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

by Al Michaels

  Buffett was fascinated by this and wanted to know how ABC could have pulled this off. I explained that we had an executive by the name of Bob Iger, whom I’d started with at ABC Sports in the mid-seventies, and who knew how to navigate his way through this complex maze and get the job done. Buffett was impressed. Years later, when we reminisced about this, Iger would tell me that ABC had to provide certain “concessions” to a variety of muckety-mucks to get this done, including guaranteeing an upgrade of certain restroom facilities in Calgary. Hey, whatever it takes! Some two decades later, of course, Bob would become the exalted CEO of the Walt Disney Company, which had bought out Capital Cities in the late nineties.

  Anyway, ABC failed to get the rights to the 1992 or 1994 Olympics, but went down to the wire with CBS and NBC in bidding for the rights to televise the 1996 Summer Games in Atlanta. My contract at the time stated that if ABC had won the bid, I would be the prime-time Olympic host. Jim McKay was going to be moving into an emeritus role and I was going to do most of the heavy lifting for ABC. It was a role I coveted, so, obviously, I followed the rights negotiations very closely.

  The bidding dragged on and on. NBC made a last bid of $456 million. (Yes, things had come a long way from ABC paying $1.5 million to broadcast the 1964 Olympics in Tokyo.) And this was after NBC had paid $401 million for the Barcelona Games in 1992 and lost money, a reported $100 million. But the thinking was that Atlanta—a domestic Olympics in the Eastern Time Zone—would lead to a bigger buildup, higher ratings, and more advertisers and sponsors.

  Still, ABC got last crack—if they bid about $10 million higher than NBC, they would win the rights to the Games. But ABC decided to pass. That one stung. And not just for me. NBC ended up making a nice profit, so, aside from the personal disappointment, it was a mistake for my company. And NBC hasn’t relinquished the rights to the Olympics since—though eventually, that ended up serving me well. More on that a little later.

  Meanwhile, after the 1989 World Series, CBS had gained exclusive network rights to Major League Baseball—the Game of the Week, the All-Star Game, and the playoffs and World Series—for almost $2 billion. The next year, ESPN got in the mix by making a deal to show regular season games as well. ESPN’s deal worked out well. CBS’s lost half a billion dollars. So in 1994, ABC and NBC returned to the game—though this time under an odd new venture that was called “The Baseball Network.” The idea was that Major League Baseball would share revenue from the deal with the networks. The upshot—particularly when the World Series was canceled in 1994 due to the strike—was another disaster.

  Since the Baseball Network was created as part of a two-year deal, with the plan for NBC to host the World Series in 1994, and ABC in 1995, someone had the bright idea after the strike to split the 1995 Series between the two networks. So, as the Atlanta Braves got set to meet the Cleveland Indians, ABC was going to broadcast Games 1, 4, and 5; NBC was going to broadcast Games 2, 3 and 6; and ABC—by virtue of winning a coin flip—had the rights to Game 7.

  The competition between the networks could be so juvenile that ABC didn’t want to promote NBC’s game and NBC didn’t want to promote ABC’s telecasts. In the middle of Game 1 in Atlanta, I was handed a promo to read. Join us here on ABC for Game Four in Cleveland on Wednesday night and for Game Five, if necessary, Thursday. With no mention of Games 2 and 3 on NBC.

  It was ridiculous—and the Rascal couldn’t help himself. “By the way,” I said after reading the promo, “if you’re wondering about Games Two and Three, I can’t tell you exactly where you can see them, but here’s a hint: Last night, Bob Costas, Bob Uecker, and Joe Morgan [NBC’s broadcast team] were spotted in underground Atlanta.” When it was NBC’s turn, Bob Costas (an honorary first cousin to the Rascal) made a similar reference to our ABC crew.

  It was a close, back-and-forth World Series, with every game except one decided by one run. The Braves won the first two games at home. Then the Indians won two of three in Cleveland. It was wonderful to be back doing postseason baseball. Tim McCarver, Jim Palmer, and I were back together and having a blast. Curt Gowdy Jr., the son of my friend and mentor, was our producer. Everyone headed back to Atlanta with the Braves leading three games to two. Game 6 was an NBC game. If Cleveland won, my gang would do the decisive Game 7, which would be a great thrill. If Atlanta won, it was all over.

