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

by Al Michaels

  Ultimately, we owned him for almost four years. We probably paid out $25,000 each year to maintain him. So we were in for $210,000 and he earned about $180,000. Which meant we were out $30,000, $15,000 apiece, or $3,750 a year. If he had won just one more race, we would have been in the black. All in all, though, a great ride. And a ton of laughs.

  After his racing days were over, we sent him up to the University of California, Davis, where they receive a lot of retired racehorses. Then in 1998, we got word that Barraq had died at the age of ten. R.I.P., wild one.

  BY HAPPENSTANCE, IN MARCH of that year, I ran into Bob Baffert, by then already a superstar trainer, at the San Felipe Stakes, one of the prep races for the Santa Anita Derby, which, in turn, is one of the West Coast prep races for the Kentucky Derby. I’d gotten to know Bob well while working on our racing coverage—in fact, the year before, his colt Silver Charm had come up just short of winning the Triple Crown, finishing second in the Belmont after winning the Derby and the Preakness.

  Meanwhile, at Santa Anita that day in 1998, Baffert had a horse in the race, and there was an unlikely connection. He sat down at the table for a minute and said, “I’ll tell you a funny story. When we were buying him at the two-year-old sale, I’m looking at the bloodlines and I see that his first cousin was Barraq. And I remembered that that was Al Michaels’s horse and he had some talent. It wasn’t the reason I bought him but it was a positive.”

  The horse’s name was Real Quiet. And Real Quiet finished second in the San Felipe that day. Then he went on to the Santa Anita Derby three weeks later and finished second again. And then Baffert takes the horse to Louisville.

  At Churchill Downs, on that first Saturday of May, Real Quiet goes off at 9–1. And with Kent Desormeaux in the saddle—Real Quiet wins the 124th running of the Kentucky Derby! At the Preakness, Real Quiet goes off as the favorite—and wins that race, too. So this horse—a first cousin of my Barraq—was now going for the Triple Crown at the 1998 Belmont Stakes. No horse had won the Triple Crown since Affirmed, twenty years earlier.

  Baffert’s Silver Charm had come up just short a year earlier. Now Real Quiet was going to try to make history in New York. He came out of the gate alertly and settled nicely, conserving energy for the mile-and-a-half marathon. With a sixteenth of a mile to go—110 yards—he had a four-length lead. Belmont Park is going wild. Until, in a flash, Victory Gallop, the second-place finisher in the Derby and Preakness, comes roaring to the finish line. It was a photo finish—and the photo revealed that Victory Gallop had won by a nose. Once again, there would be no Triple Crown.

  Meanwhile, I was thinking about Barraq. We had gelded him, and he’d been put to rest, but he was still the first cousin of a near–Triple Crown winner. Earlier that week, I’d told Bob Raissman of the New York Daily News that I was thinking of pulling a “Zachary Taylor.” Taylor was the twelfth president of the United States, who died in 1850 and whose body was exhumed some 140 years later to determine if he had indeed been fatally poisoned by arsenic. If I could only get Barraq’s body out of the ground for a few minutes, extract a little DNA, and . . . who knows? I was kidding.

  Sort of.

  EARLIER THAT SPRING, I’D gotten a call from an agent friend who’d been asked to contact me about playing a role in a sports comedy film that was created by Trey Parker and Matt Stone of South Park fame and would be directed by David Zucker, the man behind Airplane and The Naked Gun. Eight or nine other sportscasters—Dan Patrick, Jim Lampley, and Kenny Mayne among them—would also be playing various roles. And the idea was to have Bob Costas and me do the play-by-play for the “championship” game. The deal that was being offered was what’s known as “favored nations”—all of us, no matter how large or small the role, would receive $10,000. No negotiations. A couple of years before, Frank Gifford, Dan Dierdorf, and I had played ourselves in Jerry Maguire—we’d had a fairly extensive role—and the studio had offered us “scale,” or a few hundred bucks. I told Frank and Dan the movie would have a budget of $50 million and there was no freaking way we were doing it for scale. We wound up doing it against my better judgment for $5,000 apiece. Frank and Dan just wanted to have some fun and I had to be a team player. Jerry Maguire did $273 million at the box office. Glad we didn’t bust their budget.

