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

by Al Michaels

  I listened to The Main Spark, and everything sounded fine. But when Joe’s pregame show came on, this is what I heard out of my transistor radio: “Hi everybody, this is Joe Nuxhall. The Reds are in Indianapolis tonight playing their Triple A—get out of here, get out of here—you son of a bitch, you cocksucker . . . Five, four, three, two, one. Hi everybody, this is Joe Nuxhall . . . ”

  I looked down at my radio as if it were a hand grenade that had been tossed into a crowd.

  Joe had forgotten to erase the original recording before starting over. I thought and hoped I was dreaming. Now Joe comes bounding up the stairs to the broadcast booth, and as he sits down, I have to break the news. “Joe, we’ve got a big problem.”

  I explained what had happened. Joe turned bedsheet white. Remember, Joe had started his career pitching for the Reds in 1944 when he was fifteen years old. Now he was sure he was going to get fired. On the broadcast that followed that night, he might as well have been catatonic. We bused back to Cincinnati after the game. The players, who’d all heard about it from their wives, were in hysterics—but poor Joe looked as if he was ready for his own memorial service. Back home the next morning, we both got calls from Dick Wagner. The Reds that night would be playing at Riverfront Stadium, and Wagner wanted us both in his office in midafternoon. Nuxie was preparing for the worst.

  When we entered Wagner’s office together, Dick had a very stern look on his face, but he also had a slightly perverse sense of humor, and I could sense that deep down, he understood the other side of this. But at this juncture, this was not exactly a laughing matter.

  “Tonight,” he told Nuxhall, “when you go on the air, you’re going to apologize.”

  At this point, it was clear that Joe was not going to be fired—and he was relieved beyond comprehension. That morning, a local newspaper columnist had written, “How about that Reds broadcast team? Al Michaels does the play-by-play. Joe Nuxhall handles the off-color.” We left Wagner’s office and started getting ready for the broadcast. Nuxie went about his regular pregame routine. The players were still ribbing him, but he was in decent spirits—he’d avoided death row. Still to come, though, was the on-air apology that Wagner had demanded. And when Joe got up to the broadcast booth, about twenty-five minutes before the game, I could tell he was extremely nervous—in fact, he was sweating profusely. I looked over at him and asked what was wrong. With the clock ticking down, he explained, “I have to deliver this apology. I don’t have any idea what to say.”

  I tried to get Joe to relax. I wanted to lighten the mood, so I said, “Look, Joe, it’s simple. Just say, ‘Ladies and gentlemen, I’m very sorry I said ‘cocksucker.’ And it won’t happen again.’ ”

  My attempt at humor was an abject failure. I thought Joe was ready to pop me. But then I was able to get him calmed down, and help him work out what to say. He got through it, and we moved on. And he’d keep his job with the Reds another three decades, until 2004—sixty years after his pitching debut.

  IN MY THIRD SEASON in Cincinnati, the Reds won 99 games during the regular season and again finished atop the NL West, and faced the Mets, who had won only 82 games, in the National League Championship Series. In Game 1 at Riverfront, Tom Seaver took a 1–0 shutout into the eighth inning, but then Rose homered with one out to tie it, and in the ninth, with Seaver still on the mound, Bench won it with another homer. The Mets came back to even the series the next day on a Jon Matlack two-hit shutout. And then the series went back to New York, and Shea Stadium.

  Bud Harrelson, the Mets’ light-hitting, five-foot-eleven, 160-pound shortstop, had been quoted as saying that against Matlack, the Reds “all looked like me.” Joe Morgan had some sharp words with Harrelson during batting practice before Game 3. Then, in the fifth inning, with New York on its way to a 9–2 win, Rose barreled into second base on a potential double-play grounder the only way he ever did—at full speed. Harrelson was in the bull’s-eye and in a flash, punches started flying. Both benches quickly emptied. There were no ejections. But then it got ugly.

