by Al Michaels
WHEN I SIGNED ON with ABC Sports in 1976, one of the first people I would work with was Terry Jastrow. Terry was our primary golf producer but also produced and directed a lot of college football and that was where we first got together. In fact, Terry was the producer of that Stanford game in 1978 when I’d had that unbelievable ten-minute car ride with Frank Broyles regarding the futures of Bill Walsh and Bill Clinton. Later that evening, Terry would swing by San Francisco International Airport to pick up a young lady he had recently started dating. Her name was Anne Archer and the two would be married within a couple of years. Anne was just starting out as an actress and would leave an indelible mark soon thereafter when she received an Academy Award nomination for her role as Michael Douglas’s wife in Fatal Attraction. The Jastrows and the Michaelses go back a long way.
For years, Terry encouraged me to take up golf. In my twenties and thirties, I played a lot of tennis, much of it with Terry, but in my forties, Terry, a three-handicap, convinced me it was time to take up golf and sponsored me for membership to the Bel-Air Country Club. I resisted but he insisted. Ever since, I’ve looked at Terry as a drug dealer. He hooked me for life.
There’s so much to love about golf. The ambience. Four hours without any phone calls or emails. The constant challenge of trying to become better. You can never master it, but you can always improve. (In my case, when?) The competitive aspect. And maybe most of all, the camaraderie. Golf provides great insight into people. It’s social and there’s plenty of fooling around, and people reveal themselves on the course in various and often fascinating ways.
There are very few things I love more than playing golf, but my golf broadcasting experience is extremely limited. In the late 1990s, ABC had the rights to the Skins Game, a made-for-television big money competition that featured some of the sport’s premier players. And in 1997, a young star by the name of Tiger Woods would be making his Skins Game debut. To promote the event for ABC, I interviewed Tiger during halftime of a Monday Night Football game. I’d never spoken to him before, and the interview was to be a “two-way” via satellite—with me in Miami and Tiger somewhere on the West Coast. I phoned him that afternoon to go over what we’d be talking about, and mentioned how I’d recently started playing golf, how much I loved it—and my home course. He knew a lot of members at Bel-Air and we had a nice chat, and then I asked him to give me a couple of “swing thoughts.” He laughingly obliged.
The following year, Tiger was in the Skins Game again, and once more I interviewed him at halftime on the Monday night before the event. As we had done twelve months before, we spoke by phone that afternoon and I was able to get another couple of tips from him.
Then in 1999, Tiger competed in another big-money show on ABC, titled The Showdown at Sherwood. It was a live, prime-time special in August that pitted Tiger against his biggest rival at the time and the number-one player in the world, David Duval. It took place at the Sherwood Country Club in Thousand Oaks, an hour’s drive from downtown Los Angeles. As it would start at 5 P.M. Pacific Time, the last four holes of the course were lighted. I was assigned to cohost the telecast with Mike Tirico.
Tiger had been at the PGA event at the Firestone Country Club in Ohio that weekend, and had flown into Southern California, landing about three hours before the match got under way. Woods arrived at the Sherwood course at three o’clock and went out to the practice green at around four fifteen. I went over to meet him for the first time in person.
“How’s your game?” Tiger asked as he greeted me.
“Frankly, pretty bad right now.”
“Well,” he said, “with your schedule you probably don’t get to play very much.”
“Tiger, let me confess that’s not an issue.” I said. “My greatest fear is that someday, my ultimate boss, Michael Eisner, who’s also a Bel-Air member, will show up at the club. If he looked at the handicap sheet and saw I was a fifteen, that wouldn’t give him pause. But if he looked under the ‘rounds played last month’ column, he’d see the number twenty-six.”
Tiger was in the middle of taking his putter back and came to a dead stop. He looked up and said, “You play more than I do!”
Guilty as charged.
ONCE IN A WHILE, I’ve played golf with my heart beating out of my chest. In 2008, I was invited to play in the AT&T PGA tournament at Pebble Beach. My pro partner was Joe Ogilvie, a Duke graduate with a degree in economics. Between shots, we would discuss day trading. We had a blast. The other twosome included Les Moonves, the president of CBS, a longtime close friend and one of the great media moguls of this—or any other—era. His pro partner was Justin Leonard.
