You Can't Make This Up: Miracles, Memories, and the Perfect Marriage of Sports and Television (23 page)

Joan Benoit of the United States, then twenty-seven, won the gold medal. Grete Waitz of Norway took the silver. Then, around twenty minutes later, a Swiss runner, Gabriela Andersen-Scheiss, entered the Coliseum clearly in distress. Beyond exhausted, she was teetering, practically at a 45-degree angle, weaving in and out of the lanes on the track, a baseball cap pulled down low over her face. The fans were going wild, imploring her to finish. Every few seconds, she looked as if she was going to topple over and collapse. This was two years after I’d covered the death of Gordon Smiley, the Indy 500 driver, and Richard McVay, the referee at the Illinois football game. The notion that this woman might die was in the forefront of my mind.

At that point, some security people and several coaches were on the track with her. But if anyone had touched her or assisted her in any way, she would be disqualified. It was a chilling scene—and a real dilemma for the people in close proximity to her.

Meanwhile, we were in the broadcast center, watching this unfold. The pictures were so poignant, there wasn’t much to add. The second—and I mean the split second—she crossed the finish line, she was swooped up by personnel and rushed to medical treatment. Fortunately, it all ended up being a heroic moment. And, within minutes, Gabriela was just fine. But it definitely was a challenge to call it live.

AT ITS HEIGHT, ABC’S
assemblage of sports was incredibly vast. And once Howard Cosell quit calling boxing around the same time as he gave up
Monday Night Football,
much of our boxing coverage fell into my portfolio.

Boxing has always held a certain fascination for me. There’s nothing more raw and basic in sports than two guys entering a ring with nothing but a pair of trunks, a pair of shoes, and a pair of gloves. No teammates. Nowhere to hide. Nowhere to run.

In the eleventh grade, I got into my only lifetime fistfight. I don’t even know how it started but it was out on the lunch court at Hamilton High in Los Angeles. If odds had been posted, the other guy would have been a 5-to-1 favorite. But I surprised my opponent with a quick straight left hand to the cheek, and will never forget the feeling of teeth crunching. I scared the hell out of
myself
—and I also ended up causing a five-thousand-dollar dental bill. For a while after that, my friends kiddingly called me the Toonderbolt (a punch then–heavyweight champion Ingemar Johansson of Sweden had made famous). I soon joked that I would retire undefeated. But it wasn’t funny at the time. And that record would have gone down the drain if they’d been scoring my sparring session with Jesus Pimentel a few years later.

At ABC, I did dozens of fights through the eighties, everywhere from Atlantic City to Sarajevo, Yugoslavia, to Caracas, Venezuela, to Dublin, Ireland. There was also a trip to Havana for amateur boxing, where I was told to prepare for a possible visit during the event from El Commandante himself, Fidel Castro. But he never showed up.

And then there was a Saturday afternoon encounter in May 1987 in Port-of-Spain, Trinidad, between the veteran light-heavyweight Marvin Johnson, nearing the end of his career, and Leslie Stewart, who had grown up in Trinidad. Joining me on the air would be my best pal, Alex Wallau, who had made the transition from executive to producer to on-air commentator. Alex knew as much about boxing as anyone on the planet so finally, the ABC powers-that-be figured, why not, let’s try him on the air. He would be a perfect fit—he was superb. Years later, Alex would become the president of the ABC Television Network and his business card would be an all-timer: Alex Wallau—President ABC Television Network/Boxing Analyst. And along the way, he would beat stage 4 tongue cancer. Seriously.

Anyway, we couldn’t have packed more into our two days in Trinidad. On Friday night, Alex and I walked to and from a restaurant about a half mile away. It was outstanding. When we got back to the hotel, we asked the desk clerk to recommend a restaurant for the next night. She suggested a spot that was actually next door to the place we’d just come from. And then she warned, “Don’t even think about walking there. It’s absolutely much too dangerous going through the park after dark.” Well, we’d actually unknowingly just walked through that park—the Queen’s Park Savannah. My Rolex and two thousand dollars in cash had survived.

