five thousand dollars—the five thousand they’re saving on travel—and I’ll do it, mainly for Bob.”

Also, I was committing to only one day, and I was adamant that I was leaving by five o’clock. I knew enough about Hollywood movie nonsense to realize that if I didn’t make this clear, I could be brought back for a second day. Or third. Or fourth. The deal got done. I was getting a little more money than the others but the studio was saving on travel.

Costas flew in and our day on the set started at 7
A
.
M
. It turned out that this was the very last day of shooting—there would be no Day 2. They were already behind schedule and needed to get this movie finished. Our roles and dialogue bordered on inane but for the first couple of hours we were having a blast. We had totally bought in. But as the morning wore on, it was progressively deteriorating. Probably the most outrageous line was Bob’s. “You’re excited?” he asks me after some sort of great play. “Feel these
nipples
!” Bob was reluctant to say it, but they convinced him to give it a shot, promising that if it didn’t work, they could just cut it out. He believed them.

As we broke for lunch, it was clear that we were falling behind schedule. We still had all these scenes left to do and I’m thinking,
They’ll never get me out of here by five o’clock
. As everyone was scrambling and trying to cut down on the delays, they were humoring Bob and me—or so they thought—by showing us some of “the dailies,” the scenes they’d already shot over the past few weeks. We’re watching these and most were on the other side of vapid. And we’re looking at each other as if to say,
What are we doing here? This is going to be the end of our careers.

Bob turned to me and said, “Well, at least it’s a great payday.”

We hadn’t discussed anything about money before this. I wasn’t turning my nose up at ten thousand dollars, but I got the feeling something wasn’t quite kosher. “Excuse me,” I said.

“Well, at least it’s a good payday,” Bob repeated.

“
Excuse me.
”

Uh-oh. Bob looks at me, and now he knows he’s said something he probably shouldn’t have. We decided to flip a coin and the loser would have to tell the other guy how much he was getting paid.

I lost the coin flip. “I’m getting fifteen grand,” I told him. “The ten thousand for favored nations, plus an extra five because I have no travel costs. So fifteen thousand all in.”

Now it’s Bob’s turn. Sheepishly, Bob tells me that he’s getting fifty thousand dollars!

I’m now apoplectic. Not because of the money but because
they had lied
. This took me over the edge. Trust me, I’m no prima donna—and this might sound so Hollywood—but I went to the dressing room, called the agent, and told him what had happened and that I was leaving the set and going home.
I couldn’t believe I’d fallen off another turnip truck.
There may be no business like show business, but in Hollywood, there’s no bullshit like the bullshit in show business.

As the agent tried to get hold of someone at the studio, I knew that I had the upper hand. These remaining scenes were too important for the film. And it was the last day of shooting. The set was closing down in a few hours. There was no one around at that moment to fill the role. Costas and I had already done too much together. “We’ll make it right, we’ll make it right,” was the response when someone on the set got on the phone with the agent. “We’ll deal with it later, but you
have
to trust us.”

I’m still ballistic. I tell the agent, “How do we know that? ‘Trust us’? They’ve already lied to our faces. I’m out of here at five o’clock.”

I go back on the set, and now we’re rushing through the scenes. Zucker is hesitant to talk to me because he knows I’ve unearthed rotten eggs. I can’t concentrate on anything except getting in my car and calling a good friend who’s a top entertainment lawyer. I’m thinking,
I didn’t want to do this in the first place and I just want to get the hell out of here.

We finished up and I was still whacked out. I called my lawyer pal, and the next morning he was on the phone with someone in business affairs at Universal Studios who’d already been clued in. My guy says, “Bob Costas got fifty thousand dollars. Because of the aggravation factor, Al will get seventy-five thousand.”

The guy at Universal came back with an offer of twenty thousand and was adamant the studio wouldn’t go any higher.

“Absolutely not,” my lawyer says. “You are going to make this right.” And hangs up.

My lawyer then calls me and asks: “What’s the best result for you? What do want to have happen?”

“The best result?” I say. “That’s easy. Get me out of the movie—it’s a piece of crap to begin with.”

