You Can't Make This Up: Miracles, Memories, and the Perfect Marriage of Sports and Television (36 page)

That Game 5 was a classic. The Lakers led most of the way, and then the Spurs grabbed the lead with a little more than two minutes to go. With eleven seconds left, Kobe Bryant hit a jumper to put the Lakers back out in front by a point. On the next possession, the Lakers played great defense and forced Tim Duncan out beyond the free-throw line. Duncan got the ball and had to take an off-balance, going to his left, seventeen-footer that, improbably, went in, to again give the Spurs the lead with four-tenths of a second remaining. Doc presciently noted that 0.4 seconds was the absolute minimum time needed for a player to catch and shoot the ball. Well, with everyone expecting the ball to go to Kobe, Gary Payton inbounded it to Derek Fisher, who threw up a prayer that went in at the buzzer. The Lakers went on to win the series, then beat the Timberwolves in six games to win the Western Conference Finals, too, and now, it was the Lakers against the Detroit Pistons in the NBA Finals.

The Lakers were heavily favored—but in that series, they looked lost. They dropped the first game at home, and needed a desperation three-pointer by Kobe to send Game 2 into overtime, where they won it. But then they went to Detroit, lost all three games, and the Pistons were NBA champions. Larry Brown became the first coach to win an NCAA and NBA title. Chauncey Billups was named Finals MVP for leading a deep, defensive-minded cast that also included Rasheed Wallace, Ben Wallace, Tayshaun Prince, and others.

Meanwhile, the Lakers were about to implode. Not only did Malone and Payton depart, but Shaquille O’Neal was traded to Miami. Phil Jackson ended up retiring but would be back on the Laker bench after one season. And Doc Rivers, of course, went to Boston, coached the Celtics for nine seasons, and won the NBA title in 2008.

Of course, in 2013, Doc finally did get that Los Angeles job—with the Clippers. And his handling of the Donald Sterling insanity may have been his best work ever. It was quintessential Doc: a man of class, style, elegance, and grace. A special man on every level.

CHAPTER 19

Links

W
HEN I SIGNED ON
with ABC Sports in 1976, one of the first people I would work with was Terry Jastrow. Terry was our primary golf producer but also produced and directed a lot of college football and that was where we first got together. In fact, Terry was the producer of that Stanford game in 1978 when I’d had that unbelievable ten-minute car ride with Frank Broyles regarding the futures of Bill Walsh and Bill Clinton. Later that evening, Terry would swing by San Francisco International Airport to pick up a young lady he had recently started dating. Her name was Anne Archer and the two would be married within a couple of years. Anne was just starting out as an actress and would leave an indelible mark soon thereafter when she received an Academy Award nomination for her role as Michael Douglas’s wife in
Fatal Attraction.
The Jastrows and the Michaelses go back a long way.

For years, Terry encouraged me to take up golf. In my twenties and thirties, I played a lot of tennis, much of it with Terry, but in my forties, Terry, a three-handicap, convinced me it was time to take up golf and sponsored me for membership to the Bel-Air Country Club. I resisted but he insisted. Ever since, I’ve looked at Terry as a drug dealer. He hooked me for life.

There’s so much to love about golf. The ambience. Four hours without any phone calls or emails. The constant challenge of trying to become better. You can never master it, but you can always improve. (In my case,
when
?) The competitive aspect. And maybe most of all, the camaraderie. Golf provides great insight into people. It’s social and there’s plenty of fooling around, and people reveal themselves on the course in various and often fascinating ways.

There are very few things I love more than playing golf, but my golf broadcasting experience is extremely limited. In the late 1990s, ABC had the rights to the Skins Game, a made-for-television big money competition that featured some of the sport’s premier players. And in 1997, a young star by the name of Tiger Woods would be making his Skins Game debut. To promote the event for ABC, I interviewed Tiger during halftime of a
Monday Night Football
game. I’d never spoken to him before, and the interview was to be a “two-way” via satellite—with me in Miami and Tiger somewhere on the West Coast. I phoned him that afternoon to go over what we’d be talking about, and mentioned how I’d recently started playing golf, how much I loved it—and my home course. He knew a lot of members at Bel-Air and we had a nice chat, and then I asked him to give me a couple of “swing thoughts.” He laughingly obliged.