  When Rose went out to his position in left field, the fans pelted him with beer cans, batteries, and whatever else they had access to. In response, Sparky Anderson pulled his entire team off the field. The National League president, Chub Feeney, along with the umpires, prevailed upon the Mets to send a “peace party” out to left field to get the crowd calmed down. Simultaneously, the public address announcer was warning that the game could be forfeited to the Reds. So manager Yogi Berra, Seaver, Rusty Staub, and a forty-two-year old Willie Mays headed out to left field and were instrumental in restoring order. The game resumed and after the final out had been recorded, the Mets led the series, two games to one, and were one win away from the World Series.

  We bused back to the Roosevelt Hotel in Manhattan. Several cops would be brought in to stand guard outside, with extra security in the hallways. Pete Rose was a marked man and the number-one villain in Gotham City. Early that evening, everyone in the traveling party got a note slipped under their doors from the team’s traveling secretary instructing us to have our luggage in the lobby in the morning and be ready to leave town after Tuesday’s Game 4. The organization was trying to save a night’s worth of hotel bills in the event the Reds lost. Not exactly an inspirational message. But a couple of hours later the edict was reversed. Someone had figured out that that would have been a terrible signal to send to the players.

  We all boarded the bus to Shea for Game 4 at around eleven o’clock the next morning. The bus ride was by far the quietest I’d witnessed in my three years with the Reds. With so many outsize personalities on the team, someone—even if the team was struggling a bit—was always talking. But on this day—near absolute silence. As we pulled into the Shea Stadium parking lot there were three or four hundred Mets fans at the gate, holding placards, chanting, screaming, cursing at Rose, throwing rocks, eggs, and whatever else they could get their hands on at the bus. Rose, who was sitting near the front, got up, stood in the aisle, looked back at his teammates, and yelled out, “Do or die, boys! Do or [bleeping] die!” He’d have a ton of extra security at the stadium. And later that afternoon, in the twelfth inning of a 1–1 game, he’d homer off Harry Parker to win it for the Reds, and send the series to a decisive fifth game.

  I sat across the aisle from him on the bus ride back to the hotel. I said, “Pete, try to put into words exactly what you’re thinking when you know the ball is gone.” Rose says, “I was rounding first base. And when you round first base at Shea, you can look directly into our bullpen in left. And I was thinking, ‘Sparky, better get Tom Hall [a lefthander] up, because the Mets have Staub and [John] Milner [left-handed batters] coming up in the bottom of the twelfth.’” Pete had just hit the home run every kid dreams of—and barely a second later, he was already thinking about the lefty-lefty matchups his team could get in the bottom of the inning. Again, there is no one who’s ever been more totally into a baseball game than Pete Rose. For the record, Sparky would go with Pedro Borbon, a right-hander, in the twelfth, and he retired the side in order.

  Still, despite all that drama, my shot at doing back-to-back World Series on national television went down the drain the next day in Game 5 when Seaver and the Mets beat the Reds, 7–2. It was clear, though, this was an extraordinary team—and the question was not whether Big Red Machine would win a World Series, but how many.

  Even if I knew that my days in Cincinnati were numbered.

  LATE IN THAT 1973 season, the Giants had been expressing interest in me again. Their longtime play-by-play announcer, Lon Simmons, was only fifty years old, but he was retiring because of the death of his wife. (Lon would eventually unretire and we would work together in 1976.) Now the question would become, did I want to go to San Francisco, and work for a station group owned by Gene Autry? My three-year contract in Cincinnati was coming up for renewal and the Giants were offering me the chance to do television as well as radio. They were also offering me more time off so I could accept potential net
work assignments, like regional NFL games. Oh, and they were going to more than triple what the Reds were paying, with a starting salary in six figures.