Meanwhile, the business affairs exec calls my lawyer and makes a threat. “If Michaels won’t agree to twenty thousand, we’re going to take him out of the movie.”

“Perfect!” my lawyer said. “You got a deal! Take him out.” Click.

Ten minutes later, one of the top executives at Universal takes over. He realizes this is a problem that goes beyond threats from Business Affairs. The movie is already in postproduction and the film has no ending without the scenes with Bob and me.

I wound up getting the same $50,000 that Costas got, plus $10,000 for my troubles and aggravation. And, of course, the studio paid my lawyer. Actually, this whole craziness could have been a movie itself.

BASEketball
came out shortly after and was so bad, it was actually funny. It became a cult classic. Bob and I have had a thousand laughs about that whole experience. And that line about “feeling Bob’s nipples”? It wasn’t only in the movie—it was in the trailer and played in theaters nationwide for weeks. The movie was a major bomb—$23 million to make with a $7 million gross.

A few years ago someone sent me a
BASEketball
DVD and asked me to sign it. I sent it back with the following message:

“
Why did you buy this dreck? All best wishes . . .
”

CHAPTER 17

Monday Night Transformations

W
HEN I FIRST LOGGED
on to the Internet in the mid-nineties, I was immediately hooked. I could read newspapers and periodicals from around the country without having our research folks or team public relations people fax me pages and pages of material. Now I could simply do my homework by signing in. And with email, I could correspond with friends, sources, and work contacts without picking up the phone.

Around that time, I made my first foray into a chat room. I’d heard that people posted their opinions on everything from sports to politics to movies, and figured I’d see what folks thought of
Monday Night Football
. I found a chat room called “T.V. Talk,” and used an alias to log in. I posed a question that I figured would start some discussion and give me some feedback.
Hey, everyone, what do you think of
Monday Night Football
this season?
I checked back a few hours later, and there were a few responses but none of them really dealt with the show. And all of them were lewd. Seemed like a reasonable question regarding a show about which there was usually no shortage of opinions. Instead, the only messages I saw were salacious, X-rated comments having nothing at all to do with football. I wrote another post about
Monday Night
, trying to figure out why no one wanted to “chat” about the show. Finally, someone wrote to my alias. “Hey, pal, don’t you understand? ‘T.V. Talk’ isn’t television talk. It’s Transvestite Talk.”

Oops.

Still, it was clear that the Internet was going to be a transformative force. Did I envision a day when I could access the Internet from my phone to watch NFL games live—getting special notifications when teams were in the Red Zone? No. Did I foresee using the Internet to talk to my grandkids, while seeing their faces? Not really. But I knew right away that this was going to have an indelible impact—both good and bad—on the world.
Everything
in the world—sports, politics, business, media, you name it.

Concurrent with the burgeoning of the Internet, another media shift taking place was already beginning to affect me directly: ESPN—the cable channel that was ABC’s little corporate sibling was expanding rapidly. In 1996, the Walt Disney Company bought Capital Cities—including ABC and ESPN—for $19 billion. And very quickly, it became apparent that even though ABC was the top-rated network at the time, ESPN was the crown jewel of the deal.

The reason for ESPN’s growth was simple: subscriber fees. Just look at your cable or satellite bill. Cable television has a dual revenue stream—subscriber fees and commercials. Network television has only advertising. As I write this, every household with cable pays more than $5 a month to receive ESPN in their basic package. That’s over $60 a year. Multiply that by roughly 100 million households that subscribe to cable or satellite. So before ESPN opens up the gate to the parking lot in Bristol, Connecticut, before it sells a single thirty-second commercial, they’re already pocketing almost $6 billion a year. It became obvious almost twenty years ago that the playing field was anything but level. And by the way, if you’re a great-grandmother in Odessa, Texas, and have not the slightest interest in sports, you’re still paying that sixty bucks for ESPN because it’s the only way you can still watch your soap operas, your local news, and
Dr. Phil
. Sorry, Granny, you can’t have à la carte choices and save yourself hundreds of dollars a year. I’ve always felt ESPN’s Most Valuable Players through the years have been the Beltway lobbyists who’ve done a brilliant job of keeping Congress confused and at bay.