by Al Michaels
A few weeks later, we all convened for our first telecast—the preseason Hall of Fame Game in Canton, Ohio. Don gathered the entire production team on Saturday morning in a conference room at the Cuyahoga Falls Sheraton. There were about forty people in the room: Don, the broadcast team, our new director Drew Esocoff, associate directors, production assistants, runners, the key engineering people, the research folks, and a few others. When Don walked in, he was wearing all white, sucking on one of the 120 cigarettes he would smoke that day. My longtime spotter, “Malibu” Kelly Hayes, leaned over to me and said, “Good God, it’s the Great Gatsby.”
Don’s reputation preceded him. He had a big laugh, a big inventory of stories, and a big personality. He also didn’t suffer fools gladly. He had written an expansive handout—a short book, really—about his Monday Night Football philosophy and distributed it to all of us. Here’s what we’re we going to try. Here’s what is going to be different.
In late morning, it was time for a break. “It’ll be a long day for everyone—I’m sending out for some lunch,” he said. And with that, Don reached for a pad and pen and started going around the room. What do you want? Turkey? Lettuce and tomato? What about you? Ham and cheese? Okay. And what do you want to drink? Diet Coke? Caffeine or no caffeine? Don took down forty lunch orders and then handed it to a runner. He’d sent a message. Hey, we’re all a team. I may be the boss but I’m also taking food orders. Nobody’s going to stand on ceremony.
That was a year to remember. I love Dennis. Yet he’s the ultimate piece of work. He’s brilliantly funny but working with a comedian was a different kind of challenge. If you laugh at every line, you sound like a hyena. We were all going down a road never before traveled. Between second down and six and third-and-four, Dennis might drop in a short riff on Sylvia Plath. At times like those, I felt like my head was in a bell jar.
The changes went beyond the booth. Don was getting back to producing live sports after a long absence. And we had two new sideline reporters in Melissa and Eric. Ringling Bros. could have bought the rights.
On top of all that, almost every week the games were fantastic. There was drama and suspense deep into the fourth quarter. Or overtime. Blowouts were a foreign commodity on Monday Night Football in 2000. Which meant Dennis rarely had the opportunity to just let it hang out in one-sided contests, something we had been anticipating would help to keep an audience from saying good night before the final gun. In a 27–27 game with five minutes to play, the viewers didn’t want to hear an obscure joke about the Kennedy assassination or the Green Hornet or whatever esoteric reference came into Dennis’s mind.
The most memorable, wackiest game that season was the Jets-Dolphins “Monday Night Miracle,” which ended at 1:22 A.M. It took place on an off night between games of the Yankees-Mets World Series. Miami was up 23–7 at halftime. Then Arnold Schwarzenegger visited the broadcast booth and said, with random prophecy, “Wayne Chrebet is going to pull it off. I think as usual the Jets are going to come from behind, you will see. . . . I think the Dolphins have to be terminated.”
By the fourth quarter, the Dolphins were leading, 30–7 and half the crowd at Giants Stadium, including Schwarzenegger, was already in the parking lot. But here came Vinny Testaverde and the Jets. Testaverde threw three touchdown passes—the tying one, as Schwarzenegger had somewhat mused, to Wayne Chrebet. Now thousands of fans were making their way back in from the parking lot. However, the Dolphins then got a long kickoff return, and Jay Fiedler threw a 46-yard touchdown pass to Leslie Shepherd to grab the lead right back.
But wait. The Jets marched right back down the field, worked their way inside the Dolphins’ five-yard line, and Testaverde threw a pass to offensive lineman Jumbo Elliot on an insane tackle-eligible play with a few seconds left to tie the game again and send it to overtime, where they’d eventually win it.
I called it this way: “Testaverde back to pass and it is juggled and caught by JUMBO ELLIOTT! JUMBO Elliott—who’s been in the league for twelve years. It’s the FIRST TOUCHDOWN of his career! It’s the FIRST CATCH of his career!”
Dennis Miller never missed a beat. “Well,” he said, “you couldn’t keep him down forever.”