  McCarver, Palmer, and I went the ballpark for batting practice and to schmooze before the game. Then we went back to the Ritz-Carlton in the Buckhead section of Atlanta to watch the game together on NBC and prepare for what we hoped would be our Game 7. Tom Glavine, though, had other ideas. The Braves’ lefty pitched a gem, combining with Mark Wohlers on a one-hitter. Dave Justice hit a home run in the sixth, which was all the offense Atlanta needed. The Braves won the game, 1–0, and the Series, four games to two.

  By ten thirty that night, it was clear that we wouldn’t be calling Game 7 of the World Series. And I was also learning that ABC wouldn’t be bidding for the next MLB contract. So, for all intents, my baseball career was most likely over, at least for the foreseeable future. The next morning, I left for the airport to fly to Minneapolis for Monday Night Football. The car picked me up at the hotel and cruised down Interstate 75. Within minutes, we were going through downtown. Another minute later, I looked to my left and what did I see? Atlanta’s Fulton County Stadium, where I would not be calling Game 7 of the World Series that night. Then a few hundred yards south, I looked out the window again and what did I see? The under-construction Olympic Stadium (later to be turned into Turner Field), where I would not be hosting the Opening Ceremony of the 1996 Summer Games.

  Nobody will ever have to throw me a pity party, nor would I want one. On balance I have nothing to complain about. I’ve been blessed in innumerable ways. Sometimes, things are just totally out of your control. But when people ask me about any disappointments in my career, I tell this story.

  CHAPTER 15

  O.J.

  BEFORE WE WORKED TOGETHER at the 1984 Olympics I’d met O. J. Simpson a couple of times in passing. I’d be covering all the track and field events and O.J. had been signed on as the analyst for the men’s sprints. The venue for track and field was the Los Angeles Coliseum, the same facility where O.J. had starred for USC in a spectacular college football career punctuated by a Heisman Trophy. Simpson had also been a track star, a member of the USC 4x110 yard relay team that had broken the world record in 1967. He came to the Olympic role with great credibility.

  O.J. and I worked together in that spring and summer of 1984 at the Olympic Trials in Los Angeles, as well as at another track and field event in May in San Jose, to develop some familiarity with the U.S. athletes and get a chance to work together on the air. It was in San Jose that O.J. introduced me to the young woman he was dating at the time and would later marry. Her name was Nicole Brown.

  At the Olympics, O.J. was an excellent broadcast partner. He was professional. He had an easy manner and a winning personality. He was insightful. He was prepared and never showed up a second late. We called Carl Lewis’s races—as well as that women’s sprint relay on the final day when Wilma Rudolph was nowhere to be found. And beyond working well together, O.J. and I developed a nice friendship that lasted well after the assignment.

  Two years later, the family and I made the move from the Bay Area to Los Angeles. After our crazy first week there, things settled down—Linda and I had met and gotten married in Los Angeles, we knew the area, and we’d visited frequently through the years. And when we moved to the Brentwood section of the city, I had a ready-made tennis partner in O. J. Simpson. Before his knees turned him into a golfer, O.J. and I would play tennis two or three times a week, always on the court at his house, which was just a few blocks from ours. Every few months, Linda and I would go out to dinner with O.J. and Nicole. Even when O.J. switched to golf in the early nineties, I was still a regular on his backyard court. Often my new opponent would be O.J.’s former teammate both at USC and with the Buffalo Bills, one Al
Cowlings.

  People in the neighborhood raved about O.J. He was gregarious, accessible, engaging, and always walked around with a smile. In Brentwood, everyone knew O.J. and he never stood on ceremony or had any airs about him. He might as well have been running for office. Part of what would make the O.J. story so explosive was that it was so totally at odds and dramatically contrary with the image he had worked so hard to cultivate all those years.

