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

by Al Michaels

  Before the tragedy, Ebersol had been quietly talking with the league’s most powerful owners—among them, Bowlen, Robert Kraft of the Patriots, and Jerry Jones of the Cowboys, as well as others in the NFL office—as a forerunner to putting together an offer to bring the Sunday night games to NBC. Clearly, NBC had been that “other” bidder. Ebersol wanted to make Sunday Night Football a cornerstone of NBC’s prime-time programming. And he was terrific at selling his vision to the league. Sunday nights on NBC would look and feel special. It was a continuation of the philosophy Dick had first learned from Arledge. The show would be for everyone—hard-core fans and casual viewers, men and women, young and old, any and all demographics. Come one, come all.

  So, in April 2005, after a final meeting in New York City, the packages for Sunday and Monday nights were split. Ebersol and NBC won the rights to Sunday Night Football for $3.6 billion over six years, which included two playoff games each season, and two Super Bowls, as well as something else innovative: scheduling flexibility—the ability to move bad matchups late in the season out of prime time and replace them with better games. Disney, meanwhile, retained Monday Night for almost twice that—$1.1 billion per season (with no playoff games, no Super Bowls, and no scheduling flexibility), and proudly announced the package would, after thirty-six seasons, be moving from ABC to ESPN.

  How could ESPN be happy with that deal? It all went back to the dual revenue stream: cable fees and advertising. Adding Monday Night Football continued to give ESPN more leverage with cable companies to jack its fees up even higher. And, by the way, someone who knew that better than anyone was now a key executive for the NFL—Steve Bornstein. My onetime boss and the former president of ESPN had been fired by Disney and then had landed with the league, where he’d be put in charge of the new NFL Network. Now, in an imperfect storm for Disney, he was on the other side of the negotiating table from his old employer, understanding how to suck every Disney dollar out of the ESPN pipe.

  That very night after the deal was completed, I ran into an ABC executive at a restaurant in Los Angeles. ESPN was celebrating—but this executive was flipped off. The deal would mean that the entertainment division would be losing its number-one-rated prime-time show and would now have to program an entire night of prime time against Monday Night Football on ESPN. “I can’t believe it,” he said to me. “Most of ESPN’s shows are howling jackasses braying at the moon, but it doesn’t matter—because a chimpanzee could run that operation. With those cable fees, they can’t fail. And now they think they’re creative geniuses. Un-fucking-believable!”

  In that new television landscape, the NFL on TV had been transformed. And for me personally, the drama was just beginning.

  THE DAY THE DEAL was finalized in April 2005, I got a call from my boss, George Bodenheimer, who was heading both ABC Sports and ESPN. He wanted to personally talk to me about the deal and the future now that Disney had only one package. He told me that he wasn’t sure what the company was going to do with regard to the broadcasting teams, because as he saw it, “we have two very good teams—John Madden and you on Monday night, and the Sunday night team of Mike Patrick, Joe Theismann, and Paul Maguire on ESPN.” By the end of the call, I was already developing an ulcer.

  Then George made the same call to John Madden. An hour later, I called John and he was angry. He related to me the same thing that Bodenheimer had told me about “not being sure” and “the two good broadcast teams.” Madden then said he’d already called his agent, Sandy Montag, to tell him to make a deal with NBC. That wouldn’t be hard, as Ebersol loved Madden and would have put a full-court press on to begin with. Madden also knew ESPN wasn’t going to fight his departure—because he knew that Mark Shapiro, who had been given full autonomy by Bodenheimer to oversee the new Monday Night, wanted him out the door anyway—the sooner the better. Now I was really getting sick. I’d spent four great years with the most iconic analyst ever and had been looking forward to many more when a grenade had been tossed in.

  I’ve never been a big fan of Internet or newspaper polls about sports announcers, but over the years, there was one thing consistent about the polls that dealt with football analysts. John Madden was always the runaway winner. By a huge margin. And now he’s being pushed out? Insane!

