You Can't Make This Up: Miracles, Memories, and the Perfect Marriage of Sports and Television (4 page)

Well, we picked up the paper the next day and there it was—the line score. We were hysterical—and a few days later, we called back. “Hey, it’s the Fredonia stringer again. Remember Clint Romas?”

“Oh, yeah.”

“Listen to what this kid did today: he played the outfield—the coach wanted him to rest his arm before his next pitching start—and he hit four home runs!”

Sure enough, the newspaper arrived the next day, and there it was again.

A few more days later, we called in again, upping the ante. “You’re not going to believe this, but Romas pitched a perfect game, struck out twenty in a seven-inning game, and hit five home runs!”

The next morning, we couldn’t wait for the paper to be tossed into the fraternity house driveway, so we could see if we had pulled it off again. We had. The whole fraternity house exploded in laughter.

Now we had to go for the grand slam. We came up with a new idea that included Danny Murtaugh, who had managed the Pittsburgh Pirates to the World Series title in 1960, and then had left the dugout for health reasons, and had become the Pirates’ super-scout.

“Clint Romas pitched
another
perfect game, struck out
every
batter, and hit
six
home runs. And—get this—Danny Murtaugh flew in from Pittsburgh and offered Clint a hundred-thousand-dollar contract right after he stepped off the mound!”

The whole fraternity house couldn’t wait for the paper to come the next day. But as we thumbed through the sports section, there was nothing in there about our legend.

The next week, a local columnist, Dave Hicks, wrote about how his paper had been duped, and that there really was no high school baseball star named Clint Romas. But the prank had gotten solid mileage—and we were never fingered as the perpetrators.

In 2002, I got invited back to Arizona State to receive the Cronkite Award from the newly named Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication. Walter Cronkite himself—the most respected figure in the history of television journalism—was there to present the award to me in person, and in my speech, I had to ask him if he was sure he had the right guy.

You know, the guy who spent a month of school calling in stories to the local paper about the great Clint Romas.

ONE OTHER THING ABOUT
high school and college. I met Linda Stamaton in the tenth grade when we were in the same large circle of friends at Hamilton High in Los Angeles. We were in these social clubs that interacted a lot—hers was called the Carousels and mine was the Imperials. My house at that time was like a neighborhood clubhouse—my mom loved hosting and entertaining—so Linda was at my house with dozens of other kids all the time. In a school that was probably 90 percent Jewish, she was Greek Orthodox—one of the few shiksas.

She wound up going to what’s now California State University, Northridge, then known as San Fernando Valley State University, and we stayed in touch. Occasionally, during the school year, I would fly home for a weekend, and since Linda was going to school in Los Angeles, we would get together. In my junior year I took her to a Los Angeles Blades Western Hockey League game at the Los Angeles Sports Arena. As I took her home that night and went to say good-bye, suddenly it went from two friends who had regularly hugged good night to . . .
whoa
! We started dating and pretty soon, it was clear it was serious.

But there was a problem. Linda’s father was a prominent figure in the Greek community of Los Angeles, a good-looking guy, successful in business with a lot of social panache. He fashioned himself a Zorba the Greek type—and he had designs of his daughter marrying a descendant of Socrates. Or Aristotle. Or at least Aristotle Onassis. As we got serious, this became an issue. It wasn’t so much that I was Jewish. It was that I wasn’t the purebred Greek he wanted.

But in the summer of 1965, before our senior year, Linda and I decided we were going to get married. Of course, we had to tell her parents. Her mother liked me, but the whole key was to find a way to win over her father. Finally, I gathered the courage to approach him and lay out my intentions. My heart was beating like a jackhammer as I—aspiring broadcaster—got right to the point. “Mr. Stamaton, Linda and I are going to get married—with or without your blessing—and we both fervently hope that it’s
with
.”

He was speechless, and didn’t react or respond immediately. If it was a cartoon, and you’d put a caption next to his image, it would have read “Holy $%#.” Then finally he said to me—How do you expect to take care of my daughter?