  On Saturday, June 11, 1994, I was in New York covering the Belmont Stakes for ABC—Tabasco Cat was the winner—and then flew from JFK back to Los Angeles the next afternoon. I got home around six o’clock early Sunday evening. A few months before, I was starting to get smitten with golf and had joined the Bel-Air Country Club. Now, in mid-June, I knew that golf was becoming a very, very serious addiction. Of course, having been on the road for several days, I couldn’t wait to wake up on Monday morning and get right out to the course. I needed a game. I called a couple of guys but they wouldn’t be available. Then I thought about O.J., who was a member of nearby Riviera Country Club. I’ll play anywhere. I just need a game. I rang O.J.’s house but hung up when it went to the answering machine. I couldn’t wait around for a return call. Good move, as it turned out. A year later, in the trial when they were trying to determine O.J.’s whereabouts that night, any message probably would have been played back in court. No thanks.

  The next day, like everyone else in America, I heard the stunning news: Nicole Brown Simpson had been murdered, along with a friend, Ron Goldman. I had eventually gotten a golf game together and after finishing the round was getting information from the Grill Room television set at the club at the same time as most of the country. The initial word was that O.J. was in Chicago on a golf trip. I knew, of course, that O.J. and Nicole were separated and that she had moved into her own place. But I was thinking about O.J., wondering how he had found out Nicole had been killed, and how he was handling it.

  THE STORY EXPLODED IMMEDIATELY and there was a nonstop whirlpool of information and misinformation. In fact, it was becoming a cesspool of misinformation. ABC News asked me to help. Not only did I know the area, and not only did I know O.J. and Nicole, but I knew most everyone in their circle of friends. I played tennis with Al Cowlings. I knew O.J.’s good friend Bob Kardashian, and his wife at the time, Kris. (Yes, I had met the Kardashian girls when they were, like, five, seven, and ten.) I knew Bob Shapiro, who would represent O.J. I’d even met Kato Kaelin at one point. He was living in a guest suite behind Simpson’s tennis court for a few weeks. (For the record, I did not know Ron Goldman.)

  So I was brought in to try to help separate fact and fiction for ABC. I told my old boss, Roone Arledge, the president of ABC News, that I would help but I was in a dicey position. I would clearly become privy to certain information but that I’d have to protect my sources. He understood. And behind the scenes, I was working with Ted Koppel, then the host of Nightline. I was able to give Ted specific background information without attribution. And when he would ask, “How do you know this?” I could only respond, “I’m not going to give you a bum steer. You have to trust me here.” The fact that we had worked closely on the night of the 1989 World Series earthquake had given him a certain level of confidence in me.

  The day after the murder, O.J. flew back to Los Angeles from Chicago and television vans had invaded Brentwood. Rockingham Avenue was now as famous as Fifth Avenue. O.J. was in residence. By Wednesday, there had to be a thousand reporters and another thousand lookie-loos hanging out on Rockingham and the neighboring streets. Every outlet was reporting that Simpson was still in seclusion. “Would he be coming out? When would he be coming out? What will he say?” Blah, blah, blah. I called Koppel. “Ted, I have to tell you something. O. J. Simpson is not in his house. I know where he is. I can’t tell you where he is. You have to find another source if you want to use the information with attribution. But don’t report that O. J. Simpson is in the house. He’s not there.”

  “How could he get out of his house without anybody knowing?” Koppel wondered. “That seems impossible.”

  “Here’s how he got out of the house,” I said. “I’ve played tennis in that backyard more than a hundred times. There is a gate back there that connects to his neighbor’s property, and he can slide out through it and go between two other houses on North Bristol Avenue, which is the street that runs parallel to Rockingham. It’s secluded back there. Nobody would have seen him. That’s how he got out of the house.”

  Now, I knew all this because Bob Kardashian was in contact with me, and Bob had told me O.J. was at his house. I couldn’t give that away. At this point, I knew too much and I had friends involved and I couldn’t betray them by going public with information I’d learned in confidence. At the same time, I didn’t want my network repeating the same bogus information that everyone else was putting out.

  Meanwhile, as it became evident he was being investigated as a suspect, I spoke with O.J. by phone three or four times. He kept saying the same thing to me. “How can anybody think I did this?” Not, “I didn’t do it.” He just kept saying, “How can anybody think I did this?” “I can’t believe what they’re saying on the news.” In retrospect, that should have been a clear signal to me that something wasn’t right.