  They sent over the script. The movie was called BASEketball and it was a goofy comedy about a made-up sport. I decided to pass on the offer. For whatever reason, it just didn’t feel right. Then I got a call from Costas. “I hear you don’t want to do this movie,” he said. “Come on, we’ll have some fun.”

  I told him I’d think about it. Then I called the agent and said, “They’re paying all of us ten thousand dollars. But they’re flying in everyone else. I can drive to the location from my house. And Costas and I have far larger roles than any of the other guys.” I was still thinking about the Jerry Maguire deal and how Frank, Dan, and I had been played as turnip-truck bumpkins by the studio execs. That wasn’t going to happen again. I knew the budget for BASEketball would be around $25 million. “Get me another five thousand dollars—the five thousand they’re saving on travel—and I’ll do it, mainly for Bob.”

  Also, I was committing to only one day, and I was adamant that I was leaving by five o’clock. I knew enough about Hollywood movie nonsense to realize that if I didn’t make this clear, I could be brought back for a second day. Or third. Or fourth. The deal got done. I was getting a little more money than the others but the studio was saving on travel.

  Costas flew in and our day on the set started at 7 A.M. It turned out that this was the very last day of shooting—there would be no Day 2. They were already behind schedule and needed to get this movie finished. Our roles and dialogue bordered on inane but for the first couple of hours we were having a blast. We had totally bought in. But as the morning wore on, it was progressively deteriorating. Probably the most outrageous line was Bob’s. “You’re excited?” he asks me after some sort of great play. “Feel these nipples!” Bob was reluctant to say it, but they convinced him to give it a shot, promising that if it didn’t work, they could just cut it out. He believed them.

  As we broke for lunch, it was clear that we were falling behind schedule. We still had all these scenes left to do and I’m thinking, They’ll never get me out of here by five o’clock. As everyone was scrambling and trying to cut down on the delays, they were humoring Bob and me—or so they thought—by showing us some of “the dailies,” the scenes they’d already shot over the past few weeks. We’re watching these and most were on the other side of vapid. And we’re looking at each other as if to say, What are we doing here? This is going to be the end of our careers.

  Bob turned to me and said, “Well, at least it’s a great payday.”

  We hadn’t discussed anything about money before this. I wasn’t turning my nose up at ten thousand dollars, but I got the feeling something wasn’t quite kosher. “Excuse me,” I said.

  “Well, at least it’s a good payday,” Bob repeated.

  “Excuse me.”

  Uh-oh. Bob looks at me, and now he knows he’s said something he probably shouldn’t have. We decided to flip a coin and the loser would have to tell the other guy how much he was getting paid.

  I lost the coin flip. “I’m getting fifteen grand,” I told him. “The ten thousand for favored nations, plus an extra five because I have no travel costs. So fifteen thousand all in.”

  Now it’s Bob’s turn. Sheepishly, Bob tells me that he’s getting fifty thousand dollars!

  I’m now apoplectic. Not because of the money but because they had lied. This took me over the edge. Trust me, I’m no prima donna—and this might sound so Hollywood—but I went to the dressing room, called the agent, and told him what had happened and that I was leaving the set and going home. I couldn’t believe I’d fallen off another turnip truck. There may be no business like show business, but in Hollywood, there’s no bullshit like the bullshit in show business.

  As the agent tried to get hold o
f someone at the studio, I knew that I had the upper hand. These remaining scenes were too important for the film. And it was the last day of shooting. The set was closing down in a few hours. There was no one around at that moment to fill the role. Costas and I had already done too much together. “We’ll make it right, we’ll make it right,” was the response when someone on the set got on the phone with the agent. “We’ll deal with it later, but you have to trust us.”

  I’m still ballistic. I tell the agent, “How do we know that? ‘Trust us’? They’ve already lied to our faces. I’m out of here at five o’clock.”

  I go back on the set, and now we’re rushing through the scenes. Zucker is hesitant to talk to me because he knows I’ve unearthed rotten eggs. I can’t concentrate on anything except getting in my car and calling a good friend who’s a top entertainment lawyer. I’m thinking, I didn’t want to do this in the first place and I just want to get the hell out of here.