Now, I’ve done any number of telecasts throughout my career where tens and occasionally—as with the Super Bowl—even hundreds of millions of viewers are tuned in. In those situations, because of experience, I’m at home. But I never knew fear until I stood on the first tee at Pebble Beach with five thousand spectators lining the fairway and heard my name being introduced. I could barely put the tee in the ground. I wasn’t really thinking about killing someone with my opening shot, though that was in the back of my mind. I was thinking about something equally horrific. As I addressed the ball, the only thought enveloping my brain was Please, God, don’t let me whiff! All I wanted to do was hit the ball and get out of there. I must have taken the shortest, fastest backswing ever and wound up hitting my drive about 140 yards into the left rough. At least I avoided complete disaster.
Once you get away from the first tee, things settle down, and I played decently for the next couple of hours. And then I got to the fifteenth tee, home of the fabled Club 15. There are bleachers just off the tee box that hold about a thousand spectators and there’s a sign above the last row that says, PROFESSIONAL HELP FOR THE AMATEUR GOLFER. The same characters have sat there for years and they know everything about every amateur in the field. Forget Clint Eastwood or Jack Nicholson or Bill Murray. If you’re a State Farm agent from Omaha, this gang can tell you how many policies you’ve sold in the last three years.
So as I walk up to tee off, they’ve already recited most of my career back to me and now I see that CBS is going to take my drive on live national television and David Feherty is thirty feet away with a hand mike, ready for a post-shot interview. I can’t even feel my legs. The crowd goes absolutely silent and I’m standing over the ball totally frozen. At that point, all I could do was back away from the ball. I looked at the gallery and said, “Does anyone have a Valium?” It got a good laugh, which relaxed me, and I was able to quickly set up again and wound up launching one of the greatest drives of my life. It was my Walter Mitty moment. Of course, the postscript would be, with a chance to get on the green in two and have a birdie putt, I wound up on the green in three and three-putted for a double bogey. What else is new? That’s golf.
OVER THE YEARS, I’VE been fortunate to play golf with people from many spectrums. About four years ago, my friend Brad Freeman invited me to fly with him to Las Vegas to play at Shadow Creek in a fivesome that included George W. Bush. The president greeted us on arrival and not only had arranged the teams but insisted on keeping score, which can be complicated. It’s two “in the box” against three, the pairings vary, you have to factor in handicaps, and so forth. The president had already set up the scorecard.
We had three carts, and the four of us took turns riding with the president every couple of holes. We walked off the eighth green and I slid in next to him. He was at the wheel already at work. He had the card and his pencil and he was doing the math and making sure everything was perfect. I said to him, “You’re just like Ben Bernanke.”
Without missing a beat, he looked at me and said, “Better.”
And continued with the scorekeeping.
He was very competitive, but also had a great sense of humor—it was a joke fest the entire day. I pulled out my iPhone after he had made a long putt for a birdie and started to interview him as if he had won the Masters. He played right along and it was hysterical. President Bush can
play, too—a legitimate seven or eight handicap.
I’ve also played about a dozen rounds with an erstwhile presidential candidate—one Donald J. Trump. Trump, of course, doesn’t only play golf—he also owns a collection of courses around the world. I first played with Donald when my good friend Skip Bronson brought him out to Bel-Air. On the par-five eighth hole, he hit his second shot into the middle of a pond to the left of the green, creating an Old Faithful–like geyser. Then, as he’s preparing to hit his next shot, all of a sudden he’s hitting a ball that’s right behind the pond with a perfect fluffy lie and telling us that he lies two. Skip says, “How is that possible?” Donald replies, “The tide brought it over.”
The upshot: When you play with Trump, if you’re not his partner, you have no chance. Though it might cost you forty or fifty dollars to be on the other side, think of it as a cover charge: $12.50 an hour for great entertainment.