  At first I gave him the benefit of the doubt. And I did this for a number of reasons. For one thing, he was my friend. And who can believe that a friend would ever be capable of doing something so vicious? Second, the early timeline was confusing.

  O.J. may have been the guy in those Hertz commercials, racing through the airport concourse to make his flight. But in reality, I knew that like me, he hated being late for flights. We’d talked about it a number of times. Even in the pre-9/11, pre-TSA days, we both obsessed about getting to the airport with plenty of time to spare.

  O.J., remember, had an American Airlines red-eye flight from LAX to O’Hare on the night of the murder. (He was supposed to play golf at a corporate outing the next day, and would later say he was told about the murder in Chicago.) The flight left at 11:45 P.M. and the murders occurred around 10:15. Then Simpson was supposed to have gone home, cleaned up, and gotten into a limo sometime after 11 for the twenty-five-minute ride to the airport and in time to check his golf bag. My initial thought: The timeline doesn’t seem plausible. He never would have cut it that close to missing a flight.

  Also, I’d heard that Howard Bingham, Muhammad Ali’s personal photographer, was sitting across the aisle from O.J. on that flight to Chicago. To my mind, Howard Bingham, renowned in his profession and with all he’s experienced at close range in his life and his craft, is a man who would understand the human condition about as well as anybody. But when a mutual friend asked Howard if he had noticed anything out of the ordinary—if O.J. had been agitated or nervous, whether he had any inkling something had happened—Bingham said, not in the least. Which made me think, wait a minute. If Howard Bingham didn’t see anything he felt was out of sorts even minimally, then how did O.J. murder two people in cold blood, and then, ninety or so minutes later, get on a plane and be completely normal? In addition, the scene of the murders was in front of Nicole’s condo, only twenty or thirty feet from Bundy Drive, a surface street that always generates a fair amount of traffic. Someone had to see or hear something. It was such a chaotic story that initially, I didn’t know what to think. There was information coming out—and nobody knew what was true and what was total crap—that suggested he did it. And then there was mitigating information that suggested he couldn’t have.

  By the end of that week, the story was generating headlines worldwide. The plot was twisting and turning every hour. It was a national obsession. And then along came a White Bronco on the freeway early on the Friday evening of June 17, 1994.

  IT WAS FIVE DAYS after the murder, and it had been arranged that O.J. would surrender to police late that Friday morning for questioning. He’d be picked up at Bob Kardashian’s house. Even though a double-murder charge carried no bail in Californi
a, and, potentially, the death penalty, because of the circumstances O.J. was given the opportunity to turn himself in. The cops arrived sometime around eleven. But when they got there, O.J. was gone. He had sneaked out with Al Cowlings. Kardashian didn’t even know that O.J. had left the house. Where was O.J.? The dark joke going around that day was that Al Cowlings was driving O.J. to visit Nicole’s grave in Costa Mesa, in Orange County. And that when he found out where they were going, O.J. turned to Cowlings and said, “I said Costa Rica, motherfucker, not Costa Mesa.”

  By 2 P.M., the Los Angeles Police Department sent out an all-points bulletin. And so the search for O.J. began. I got a call at home from ABC News. While most of my work for the network that week had been behind the scenes, I had also agreed to do a couple of short on-camera interviews. So I’d appeared on Nightline to lend focus to certain information, talk about some of the principal figures, and discuss what it was like to work with O.J. on the air. But that night, a horse by the name of Barraq would be running at Hollywood Park. Three years earlier, my good friend Dave Leveton, a lawyer, had gotten me to go in fifty-fifty with him and buy my first racehorse. Dave had owned a number of horses and I went along for the ride. We were having a blast. Barraq had been earning his keep.

  The producer said to me, “Can you go on Nightline at eight forty-five Pacific Time with Ted?”

  I explained that I had to be at Hollywood Park—I didn’t say why—but I’d be happy to do it if they would send a satellite truck to the track. I told the producer, “I’ll do the interview from there.” Post time was scheduled around 9 P.M.