I told him that my goal, and my dream, was to become a sports announcer. Mr. Stamaton knew so little about sports that his perception of a sports announcer was the guy who tells the fans on the way out of the park, “Thank you for coming, and drive carefully on your way home. Good night.” But when I explained the difference between a public address announcer and what I wanted to do—broadcast games on radio and television—I think he started to understand. Ultimately, he realized how serious we were, and that this was really going to happen. Within a few weeks he gradually and wholeheartedly embraced me and set his sights on throwing a wedding the Greek community of Los Angeles would always remember. He succeeded.

He became a huge sports fan, and we wound up having a wonderful relationship until his death in 2002.

Linda is still the love of my life. How’s that for a way to get there.

CHAPTER 4

Cut by the Lakers

I
GRADUATED FROM ARIZONA STATE
in 1966 with a degree in radio and television, a minor in journalism, and somewhere in the range of two hundred live baseball, football, and basketball broadcasts on my résumé. I was ready to break into the business. All I needed was a shot. Looking back now, I was naïve, but that was valuable. At that age, naïveté can be a good thing. Everything is still possible.

The fact was, teams weren’t exactly eager to hire a twenty-one-year-old kid right out of college. I had written letters to every franchise in Major League Baseball. Every NBA franchise, too. No responses. Teams in those days had flagship radio stations, but there was no real television presence—no cable, certainly no regional networks. Which meant there was usually just only two play-by-play jobs per team. And not a lot of “churn,” as we say today. Once you got one of these jobs, you’d normally hang on to it for years. All I could do was go to the mailbox every afternoon and hope that I’d hit the lottery.

Right around graduation, the city of Phoenix was awarded an NBA team that would start play in 1968. The new team had hired a general manager by the name of Jerry Colangelo, a bright young Chicago Bulls executive.
Perfect opportunity,
I thought—I knew the Phoenix market, and maybe I could connect with this GM who wasn’t much older than I was. I made an appointment to meet with Colangelo. I drove back to Phoenix from Los Angeles to interview with him at his office, which was actually a trailer outside the Veterans Memorial Coliseum. Jerry couldn’t have been nicer, or more encouraging—we still run into each other to this day, and reminisce about that meeting. But in 1968, he didn’t have that job for me. The new team needed an established voice, someone known in the area.

Ironically, the announcer Colangelo hired was also an Arizona State–affiliated broadcaster who called ASU games on local radio. He’d often be in an adjacent booth—me broadcasting to a seven-block radius, him to most of the rest of the state of Arizona. His name—Al McCoy. Al turned eighty in the spring of 2013, and as I write this, he’s still calling the Suns games on KTAR. Colangelo always had a great eye for talent on and off the court.

Meanwhile, back in Los Angeles, I needed a job. When I was home from college a couple of summers, I’d worked as an office boy for a Hollywood television production company. And before I left to go back for my senior year, I had to train a new office boy. He’d go on to become one of the most successful writer/producers in television history, with shows like
The Rockford Files
and
The A-Team
on his résumé. But back then, I was just teaching him how to answer phones. His name was Stephen Cannell.

Anyway, at that job, working at a game show called
Seven Keys,
I met someone who knew someone who knew somebody who knew Chuck Barris. Chuck had started out in the music side of the TV business, working on
American Bandstand
with Dick Clark. He even wrote a hit song called “Palisades Park.” Eventually he’d move into game shows and start his own company to produce them. His first show was a hit—
The Dating Game.
And he offered me a full-time job in the summer of 1966, shortly after my graduation, to help procure potential contestants. The salary: ninety-five dollars a week.

I was getting married to Linda within three months, and in fact, Chuck would wind up hiring Linda shortly thereafter to be an assistant prize coordinator. But there I was in a small room in an office just two blocks south of Sunset on Vine Street in Hollywood, with about five other production assistants, basically cold-calling women—and men—and then interviewing them on the phone, seeing if they wanted to be considered as contestants. I’d also ask if they had friends who might be interested—that’s how we got the call lists. And this was in a world of rotary-dial phones and no answering machines. For twelve hours a day, I called strangers and hoped they’d pick up.