The following day, at an outdoor stadium, with the rain coming and going, Stewart wins the fight with an eighth-round TKO. The place goes bonkers. Hundreds of fans storm the ring to celebrate. I’m seated at ringside and get whacked in the back of the head before another guy uses me as a step stool to climb into the celebration. At this point, we’re in commercial as I scramble under the ring for safety. My headset is still on as I yell to our producer in the truck, “I’m gonna get killed. Get these animals away. Now!” At the time, even if you weren’t on the air, the satellite transmission would pick up everything. So anyone with a dish could hear every word. The next morning, Alex and I had a very early flight to New York and as we boarded, I caught a glimpse of the local newspaper. There I am on the front page under a humongous headline that blared: ABC
REPORTER: GET THESE ANIMALS AWAY
. That plane couldn’t get off the ground fast enough.

That flight to JFK would stop in Barbados. Alex had “discovered” Howard Stern before Howard became the self-proclaimed “King of All Media.” At the time Stern was only on in New York and a couple of other East Coast cities, so Alex would tape every show and then send the cassettes to me in Los Angeles. We were his biggest fans. On this trip, Alex had brought along three or four of Howard’s most recent shows and we sat there on the plane with dual headsets on, laughing hysterically. On the stop in Barbados, with the Stern tapes still rolling, we notice a small entourage escorting a couple of people onto the plane. We weren’t paying much attention. Then we’re airborne again, and Alex and I might as well have been rolling in the aisle. We were listening to Stern at his funniest. One row in front of us and across the aisle, a man turns around to see what’s going on. We’re in convulsions when the man, in clerical garb, smiles. You could tell he was enjoying the fact that we were enjoying whatever it was we were listening to on our earphones. The man was Bishop Desmond Tutu. All Alex and I could think was,
He should only know what we’re so hysterical about!
Which, of course, only made us laugh twice as hard. Every ounce of my body ached when we got to New York.

THEN THERE WAS ANOTHER
unforgettable night. April 15, 1985. Thomas Hearns versus Marvelous Marvin Hagler. I called the fight with Al Bernstein. The fight was broadcast live on closed-circuit television, and would then air on tape on ABC several days later. With Mike Tyson’s career just beginning, boxing’s most compelling stars were the foursome of Sugar Ray Leonard, Roberto Duran, Marvin Hagler, and Tommy Hearns. There had been the Leonard-Duran
no mas
fight. Leonard and Hearns had also staged an epic battle. Hagler and Duran had gone the distance. You had this four-way rivalry and, whatever the combination, you usually had a terrific fight.

So, that night in 1985, it was Hagler and Hearns’s turn, with the undisputed world middleweight title at stake. Bob Arum was the promoter, and there’d been a massive buildup. The night before the fight, I remember talking to Alex Wallau, who was producing the telecast, and we both felt Hagler because he wanted it more. Marvin had felt like he had gotten the least respect of the quartet—that he was the Ringo Starr of the Big Four. Sugar Ray was the lead character, Duran was the Latin idol, Hearns was the Hit Man from Detroit. Hagler, who hadn’t lost a fight in almost a decade, was from Brockton, Massachusetts, the working-class man with blue-collar appeal, the fighter who wanted to prove he was the best of them all.

There was unbelievable electricity at Caesar’s Palace that night, with the outdoor arena erected in the parking lot. The crowd was already in a frenzy when the fighters entered the ring. In all sports—not just boxing—almost always, when there’s that kind of buildup, the actual event doesn’t equal the hype. Sometimes it doesn’t even come close. What still stands out to me about this fight: people couldn’t wait for the fight to start, and it totally eclipsed the hype. Some boxing fans felt it might have been the Fight of the Century. Indisputably, Round 1 was one of the great rounds, if not
the
greatest round, of the century.

In most fights, the first round is generally a feeling-out process. One guy might try to sneak in a punch, but it’s usually a starter course before the main dish. Not this night. The bell rang and Hagler and Hearns quickly met in the center of the ring and just started whaling on each other. No strategy, no defense, no parrying, no feeling-out process. Just bombs and haymakers.

Am I really seeing this? Fights don’t start like this.
They were trying to kill each other. This was the purest of back-alley brawls. It took me a good twenty seconds just to wrap my head around what I was witnessing.

And it didn’t stop. They kept pounding away. And that night, I saw certain things with the naked eye that were not discernible when I looked at the tape later on. In boxing, sometimes television can’t do complete justice to what the naked eye can observe from ringside. Television just can’t take you there.

