You Can't Make This Up: Miracles, Memories, and the Perfect Marriage of Sports and Television (15 page)

In 1981, I would be back again at the World Ski Flying Championships—this time being held in Oberstdorf, West Germany. The event took place in the morning—approximately 10
A
.
M
. to 12:30
P
.
M
. local time—and was scheduled to air on
Wide World of Sports
later that day—4:30
P
.
M
. on the East Coast. The plan was to edit the two-and-a-half-hour event into a half hour of television content—basically, just feature the top competitors, tell their stories, and show their jumps. It was the kind of condensed storytelling coverage that Roone Arledge, the president of ABC Sports, had pioneered on Olympic coverage and
Wide World
. But with quick turnarounds, it wasn’t easy.

The producer in Oberstdorf was Doug Wilson. Doug was a very talented and artistic producer who was renowned at ABC for his keen eye and skill at putting together taped shows. On many of those, he typically had days or weeks to edit. In Oberstdorf, Doug only had about seven hours between the end of the event and the window of satellite time that had been booked. Typically, a 60–90 minute window would be reserved to feed a half-hour segment (really closer to twenty minutes when you factor in commercial breaks) from Europe to the United States.

My broadcast partner that day was Art Devlin, a former ski jumper from Lake Placid, New York, who’d competed in the 1952 and 1956 Olympics. Art was ABC’s Nordic sports analyst—which meant he worked ski jumping events, cross-country skiing events, and of course, ski flying events for
Wide World of Sports
. I’d first met Art in Sapporo, Japan, in 1972 when I’d made my Olympic broadcasting debut. Art, like me, was one of the nine total announcers NBC had sent over for those Winter Games.

Art and I recorded a good portion of the broadcast “live-to-tape”—as the event was actually taking place. Before the competition began, we recorded our introduction—“the scene set,” in television parlance—and right after the event concluded, we did an on-camera close. Whatever we didn’t cover from the site we would voice later that evening, once the editing was complete. And the result would (hopefully) be a seamless half hour of network television.

When the competition ended, Art and I went back to our hotel to take a break while the crew, led by Doug Wilson, hunkered down in the edit rooms (which were actually tiny vestibules in trailers near the site). We returned a few hours later to learn that Doug and his gang were behind schedule, still working feverishly with the satellite window fast approaching. The atmosphere was tense—if the show wasn’t fed by the end of the satellite window, it would cost the network many thousands of dollars to extend the window, and draw the ire of executives back in New York. And then, of course, there was the additional risk of not getting the show fed to New York in time for the actual broadcast, which would be a total disaster.

Art and I soon got started and voiced over—or “laid down”—most of our commentary. But the satellite clock was ticking. There were still the last couple of minutes of the show to voice over—the final two jumps that would determine the winner. Now there was less than ten minutes of satellite time remaining. Art and I sat in the booth, waiting to get the cue from Doug to resume and finish up. Now there were seven minutes left in the window. Six minutes. Finally, with five minutes to go—and about two minutes of content to record—we were ready to call the next-to-last jumper of the day. I think it was Armin Kogler of Austria, who was in second or third place and needed one more good jump to secure a medal, perhaps even gold.

The tape rolls and as Kogler becomes airborne, Art excitedly shouts, “Oh, it’s a tremendous jump and he’s well out over the tips of his skis!” Not two seconds after Kogler has left the lip of the ramp, our monitor goes blank. Now we have a technical issue.

In our headsets, Wilson says, “Hang on—it’ll be fixed in a minute.”

Art took his headset off and opened the door for some fresh air as I waited nervously. Now we’re totally up against the gun. Then Art puts his headset back on and we’re ready to resume. The tape rolls.

“Oh, it’s a terrible jump!” Art bellowed.

Wilson yells, “Stop!”

“Art—it’s a
great
jump, what are you doing?”

We were all so exhausted at that point that Devlin thought we were rolling in the next jump by another guy.

“Oh, that’s Kogler again? Sorry.”

Somehow, someway, we got it all done with thirty seconds of satellite time on the clock. The whole show had been successfully fed. And America got to see Armin Kogler win a silver medal with a final leap that walked a fine line between tremendous and terrible.

