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

by Al Michaels

  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.

  When the World Series finally resumed Friday night, October 27, there was an odd vibe. After all, no one had been down this road before. There was this transition we had to make—from a natural disaster story back to sports. People were going to be interested in the resumption of the Series on a number of levels. Some viewers would be focused on how the area itself had rebounded. Others would be curious as to what the quality of play would be like following a week-and-a-half hiatus. It felt strange to be back at Candlestick Park. In a nice touch, multiple ceremonial first pitches were thrown out simultaneously by many of the earthquake night’s first responders.

  Game 3 was an Oakland rout. Then in Game 4, the A’s were leading 8–0 by the sixth inning. The Giants mounted a comeback to get it to 8–6, and with one on and two out in the seventh, Kevin Mitchell hit a drive to the warning track in left. It would have tied the game but was caught two feet from the fence by Rickey Henderson. The Giants never got any closer, the A’s finished off the sweep, and we all finally went home.

  Home from the most unusual World Series of all.

  IT WAS AROUND THAT time—the end of the 1980s—that sports television began to change in significant ways. The prime example was a decade-old cable network out of a small town in Connecticut, devoted entirely to sports and gaining traction. After years of broadcasting marginal and off-the-wall events, the network was bidding for and gaining rights to some major packages. It was called ESPN—Entertainment and Sports Programming Network—and 80 percent of it was owned by Capital Cities, the parent company of ABC.

  There wasn’t a lot of intermingling at that time, in good measure because the ABC network had a lot of unionized personnel, especially on the technical side, and ESPN was a nonunion shop. And again, we were ABC, the network that went to every television home. And the ABC brand, created by Roone Arledge—the entity that carried Monday Night Football and Wide World of Sports and the Olympic Games—well, the feeling was that it couldn’t be overtaken or even challenged by some cable network that aired aerobics shows and kickboxing events and billiards tournaments. At least that was the sense.

  Meanwhile, broadcast rights fees for sports properties were soaring and the bidding process was becoming more and more competitive. The two biggest properties that ABC was involved in the bidding for at that point were baseball and the Olympics. The NFL package still had a few years to run.

  I loved covering the Olympics. In Sarajevo, Yugoslavia, in 1984 and Calgary, Alberta, in 1988, there had been no miracles or even medals for the United States hockey team, but Ken Dryden and I were reunited and added some more great memories. I was also the play-by-play (stride-by-stride?) announcer for figure skating in Sarajevo and called the gold medal performances of Katarina Witt and Scott Hamilton and the iconic ice-dancing performances of Jane Torvill and Christopher Dean.

  Meanwhile in Calgary, this was the first Olympic Games under our “new
management.” Cap Cities was now in charge but Roone Arledge, despite being solely the head of ABC News but no longer ABC Sports, would executive-produce the Games.

  A couple of nights before the competition began, Arledge and some of the new top brass put together a small dinner to introduce the Cap Cities board members and top investors to some of the ABC announcers and event analysts. I was invited along with Jim McKay, Keith Jackson, and a few other on-air folks. I wound up being seated next to none other than Warren Buffett, who at that point, wasn’t 5 percent as well-known as he is today.

  Buffett was totally interested in every aspect of the broadcast, asking dozens of questions, and at one point was intrigued when I told him how ABC had been able to “influence” the hockey schedule so that the USA-USSR game in Calgary would not be played on the opening night of the hockey tournament, as was originally scheduled. The Americans, I explained to Buffett, had been lined up to meet the Soviets in the opener because the pairings had been determined by the results of an international tournament that had been held in Europe months earlier. If the U.S. team had suffered a one-sided defeat to the Soviets, it would have severely impacted their chances of advancing to the medal round and, most important for ABC, would have created little or no interest in hockey for the rest of the Olympics, with a concurrent decline in ratings. Instead ABC had worked with (leaned on?) the governing bodies and so a few weeks before the torch would be lighted in Calgary, the schedule came out and the U.S. team would face, in the opener, not the Soviet Union—but Austria. The U.S.-Soviet matchup had been pushed back to Game 3. If there was a line on the game, the United States would have been favored by about five goals. (The United States would win the game, 10–6.)