  In August, with a sense that the Giants were going to come after me following the season, and with the Reds leading the National League West, we had a Saturday night game at Riverfront Stadium against the Cardinals. The atmosphere was electric. There were fifty thousand fans in the stadium on a pristine summer night. You had Bench, Rose, Morgan, Perez, and Dave Concepcion in the lineup, and Sparky in the dugout. Earlier that day, the Reds had called up the top prospect from their Triple-A farm club. He was the starting right fielder that night and went 2-for-4. His name? Ken Griffey. Senior. And I’m thinking, Oh my God—here comes another Reds superstar. And I’m also thinking, am I really going to leave this behind?

  The season is over and in comes the offer from San Francisco. Linda and I talked about it and tried to figure out what it would take for us to stay in Cincinnati. We had grown very comfortable with the town and had a lot of good friends. We decided that we would probably stay in Cincinnati if the Reds came up to $70,000 or $75,000. It would mean more than doubling my salary. But it would still be considerably below what the Giants were offering. I still didn’t have an agent, so I went into a meeting with Howsam and Wagner for the renegotiation. They offered me $40,000, and felt that a 33 percent raise was more than fair. I remember saying to Howsam, “I’m sorry, but we’re not really even close. If that’s the final offer, I have to go to San Francisco.”

  There was one slightly messy postscript. Several months later there was a column in the Sporting News detailing my departure and questioning the wisdom of the Reds in letting me get away. Dick Wagner took issue with the article and wrote a letter to the editor in which he implied that I’d signed with San Francisco prior to negotiating with the Reds and questioned my “maturity.” He also released the salary I was earning with the Giants. I had to respond. I wrote my own letter to the editor that read in part: “I negotiated in good faith with the Reds. I have known Dick Wagner for years now, and have come to the conclusion that his definition of maturity is total subservience.” Today, I can look back and laugh. But this was before the days of media agents and the Internet and Twitter battles. These were the days of dueling letters to the editor. And by the way—now you know what I said to George Clooney when he asked me why I had ever left Cincinnati. He understood.

  In any case, while the Big Red Machine went on to win the World Series in 1975 and 1976, I would be in San Francisco. It was a very hard decision—I was walking away from what I knew would be one of the great teams in the history of baseball.

  But San Francisco had made me the offer I couldn’t refuse.

  CHAPTER 7

  The Giants of Candlestick, and the Wizard of Westwood

  BY THE EARLY 1970S, the marriage between sports and television was evolving and strengthening. More and more games were being televised—on the three networks and local TV as well—and the fit was working. Fans could see their favorite teams more often—without fighting traffic, or paying for parking, or waiting in line at a concession stand, or having their view blocked by someone who wouldn’t get down in front. Instant replay and other innovations were enhancing the experience. And television sets were improving. The pictures were sharper, and in 1972, for the first time, more Americans bought color TVs than black-and-white sets.

  Television networks and local stations were adding more sports programming. And they were paying for it. By the seventies, the broadcast rights fees for leagues, primarily the NFL and Major League Baseball, were steadily increasing. Same for the Olympics. ABC had paid $1.5 million to air the 1964 Summer Games in Tokyo—and then for the Munich Games eight years later, the rights fee multiplied by six to $7.5 million. That was a lot of money then, but also provided a lot of inventory—dozens, sometimes even hundreds of hours of airtime. And sports programming was still generally cheaper than developing original shows that might or might not become hits. Local stations were carving out more and more deals with teams in their markets.

  On a personal level, I loved it. There would be more sports programming to watch, more jobs in the industry. But as far as my particular job was concerned, I would be doing play-by-play for the Giants both on radio and television. At that time, television play-by-play wasn’t radically different from radio play-by-play. Replays were generally just slowing down the same few seconds of action that we had just seen live. And graphics would be added. In the seventies, there were a number of team broadcasters, for instance Vin Scully with the Dodgers and Chick Hearn with the Lakers, who regularly did TV and radio simulcasts—the same audio was being provided simultaneously by the same announcer for both mediums. (To this day, Vinny still simulcasts a couple of innings for the Dodgers.)

