You Can't Make This Up: Miracles, Memories, and the Perfect Marriage of Sports and Television (39 page)
Authors: Al Michaels,L. Jon Wertheim
And then there’s our current sideline reporter, the supreme Michele Tafoya. I first worked with Michele on our NBA coverage on ABC. One of her most memorable postgame interviews came after that classic Game 5 of the Western Conference semifinals in 2004 between the Lakers and the Spurs. After Tim Duncan had hit his off-balance seventeen-footer to give the Spurs the lead and Derek Fisher answered with his crazy, not-to-be believed shot at the buzzer, the Lakers sprinted off the court—“The officials will review it but the Lakers are already on the tarmac,” I said on the air. The only guy who couldn’t race away from Michele? Let’s put it this way—conditioning always seemed to be an issue with Shaquille O’Neal. So Michelle corrals him and asks him to describe the end of the game. Shaq smiles and says, “One lucky shot deserved another.” Perfect.
Two years ago in Baltimore, the Patriots met the Ravens in a Sunday night game less than twenty-four hours after the nineteen-year-old brother of Ravens wide receiver Torrey Smith had died in a motorcycle accident. Smith hadn’t slept a wink but still played and had a tremendous game, catching six passes for 127 yards and two touchdowns. Michele interviewed him only moments after the Ravens had pulled off a dramatic 31–30 win. A sideline reporter cannot have a tougher task yet, as always, Michele pulled it off perfectly with the exact balance of sensitivity, compassion, and journalism.
Before that season was over, we were back in Baltimore, where the star of that night’s game was Jacoby Jones, who ended his interview by saying to Michele, “Thanks, gorgeous.” Take a guess what her new nickname became.
More recently, we had a scary situation develop at the end of the first half on a
Sunday Night
game when Gary Kubiak, then coaching the Houston Texans, collapsed as the teams went to the locker room. It was a frightening moment. Michele was right there and kept the audience apprised of what was happening without speculating. Fortunately, Kubiak would be okay. And once again, Michele totally nailed it.
I’ve called two Super Bowls on NBC—and both have gone down to the wire: the Steelers and Cardinals with John Madden in 2009 and then the Giants’ upset of the Patriots with Cris Collinsworth in 2012. Ten months before that game in Indianapolis, Linda and I had made a trip to Israel that had been organized by Patriots owner Robert Kraft and his wife, Myra. We experienced six amazing and memorable days. The Kraft family has been intimately involved with Israeli charities for many years and to witness firsthand the adoration and love that entire country had for Myra Kraft was mind-blowing. She had been deeply and personally involved with hospitals, schools, child-care centers, small businesses, and a dozen other institutions. At the time, she was also in remission from cancer but it had resurfaced and at the end of the trip Bob told me that she’d be going back into the hospital as soon as they returned to Boston. Myra never said a word about it and I will never forget walking six or seven miles back and forth around the Old City in Jerusalem with Myra as our tour guide. It’s something she’d probably done a hundred times but her passion and enthusiasm never waned in those four hours. It was likely her last really good day on earth. She’d be back in the hospital two days later and would die in four months. God bless Myra Kraft.
That Super Bowl was also the first overseen by the new chairman of NBC Sports, Mark Lazarus, who took over for Dick Ebersol in 2011. Mark has been the best kind of boss to work for. He puts the right people in the right spots and lets them do their thing. And he supports them. You can’t ask for more. He makes it easy for all of us to keep waiting all day for Sunday night.
I
SIGNED ON WITH NBC
to do only
Sunday Night Football.
But then in late 2009, Dick Ebersol asked me if I’d host the daytime studio show for the 2010 Vancouver Winter Games. It had been about fifteen years since I’d missed out on the chance to host the 1996 Atlanta Olympics—and it was something that still had a lot of appeal. So shortly after the football season, it was off to Canada.
I had a great time. And since I was hosting the daytime show, I was finished each day at 6
P
.
