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

by Al Michaels

  Ultimately, the network couldn’t work that out, so instead I agreed to tape an interview at the ABC studio in Hollywood at five o’clock and leave from there to go to the track. By the time I got to the studio, O.J. was still on the loose, whereabouts unknown. I did a brief taped interview with Ted Koppel that would run on Nightline that night, got up to leave—and then, I hear all hell breaking loose from the newsroom. O.J. is on the freeway. In a white Bronco. And a few minutes later—Al Cowlings is in the driver’s seat.

  I’m told I’m not to go anywhere and minutes later, I’m on a set downstairs alongside Bill Redeker, the West Coast correspondent for the network. Judy Muller, another ABC News correspondent, was at a separate location and tied in with us. Now the network was in full “special report” mode, with Koppel in Washington and Peter Jennings in New York. And I’m tethered to our set because O.J. was on a freeway in Los Angeles. I wasn’t going anywhere and resigned myself to the fact that Barraq would probably have to go to the starting gate in a couple of hours with his co-owner ten miles up the road.

  Almost 100 million Americans were going to watch this play out on one of the networks, captivated by a spectacle that was unlike anything anyone had ever seen. Would O.J. get caught? Surrender? Somehow escape? Or even kill himself right there on live television?

  Now it was after six o’clock. Knowing exactly where they were when the California Highway Patrol started its pursuit, I began doing “geography narration”—similar to my role on the night the earthquake interrupted the 1989 World Series. But instead of “there’s the Bay Bridge,” it was “there’s Sunset Boulevard.” The slow-speed chase was continuing. The cops were following. People on the freeway were cheering. O.J.’s friends and former teammates were calling into the networks, telling him to turn himself in. Al (A. C.) Cowlings—my tennis partner—was driving. It was all beyond surreal.

  Soon we’re into the seven o’clock hour. It’s ten o’clock in the east on a Friday night, which means it’s time for ABC’s 20/20. So this chase has become not just an ABC News special—preempting prime time programming—but it’s now part of 20/20, hosted, as always, by Barbara Walters. And once that happens, who has to get on the air, somehow, someway? Barbara, of course. It was her show. So now she’s in our New York studio. We had Koppel, we had Jennings, we had Redeker, we had Muller, we had yours truly, and a couple of other correspondents out in the field. We had it pretty well covered. But this was developing into a potential crime of the century—so Barbara, of course, had to weigh in.

  And how did she? As we continued to go back and forth, covering every aspect of this not-to-be-believed drama with tension building by the second, Barbara jumped in.

  “Does anybody know how old O.J. is?”

  There was silence. In our studio, I looked at Redeker. He looked incredulous. We rolled our eyes at each other. I couldn’t see Jennings or Koppel at that point but I could only imagine the looks on their faces.

  Does anybody know how old O.J. is? Seriously?

  Somebody answered forty-six. But more important, the question spoke volumes about television—and about how gigantic this story was. Everybody had to get a piece of the action, no matter how marginally relevant. Or irrelevant. Everyone had to be involved.

  A little before eight o’clock, Cowlings and Simpson pulled into O.J.’s driveway in Brentwood but stayed in the car. There were a dozen helicopters overhead. There were photographers and cameramen positioned outside the gates, even if they couldn’t really shoot over the hedges. So the television viewer was basically seeing the Bronco only from an aerial view. And there was no visible movement in the car.

  At this point, there was little but speculation when Peter Jennings said, “Well, we have on the phone a Robert Higgins who lives in the neighborhood and is on the ground and can see inside the van. Mr. Higgins—”

  I heard a voice that said, “Ah yay-ess, how ah you?”

  I immediately smelled a rat. I knew most of the neighbors. I knew a lot of people in Brentwood and on O.J.’s street. I’d never heard of a Robert Higgins. And I knew that it would be next to impossible for anyone to see into O.J.’s driveway from ground level outside the property. I looked over at Redeker. He knew what I was thinking and nodded.

  Jennings hesitated a second and said, “Uh, just about as tense as you are, I assume.”

  The voice again, “Oh my Lawd, this is quite the tensest.”