MY MOST UNFORGETTABLE
WIDE
World
assignment of all came when I was dispatched to an event that been a longtime staple of
Wide World of Sports
: Motorcycles on Ice, in the small town of Inzell, nestled in the Bavarian Alps in what was then West Germany. It featured a large group of Europeans—Poles, Slavs, Austrians, Czechs, Soviets, and East and West Germans—who gathered to race motorcycles on what was basically an outdoor speed skating track. The bikes’ tires were outfitted with large spikes. The event started in the early evening but the crowd consisted primarily of fifteen thousand wild and woolly Germans and Austrians—Salzburg was an easy drive away—who had made their way to the site around lunchtime to start tailgating. At that moment, the parking lot had become the Schnapps capital of the planet.

Our producer at that event, Geoff Mason, was always looking for different little twists. His idea on this night was simple: for the scene set, instead of my simply looking at the camera to welcome everybody, I would ride one of the motorcycles down a straightaway, stop at the finish line, take off my helmet, and say, “Hi, I’m Al Michaels and welcome to Inzell, West Germany, for Motorcycles on Ice.”

As the new kid on the ABC Sports block, I was trying to make a favorable first impression. You want to be collegial and collaborative and a team player. So I concealed a potentially important piece of information from Mason: The only bike I had ever ridden was a Schwinn. I’d never been on a motorcycle, much less driven one, and I didn’t know how one worked or what I was supposed to do. And, oh, by the way, this is all supposed to happen on
ice,
on national television! But I was game.

The first order of business was outfitting me in motorcycle leathers so I looked the part. Somebody on our crew found a Russian rider who hadn’t made the cut in the preliminary races and was willing to lend me his. The problem was that the guy was probably five six and weighed 145 pounds. I was five ten, 180. I felt like I was being poured into a straitjacket. Breathing became an issue.

I was flanked by some of the other riders. There was Czech being spoken on one side of me, Russian on another, and German behind me. Of course, I couldn’t hear much of anything anyway, because I was wearing a helmet that was scrunched onto my noggin. I had no idea what I was doing—Is this the clutch? Do I turn it or twist it?—and there were thousands of tipsy spectators now watching.

All I know is that at one point I started to rev the engine. Thinking back, I was beginning to let the clutch out, which would have launched me a hundred feet in the air, if not for one of the Soviets, who grabbed my hand and kept the clutch engaged so I couldn’t move—and clearly preventing me from taking off and either killing myself or just launching me into space, never to come back.

At that point, Mason decided it was prudent to kill the idea.
Thank you, God.
There’s a problem, though. It’s 7:20 and the races would start at 7:30. And we needed a scene set, even if it was going to be less ambitious. Quickly it was decided that I’d change out of the leathers—no easy task—and just wear my yellow ABC parka, go over to the finish line, and tape the open.

Except now there was another problem. Our audio crew was working to fix a technical glitch. And so as I stood there in my parka, waiting for the cue, an announcement came over the PA system, followed by whistling and shrieking. Whistling, of course, is the European form of booing. The next whistling sounds I heard were bottles being thrown past my head. I turned to my interpreter. “What the hell is going on?”

He looked straight ahead. “Oh, they just announced that the race is going to start late because the American television production needs more time.” Mason had gotten the word to the PA announcer.

“Are you out of your mind?” I yelled to Mason in the truck. He couldn’t even hear me. My mike still wasn’t working. So there I am, having barely avoided death on a motorcycle with protruding spikes revving up on a blanket of ice—and now I’m going to be sliced open by vodka bottles!

Maybe it was time to go back to the Pro Bowlers Tour.

In the end, as always, we got it done. I delivered my opening (standing, not riding), the races started, and the telecast went well. Somehow, someway, everything on
Wide World of Sports
would work out. Roone Arledge must have known some higher being.

CHAPTER 9

Do You Believe in Miracles?

R
OONE ARLEDGE ALWAYS TOOK
his time and made announcing assignments later than any of us preferred. So in the fall of 1979, I knew that in February I’d be covering the 1980 Winter Olympics in Lake Placid, New York—but not which events. Figure skating was the domain of Jim McKay and Dick Button, so I could cross that one off the list. Frank Gifford and Bob Beattie were certain to be assigned to alpine skiing. Those characters couldn’t get enough of the après-ski scene and Roone, as one of Frank’s best friends, was happy to oblige. Speed skating would be a plum assignment because Eric Heiden, a 21-year-old from Wisconsin, was favored to win five gold medals. If a megastar would come out of these Games, it was Heiden. Ski jumping, cross-country skiing, and biathlon held little appeal. As far as hockey was concerned, I thought it would provide a decent story but the Soviets had won the gold medal at every Olympics dating back to 1964, and would be the heavy favorites again in Lake Placid.