  We finished up and I was still whacked out. I called my lawyer pal, and the next morning he was on the phone with someone in business affairs at Universal Studios who’d already been clued in. My guy says, “Bob Costas got fifty thousand dollars. Because of the aggravation factor, Al will get seventy-five thousand.”

  The guy at Universal came back with an offer of twenty thousand and was adamant the studio wouldn’t go any higher.

  “Absolutely not,” my lawyer says. “You are going to make this right.” And hangs up.

  My lawyer then calls me and asks: “What’s the best result for you? What do want to have happen?”

  “The best result?” I say. “That’s easy. Get me out of the movie—it’s a piece of crap to begin with.”

  Meanwhile, the business affairs exec calls my lawyer and makes a threat. “If Michaels won’t agree to twenty thousand, we’re going to take him out of the movie.”

  “Perfect!” my lawyer said. “You got a deal! Take him out.” Click.

  Ten minutes later, one of the top executives at Universal takes over. He realizes this is a problem that goes beyond threats from Business Affairs. The movie is already in postproduction and the film has no ending without the scenes with Bob and me.

  I wound up getting the same $50,000 that Costas got, plus $10,000 for my troubles and aggravation. And, of course, the studio paid my lawyer. Actually, this whole craziness could have been a movie itself.

  BASEketball came out shortly after and was so bad, it was actually funny. It became a cult classic. Bob and I have had a thousand laughs about that whole experience. And that line about “feeling Bob’s nipples”? It wasn’t only in the movie—it was in the trailer and played in theaters nationwide for weeks. The movie was a major bomb—$23 million to make with a $7 million gross.

  A few years ago someone sent me a BASEketball DVD and asked me to sign it. I sent it back with the following message:

  “Why did you buy this dreck? All best wishes . . .”

  CHAPTER 17

  Monday Night Transformations

  WHEN I FIRST LOGGED on to the Internet in the mid-nineties, I was immediately hooked. I could read newspapers and periodicals from around the country without having our research folks or team public relations people fax me pages and pages of material. Now I could simply do my homework by signing in. And with email, I could correspond with friends, sources, and work contacts without picking up the phone.

  Around that time, I made my first foray into a chat room. I’d heard that people posted their opinions on everything from sports to politics to movies, and figured I’d see what folks thought of Monday Night Football. I found a chat room called “T.V. Talk,” and used an alias to log in. I posed a question that I figured would start some discussion and give me some feedback. Hey, everyone, what do you think of Monday Night Football this season? I checked back a few hours later, and there were a few responses but none of them really dealt with the show. And all of them were lewd. Seemed like a reasonable question regarding a show about which there was usually no shortage of opinions. Instead, the only messages I saw were salacious, X-rated comments having nothing at all to do with football. I wrote another post about Monday Night, trying to figure out why no one wanted to “chat” about the show. Finally, someone wrote to my alias. “Hey, pal, don’t you understand? ‘T.V. Talk’ isn’t television talk. It’s Transvestite Talk.”

  Oops.

  Still, it was clear that the Internet was going to be a transformative force. Did I envision a day when I could access the Internet from my phone to watch NFL games live—getting special notifications when teams were in the Red Zone? No. Did I foresee using the Internet to talk to my grandkids, while seeing their faces? Not really. But I knew right away that this was going to have an indelible impact—both good and bad—on the world. Everything in the world—sports, politics, business, media, you name it.

  Concurrent with the burgeoning of the Internet, another media shift taking place was already beginning to affect me directly: ESPN—the cable channel that was ABC’s little corporate sibling was expanding rapidly. In 1996, the Walt Disney Company bought Capital Cities—including ABC and ESPN—for $19 billion. And very quickly, it became apparent that even though ABC was the top-rated network at the time, ESPN was the crown jewel of the deal.

  The reason for ESPN’s growth was simple: subscriber fees. Just look at your cable or satellite bill. Cable television has a dual revenue stream—subscriber fees and commercials. Network television has only advertising. As I write this, every household with cable pays more than $5 a month to receive ESPN in their basic package. That’s over $60 a year. Multiply that by roughly 100 million households that subscribe to cable or satellite. So before ESPN opens up the gate to the parking lot in Bristol, Connecticut, before it sells a single thirty-second commercial, they’re already pocketing almost $6 billion a year. It became obvious almost twenty years ago that the playing field was anything but level. And by the way, if you’re a great-grandmother in Odessa, Texas, and have not the slightest interest in sports, you’re still paying that sixty bucks for ESPN because it’s the only way you can still watch your soap operas, your local news, and Dr. Phil. Sorry, Granny, you can’t have à la carte choices and save yourself hundreds of dollars a year. I’ve always felt ESPN’s Most Valuable Players through the years have been the Beltway lobbyists who’ve done a brilliant job of keeping Congress confused and at bay.

