You Can't Make This Up: Miracles, Memories, and the Perfect Marriage of Sports and Television (3 page)

When I was seventeen, ABC launched a new show on Saturdays,
Wide World of Sports.
Years later, I’d become a regular on
Wide World
. There was Jim McKay’s famous line, “the thrill of victory and the agony of defeat,” as the ski jumper—a Slovenian by the name of Vinko Bogataj—careened down and then fell off the side of the jumping hill. It looked catastrophic. What you didn’t see was that thirty seconds later, he walked away with only minor injuries. Still, I always found the next line to be even more poignant. “The human drama of athletic competition.” That’s what I could never get enough of.

Even now, when I’m in my car in Los Angeles, I’ll turn on a Dodger game and still know I’m going to hear Vin Scully, well into his eighties, describe some of that drama. I used to dream about replacing Scully and becoming the voice of the Dodgers at some point in my life. That ship, of course, has sailed. A couple of years ago, I was at an awards luncheon with Vin and said to him, “Let me get this straight. How is it that
I’m
going to retire before
you
?”

We shared a wonderful laugh.

BY THE TIME I
reached the end of high school, I may not have been talking into a rubber hose in the backyard anymore, but my dream of becoming a sportscaster had not wavered one iota. So as graduation approached, and I got set to choose a college, I had two criteria above all others: to stay on the West Coast, and to find a school with a radio and television program as well as a campus radio station (and maybe even a TV station) that allowed students to broadcast sports.

My father helped me research it, and we narrowed the choice down to two schools, the University of Southern California and Arizona State. And since another criteria was going away to college, and USC was a fifteen-minute drive from our house, the decision was pretty much made for me.

So, in September 1962, I flew to ASU in Tempe and registered for classes. Standing in a long line, I ended up talking with a kid standing behind me. He was from Wisconsin, and he was there on a baseball scholarship. Not long after that, we’d run into each other again—him playing on the freshman team, and me calling games on the campus radio station for the varsity. And ten years after that, we’d find ourselves in the same place again—the visitors’ clubhouse the day before Game 1 of the 1972 World Series. The kid’s name was Sal Bando. And unbelievably, long before he was a four-time All-Star with the Oakland Athletics, and before anyone knew my name, there we were together, standing in line to register for classes at ASU.

Long before reality exceeded the dream, I discovered that Arizona State was the perfect school for me. The Sun Devils baseball team played about forty home games, and I called the majority of them for the campus radio station. The team was coached by Bobby Winkles, who would later go on to manage the Angels and A’s. Our broadcasts were live, and I also recorded some of them on reel-to-reel tape so that at some point I’d have a compilation for future auditions. I called most of the games by myself, but every now and then another kid would show up and work a few innings, but only if he didn’t have a class conflicting with the game. For me, though, calling the games was the priority. Even if the campus radio station could only be picked up within a radius of seven blocks, I loved it.

By my junior year, Bando had become a standout third baseman on the varsity, but the biggest star was a sophomore outfielder named Rick Monday. There was also an outfielder on the freshman team. The following September, he was a cornerback on the football team, and then when the baseball season began, he was the starting right fielder. There was nothing to indicate any outsize personality—he was just another one of the guys on the team. His name? Reggie Jackson. And let me tell you something—had he chosen football, I think Reggie would have been good enough to play in the NFL.

By the time I finished my four years at ASU, I had called at least 150 baseball games. I was the sports editor for the school newspaper and wrote a column called “The Hot Spot.” Year-round, I also announced football, basketball, and some track meets as well. I would walk across campus from one class to another and dream of doing the World Series and the Olympics. The dreams were as big as they could be.

Back then, Arizona State was in the Western Athletic Conference, playing the vast majority of its football games at night and in the Mountain Time Zone. The teams were usually very good, but because the games would end past the deadlines of eastern newspapers, not much national attention was paid to the program. My sophomore year, the fall of 1963, the Sun Devils were supposed to play a ten-game schedule. But we ended up playing only nine, because on November 22, President Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas. Our game against Idaho the next night, one in which ASU would have been a huge favorite, was canceled.

