You Can't Make This Up: Miracles, Memories, and the Perfect Marriage of Sports and Television (25 page)

The Bills would return to the Super Bowl each of the next three years—and lose each time. They never got closer to a championship than those couple of feet wide right.

WELL BEFORE I STARTED
on
Monday Night Football,
dating back to my days on college football, I loved to “sneak” in quick references to the gambling line. It was just a way to let the savvy audience know that I understood
all
the reasons why they might be watching. There was also an assumption on the audience’s part that this was the type of thing that was
verboten.
When I make an allusion to the point spread, or the over/under, I know some people catch it, and others don’t. And that’s fine—it’s just another way to have fun, and connect with the fans who do have money invested on the game. I’ve heard it many times through the years—“Michaels must have a lot of money riding on these games.” Let me forever set this straight. The primary reason I love sports is because of its unpredictability.
Nobody
knows who’s going to win. I have some otherwise very smart friends who shell out thousands of dollars to subscribe to tout sheets. I keep telling them they’re crazy. Or delusional. Very few people could be more wired into information than the broadcasters. We have access to both teams—coaches, players, owners, GMs, anyone who would know anything. And let me tell you that if I had to make my living betting on football, I’d be researching Chapter 11 covenants. I can’t remember the last time I bet on a sports event, horse racing excepted. I do love action, though. But I can get my jollies through the greatest game ever invented—Craps. Roll ’dem bones. But I digress . . .

So in January 1995, along came Super Bowl XXIX—the San Francisco 49ers and the San Diego Chargers meeting in Miami. The game featured the biggest point spread in Super Bowl history—early in the week, San Francisco had been favored to win by 19 points, and the spread was 18 to 18½ points on the day of the game.

That Super Bowl marked the only time I was ever asked specifically by a boss to stay away from any gambling references. “Look,” Dennis Swanson said to me. “The league is really sensitive about the point spread, and the disparity in this one, so if you can just avoid any of that, that would be great.” Very occasionally, the league will reach out in that way to a network. We’re independent, not the NFL’s public relations arm, and we are not restricted to the degree many people think we are. On the other hand, it is a partnership, there’s a ton of money in play, and you want to accommodate each other when possible. It can be a fine line—you don’t want to hurt the product, but you want to stay independent and maintain your integrity.

Either way, on that Super Bowl Sunday, the Rascal could only be held in check so long.

The 49ers received the opening kickoff. Three plays later, from the Chargers’ 44, Steve Young threw a touchdown pass to Jerry Rice. Referring to the Chargers’ other designation, I said, “the Lightning Bolts just got struck by one.” And the rout was on. It was the first of six touchdown passes Young would throw that day.

As the game wound down, the score—with that 18½-point spread, mind you—was 49 to 26. Meaning that a Chargers’ touchdown could make it a 16-point game. And with just enough time for one final play, the Chargers had the ball near the San Francisco 35-yard line. Stan Humphries was the Chargers quarterback, and he dropped back to pass, looking deep downfield for Shawn Jefferson. “Humphries back to pass,” I said, “and all over America hearts are beating furiously as he launches one to the end zone. Incomplete!”

I couldn’t help myself.

And everyone across the country who’d bet on the Niners exhaled.

WHEN I WAS IN
high school and my father was involved in the first AFL television negotiations, he took me with him one morning to the then–Los Angeles Chargers’ training camp. I was introduced to a young assistant coach by the name of Al Davis. This was 1960. I remember Davis asking my dad a lot of questions about the television deal. Davis couldn’t soak in enough information about everything, not just X’s and O’s. Of course, he’d go on to become the head coach and eventually controlling owner of the Oakland Raiders. And in the mid-sixties, he would briefly become commissioner of the American Football League and help to facilitate the merger between the AFL and the NFL. Many years later, when I was living in the Bay Area, I would run into him from time to time. In the late seventies, I was broadcasting a baseball game in Detroit for ABC on the same Sunday afternoon the Raiders had a game in Pontiac against the Lions. Davis invited me to fly back home with the Raiders on the team plane.

Eventually, the Raiders moved to Los Angeles—and not long after, the Michaels family did, too. So I would run into Davis there as well. When the Raiders would be preparing for a game on
Monday Night Football,
I’d show up at their practice facility and get treated like gold. Davis would give me a thirty-minute private audience on the sideline. On the one hand, this was contrary to everything you would hear about the secretive, inhospitable, paranoid Al Davis Raiders. On the other hand, it made sense—Davis thrived on being unpredictable.