The following year, Tiger was in the Skins Game again, and once more I interviewed him at halftime on the Monday night before the event. As we had done twelve months before, we spoke by phone that afternoon and I was able to get another couple of tips from him.

Then in 1999, Tiger competed in another big-money show on ABC, titled
The Showdown at Sherwood.
It was a live, prime-time special in August that pitted Tiger against his biggest rival at the time and the number-one player in the world, David Duval. It took place at the Sherwood Country Club in Thousand Oaks, an hour’s drive from downtown Los Angeles. As it would start at 5
P
.
M
. Pacific Time, the last four holes of the course were lighted. I was assigned to cohost the telecast with Mike Tirico.

Tiger had been at the PGA event at the Firestone Country Club in Ohio that weekend, and had flown into Southern California, landing about three hours before the match got under way. Woods arrived at the Sherwood course at three o’clock and went out to the practice green at around four fifteen. I went over to meet him for the first time in person.

“How’s your game?” Tiger asked as he greeted me.

“Frankly, pretty bad right now.”

“Well,” he said, “with your schedule you probably don’t get to play very much.”

“Tiger, let me confess that’s not an issue.” I said. “My greatest fear is that someday, my ultimate boss, Michael Eisner, who’s also a Bel-Air member, will show up at the club. If he looked at the handicap sheet and saw I was a fifteen, that wouldn’t give him pause. But if he looked under the ‘rounds played last month’ column, he’d see the number twenty-six.”

Tiger was in the middle of taking his putter back and came to a dead stop. He looked up and said, “
You
play more than
I
do!”

Guilty as charged.

ONCE IN A WHILE,
I’ve played golf with my heart beating out of my chest. In 2008, I was invited to play in the AT&T PGA tournament at Pebble Beach. My pro partner was Joe Ogilvie, a Duke graduate with a degree in economics. Between shots, we would discuss day trading. We had a blast. The other twosome included Les Moonves, the president of CBS, a longtime close friend and one of the great media moguls of this—or any other—era. His pro partner was Justin Leonard.

Now, I’ve done any number of telecasts throughout my career where tens and occasionally—as with the Super Bowl—even hundreds of millions of viewers are tuned in. In those situations, because of experience, I’m at home. But I never knew fear until I stood on the first tee at Pebble Beach with five thousand spectators lining the fairway and heard my name being introduced. I could barely put the tee in the ground. I wasn’t really thinking about killing someone with my opening shot, though that was in the back of my mind. I was thinking about something equally horrific. As I addressed the ball, the only thought enveloping my brain was
Please, God, don’t let me whiff!
All I wanted to do was hit the ball and get out of there. I must have taken the shortest, fastest backswing ever and wound up hitting my drive about 140 yards into the left rough. At least I avoided complete disaster.

Once you get away from the first tee, things settle down, and I played decently for the next couple of hours. And then I got to the fifteenth tee, home of the fabled Club 15. There are bleachers just off the tee box that hold about a thousand spectators and there’s a sign above the last row that says,
PROFESSIONAL HELP FOR THE AMATEUR GOLFER
. The same characters have sat there for years and they know everything about every amateur in the field. Forget Clint Eastwood or Jack Nicholson or Bill Murray. If you’re a State Farm agent from Omaha, this gang can tell you how many policies you’ve sold in the last three years.

So as I walk up to tee off, they’ve already recited most of my career back to me and now I see that CBS is going to take my drive on live national television and David Feherty is thirty feet away with a hand mike, ready for a post-shot interview. I can’t even feel my legs. The crowd goes absolutely silent and I’m standing over the ball totally frozen. At that point, all I could do was back away from the ball. I looked at the gallery and said, “Does anyone have a Valium?” It got a good laugh, which relaxed me, and I was able to quickly set up again and wound up launching one of the greatest drives of my life. It was my Walter Mitty moment. Of course, the postscript would be, with a chance to get on the green in two and have a birdie putt, I wound up on the green in three and three-putted for a double bogey. What else is new? That’s golf.

