You Can't Make This Up: Miracles, Memories, and the Perfect Marriage of Sports and Television (10 page)

Older and more experienced, I’m now to the point where I don’t even think about that. What’s the worst thing that can happen to me now? I make a terrible mistake, and I say, “Folks, I don’t know what to tell you. I had a complete brain cramp.” But you don’t have that luxury at age twenty-seven, so I felt enormous pressure.

Before Game 1, I was beyond nervous. This was the
World Series
. There was the red, white, and blue bunting. A buzz throughout the city. A television audience of many millions. Fifteen minutes before the game, we rehearsed the open. Now we’re on the air live. Gowdy opens up the telecast, sets the scene, and then turns to bring me in. “We now welcome in the young Cincinnati Reds announcer, Al Michaels.”

The camera pulls back for a “two-shot,” which means we’re now both on camera. I had one subconscious thought I couldn’t get out of my brain:
Please, God, when I open my mouth, let
air
come out
. That’s how exhilarated and nervous I was. I wasn’t sure
what
was going to happen when I began to move my lips. But fortunately, words did come out and I think they even made sense.

The Reds lost that Series to the A’s in seven games. I didn’t make any glaring mistakes. I’m sure I made a couple of minor ones, but making none is like asking a hitter to bat 1.000. Despite the Reds losing, I still had an afterglow when it ended. The national exposure and the entire experience was a dream come to life. At about that same time, I was learning that the San Francisco Giants were interested in signing me, but I was under contract with the Reds through the 1973 season.

After the Series, as he did when I was in college, Curt Gowdy again took me under his wing and said, “Kid, you’re gonna have a good career. Just do me a favor. Don’t ever get jaded.” Which at that time was unthinkable. I was in my twenties and living the life and everything felt fresh and new. But as my career continued on, and even to this day, I can still hear Curt’s words in my ears.

THERE ARE BLOOPERS, AND
then there are
bloopers.

In May 1973, Joe Nuxhall and I bused with the Reds to Indianapolis, where we would play an exhibition game that night at the old Bush Stadium against our Triple-A affiliate, the Indianapolis Indians. In that era, in-season exhibition games between parent clubs and their minor-league affiliates were common. Per usual, I taped my pregame show,
The Main Spark,
with Sparky Anderson in his clubhouse office. Our standard procedure was for me to tape the Sparky show with a cassette recorder, and then hand the recorder to Joe, who would tape his pregame show, called
Turfside,
in one of the dugouts with a player. We had a regular engineer who worked every game at Riverfront, and on the road there were regular engineers who worked with different teams, and were experienced in dealing with different formats and workflows.

So, that night, Joe taped his
Turfside
show with one of our minor-league prospects in the Indians dugout. I was out by the batting cage and as he taped his segment maybe ninety minutes before the game, I noticed several of the Reds’ players gathered in front of the Indians dugout. There was a little commotion, and a lot of laughter. I thought nothing of it—but as I look back now, I remember one of the players tossing pebbles in Joe’s direction to distract him.

I took the tape machine back from Joe, went back upstairs to the broadcast booth about an hour later, and gave it to the engineer, whom we’d never worked with before—he was on loan from a local station in Indianapolis. I told him each of our segments began on tape the same way—with Joe or I saying “Five, four, three, two, one” as a cue to let him know he could then hit playback. Then I went out on a catwalk behind the broadcast booth to get the last rays of the afternoon sun. I had in my hand a transistor radio to listen to the show and make sure everything went smoothly. Indianapolis is barely one hundred miles from Cincinnati and our station, WLW, came in clear as a bell.

I listened to
The Main Spark,
and everything sounded fine. But when Joe’s pregame show came on, this is what I heard out of my transistor radio: “Hi everybody, this is Joe Nuxhall. The Reds are in Indianapolis tonight playing their Triple A—get out of here, get out of here—you son of a bitch, you cocksucker . . . Five, four, three, two, one. Hi everybody, this is Joe Nuxhall . . . ”

I looked down at my radio as if it were a hand grenade that had been tossed into a crowd.

Joe had forgotten to erase the original recording before starting over. I thought and hoped I was dreaming. Now Joe comes bounding up the stairs to the broadcast booth, and as he sits down, I have to break the news. “Joe, we’ve got a big problem.”