A few years back, Donald bought a course in Palos Verdes, just south of Los Angeles, right on the Pacific Ocean. We’ve played there a handful of times, and on each occasion, all throughout the round, Trump would keep saying, “This is the number-one course in California, hands down. Every golf magazine has it at the top of the list. Nothing even compares, not even Pebble Beach.” Finally, one time, on about the fifteenth hole, Donald proclaimed, “Al, let me tell you why this is better than Pebble Beach. Look right out there—what do you see?”
“Of course, Donald, the Pacific Ocean.”
And then he said, “And you’ve played Pebble Beach. What do you see from that course?”
“Well, that’s Monterey Bay.”
And then as only Donald J. Trump could sum it up—“You see what I mean! They have a bay. I have an ocean.”
At which point, I couldn’t resist.
“Donald,” I said, “we’re both New York kids, so let me ask you. Is Monterey Bay connected to the Pacific Ocean by the Gowanus Canal?”
He might have heard me. I don’t know. He just kept on selling. Donald the Irrepressible.
SOME OF THE WORLD’S greatest athletes are also fanatical golfers. In the summer of 1998, I was vacationing on Maui with the family, and Michael Jordan was staying at the hotel next to ours on Wailea Beach. At this point, he had retired from the Chicago Bulls for a second time. I’d never met him but we ran into each other on the beach and started to talk about golf. “I’ll give you a call,” he said. “We’ll play.” Sure enough, the next morning there was a voice mail in my hotel room from Michael inviting me to play that afternoon at Wailea.
I met him at the course and he introduced me to the other members of the foursome he had assembled: the head pro from Wailea and his friend—Joe Morgan. “Have you guys met?” he asked. Have we met? Joe and I laughed. We’d known each other since 1972 when he was traded to the Reds, and then we’d worked together at ABC for a number of years. That he’d be on Maui at the same time was a nice coincidence.
Anyway, as we started the round, it was clear that Michael had an interesting quirk. He didn’t just play from the back tees. He played as far back as he could go. If there were twenty yards available behind the back tees, that was where Michael would tee off. He wanted the course to play as long as possible.
At one point he was in a fairway bunker and hit a five-iron from about 205 yards out that landed within three feet of the cup. He hit a number of other terrific shots that day, making six or seven birdies. He was also great company—collegial and funny and excited to talk about all sports, mainly the NFL.
After the round, we went into the clubhouse restaurant and sat down. It was in the middle of the 1998 home run chase that had captivated the country and we started talking about Sammy Sosa and Mark McGwire and whether either or both could break Roger Maris’s record. Jordan, remember, was only a few years removed from playing minor-league baseball—the conversation interested him as much as it did Joe and me. Above the bar, there was a small television set—maybe twenty-seven inches—and it was probably fifty feet away from us, a little shorter than the distance from the plate to the pitcher’s mound. It was late afternoon in Hawaii, which meant it was nighttime on the East Coast and SportsCenter was on. The screen displayed the results of the Cubs game from earlier in the day and a lot of other information about the game that we would have needed a telescope to decipher.
Morgan and I got up from the table to take a closer look and to see if Sosa had hit a home run. But Michael started reading the information on the screen from his chair. Cubs won, 5–4, Sosa was two for four with a double and a walk. He read everything on the screen. Morgan and I looked each other dumbfounded. Later, as we walked out to the parking lot, Joe and I figured that Michael must see in 4-D, not 3-D. The same way they used to talk about Ted Williams’s incredible eyesight, clearly Jordan had something similar going on. With his eyes, just imagine how that rim must have looked from eighteen feet out.
AND FINALLY, IT’S THE NFL off-season in the early summer of 2012. Peyton and Eli Manning were out in California, and came to Bel-Air as my guests. I invited my buddy Skip Bronson and we played a match: Peyton and Skip against Eli and me. I think we put forty or fifty dollars on the line.
Now, Eli may have his two Super Bowls and Peyton may have his one and numerous MVP awards and both have had magical careers. But that day, the big brother/little brother dynamic was completely in evidence. They absolutely wanted to beat each other and Peyton was squirming as Eli and I got off to a very good start and built a fairly significant lead by the fifteenth hole.