  Now I was certain it was a prank call. “Mr. Higgins” sounded like he was auditioning for the old Amos ’n’ Andy show. But Jennings kept going.

  “What can you see?” he asked in a somber voice.

  “Well what I’m a-lookin’ at right now, I’m lookin’ at the van and what I see is O.J. kind of slouching down and looking very, very upset. No—looky here, he look very upset. I don’t know what he gonna be doin’.”

  There was an awkward pause but Jennings kept on with the questions. I was in Los Angeles and Jennings was in New York but I was trying to signal to people in our studio to let them know this was a prank.

  I could hear through my earpiece someone in New York tell Jennings to “wrap this thing up because we don’t know about this call.”

  “Thank you, Mr. Higgins,” Jennings concluded.

  But before the control room could him off, the voice said, “And Baba Booey to you all.”

  It was one of the Howard Stern guys. Of course it was. I immediately figured it was the fabled Captain Janks but sometime later discovered that it was another prankster, “Maury from Brooklyn.” Having been a big Howard fan, I obviously knew Baba Booey, Stern’s well-known nickname for his producer, Gary Dell’Abate. Peter didn’t. He was just confused. And now someone had to say something—to disabuse Jennings and the audience of any notion that it had been a legitimate call, and do so while realizing that whatever was said was going to be played on The Howard Stern Show until the day I’d be pushing up daisies. I had to form my words very, very carefully knowing that on Monday morning, Howard and Robin and the whole gang would be having a field day.

  Peter went on for another few seconds, and then I jumped in. “Peter,” I said, “just for the record, this is Al Michaels—that was a totally farcical call. Lest anybody think that was somebody who was truly across the street—that was not. He used a name in code that was indicative of the mentioning of the name of a certain radio talk show host. So he was not there.”

  For the record, lest and farcical are two words I don’t think I’d ever used before, at least publicly. But I was too busy parsing every syllable in my brain—How do I want to say this so that when they play this back on The Howard Stern Show, a show I’ve already been on a few times, it doesn’t appear as though I’m trashing Howard?

  Jennings thanked me and added, “We have them [pranksters] on every coast. Not the first time or the last time we’ll have been had.” So now Barbara Walters was asking how old O.J. was, and Peter Jennings was getting bamboozled. Network news divisions have had finer hours.

  A quick digression: Months later I’m a guest on Howard’s show in New York, and of course they played the hell out of that clip—“lest,” “farcical,” the whole deal. That night, I’m at Giants Stadium for a Monday night game. It’s four months after that O.J. night of nights. I’m out on the field an hour before the game, and fans are yelling at me. Hey Al, lest anyone think that was a legitimate call, it was totally farcical! To this day, twenty years after the fact—and it could be anywhere in the country—I still hear it regularly. “Hey, Al, it’s totally farcical!”

  O.J. eventually got out of the car and was taken into custody shortly thereafter. My night in the studio was over at a little past nine o’clock.

  And then there was my horse, Barraq. His race had been run. My partner, Dave Leveton, calls to say we had a winner. Not only that, but Barraq had held the lead from the starting gate to one hundred yards from the finish when he’d been overtaken. Then, as could be said in horse racing parlance, “he reached deep down and found more.” I’
d missed it all.

  O.J. WOULD SPEND THE next year-plus in jail, and I visited him three times. Don Ohlmeyer, the former Monday Night Football producer who had then turned NBC into an entertainment juggernaut and had worked with O.J. on a number of projects, was a regular visitor. You had a couple of hangers-on that were there pretty much all day long—guys who didn’t have jobs but had gotten on the approved visitors’ list and who just wanted to be able to tell their friends they were with O.J. regularly. On one visit, O.J. told me what pests they had become but he wasn’t sure how to get rid of them. It was like a menagerie. On two of my visits, the Menendez brothers, who were awaiting a retrial on charges they had murdered their parents, were sitting in the next cubicle talking to Leslie Abramson, their attorney.

  O.J. was on the other side of the Plexiglas and, rather than denying it all, he was still saying, “I can’t believe anybody thinks I could have done this,” or “How can they think I did this?” That was more and more disconcerting for me. He never said, “I didn’t do it!” Again this is all hindsight, but if you were in jail for a double murder you didn’t commit and one of the victims was your wife, wouldn’t you be figuratively pounding the walls? Maybe literally, too.