  So, in June 2005, two months after the NBC deal was announced, John Madden signed a deal to move to Sunday Night Football for the 2006 season. And not long thereafter, when it appeared I’d remain on Monday Night Football after it moved to ESPN, Shapiro announced the hiring of Joe Theismann for the Monday Night analyst role. I got a call from the owner of the Patriots, Bob Kraft, a good friend and, as a key member of the NFL broadcast committee, a man I spoke with regularly. He asked me to explain what was going on. I said it’s simple—it’s like you trading Tom Brady for a seventh-round draft choice.

  Around that time, ESPN also announced that its Sunday night production team would be taking over Monday Night Football when it moved to cable the following season. Now it wasn’t just John leaving—Fred Gaudelli and Drew Esocoff were being shoved out by Shapiro as well. Upset, I called Bodenheimer. He said that much of the decision had to do with “loyalty.” I told him I didn’t understand. Fred and Drew had been longtime ESPN employees who had been promoted to work on Monday nights on ABC. They’d been under the same umbrella longer than the current ESPN guys who were now being named to take their places. So how in hell did replacing them have anything to do with loyalty?! That move told me all I needed to know. It was never clearer that, to the people running things from Bristol, Connecticut, if you were an ABC character, you might as well be wearing a scarlet letter.

  I was no fan of Mark Shapiro, a self-promoting and self-anointed wunderkind, and the feeling was mutual. But he was told by people above him that, like it or not, I was going to remain as the play-by-play announcer on Monday Night Football. Along the way, months earlier, when there had been an unflattering article written about me in the New York Post that included the exact details of my NBA contract, I asked a colleague in the ABC PR department to look into it, and he traced the leak directly to Shapiro’s office. Nothing like the enemy within.

  Of course, right after naming Theismann the new analyst, and pushing Fred and Drew (and indirectly, John) out, guess who walked away from ESPN in the fall of 2005? Shapiro. He’d taken a job with Redskins owner Dan Snyder to run the Six Flags amusement parks operation. So he’d never even be around for a single ESPN Monday Night Football telecast. As one colleague so adroitly put it, “Bodenheimer gave Shapiro the keys to a shiny, brand-new Ferrari and the kid crashed it into the wall. And then walked away from the scene.” Some business, huh?

  Meanwhile, the 2005 NFL season would be a lame-duck year on ABC. Even though I knew I could stay with the new Monday Night package in 2006, my contract was expiring and I obviously was interested in going with John to NBC when the season concluded. And it appeared I’d have until the end of 2005 to make a choice. Dick Ebersol had already been in contact with my agent and wanted me to come over. But the initial offer was one I couldn’t accept. I was being asked to take a significant cut in salary and I knew that, in addition, I would almost certainly have to give up the NBA, which I was really growing to love. Then, all of a sudden, while on vacation in Hawaii in July, ESPN told me they wanted an answer immediately. They’d clearly gotten the word that NBC was talking with me. I had less than forty-eight hours to make my decision. The NBC offer wasn’t palatable. So, after three gulps of Pepto-Bismol, I called George Bodenheimer to say I was staying. It was announced the next day.

  Sure enough, 2005 was an awkward year. John was going to NBC, Fred and Drew were in career limbo, and I was rolling around in bed every night trying to figure out the rest of my career. The last few years had been too much fun and now I was going off to some “foreign” operation without my buddies, who just happened to be the best in the business. In October, Bodenheimer came to a Monday Night game in Indianapolis. An hour before kickoff, we walked onto the field
together. I told George that I was hearing from my sources in the league office that beginning next season Monday Night on ESPN wasn’t going to get the same schedule of premier games that the ABC version had gotten. George said no—Mark Shapiro had assured him the schedule would still be the same. I had better information, and I told George the litmus test would be when the schedule came out the following spring. In all my years doing Monday Night Football except one or two, the reigning Super Bowl champion had appeared the maximum number of times on Monday night—three. If that was the case again, then that would be the sign the schedule was of the same quality. But if the champion played just twice, or conceivably only once, that would be a sign that Monday night’s reign as the NFL’s premier game was a thing of the past. I told George I was hearing there would be not three, not even two, but one appearance only. And that Sunday Night Football on NBC would feature the champions three times. And could “flex” them in even more.