In 1991, I got Davis to agree to tape a rare interview that we would play during halftime of a Monday night game in Kansas City. At one point, Davis said, “I want to be known as a maverick.” When we came out of the tape, on the air now with Gifford and Dierdorf, I talked about Davis’s chances for the Pro Football Hall of Fame. From serving as AFL commissioner and helping to formulate the NFL merger to hiring John Madden to “Just Win, Baby” to winning multiple Super Bowls, Al Davis’s football résumé was overflowing. I then said, “I’m hearing that one reason he might not be voted to the Hall was that some voters, mainly sportswriters, had enough of a personal dislike of him to keep him out of Canton.” (Plenty of those guys had crossed swords with him over the years.) I concluded by saying if that was true, it was a denigration of the entire process.

Well, Davis got voted in and was enshrined the following year. When he learned that he’d be voted to the Class of 1992, he called me at home. “I just want to thank you. It wouldn’t have happened without what you did.”

“Wow, congratulations,” I said. “That’s great. But
you
did it, not me.”

“You’re the second call I made,” he said.

He said the first call was to his wife. I had no idea if he was telling the truth. All I knew was what he was telling me.

But then came the subsequent season. In 1992, the Raiders’ star running back—a certain future Hall of Famer in his own right, Marcus Allen—wasn’t getting much playing time. Bo Jackson had suffered a football-career-ending injury in the 1990 playoffs, then the Raiders had signed Roger Craig in 1991. In ’92 they would bring in Eric Dickerson to do the heavy lifting. It was a mystery as to why Allen was falling down the depth chart and rotting on the bench. It was apparent that this decision went beyond his football skills and that it was being made—for whatever reason—at the top, by Al Davis.

Allen hadn’t spoken out publicly about his reduced playing time. But I knew him well, and reached out to ask if he’d do an interview for a Monday night game the Raiders had coming up in Miami a couple of weeks hence. There couldn’t be a better platform than
Monday Night Football
to get his side of the story out there. And Marcus agreed. By this point he had had enough of the Raiders.

We taped the interview in Los Angeles—in the family room of my home, actually—forty-eight hours before the game in Miami. And he had plenty to say about Al Davis—accusing the Raiders owner of trying to ruin his career, and stop him from going to the Hall of Fame. And he asserted that the Raiders coach, Art Shell, had told him that the situation was out of his hands. Was Davis holding a personal vendetta against Allen, I asked him? “No question about it” was the answer. “He told me he was going to get me.”

We kept the interview tightly under wraps until it aired. We knew there would be a firestorm if the content got out before kickoff. We also knew there would be a firestorm once it was broadcast. The Raiders chartered to Miami on Sunday and there wasn’t a peep. I got to Florida that afternoon. The following day—game day—I called Davis in his hotel room around noon. Kickoff would be at 9
P
.
M
.

“Al, you’re probably not going to be happy, but I’ve done an interview with Marcus Allen that we taped on Saturday. I want to read to you a transcript of what will be on the air tonight. Then I want to read you the outtakes, so you know exactly what was said, what we’re using, and what we’re not using. And we’ll give you equal time. We gave Marcus three and a half minutes. You can have three and a half minutes. If you want to respond to this, we can tape something this afternoon. Or we could do it at the stadium. Or we can do it live during the game. Or you can do nothing.”

I read Allen’s quotes to Davis and asked him what he wanted to do. He said he’d call me back. At around three thirty, he called and read to me a statement that said, in effect, that Marcus was full of shit and a bad guy. I listened to it. I wrote it all down. Then he said, “You have to talk to Art Shell about this, too.”

I said, “Why? He’s coaching a big game tonight. I don’t want to go to Art Shell on the field before the game and have him deal with this. You can deal with Art and broach it with him. I’ll report whatever he says.” Davis didn’t respond to that.

On the field before the game, Art Shell comes over to me. “Al told me what’s going on.” He was shrugging his shoulders like it wasn’t that big a deal.

Then at halftime, the interview aired. Even without the Internet to fan the flames, it was the biggest sports story in the country the next day—far bigger than the game, which Oakland lost. Headlines in every newspaper in the country.
Raiders’ Allen Airs Out Feud with Davis. Allen Says Team Owner Is Ruining His Career.
Of course, it completely blew up my relationship with Al Davis.