As it turned out, Arizona State only lost one game that season: their opener at home against Wichita State. ASU took a 13–0 lead, but then Wichita ran off thirty-three unanswered points and won the game in a stunning upset. One of the Wichita State starters? A linebacker named Bill Parcells.

Sun Devil Stadium had just opened up, and the locker rooms hadn’t been completed, so the team dressed at the old venue, Goodwin Stadium, about a half mile away, and then bused up to the new place. Well, after that game, I went back down to Goodwin to interview the players. Except that when I walked inside the locker room, no one was there. Where was everyone? Well, Frank Kush, who would coach the team for twenty-two seasons before a brief run with the Colts in the NFL, was the classic drill sergeant. Most of the players feared him—a few even despised him. Losing a game to Wichita State, to say the least, did not sit well with Kush, so when the team got off the bus at the old stadium, he had the field lights turned on. “Don’t even think about changing clothes,” he told the players. “You didn’t play at Sun Devil Stadium, so you’re going to play
now
.” And the team stayed in their full uniforms and went through a full-contact scrimmage that didn’t end until almost midnight.

Years later, in one of my dozens of meeting with Bill Parcells before a Monday or Sunday night game, I reminded him of that night. Bill has a steel trap for a memory and remembered everything about the game. “Well, here’s something you probably don’t know,” I said. “While your team got dressed and out of there, Frank Kush had the whole ASU team stay out on the practice field in their uniforms for a full-contact scrimmage.”

“Don’t know it?” Parcells said, laughing. “Listen. We got dressed that night and headed to the airport in a bunch of school buses. We looked out and the lights were on at the stadium. So when we drove by the field, we pushed down those half windows, all screaming at the team we just beat, ‘Screw you!’ ”

Classic Parcells.

CHAPTER 3

The Rascal

W
HEN I WAS GROWING
up, Vin Scully and my father were my two most important broadcasting mentors. Vin, through all the listening I did on the radio. And my father, through advice, guidance, and encouragement along the way.

By this time, my dad was becoming quite successful in his own work. Not long after we’d moved to Los Angeles, he’d switched to another agency, MCA, and they’d asked him to start a sports division, brokering deals and buying rights to sporting events. My father was instrumental in writing the original American Football League television contract with ABC—parts of which were drafted on my kitchen table in 1959. The league started in 1960, and as a high school kid, I met Lamar Hunt, Ralph Wilson, and Bud Adams, all original owners, as well as Barron Hilton, who was the original owner of the Chargers, when they started in Los Angeles. (Barron was the son of the legendary Conrad Hilton, but is probably best known today as the grandfather of Paris Hilton.)

Around that same time, my father, on behalf of MCA, began to make deals with a Cleveland sports entrepreneur by the name of Mark McCormack. McCormack was representing the then-emerging young golf stars Arnold Palmer, Jack Nicklaus, and Gary Player, and my father was involved in the deals for
Shell’s Wonderful World of Golf, Big Three Golf,
and other golf television specials. He and McCormack were in frequent negotiations. By the mid-sixties, as McCormack’s management company, International Management Group (IMG), was growing, he asked my father to join with him. McCormack’s idea was to take out the middleman and develop and produce his own programming. And that’s how the man who represented Joni James, and moved his family to Long Island after a nominal raise, ended up founding and running Trans World International (TWI), the television arm of IMG, which is still around today (it’s now called IMG Productions). My dad always recognized the enormous potential of sports on television, and he was very excited that my dream was to get into the business.

My father crossed paths with all kinds of sports figures, and at one point, he met Curt Gowdy, already a broadcasting legend, then the voice of the Boston Red Sox. The Red Sox were in Scottsdale, Arizona, for spring training—about five miles from the ASU campus. My father had mentioned to Gowdy that he had a son at Arizona State who wanted to be a sports broadcaster. Gowdy told my dad to have me give him a call, and that he’d be happy to listen to a tape.

So when I called Curt, he invited me to the ballpark. I brought my tape recorder, and suddenly there I was, nineteen years old, sitting next to Curt Gowdy in some little room adjacent to the Red Sox clubhouse underneath Scottsdale Stadium, as he listened to my tape. Curt gave me some advice and some tips and a good deal of encouragement. Over the years to follow, our paths would cross and crisscross in all sorts of ways. But I’d never forget that first meeting, and that first act of kindness.