  The verdict came down in October 1995 and millions of people will never forget the look on Bob Kardashian’s face. He was clearly stunned by the pronouncement, “not guilty.” A lot of O.J.’s friends had the same reaction. O.J. would be back home on Rockingham Avenue within the hour.

  I look at it clinically now and I look back on it historically. I haven’t spoken with O.J. in years, and have no plans to. Obviously, the vast majority of people in this country feel that he did it. A billion words and a million hours of airtime have microscopically dissected every aspect of the murder, the trial, and the aftermath. Adding anything more is ad nauseam redundant. But we’ll never hear the end of it.

  CHAPTER 16

  Diversions

  I CAME TO MY LOVE of horse racing at an early age. At the start of the book, I wrote about going to Roosevelt Raceway on Long Island with my parents, publishing my tout sheet, Big Al at Westbury, and once correctly picking a 75–1 shot named Algerine to win. Well, when we moved to California, things didn’t change much. My mom—the Original Rascal—would occasionally show up at Hamilton High School, seek out the assistant principal, and explain that her son had a dentist appointment and she was there to pick me up. Naturally, the “dentist appointment” was either at Santa Anita or Hollywood Park, depending on the time of year. We made this our little secret and kept it from my father—he took me to the track only on weekends. And Lila Michaels only further sealed her first-ballot induction into the Mothers’ Hall of Fame when she started taking two of my friends along with us to my dentist appointments. My buddies had a lot of cavities to fill, too.

  Decades later, knowing how much I liked horse racing, Dennis Swanson assigned me to work the Kentucky Derby on ABC in 1986. I was thrilled. (I was less than thrilled when I got to Churchill Downs, this iconic sports venue, and found that it bordered on ramshackle. Plenty of renovations since.) Then, starting in 1987, until ABC lost the rights in 2001, I covered every Triple Crown race—forty-two in a row. An added bonus was that ABC’s horse racing producer was Curt Gowdy Jr.

  Jim McKay and I would cohost the coverage, while Dave Johnson called the actual race itself. Through the years, we were joined by Charlsie Cantey, Lesley Visser, Hank Goldberg, and various jockeys like Gary Stevens, Chris McCarron, Jerry Bailey, and Mike Smith, who were either injured at the time or without a mount. Robin Roberts was even with us for a couple of races before ascending to stardom on Good Morning America. We had a fabulous crew and a lot of good times. People would ask me how we filled all our time on the air—our pre-race window was usually over an hour—when the actual race was around two minutes. The truth is, the hardest part of those broadcasts was condensing all our material and fitting it into the allotted time.

  No sport has richer stories—from the owners to the trainers to the jockeys to the horses to the breeders to the railbirds—than horse racing. I’m not sure any other sport reaches such a cross section of society. At a racetrack the upper crust shares the same emotions as folks taking their last dollar to the betting windows. Royalty shares an afternoon with the proletariat. Still, for almost as long as I can remember, there’s always been talk about racing’s impending death. Some of this is because new locales and new methods for gambling are always emerging. Some of this is because, unlike ballplayers, horses run only for a very short period of time—making it hard to form an attachment with an “athlete” who will be retired and sent to stud after only a couple of years on the playing field. Would a Triple Crown winner transform horse racing and restore the sport to all its past glory? Of course not—the winner would be a big story for a few days and then be shipped to the nostalgia file.

  But I don’t think the sport will ever completely die. Although just last year, Hollywood Park, one of my all-time favorite tracks, closed its gates for the final time. Horse racing may not be what it used to be, but that’s generally because sports are like other businesses. They need to innovate and grow and avoid getting complacent, while making good strategic decisions and reacting smartly to trends. Those that do, grow and succeed. Those that don’t are left behind. I never would have imagined that a day would come when you could walk down the street of any major American city and go blocks without anyone knowing the name of the current world heavyweight boxing champion. I also never would have guessed that more fans would choose to watch an NFL preseason game than a Major League Baseball playoff game, and that the NFL Draft would outrate most NBA playoff games. It’s a new world order.