  I’ve always subscribed to the philosophy that on television less is usually more. What I mean by that is that on radio, verbs are very important, because the audience can’t see the game. But on television, the viewers are absorbing the action with their own eyes and in effect, the verbs are being played out visually in their brains. If an announcer says, “he swings and rips one into right field for a base hit” but at home you see it as more of a soft line drive, it’s disconcerting. What I try to do on TV instead is strike the right tone, and match the words to the action without necessarily using a lot of verbs. Often, ellipses or captions can suffice. You don’t have to be nearly as descriptively complete as you do on radio.

  One distinct difference since the advent of television: You can only appreciate the exploits of athletes from the pre-television age through written accounts and stories that have been passed down. There’s little or no archival visual coverage. It’s almost impossible to go back and look at more than snippets of what somebody like Jim Thorpe did. From time to time, you might see a grainy film clip, but that’s it. When I’m asked to name the greatest athlete of all time, I’ve long answered Thorpe. Here was a man with so much talent and skill and durability that he played professional football and baseball, and won Olympic medals. How differently would we think about Jim Thorpe today if his whole career had been played out on television?

  WE MOVED FROM CINCINNATI to the Bay Area in late November 1973, and before I had even announced one game for the Giants, an additional opportunity came along. Dick Enberg had been the play-by-play man for UCLA basketball on KTLA, a local station in Los Angeles (the same station where I’d worked during a couple of summers in college). Under John Wooden, the Bruins had become the greatest dynasty in the history of college basketball. Enberg was being hired to work for NBC full-time and would no longer be able to do UCLA games on local Los Angeles television. KTLA was owned by Golden West Broadcasting, the Gene Autry enterprise that also owned KSFO—the station in San Francisco for which I’d be announcing the Giants games in the spring. With Dick leaving, suddenly the UCLA job was open. A Golden West executive called me and asked if I’d be interested in that job. UCLA basketball? John Wooden? A team that would enter the season with already the longest win streak ever? I said, I’d love it.

  For me, it worked very well logistically. Because of the team’s popularity, UCLA played the majority—and nearly all of its nonconference games—at home, primarily on back-to-back Friday and Saturday nights. With that schedule, I could fly down from the Bay Area on Fridays around noon, work the game, stay overnight (my folks were living in Los Angeles, so I could see them as well), work the Saturday night game, and then take a midnight flight back home. I could do two games with only one night away from the family. And the travel to road games typically kept me on the West Coast and included a weekend when the Bruins would visit Stanford and Cal—games I could drive to from home.

  Sports television was growing, but there was still concern in some quarters that if games were televised live, the gate would suffer. So even though Pauley Pavilion, UCLA’s home gym, was packed for every game, the home games were televised on tape delay. I would do the games live to tape, but the broadcast wo
uldn’t start until 11 P.M. Still, even at that hour, the ratings were spectacular. We once saw research that UCLA Friday night home games were outdrawing Johnny Carson and The Tonight Show by something like five-to-one. On the road, the games would air live.

  But before I could officially inherit the job, I had to get the blessings of UCLA athletic director J. D. Morgan and Coach Wooden himself. A month before the season would begin, I flew to Los Angeles to go to a practice and meet Morgan and Wooden. I met Morgan in his office, and then he walked me over to Pauley Pavilion, where the Bruins would be practicing. We sat down in the second row of the bleachers. The team had just come onto the court to limber up, and drills would begin in a few minutes. At that point, Coach Wooden came over and sat down next to me. We hit it off right away. Wooden was a huge baseball fan and knew my background. And as a southern Indiana native, he knew all about the Cincinnati Reds. So, while his players continued to loosen up, we sat there talking not about basketball, but mostly about Pete Rose, Johnny Bench, Sparky Anderson, and the Big Red Machine. I got the job.

  UCLA came into the 1973–74 season with a 75-game winning streak. The team’s roster included Keith (later to change his name to Jamaal) Wilkes, Dave Meyers, the freshman Marques Johnson, and a very free-spirited center—Bill Walton. You can’t overstate the greatness of that group. And it all began with the man who, for my money, was the greatest coach in the history of sports, John Robert Wooden.