To Davis, a television partner of the NFL—particularly
Monday Night Football—
shouldn’t have been stirring this pot. But again, the show was not a mouthpiece for the league or for his organization. This was a big story and we weren’t going to tiptoe around it. People wanted to know what was happening in this wacky scenario, how Marcus Allen felt about it—and we were going to tell them.

Davis never forgave me. I was the enemy now. And he let me know it in typical Al Davis manner. I would cover the Raiders many more times through the years, including a Super Bowl appearance against the Buccaneers. In Denver, a year or two after the Allen interview, I was out on the field an hour before the game and I saw Al glaring at me. I’m maybe fifteen yards away and I could hear him muttering. “I’m gonna get you. I’m gonna get you.”

What? He loved to intimidate people but I wasn’t going to take any crap from him. “Hey Al,” I said. “You’re gonna get me? I’m right here. Come and get me.” He just kept muttering.

When John Madden was inducted into the Hall of Fame in August 2006, NBC—where I’d just moved—did the game that’s played in conjunction with the ceremony. Davis gave a warm induction speech. At the party for Madden, Davis and I happened to come face-to-face. I complimented him on his speech. He nodded and walked away.

Davis ended his relationship with a lot of people this way. If he felt you crossed him, he’d threaten you. He always wanted to be dominating. He loved that word. “We’re gonna
dominate
the other team.” But he also wanted to dominate people. What a way to go through life. Maybe it’s no coincidence that in his years in Los Angeles, one of his best friends was Donald Sterling. You’d see them together at Clipper games. I’m not sure who enjoyed a courtroom more. Especially if they were the plaintiffs. Davis will forever be linked to “Just win, baby.” It could easily have been “Just litigate, baby.”

In this business, you try to be fair. But you also have to be honest with the viewers. If you lose credibility, you have nothing. And that can mean running the risk of having relationships with friends and sources go through some turbulence. Some relationships can withstand that. But not all.

CHAPTER 14

Two for the Ages

W
HILE
MONDAY NIGHT FOOTBALL
would become my calling card at ABC Sports, the network originally hired me for baseball. And from 1976 to 1989, I did every season of
Monday Night Baseball,
as well as five All-Star Games, and some memorable—and unbelievable—postseason series.

In 1979 and 1981, I split the World Series play-by-play with Keith Jackson. Then, in 1983, I broadcast the entire series with Howard Cosell and Earl Weaver. It was the year after Weaver had stepped away from managing, and his Orioles, led by his successor, Joe Altobelli, ended up beating the Phillies in five games. Nineteen eighty-five was the year that Howard Cosell’s book got him removed from the booth just before the World Series started. I was delighted when Tim McCarver replaced him. Just before we went on the air for Game 1, I asked Tim if he was more nervous as a player or a broadcaster starting the World Series. Tim looked at me and said, “Are you kidding? Broadcaster!” Then, with the St. Louis Cardinals and the Kansas City Royals facing off in an all-Missouri affair, the Series was marked (or, if you were a Cardinal fan, marred) by umpire Don Denkinger’s blown call at first base in the bottom of the ninth inning of Game 6. With the Cardinals up 3–2 in the series, and leading 1–0 in the Game 6, needing just three outs for the title, the Royals’ Jorge Orta led off the inning with a grounder to Jack Clark at first base. Clark flipped the ball to pitcher Todd Worrell covering. Denkinger, who was actually one of the better umpires of his time, called Orta safe, even though replays indicated he was clearly out. Kansas City ended up scoring two runs in the inning to win the game.

The next night, in Game 7, the Royals jumped out to a 5–0 lead after three innings and finished the Cardinals off with six more runs in the fifth. In that fifth inning, with Denkinger now umpiring behind the plate, Whitey Herzog went to his bullpen to bring in the volatile Joaquin Andujar, a 21-game winner during the regular season, and one batter later, Andujar charged Denkinger after a pitch had been ruled inside. He was immediately joined by Herzog in a heated argument. Both the pitcher and manager were ejected. After the 11–0 loss, Herzog was asked how a manager could
possibly get ejected
in the seventh game of a World Series. “I’d seen enough,” Whitey said.