When the assignments finally came out a few weeks before the Games, sure enough, I’d been given hockey. Why? Because Dennis Lewin, one of our producers, recalled that I had called the gold medal game on NBC at the 1972 Games. In addition, Howard Cosell had never called a hockey game. Neither had Keith Jackson, nor Chris Schenkel, nor Jim McKay, nor Bill Flemming, nor anyone else on the staff. So I had more hockey experience than any of the other guys. Sixty minutes worth! And I could explain icing and offside.

I felt good about the assignment—in the Winter Olympics, an indoor role is always good—and the more I learned about the U.S. team, the better I felt. It looked like they would have a decent shot at a bronze medal. I felt better still when I found out my partner would be Ken Dryden, the former Montreal Canadiens goalie whom, almost a decade earlier, I’d watched from the balcony at the Montreal Forum along with Pete Rose, Johnny Bench, and a couple of other Cincinnati Reds. Dryden had just retired at the age of thirty-one, and was just getting started on what has been an eclectic career as a writer, scholar, lawyer, broadcaster, businessman, and politician. As Lake Placid approached, Art Kaminsky, Ken’s agent and old friend from Cornell, had pushed ABC to hire Dryden as the hockey analyst for the Olympics. Dryden had always followed all sports, and when the ABC execs asked him whom he might like to work with, he had said, “How about Al Michaels?” They replied, “Great—that’s exactly who we were thinking about.”

By December 1979, we were ramping up our prep work. In the middle of the month, an event called the Izvestia Tournament, named for the newspaper that sponsored it and featuring the national hockey teams from several countries, would be held in Moscow. Ken and I flew there to watch Finland, Sweden, Canada, Czechoslovakia, and the Soviet Union itself in action. We would be there four days and get to watch somewhere around a dozen games. Dryden flew in from Montreal, I flew in from the Bay Area, and we met at the hotel in Moscow and had dinner the night before the tournament started. We hit it off immediately. Ken was extremely smart, impeccably articulate, and very measured. (To this day, I contend that he should have been the prime minister of Canada.) At the end of the meal, after the table had been cleared, we sat there talking about the difference between the styles of play in the NHL and international hockey. Ken explained the impact of the wider rink in international play, and how the different geometry affected strategy. I found it fascinating, superbly well considered, and brilliantly summarized. After about this ten-minute dissertation, he says to me, “So, do you think this is the type of thing that will interest our audience?”

“Yes. Yes I do,” I responded. “But Ken, let me introduce you to the world of television. Can you get it down to eight seconds?”

AGAIN, THE EXPECTATIONS FOR
the U.S. team were modest. A bronze medal would be considered a decent achievement. And there was no question about who would win the gold. Dryden had played against the Soviets in the seventies and he and I saw the Soviet team play six or seven games before the Olympics. They toyed with the competition. Three days before the Olympics began, the Soviet team played an exhibition game against the U.S. team at Madison Square Garden. The final score was 10–3, Soviets. It looked more like 20–0.

This, of course, was before the International Olympic Committee allowed professionals to compete. So, in theory, the Olympics were an amateur competition, and the U.S. team was mainly composed of kids in college or those who had recently graduated. Several players were from the University of Minnesota, because Herb Brooks, the American coach, had been the Golden Gophers’ head coach. Four players—including Mike Eruzione, the captain, and Jim Craig, the goalie—were from Boston University. A couple of guys were from Minnesota-Duluth, Mark Johnson was from Wisconsin, and Ken Morrow was from Bowling Green. The average age was 22. One player, Mike Ramsey, had just turned nineteen. The grizzled veteran was twenty-six-year-old Buzz Schneider, who had been a member of the U.S. hockey team at the 1976 Winter Olympics in Innsbruck, Austria. Buzz had played some minor-league hockey, but had then regained his amateur status in time for Lake Placid.