I explained what had happened. Joe turned bedsheet white. Remember, Joe had started his career pitching for the Reds in 1944 when he was fifteen years old. Now he was sure he was going to get fired. On the broadcast that followed that night, he might as well have been catatonic. We bused back to Cincinnati after the game. The players, who’d all heard about it from their wives, were in hysterics—but poor Joe looked as if he was ready for his own memorial service. Back home the next morning, we both got calls from Dick Wagner. The Reds that night would be playing at Riverfront Stadium, and Wagner wanted us both in his office in midafternoon. Nuxie was preparing for the worst.

When we entered Wagner’s office together, Dick had a very stern look on his face, but he also had a slightly perverse sense of humor, and I could sense that deep down, he understood the other side of this. But at this juncture, this was not exactly a laughing matter.

“Tonight,” he told Nuxhall, “when you go on the air, you’re going to apologize.”

At this point, it was clear that Joe was
not
going to be fired—and he was relieved beyond comprehension. That morning, a local newspaper columnist had written, “How about that Reds broadcast team? Al Michaels does the play-by-play. Joe Nuxhall handles the off-color.” We left Wagner’s office and started getting ready for the broadcast. Nuxie went about his regular pregame routine. The players were still ribbing him, but he was in decent spirits—he’d avoided death row. Still to come, though, was the on-air apology that Wagner had demanded. And when Joe got up to the broadcast booth, about twenty-five minutes before the game, I could tell he was extremely nervous—in fact, he was sweating profusely. I looked over at him and asked what was wrong. With the clock ticking down, he explained, “I have to deliver this apology. I don’t have any idea what to say.”

I tried to get Joe to relax. I wanted to lighten the mood, so I said, “Look, Joe, it’s simple. Just say, ‘Ladies and gentlemen, I’m very sorry I said ‘cocksucker.’ And it won’t happen again.’ ”

My attempt at humor was an abject failure. I thought Joe was ready to pop me. But then I was able to get him calmed down, and help him work out what to say. He got through it, and we moved on. And he’d keep his job with the Reds another three decades, until 2004—
sixty
years after his pitching debut.

IN MY THIRD SEASON
in Cincinnati, the Reds won 99 games during the regular season and again finished atop the NL West, and faced the Mets, who had won only 82 games, in the National League Championship Series. In Game 1 at Riverfront, Tom Seaver took a 1–0 shutout into the eighth inning, but then Rose homered with one out to tie it, and in the ninth, with Seaver still on the mound, Bench won it with another homer. The Mets came back to even the series the next day on a Jon Matlack two-hit shutout. And then the series went back to New York, and Shea Stadium.

Bud Harrelson, the Mets’ light-hitting, five-foot-eleven, 160-pound shortstop, had been quoted as saying that against Matlack, the Reds “all looked like me.” Joe Morgan had some sharp words with Harrelson during batting practice before Game 3. Then, in the fifth inning, with New York on its way to a 9–2 win, Rose barreled into second base on a potential double-play grounder the only way he ever did—at full speed. Harrelson was in the bull’s-eye and in a flash, punches started flying. Both benches quickly emptied. There were no ejections. But then it got ugly.

When Rose went out to his position in left field, the fans pelted him with beer cans, batteries, and whatever else they had access to. In response, Sparky Anderson pulled his entire team off the field. The National League president, Chub Feeney, along with the umpires, prevailed upon the Mets to send a “peace party” out to left field to get the crowd calmed down. Simultaneously, the public address announcer was warning that the game could be forfeited to the Reds. So manager Yogi Berra, Seaver, Rusty Staub, and a forty-two-year old Willie Mays headed out to left field and were instrumental in restoring order. The game resumed and after the final out had been recorded, the Mets led the series, two games to one, and were one win away from the World Series.

We bused back to the Roosevelt Hotel in Manhattan. Several cops would be brought in to stand guard outside, with extra security in the hallways. Pete Rose was a marked man and the number-one villain in Gotham City. Early that evening, everyone in the traveling party got a note slipped under their doors from the team’s traveling secretary instructing us to have our luggage in the lobby in the morning and be ready to leave town after Tuesday’s Game 4. The organization was trying to save a night’s worth of hotel bills in the event the Reds lost. Not exactly an inspirational message. But a couple of hours later the edict was reversed. Someone had figured out that that would have been a terrible signal to send to the players.