If you’ve seen
Confessions of a Dangerous Mind
or know anything about Chuck, you know he’s a character. As a boss, he was also a great motivator. After I was in the office for all of four days, he came in and said with all the enthusiasm on the planet, “You’re doing an incredible job! I’m giving you a raise to a hundred bucks!”

A week later, “Al, you’re doing a fantastic job! I’m bumping you up to $105 a week.” I went back to work feeling like a million bucks.

Then another week went by. “Just fabulous work you’re doing. I’m giving you
another
raise to $110.”

Within a few months, my starting salary almost doubled, getting up to something like $160. Which was terrific, except for one thing: that’s probably what I should have been making from the start. Chuck was a master psychologist.

I started working at
The Dating Game
in late June, and got married on Saturday, August 27, 1966. As I’ve said, the ceremony was beautiful, and the guests had a great time. Chuck was invited, and in the receiving line he sidled up to me. I figured he was going to congratulate me, or maybe offer another raise. Instead he leaned in and said, “So, when are you coming back from your honeymoon?”

“Thursday, Chuck.”

He paused. “Are you back in town Thursday—or back to work Thursday?”

“Yes, Chuck, I’ll be in the office Thursday.”

BEFORE THE 1966 FOOTBALL
season, after years of competition, the NFL and AFL reached an agreement to merge. The complete merger wouldn’t take place until 1970, but in the meantime, the champions of each league would meet in a title game at the end of every season. As a big AFL fan, I couldn’t wait.

My brother and I had been following the renegade league since its founding in 1960, and were planning to go to the inaugural championship game at the Los Angeles Coliseum in January 1967. My dad wound up with two fifty-yard-line tickets for us. Tremendous.

The tickets read “AFL-NFL World Championship Game”—the term
Super Bowl
had been tossed around by football executives, but not officially coined yet. The Coliseum held nearly 100,000 people—but on that day, there were more than 30,000 empty seats. And with the Green Bay Packers and Kansas City Chiefs matching up in Los Angeles, for the most part the crowd consisted of mainly neutral observers, and was relatively absent of passion. Today at NFL games, you might have catering by Bobby Flay or Wolfgang Puck. But that afternoon, it was just your basic hot dogs and Cokes at the concession stands.

The game was televised on two networks: CBS, which held the NFL rights, and NBC, which had the AFL package. Because a lot of the details of the game hadn’t been worked out until late in the season, rather than negotiate the leagues basically said, “Here, you both televise it.” CBS had Ray Scott, Jack Whitaker, and Frank Gifford in their booth, while NBC had Curt Gowdy and Paul Christman. The cost of a thirty-second commercial on either network? Forty-two thousand dollars.

Meanwhile, with regard to the competition, a lot of people still considered the AFL a minor league. And the Chiefs certainly weren’t intimidating to the Packers, who had Bart Starr at quarterback and Vince Lombardi roaming the sidelines. The first half was competitive, though. The Packers led only 14–10 at halftime, and I remember talking to another Chiefs fan and speculating that Kansas City had a chance to win this thing after all. So much for that. Green Bay outscored KC 21–0 in the second half, and won the game, 35–10.

No one then had any inkling that the Super Bowl would grow to become an unofficial national holiday. That the thirty-second commercial spot that cost $42,000 in 1967 would balloon to $4 million by 2014. More people now watch the game than vote for president. Ironically, for as wildly as the NFL has grown, Los Angeles—with its huge population and good weather and all those ties to the media and entertainment communities—doesn’t have an NFL team. The reason in a nutshell: no first-rate football stadium.

There wasn’t much traffic as David and I drove out of the stadium that day. And how in the world could I have possibly imagined that forty-eight years later, in February 2015, I’d be getting ready to call my ninth Super Bowl on national television.

WHILE WORKING FOR CHUCK
Barris, I continued my search for a sports broadcasting job. I wrote to dozen of team owners, general managers, and individual announcers—some of whom, like Ernie Harwell in Detroit, actually took the time to write me encouraging and gracious letters in response. The advice was generally to just keep knocking on those doors. And a few months later, in the summer of 1967, I thought I’d gotten my big break.