During that off-the-charts 2000 season, we had a lot of laughs off the air, too. Christmas Day was a Monday, so we were in Nashville for the Titans and Cowboys. On Sunday night, Christmas Eve, Dennis and I went to dinner at the Palm. It had just opened a week or two before. The décor included caricatures on the walls of a few local celebrities but primarily politicians and all the city councilmen. The manager had heard that Dennis might be coming in, so there was a caricature of him that they’d put up at the last minute. After the meal, the manager asked him to sign the picture.
Dennis said sure, and got up on the banquette to sign his name. But leave it to Dennis—he didn’t stop there. He kept going, signing his name on the caricatures of all these Nashville muckety-mucks and country music singers. All the manager could do was laugh nervously. What he really wanted to do was whack him.
We walked out and headed back to our hotel, the Loews Vanderbilt. I had a problem with the phone in my room and the maintenance man came up. “Yeah,” he said, “we’ve had issues with the whole phone system since the election.” He went on to explain that Al Gore and his staff had headquartered there on Election Night, a few weeks earlier.
“Wait a second,” I said. “When Gore called George W. Bush that night to congratulate him and concede the election—before all hell broke loose and we learned all about hanging chads—he did it from here?”
“Yup,” the guy said. “He was in the suite at the end of the hall.”
So a few minutes later, I made my way over to the Presidential Suite. And what do you know—the door was slightly ajar. Bud Adams—the Titans owner who’d founded the Houston Oilers of the AFL in 1960, had moved the team to Tennessee in 1997, and had negotiated television deals with my father—would always stay in that suite when he was in town. I knocked but no one answered. I tiptoed in, figuring if I saw Adams, I could just wish him a Merry Christmas. But no one was there. I was envisioning Gore, his team around him, in this room on Election Night. I looked at a coffee table in the living room and assumed I might be staring at the phone that Gore had used to call Bush. He’d probably used a dedicated phone that his team had installed but at least this instrument was in the neighborhood.
Here comes the Rascal, Christmas Eve Edition. I removed the phone from the jack, took it back to my room, and stuck it in my suitcase. With the statute of limitations having lapsed, I will confess that now, in my home in Los Angeles, sits the phone that Al Gore might have used (or at least its first cousin) to as it turned out, prematurely concede the most contested presidential election in U.S. history. It was a Christmas present for myself.
As for Dennis, he’d be with us for two seasons. It was wild and wacky and mostly good fun. Dennis’s notes were on a long and narrow piece of cardboard with about eighty lines written on it. I’d say, “Dennis, you’re so good, so quick on the uptake. Why do you need this crutch? You hardly use any of these.” It was a security blanket.
Dennis’s tenure was met with all manner of reviews. If there was one thing that worked against him, it was this: so much of comedy is visual. If Dennis was on Saturday Night Live or The Tonight Show or his HBO series, you saw him. You’d see his facial expressions, his body language. In the middle of a football game, in the midst of the action and with your focus on the field and the crowd roaring, words are often extraneous. The audience might be thinking: What did he say? And you certainly couldn’t laugh at any of his facial movements—you couldn’t see them.
Ohlmeyer would leave after one season and hand the reins to Fred Gaudelli, for my money hands-down the finest sports producer ever to come down the pike. As I write this, Fred and I are in our fourteenth season together. Miller would be out after two. I look back at it this way: he revitalized the show and brought it back into the national conversation. Harder to do th
an you might think.
After his brief era, though, it was time for the gold standard to come aboard.
CHAPTER 18
Partners
OVER THE YEARS, I’ve worked with more than one hundred broadcast partners, from O. J. Simpson to Arthur Ashe to Johnny Unitas to Don Drysdale to Bruce Jenner. Most of them have been former players or coaches. In a few cases, they’ve struggled to make the transition. Mark (the Bird) Fidrych, who used to talk to the baseball on the mound, rest his soul, worked one game and decided that the broadcast booth wasn’t for him. He actually said to me in the fifth inning—on the air—that he had to go to the bathroom. In other cases, the transition has been so smooth that the former athletes end up redefining themselves. Cris Collinsworth, for example, is so good at his craft that fans either forget or aren’t even aware that he was once a very good NFL wide receiver who played in two Super Bowls.