At one point, they were both directly above me. Hearns is on my left, Hagler is on my right. Hearns throws a straight right hand into the left side of Hagler’s face. As if in super-slow motion, Hagler’s face compresses and contorts and for a split second, I think it’s going to cave in. His cheek has become totally concave. The thought flashes through my brain:
He’s killed him
. He hit him so hard that it looked like Hagler’s whole face would implode.

But then, as in a cartoon, Hagler’s cheek popped back into its regular shape, as if nothing had happened. And then Hagler jumped right back on Hearns. I couldn’t believe what I was seeing. No one could have absorbed that punch and still be
alive,
much less go back on the offensive. The round ended and my heart—and fifteen thousand other hearts—was beating furiously. I’d just witnessed three insanely exhilarating minutes. Hearns’s trainer, Emanuel Steward, couldn’t have summed it up better than when he later said that his man “fought twelve rounds in one.”

In the second round, which couldn’t compare to the first (then again, what could?) but was still a compelling three minutes, Hagler started to bleed badly. As his cornermen worked on the cut after the bell, it became clear that there was a real possibility this fight would soon have to be stopped. If that had happened, the result would have been a technical draw. So Hagler, who in my mind had slightly gotten the better of Hearns so far, knew he needed to finish him off quickly. He moved in for the kill, landed some shots, and Hearns went rubber-legged. At that point, two minutes into the third round, referee Richard Steele stepped in and stopped the fight, and Marvin Hagler had defended his middleweight crown.

I still occasionally look at that fight. This was a case where you had to have the excitement of your voice match the excitement of what you were seeing. But this was a fight that overwhelmed anything anybody had to say. The following week,
Sports Illustrated
featured the fight on the cover. The headline was “Eight Minutes of Fury.” A perfect description. Eight minutes no one who was there would ever forget.

HAGLER-HEARNS TOOK PLACE ABOUT
a month after Capital Cities bought the ABC network in a surprise deal. One of the first moves the new regime made when they got the keys to the house a little over a year later was to remove Roone Arledge as the head of ABC Sports—he would now hold only one title, President of ABC News (though Roone would negotiate to continue producing the Olympics). In 1986, I was in the first year of a four-year deal. I didn’t know exactly what was going to happen, but I wasn’t too worried beyond the basic level of anxiety that comes with having a new boss.

Meanwhile, in late 1985, Linda and I decided we would move from the Bay Area to Los Angeles. We had each lost a parent—my father, her mother—in recent years. We wanted to be close to our surviving parents and close to our siblings, and we were both around forty and wanted a midlife change. So we decided to return to Southern California.

Boy, did we pick a hell of a week to make the move. In late January 1986, we moved south, uprooting our teenage son and eleven-year-old daughter in the middle of a school year. In a pouring rainstorm, the moving van arrived twenty-four hours after the Space Shuttle Challenger disaster. And then, just as the truck pulled up to our new home in Los Angeles, I discovered that my new boss at ABC Sports would be a man named Dennis Swanson. Dennis had been running WLS, the ABC affiliate in Chicago, where he’d given Oprah Winfrey her first daytime talk show. Swanson was a former officer in the Marine Corps and had a reputation for being very aggressive—a bull in a china shop kind of guy. So there was a sense that he wasn’t going to pay homage to Roone by taking things slowly or being hesitant to shake things up. Still, what came next was a huge surprise.

I’m in my new home in Los Angeles, helping to unpack boxes, when Ken Wolfe, the young producer whom I’d worked with frequently, calls me up. Kenny sounded very excited. “Do you have any idea what’s going on here?” he said.

“No.”

“Sit down,” he said. “You know who is going to do
Monday Night Football
?”

“No. Who?”

“You and me.”

“
What?
”

“I’m going to produce, and you’re going to do the play-by-play. You didn’t hear it from me—but it’s happening.”

I was stunned. Howard Cosell had left the show after the 1983 season. Frank Gifford had just completed his fifteenth season as the play-by-play announcer. Joe Namath and O. J. Simpson were the analysts. Was Swanson
really
going to do this?

What I later learned was this: Swanson was a rabid college football fan. He watched games every weekend. One Saturday in 1985, he was watching the “A” game on ABC. The game became one-sided in the second half. So the network switched the game that I was doing to much of the country, including Chicago, where Swanson lived. Swanson later told me he loved the burst of energy and, in his mind, the way I was engaging the audience.