OVER THE YEARS, I’VE
been fortunate to play golf with people from many spectrums. About four years ago, my friend Brad Freeman invited me to fly with him to Las Vegas to play at Shadow Creek in a fivesome that included George W. Bush. The president greeted us on arrival and not only had arranged the teams but insisted on keeping score, which can be complicated. It’s two “in the box” against three, the pairings vary, you have to factor in handicaps, and so forth. The president had already set up the scorecard.

We had three carts, and the four of us took turns riding with the president every couple of holes. We walked off the eighth green and I slid in next to him. He was at the wheel already at work. He had the card and his pencil and he was doing the math and making sure everything was perfect. I said to him, “You’re just like Ben Bernanke.”

Without missing a beat, he looked at me and said, “Better.”

And continued with the scorekeeping.

He was very competitive, but also had a great sense of humor—it was a joke fest the entire day. I pulled out my iPhone after he had made a long putt for a birdie and started to interview him as if he had won the Masters. He played right along and it was hysterical. President Bush can play, too—a legitimate seven or eight handicap.

I’ve also played about a dozen rounds with an erstwhile presidential candidate—one Donald J. Trump. Trump, of course, doesn’t only play golf—he also owns a collection of courses around the world. I first played with Donald when my good friend Skip Bronson brought him out to Bel-Air. On the par-five eighth hole, he hit his second shot into the middle of a pond to the left of the green, creating an Old Faithful–like geyser. Then, as he’s preparing to hit his next shot, all of a sudden he’s hitting a ball that’s right
behind
the pond with a perfect fluffy lie and telling us that he lies two. Skip says, “How is that possible?” Donald replies, “The tide brought it over.”

The upshot: When you play with Trump, if you’re not his partner, you have no chance. Though it might cost you forty or fifty dollars to be on the other side, think of it as a cover charge: $12.50 an hour for great entertainment.

A few years back, Donald bought a course in Palos Verdes, just south of Los Angeles, right on the Pacific Ocean. We’ve played there a handful of times, and on each occasion, all throughout the round, Trump would keep saying, “This is the number-one course in California, hands down. Every golf magazine has it at the top of the list. Nothing even compares, not even Pebble Beach.” Finally, one time, on about the fifteenth hole, Donald proclaimed, “Al, let me tell you why this is better than Pebble Beach. Look right out there—what do you see?”

“Of course, Donald, the Pacific Ocean.”

And then he said, “And you’ve played Pebble Beach. What do you see from that course?”

“Well, that’s Monterey Bay.”

And then as only Donald J. Trump could sum it up—“You see what I mean! They have a bay. I have an ocean.”

At which point, I couldn’t resist.

“Donald,” I said, “we’re both New York kids, so let me ask you. Is Monterey Bay connected to the Pacific Ocean by the Gowanus Canal?”

He might have heard me. I don’t know. He just kept on selling. Donald the Irrepressible.

SOME OF THE WORLD’S
greatest athletes are also fanatical golfers. In the summer of 1998, I was vacationing on Maui with the family, and Michael Jordan was staying at the hotel next to ours on Wailea Beach. At this point, he had retired from the Chicago Bulls for a second time. I’d never met him but we ran into each other on the beach and started to talk about golf. “I’ll give you a call,” he said. “We’ll play.” Sure enough, the next morning there was a voice mail in my hotel room from Michael inviting me to play that afternoon at Wailea.

I met him at the course and he introduced me to the other members of the foursome he had assembled: the head pro from Wailea and his friend—Joe Morgan. “Have you guys met?” he asked.
Have we met?
Joe and I laughed. We’d known each other since 1972 when he was traded to the Reds, and then we’d worked together at ABC for a number of years. That he’d be on Maui at the same time was a nice coincidence.

Anyway, as we started the round, it was clear that Michael had an interesting quirk. He didn’t just play from the back tees. He played as far back as he could go. If there were twenty yards available behind the back tees, that was where Michael would tee off. He wanted the course to play as long as possible.

At one point he was in a fairway bunker and hit a five-iron from about 205 yards out that landed within three feet of the cup. He hit a number of other terrific shots that day, making six or seven birdies. He was also great company—collegial and funny and excited to talk about all sports, mainly the NFL.