Some former jocks approach the commentary role with the mentality I played the game, I was on the field and you weren’t. So listen to what I have to say. That’s usually when laziness blends with arrogance. That won’t cut it. I worked with one analyst, a former quarterback, who would constantly say things like “This is what the quarterback is thinking here.” The situation didn’t matter. I always wanted to say, “Really? Every quarterback is thinking the same thing on every third-and-four? Just because you once were a quarterback doesn’t mean you know what all quarterbacks are thinking in every situation. This is what you were thinking, not everybody.” The best of the best—John Madden, Cris Collinsworth, and Tim McCarver, to name three of my all-time favorites—worked their butts off to learn what a specific player or coach or manager might or might not do in a specific situation. That’s part of what always separated them from the pack.
No one would compare my job to hard physical labor. But it is a lot of work. There are meetings upon meetings. There is a ton of preparation. You have to keep up and stay ahead of everything that’s going on that can impact a telecast. You have to be able to anticipate intelligently. Yes, in a small market, a former athlete with a big enough name can make it simply by showing up. He played the game, knows enough people with the team, tells a few stories. You can make a good living doing that. But that’s not going to get you to the network level. Or if it does, it won’t be for long.
What makes the good ones really good? They understand broadcasting and the art of communicating. They don’t think of themselves as being in the ex-jock business—they’re in the broadcasting business. They understand story lines and flow and perspective. They understand the dissemination of information. They develop a sense of timing and learn how to use their voices and the art of inflection. They know what the seventy or eighty other people on the crew—the unsung people who often make you look a lot better—are doing and respect them. And they are always trying to improve.
And you’re never too old. Another of my favorite partners was the former basketball coach Hubie Brown, with whom I did the NBA on ABC a decade ago. Hubie is now in his eighties and still going strong. God bless him. Every couple of weeks, Hubie would say to me, “Tell me how I can get better. Don’t hesitate. I want to know. What do you think I should work on?”
Not only was he a great teacher—he was a pretty good student, too.
IN 2002, TWENTY-SEVEN YEARS after I first met with him in his office when he was coaching the Raiders, John Madden and I reunited. ABC had first tried to sign John for Monday Night Football at the end of the 1992 season but Fox had just gotten the rights to the NFL and made John a blowaway offer. The network made another push for him when Frank Gifford left after the 1997 season. It was close but didn’t happen. Finally, after the 2001 season, Howard Katz, the president of ABC Sports, and Alex Wallau, the president of the network who’d always coveted Madden, made another big play. Pat Summerall, John’s longtime partner on CBS and Fox, was soon retiring, and Fox was looking to go in another direction. This time, the timing and fit were perfect. John Madden was moving to Monday Night Football.
John and I had crossed paths on a few occasions through the years, and of course had listened to each other hundreds of times. When his move to ABC became imminent, we spoke by phone. Already, there was some skepticism from a few television critics and others wondering if we could “coexist.” John and I just laughed about it because we knew there was not a chance in a hundred that it wouldn’t work.
In one of our initial conversations, I asked John a question. I had remembered watching Super Bowl XXXI on Fox several years earlier—New England against Green Bay. During the lead-up to the game, the question of whether Bill Parcells was going to leave the Patriots was a huge story. Parcells was being totally evasive with the media. Though most of the speculation had him resigning, no one really had the definitive answer and it remained a big mystery. Then, near the end of the game, Madden said on the air, “Well, Bill Parcells will not be flying home with the team.”
He had worked the edges of saying Bill Parcells will not be back with the team next season without ever actually saying it. To me, it was simple. John knew the real story. Parcells had told Madden of his plans. And Madden had the scoop.
I recounted this to John and he agreed with my analysis of the situation. I said, “That’s the kind of thing where, if you and I are working together, I’d want to have a back-and-forth about this. If we have a scoop, I’d want us to dive right in and not skirt the edges or beat around the bush. Would you be comfortable with that?”