But then the lead began to fray. Still, as we teed off on 17, Eli and I knew we only had to halve one of the final two holes to clinch the win. Then on the seventeenth green, Bronson makes a forty-foot snake for a birdie. And I then proceeded to miss a three-footer for a par, which would have been a net birdie—leaving Eli and me with an even slimmer margin. Then on 18, Bronson sinks another long bomb but I’m still in position to tie the hole and win the match with another three-footer. Which, of course, I lipped out. Choke City.
I had cost Eli the match.
I was distraught and all the more so when I saw how ebullient Peyton was. He was hugging Skip for making the putts and laughing about the fact that he was going to collect from his brother. Eli was gracious and a good sport but I couldn’t blame him if he wanted to kill me. All I could do was put my hat down over my eyes. I didn’t want to look at him.
A few months later, the Sunday Night Football opener would be played in New York. We went to meet with the Giants a couple of days before and I put my hat down over my eyes again as soon as Eli walked in the room. I said, “I can’t even look at you.”
He said, “Nah, you got a bad read on that one.”
There’s your perfect teammate.
CHAPTER 20
A New Home
TELEVISION BUSINESS DEALS HAVE always interested me. It started with my father exposing me to the inner workings of the business during his time at MCA and Trans World International, and has continued to this day. I’ve always been fascinated with the backroom intrigue and the deal making.
So I understood almost everything when I wound up with an inside look at one of the landmark deals in the history of sports television.
It’s October 2004. I was in the middle of my nineteenth season on Monday Night Football, and my third with John Madden. We were in Cincinnati for a game between the Bengals and the Broncos, and on the afternoon of the game, I had a cup of coffee in the lobby of our hotel with Broncos owner Pat Bowlen. Pat was a longtime friend, and also, at the time, the chairman of the NFL owner’s committee that negotiated television rights. The league’s eight-year deals with its broadcast partners were set to expire after the 2005 season, and already the wheels had been set in motion for negotiations to renew the packages. As it stood, CBS had the rights to AFC games, Fox had the NFC, ABC had Monday Night Football, and ESPN had the Sunday night game. CBS and Fox had quickly re-upped with the league, but Disney—the owner of both ABC and ESPN—was slow-playing it, despite
having the chance to continue to control both the Sunday and Monday night games. And Bowlen, knowing that I could get the word back to the home office, wanted me to deliver a message.
“Your company is asleep at the switch,” he told me. “The number is $1.5 billion.” That was the number it was going to take, per year, to lock up the rights to both of the prime-time games.
Then Bowlen gave me one more piece of information to pass along: “Despite what your people might think, the NFL does have another bidder.”
Fifteen minutes later, I was back upstairs in my hotel room and on the phone with Bob Iger, who was months away from succeeding Michael Eisner as the head of Disney. When I passed along what Bowlen had said, he told me he thought the NFL was most likely bluffing, setting up a stalking horse to drive up the price. I agreed. Neither of us could identify a serious bidder. NBC was totally in the dumps and hemorrhaging money—to us, they didn’t figure—and Turner Broadcasting seemed like too much of a long shot. No well-run company wants to be fooled into bidding against itself. We hung up but one thing was still gnawing at me; I’d known Pat Bowlen to be gruff and to be tough, but also to be a straight shooter.
With a deadline approaching, Disney decided to pass on paying the $1.5 billion. So the league pulled the offer off the table and set a rebid for the spring of 2005. And when Disney returned to the negotiating table, sure enough there was another player—hungry to make a deal, and get back in business with the NFL. It was, in fact, NBC.
In 2005, NBC was a last-place network with a struggling prime-time lineup. But they did have a legendary executive running their sports department, Dick Ebersol. Dick had first worked for Roone Arledge as a researcher on ABC Sports’ Olympic coverage. Then he helped create Saturday Night Live and later became the head of NBC Sports. But on Thanksgiving weekend of 2004, Dick’s life changed in an instant. He had been flying out of Montrose, Colorado, when his private plane crashed on takeoff. Dick had to be pulled from the wreckage by his son Charlie, but his youngest son, thirteen-year-old Teddy, was killed. Dick sustained serious injuries and recuperated for months but continued to work on the NBC deal.