  In 1996, Steve Bornstein, the head of ESPN, took over for Dennis Swanson. Swanson, who’d given me the plum of plums—Monday Night Football—was “retiring” at age fifty-eight. In other words, pushed out. And Bornstein would now be running both ESPN and ABC Sports. It was no surprise—I could see it coming from the moment Disney took the deed to the house. A couple of days after he took the job, my new boss called and said, “I want to sign you to a contract extension with alacrity.” I laughed at the word and still throw it out on the air every once in a while, a throwback to that phone call. Steve flew out to Los Angeles later that week and said something that was sweet music to my ears. Over breakfast at the Peninsula Hotel, he said, “ESPN is important. But I want to restore the glory of ABC Sports.” It never happened.

  ESPN was founded in the late seventies. Today the cable industry is more profitable than ever. Which is why the major media conglomerates, and even the leagues themselves, have launched cable sports channels. But Disney had a gigantic head start when it acquired ESPN. And once management had started merging ESPN with ABC Sports, the endgame was clearly apparent: the cable channel was going to be the mother ship. The network sports division would be, sooner or later, swallowed whole.

  Monday Night Football started to feel ESPN’s weight in the late 1990s. One example among many: to pump up ESPN’s Sunday Night Football broadcast, the network “borrowed” MNF’s exploding graphics and took Hank Williams Jr.’s opening song, “Are You Ready for Some Football?” I was walking through a hotel lobby in Denver with Dan Dierdorf when we first heard the song blaring out of a television set on a Sunday night telecast. Dan
and I looked at each like, “Whoa, what are we doing here? Isn’t our game tomorrow?”

  Also, in 1998, in the name of “synergy”—then the big corporate buzzword—the Monday Night Football kickoff was moved up from 9 P.M. to 8:20 P.M., and each telecast opened with a pregame show at the ESPN Sports Zone restaurant in Baltimore. I often felt synergy should be spelled “sinergy.” As in sacrilegious. This was just a bald-faced way to promote ESPN’s new restaurant chain. It was Frank Gifford’s first year out of the booth since 1970 and somebody came up with the brilliant idea to have him fly to Baltimore every week and do a short segment from a glass-enclosed cubicle. He couldn’t have looked more uncomfortable. The whole show felt like a cheap carnival act. It might as well have been hosted by Bozo the Clown with a seltzer bottle.

  Still, the most dramatic changes for me came in the broadcast booth. At the end of 1997, after a twenty-seven-season run that dated back to the second year of Monday Night Football, Frank left the show. His contract wasn’t renewed. (He was only offered that small role on the pregame show.) Things were getting so bizarre at the time that Michael Eisner, then the head honcho of Disney, was set to call Frank to give him the word himself. Frank deserved to hear it from the “big boss.” But Frank was unreachable (it was later learned he’d been undergoing knee surgery) and after several failed attempts, Eisner had to get on a plane for Europe. So it fell to Bob Iger, then number two at the company, to get the word to Gifford. But Frank was still nowhere to be found and Iger would soon be on a plane himself. Word was starting to leak out that Frank’s reign was over and it was important that he’d hear it from the company—and not the press. Meanwhile, even though Bornstein was now heading both sports divisions, a guy named Brian McAndrews had been given a senior management title at ABC Sports. So somehow it was now left to a guy who’d barely been there and would leave soon thereafter to call Frank Gifford. One thing about Frank—he’d seen it all over the years and could be oblivious to the comings and goings in the executive suite. My phone in the house rings the next afternoon. It’s Frank. He was always the coolest guy in the room. So matter-of-factly that he might as well had been talking about the weather, he says, “I think I just got fired by a guy I never heard of.” And thus ended Frank Gifford’s incredible run in the Monday Night Football broadcast booth.