He paused and said, “You know, sometimes it’s difficult to fly the plane alone.” It was exactly the kind of answer I wanted to hear. It was another way of saying “definitely.”
John came in a year after Fred Gaudelli had replaced Don Ohlmeyer as the producer of the show. Don had only signed on for a year or two, and felt that he’d accomplished almost everything he’d wanted to in that 2000 season. The truck would now be in great shape with Gaudelli and Esocoff (it still is, to this day)—but now we were rebooting again in the booth. And in a meeting before the 2002 preseason started, Fred asked John and me if we wanted to announce a practice game—pretend we were doing a real telecast over the tape of a game from the previous season. If there would be any kinks, we could work them out in the form of a rehearsal. John looked over at me as if to let me make the decision since he was new to Monday Night and I was the incumbent. “No, it’s better to just let it happen,” I said, and then looked over at John. “We don’t need this, do we?”
He said, “I was hoping you would say that.”
So our first time ever together in a broadcast booth was at the Hall of Fame Game in Canton in 2002. As confident and optimistic as we were, there’s always that tiny inkling of doubt lurking, where you think, Well, maybe it won’t be as good as we think it will and we’ll have to work out some bugs. But before John and I got to the second commercial break, I felt like we’d worked together for ten years. There was an immediate and natural flow. From those first few minutes on, we didn’t so much as need eye contact. It felt great. And it would stay that way for the seven years we worked together.
John and I quickly became great pals outside the booth as well. He even indulged my vegetable-phobia. One night, when we were in Green Bay, I ordered French onion soup without the onions—just the broth with cheese and croutons. He was in hysterics. John and I even discovered that we share the same recurring nightmare: we’re late for a game and we’re stuck on this ring road that surrounds the stadium and can’t get to the booth on time.
Part of what made John Madden such a singular broadcaster was the circumstances. So many former athletes and coaches still relish and thrive on competition. Inevitably, they discover that in television, you can’t quite re-create the feeling of walking off the field or court and looking at the way the lights on the scoreboard align and knowing for certain if you’ve won or lost, succeeded or failed. For coaches, in particular, there’s no scoreboard to look at when you walk out of a booth after a game. Some viewers might think you did a grea
t job and others would like to see you forever pinned under the wheels of a moving van. Good luck figuring out a final score. For many big names who’ve transitioned into broadcasting—among them Joe Gibbs and Bill Walsh in football, Pat Riley and George Karl in basketball, Joe Torre and Bobby Valentine in baseball—television was a stopover between jobs, or a coda to a long career to be approached as a part-time pursuit.
Coaching has always been a demanding job. George Halas coached the Chicago Bears for forty years, but even he temporarily stepped away after ten consecutive seasons on four separate occasions. (It didn’t hurt that he also owned the team.) Today, the demands on coaches are almost criminal. Sleeping in the office is not uncommon and many devote as many hours to the job in the off-season as they do in-season. Sometimes coaches just need a break, and television can be a way to take what amounts to a leave of absence.
In the case of John Madden, there was none of that. He knew he wouldn’t reenter the world of coaching. So he devoted himself to a career in television soon after he left the sidelines. He was only forty when he led the Raiders to victory in Super Bowl XI. He won more than one hundred games as a head coach, and then stepped away when he was only forty-two. He never went back. He couldn’t go back.
Most fans are familiar with the Madden Cruiser, the made-to-order bus John took from game to game. It fit his image—which was thoroughly genuine—of being a man of the people you’d might have a decent shot to run into some day at an Arby’s in Keokuk, Iowa. And it’s well known that John rode the bus because he was petrified of flying. I’m not sure people ever realized just how debilitating his fear of flying was.
For starters, John played at Cal Poly–San Luis Obispo in the late fifties. He knew many of the coaches and players on the team plane that crashed in Ohio after a game against Bowling Green in October 1960. Twenty-two of the forty-eight people on board were killed, including sixteen players. Secondly, John has claustrophobia. They’d shut the cabin doors—and John would feel like he had to get out. John and I and a couple of others once got stuck between the first and second floors of a large freight elevator at a hotel in San Diego. It lasted only a couple of minutes but it was not a pretty sight.