  IN 1990, IT WAS time for me to take the next step in the world of thoroughbred racing. There’s the old joke: How do you make a small fortune in horse racing? Start with a big fortune. I have my own variation of that. In 1990, along with my friend Dave Leveton, who’d owned a number of horses, including one that ran in the Kentucky Derby (Masterful Advocate in 1987), we bought a yearling and named him Ultimate Fantasy. He got sick and died before he ever got to the races. Not the most auspicious start. Then in 1991, we decided to go in fifty-fifty on another horse. We wanted a race-ready animal, one we could send to the track immediately.

  Dave knew what he was doing. His trainer, Gary Jones, was one of the best in California. And we didn’t want to get another yearling (a horse between one and two years old). So we went to a bloodstock agent who imported horses from Europe, and a few weeks later, bought a four-year-old by the name of Barraq (pronounced just like the first name of the president). He’d already been named by the previous owner, as a play on the name of the horse that had transported the prophet Muhammad from Mecca to Jerusalem. (At that point, Dave and I laughed and figured he had to be a distance specialist.) He had been bred in Kentucky but had run three or four times in France and fared pretty well. He was an allowance horse, not a stakes horse, which meant he could only run in races that had certain qualifying conditions. And then, after his racing career was over, my goofball dream was that Barraq would become a big-time stallion. The horse cost us $110,000—we each put up $55,000.

  He was brought to California from Europe for his first race, at Santa Anita on April 18, 1991. It was a 96-degree day. I’d been to Santa Anita hundreds of times going back to the days of my mother taking me to “the dentist.” But never as an owner. Now here I was at arguably the world’s most beautiful racetrack in a sports jacket and tie, so nervous and excited and hot that I’m not just sweating through my shirt, I’m not just sweating through my jacket—I’m sweating through my tie. This is my horse and he’s about to run a mile on the turf course of Santa Anita. Chris McCarron, the jockey who’d won the Kentucky Derby and the Preakness aboard Alysheba in 1987, is riding my horse! The superb race caller Trevor Denman will call the race. I’m in Dreamland.

  Barraq was, as I recall, the second choice—French import, first race in America. He had a lot of backing and went off
at 2 to 1. As they broke from the starting gate, my eyes were pinned on him. He looked like Pegasus, leaping high in the air, a wild horse trying to get out of the bit. His head was turned toward the grandstand at a 90-degree angle. McCarron was fighting for control. Trevor Denman’s call went something like this: And away they go. King Raj on the inside is off to a good start. Indigena is second along the rail. And then there’s Barraq. Barraq is rank. Barraq is very rank. McCarron has his hands full! He was also pouring sweat—“washy,” as the saying goes in racing. He’d used up the bulk of his energy in the first hundred yards.

  At the end, though, Barraq finished second and I was ecstatic. He had broken horribly, McCarron had to fight him all the way, and he still had enough left that he could finish second in an allowance race. The purse was thirty-five thousand dollars, and with second place worth around 20 percent, we made a few grand. A good day and tremendous fun.

  Now, of course, I couldn’t wait for his next race. But first, a couple of days later, I got a call from Gary Jones, the trainer. “I’m gonna geld him. He’s too crazy.”

  Castrate Barraq?! No! Why?

  “Geld him?” I said, “Gary, this could be the greatest stallion of all-time!”

  Jones was never one to mince words. “Don’t be nuts,” he said. “Ain’t gonna happen. The guy training him in France screwed him up. This is the only chance to get him under control.”

  I was still fantasizing about the millions this horse was going to bring in from the breeding shed. But my dreams of founding the next Calumet Farm would end that night with a scalpel.

  So we now had a four-year-old gelding. And what do you know—he winds up winning five races in his career—one at Hollywood Park, three at Santa Anita, and one at Del Mar. He’d have probably won a few more but the problem was he was always out of commission. He was like a kid who couldn’t stop from getting sick. Every few races, Gary would call. “Well, we have to put him on the shelf for a while.” It was always a lot of fun paying those vet bills while our boy sat in the stall!