We all boarded the bus to Shea for Game 4 at around eleven o’clock the next morning. The bus ride was by far the quietest I’d witnessed in my three years with the Reds. With so many outsize personalities on the team, someone—even if the team was struggling a bit—was always talking. But on this day—near absolute silence. As we pulled into the Shea Stadium parking lot there were three or four hundred Mets fans at the gate, holding placards, chanting, screaming, cursing at Rose, throwing rocks, eggs, and whatever else they could get their hands on at the bus. Rose, who was sitting near the front, got up, stood in the aisle, looked back at his teammates, and yelled out, “Do or die, boys! Do or [bleeping] die!” He’d have a ton of extra security at the stadium. And later that afternoon, in the twelfth inning of a 1–1 game, he’d homer off Harry Parker to win it for the Reds, and send the series to a decisive fifth game.

I sat across the aisle from him on the bus ride back to the hotel. I said, “Pete, try to put into words exactly what you’re thinking when you know the ball is gone.” Rose says, “I was rounding first base. And when you round first base at Shea, you can look directly into our bullpen in left. And I was thinking, ‘Sparky, better get Tom Hall [a lefthander] up, because the Mets have Staub and [John] Milner [left-handed batters] coming up in the bottom of the twelfth.’” Pete had just hit the home run every kid dreams of—and barely a second later, he was already thinking about the lefty-lefty matchups his team could get in the bottom of the inning. Again, there is no one who’s ever been more totally into a baseball game than Pete Rose. For the record, Sparky would go with Pedro Borbon, a right-hander, in the twelfth, and he retired the side in order.

Still, despite all that drama, my shot at doing back-to-back World Series on national television went down the drain the next day in Game 5 when Seaver and the Mets beat the Reds, 7–2. It was clear, though, this was an extraordinary team—and the question was not whether Big Red Machine would win a World Series, but how many.

Even if I knew that my days in Cincinnati were numbered.

LATE IN THAT 1973
season, the Giants had been expressing interest in me again. Their longtime play-by-play announcer, Lon Simmons, was only fifty years old, but he was retiring because of the death of his wife. (Lon would eventually unretire and we would work together in 1976.) Now the question would become, did I want to go to San Francisco, and work for a station group owned by Gene Autry? My three-year contract in Cincinnati was coming up for renewal and the Giants were offering me the chance to do television as well as radio. They were also offering me more time off so I could accept potential network assignments, like regional NFL games. Oh, and they were going to more than
triple
what the Reds were paying, with a starting salary in six figures.

In August, with a sense that the Giants were going to come after me following the season, and with the Reds leading the National League West, we had a Saturday night game at Riverfront Stadium against the Cardinals. The atmosphere was electric. There were fifty thousand fans in the stadium on a pristine summer night. You had Bench, Rose, Morgan, Perez, and Dave Concepcion in the lineup, and Sparky in the dugout. Earlier that day, the Reds had called up the top prospect from their Triple-A farm club. He was the starting right fielder that night and went 2-for-4. His name? Ken Griffey. Senior. And I’m thinking,
Oh my God—here comes
another
Reds superstar. And I’m also thinking, am I
really
going to leave this behind?

The season is over and in comes the offer from San Francisco. Linda and I talked about it and tried to figure out what it would take for us to stay in Cincinnati. We had grown very comfortable with the town and had a lot of good friends. We decided that we would probably stay in Cincinnati if the Reds came up to $70,000 or $75,000. It would mean more than doubling my salary. But it would still be considerably below what the Giants were offering. I still didn’t have an agent, so I went into a meeting with Howsam and Wagner for the renegotiation. They offered me $40,000, and felt that a 33 percent raise was more than fair. I remember saying to Howsam, “I’m sorry, but we’re not really even close. If that’s the final offer, I have to go to San Francisco.”

There was one slightly messy postscript. Several months later there was a column in the
Sporting News
detailing my departure and questioning the wisdom of the Reds in letting me get away. Dick Wagner took issue with the article and wrote a letter to the editor in which he implied that I’d signed with San Francisco prior to negotiating with the Reds and questioned my “maturity.” He also released the salary I was earning with the Giants. I had to respond. I wrote my own letter to the editor that read in part: “I negotiated in good faith with the Reds. I have known Dick Wagner for years now, and have come to the conclusion that his definition of maturity is total subservience.” Today, I can look back and laugh. But this was before the days of media agents and the Internet and Twitter battles. These were the days of dueling letters to the editor. And by the way—now you know what I said to George Clooney when he asked me why I had ever left Cincinnati. He understood.