  The schedule for 2006 would come out that next April. Sure enough, the Super Bowl champion Steelers would appear only once on the Monday Night schedule. Week two. At Jacksonville.

  I wouldn’t be there.

  LATE IN THAT LAME duck 2005 season, Dick Ebersol visited a Monday Night Football game in Baltimore, and watched Fred and Drew produce and direct part of the game in the production truck. He later compared it to “watching the frickin’ ballet.” Minutes after the game, Dick signed Fred—who was being cast aside by ESPN—to produce Sunday Night Football the following season. Ebersol had already signed Drew to direct the new Sunday Night. So now I was the last of the Mohicans. Meanwhile, Ebersol still hadn’t chosen a new play-by-play announcer for the package.

  Finally, at the end of December, I had to at least explore the possibility of getting out of my ESPN deal. In my mind, it just wasn’t going to work. I was learning too much about their “new” approach to Monday Night Football and I was going to be the wrong guy in the wrong place. I knew Madden, Gaudelli, and Esocoff were politicking Ebersol to get me over with them. I wanted to go there in the first place but couldn’t accept the offer. Word began to get out that I was looking to jump to NBC. I knew it would look like I was trying to “break” my contract. One columnist to whom the information was leaked wrote exactly that. I wanted to say, “Hey, pal, nobody breaks a contract to take a forty percent pay cut!” But I had to stay quiet. I just knew it had to get done.

  Quickly, agents and more executives got involved. This was going to happen. Disney got some concessions from NBC for releasing me from my deal—including rights to broadcast additional Ryder Cup programming and to extended highlight packages from other NBC properties, including the Olympics. Right after the Super Bowl, in which the Steelers beat the Seahawks in Detroit, 21–10, the deal was 99 percent done. But it had already been a headache for ABC’s and ESPN’s public relations departments. For several weeks they’d had to deal with the lame-duck statuses of John, Fred, and Drew, plus rumors of my possible departure. At one point in Detroit during Super Bowl week, I personally apologized to the PR people for the distraction. Then, though, a wacky plan was hatched to make their jobs easier when the deal was announced.

  In the 1920s, before he’d created Mickey Mouse, Walt Disney’s original cartoon creation at Universal Studios was a character named Oswald the Lucky Rabbit. But Walt Disney hadn’t been able to hold on to the rights when he left the studio—and all these years later, Universal (NBC’s corporate sibling) still owned Oswald, even though no one had any idea who Oswald was. Some Disney heirs had asked Bob Iger for years to try to bring Oswald “back home.” This was hardly a high-priority issue for Bob. Then someone came up with the idea that if we included Oswald in this deal, the press would lock in on that aspect of the story and it would overshadow any suspicions of nefariousness. And that’s exactly what happened. Even though the deal had already been done pre-Oswald, still, to this day, I’ll occasionally see or hear a story that says I was traded for a cartoon rabbit—normally written or told by someone who should be traded in a two-for-one deal for Dopey and Goofy.

  There was a much bigger story, though. Within a year, Sunday Night Football, with the old Monday Night’s producer, director, announcers, and about forty of the best technicians and production men and women in the country, would be one of the top few shows on television—with the best games and matchups and 50 percent more viewers than ESPN’s “new” Monday Night Football. It might not be an over-the-top exaggeration to say that this deal saved NBC. That sentiment was echoed throughout the network.

  THE FIRST THREE SEASONS of Sunday Night Football were an extension of those wonderful last four years of the Monday Night Football we’d been a part of at ABC. Then, when John Madden retired after that epic Steelers-Cardinals Super Bowl, Cris Collinsworth was waiting in the wings. As I’ve said many times, I felt like I went from Joe DiMaggio to Mickey Mantle.

  I first crossed paths with Cris when I covered three or four of his University of Florida games. In 1988, when I was calling the baseball All-Star Game in Cincinnati, and he was nearing the end of his NFL career with the Bengals, he’d stopped by the booth before the game to ask if we could announce on national television that he’d be getting engaged to the beauteous Holly Bankemper before the night was done. We couldn’t. But I loved his chutzpah. In 2006, Dick Ebersol had brought him over from Fox to work the Sunday Night pregame show along with Bob Costas, making him the obvious candidate to replace John Madden when he retired. It was the perfect choice.