At ASU, broadcasting games was at the center of my college experience, but of course there was also time for fun. I had a journalism professor, Gordon Jones, who was a horse racing aficionado—believe it or not, he eventually became the racing writer/handicapper for the
Los Angeles Herald Examiner.
I’d show up for class ten minutes early, before the other students filed in, and he and I would talk about that day’s races, going over potential daily double bets. If there was a combination we liked, Professor Jones wasn’t above wrapping up class twenty minutes early so he and I could drive the thirty miles to Turf Paradise in northwest Phoenix in time to get a bet down on the first race.

Gordon Jones—first ballot, unanimous choice for the Professor Hall of Fame.

In another journalism class, on the first day of school in my sophomore year, a few buddies and I were sitting in the back, and, nineteen-year-old boys being nineteen-year-old boys, we ranked the fifteen girls in the class, 1 through 15 in terms of who we wanted to ask out on a date most. This was our own goofball version of the NFL Draft. Well, talk about a jaw-dropping moment: fast-forward to the following September, and get this—our consensus number-four pick in a classroom with fifteen girls at Arizona State University is walking down the ramp wearing a tiara with Bert Parks singing “There she is, Miss America.”
What?
Her name was Vonda Kay Van Dyke, and she had blown the judges away in the talent portion because she was a tremendously skilled ventriloquist. Her dummy’s name was Kurley-Q.

But talk about dummies. How about my buddies and me drafting her fourth in a class of fifteen? Can you imagine drafting Tom Brady in the sixth round? Oh wait . . .

IN 2001, I WAS
in Miami doing a
Monday Night Football
game, Jimmy Johnson was in Key West, and we were doing what’s known in the TV business as a two-way—a satellite interview. This was eight seasons after Johnson had led the Dallas Cowboys to back-to-back Super Bowl titles in the nineties, and then abruptly left the team after clashing with the team’s owner, Jerry Jones. In the months before our interview, a number of people were speculating that Jerry had had some plastic surgery. Meanwhile, the Cowboys were 4-8 and in last place in their division. And as we discussed his old team’s travails, Jimmy couldn’t help himself.

“If Michael Jackson—I mean, Jerry Jones—would have kept Troy Aikman, they’d be in first place,” he said with an impish gleam.

Then, as soon as we got to the commercial, I could hear the guys in the truck still laughing
.

The next day, I called Jimmy to thank him for doing the interview and told him I couldn’t believe what he’d said.

“You know what,” he said. “You gotta have a little rascal in ya.”

Rascal? Absolutely.

When I was a kid, my mom was the first to cultivate my mischievous side. Then came Arizona State. I took my broadcasting training seriously, but I was in college. My inner rascal had to find its way out whenever it could.

I was in the Sigma Nu fraternity, where I met a guy named George Allen (no relation to the NFL coach), who became a good friend. Like me, George was a city kid—he was from New York. Like me, George enjoyed pranks. And together in what in our minds was then a small, Podunk town, we were always on the lookout for a prank.

At the time, Phoenix had no major sports teams, so any pro event felt like a big deal. One night, the just-opened Veterans Memorial Coliseum booked an exhibition minor-league hockey game between Tulsa and Oklahoma City—the first hockey game ever played in the new building. We wanted to go, but of course had to figure out a way to get in for free.

Our solution? A few hours before the game, George and I called the box office and made up a name, pretending to be a Tulsa player with a far-fetched story. “Hey, I missed the original flight to Phoenix and my wife just gave birth and everything got messed up. Can you leave me free tickets for two close relatives.” Two hours later, we showed up at the box office just before the game and—what do you know?—two tickets were waiting. Eighth row, center ice.

On another night we were bored and decided to see if we could put one over on the sports desk at the Phoenix newspaper, the
Arizona Republic
. So we created a high school baseball player: Clint Romas from Fredonia, Arizona—and pretended to be the stringer calling in with the line score from this tiny town just north of the Grand Canyon with a population of about a thousand. “Fredonia beats so-and-so, the score was four to nothing, and Clint Romas not only pitched a two-hit shutout—he hit two home runs!”