  It isn’t just that Cris has superb insights and it’s not just that he sees every aspect of the game—and I mean every part of the game. As with all the top-of-the-pyramid analysts, he knows how to communicate and connect with the viewer. You turn off the vast majority of the audience when you get too technical. Walk down the street and ask 100 people to define a “three-technique tackle,” and 99 of them would look back at you like zombies. Cris has mastered the art of taking complex points and explaining them so lucidly that everyone can understand.

  One great example of Cris’s uncanny prophetic ability came at the end of a game in October 2012. The Chargers were playing the Saints in New Orleans, and the Saints were up by a touchdown in the final minute. San Diego had the ball, and on second and ten, Philip Rivers threw an incomplete pass. And then Cris explained there was more to the story. During the replay, Cris pointed out that the Chargers’ left tackle, Jared Gaither, had been beaten by Saints defensive end Martez Wilson, which led Rivers to have to release the ball early to avoid a sack. Cris went on to say that Gaither looked hurt, and warned that if the Chargers didn’t adjust, Wilson was going to have a sack to end the game. Well—what happened on third down? Wilson beat Gaither, sacked Rivers, stripped the ball, and recovered it. Game over. As perfectly and succinctly predicted by Cris Collinsworth.

  Cris also has always been very candid, unafraid to say things that might not sit well with the people he’s talking about—players, coaches, even owners—but that are true. And he does it all without making a show of himself. Cris is not one of those “experts” who figuratively jump up and down and scream to the world, “Listen to me! Look at me!” He just tells it as it is.

  When we started together in 2009, it was seamless—exactly like working with John Madden or Doc Rivers. And then, apart from being a sensational partner, Cris also became a great friend. A couple of years ago, he arranged something that was going to put me, in a manner of speaking, over the moon. He arranged for me to meet the one human being who topped my list of “the one person you’d never met whom you’d most like to have dinner with.”

  At one time or another, I’ve covered almost every sports star of the last four decades. I’ve gotten to know many of them well. I’ve been fortunate enough to meet presidents, inventors, renowned authors, and a veritable “Who’s Who in America” (and elsewhere). But the one man I always wanted to break bread with was Neil Armstrong. I’m not entirely sure where it came from—it’s not like I was ever an astronomy buff. But as a child, at l
east as a child in my generation, flying to the moon was the be-all and end-all. And then, in 1969, it happened!

  Not to diminish winning a Nobel Prize or batting title or Super Bowl or Oscar. But, come on! Neil Armstrong was the first human to walk on the moon. Trump that.

  Well, in 2011, at dinner one night, Cris Collinsworth finds out about my fascination with Neil Armstrong. “If I could have dinner with one person,” I tell him, “it would be Armstrong.”

  As it turned out, Cris—a prominent figure in Cincinnati, which was where Neil Armstrong lived—knew Neil and had played several rounds of golf with him. It also turned out that—no surprise, really—Neil loved sports. And Cris arranged that a couple of nights before the Steelers at Bengals game in October 2012, we would be having dinner with Neil Armstrong! If there was a game on our schedule I couldn’t wait for, this was the one.

  In August—two months before that game—Collinsworth and I were in New York preparing to do a preseason game. As we drove back from the Jets’ practice facility, the radio was on. And we hear the report: Neil Armstrong has died of complications from coronary artery bypass surgery.

  R.I.P. forever, Mr. Armstrong.

  FOR YEARS, THE FOOTBALL season would start with articles predicting the impending doom of Monday Night Football. It’s now only been around for forty-five seasons. I spent twenty of those in the booth and they went by in about twenty minutes. And now it’s Season Nine of NBC’s Sunday Night Football and they’ve gone by just as rapidly. For the last two years, it’s been the highest-rated show in all of television. All of us on the package know that the games, the matchups, and the superstars are the central part of the show’s appeal. But there are more than a hundred people who devote a major portion of their lives working to make Sunday Night the very best presentation of a football game ever.