M
.—giving me the chance to go out and play spectator almost every night. The majority of time the hockey arena was my venue of choice. I always took Cris Collinsworth with me and turned my Florida-born partner into a hockey maven. And what we watched was some of the greatest hockey ever played—the NHL broken up by countries, two weeks of pulsating games. It was all capped off by that dramatic finish in the gold medal game, with Zach Parise of the United States tying it with less than a minute to go in regulation, and then Sidney Crosby winning it for Canada with a golden goal in overtime. I hosted the first two periods in the arena and then had to leave to get ready to cohost the Closing Ceremony at B.C. Place with Bob Costas. I watched the end of that game with Bob in a small room at the stadium where we were preparing for the show. The feed to our television monitor was on a brief delay—and the thousands of people who had already come into the stadium for the Closing Ceremony were watching it live on the big overhead screens. So, in overtime, when we felt the stadium shake, accompanied by a huge roar, we knew the Canadians must have won it—just a few seconds before we saw Crosby’s actual goal.
In London in 2012, I was the daytime studio host again and loved it. The Summer Games have almost three times as many events as the Winter Games, and I saw several of them in person. Being in the Olympic Stadium when the British long-distance star Mo Farah won the 10,000 meters, and feeling that crowd erupt when he took the lead on the final lap, was spine-tingling. And Usain Bolt’s performance—winning repeat Olympic gold medals in the 100 meters and 200 meters—provided another shot of electricity. One of the greatest things about sports is the dosages in which the thrills come. You can get a double-overtime hockey game that keeps you riveted for four hours. Or in Bolt’s case, two unforgettable memories in fewer than thirty seconds,
total
!
And then there was Sochi 2014, the Winter Olympics. It was an event that was overshadowed beforehand by threats of terrorism. Fortunately, nothing materialized. And then within days of the Closing Ceremony, Russia would invade Crimea and set off a confrontation with Ukraine. But during those two and a half weeks, the athletes, as is always the case with the Olympic Games, turned in a number of remarkable performances. And once again, the hockey tournament was near the top of the list. Though neither would wind up winning a medal, the game between the United States and Russia in group play was spectacular. It went all the way to a shootout with T. J. Oshie of the St. Louis Blues scoring four times to win it for the Americans (international rules, unlike NHL rules, allow coaches to reuse shooters as often as they wish), while Jonathan Quick—the goalie who three months hence would be leading my Kings to a second Stanley Cup in three seasons—made a series of terrific saves to hold off the Russians.
The next day, Quick came to our NBC compound in the International Broadcast Center to be interviewed by Dan Patrick on NBCSN. He wasn’t the only star goalie on the premises that afternoon. For our daytime show on NBC, we’d also booked a guest whom I’d never met but wanted to talk to for thirty-four years. His name: Vladislav Tretiak. He was the Soviet goaltender on three gold-medal-winning Olympic teams and was also on the Soviet team that had lost to the United States in Lake Placid in 1980. He’s still so heroic in his homeland that he was chosen to light the cauldron for the Opening Ceremony in Sochi. Many consider him the greatest goalie ever.
I met Tretiak when he arrived. We talked for a few minutes and then he went into a room to get some makeup put on before we would start taping. Meanwhile, as I walked out into the hallway, I ran into Jonathan Quick. On a whim, I asked him if he’d ever met Tretiak. He said no. And then I said, “Would you like to?” Wide-eyed and emphatically, he said, “Yes!” I said to come with me and fifteen seconds later I felt as if universes were intersecting and I was introducing Derek Jeter to Babe Ruth. It was a wonderful thing to witness.
A few minutes later, Tretiak and I sat down to do the interview. Vladimir Posner, the Russian commentator who had appeared on
Nightline
often during the Cold War years and was now working for NBC in Sochi, was also on the set to serve as a translator. But when I began asking him questions, starting with his thoughts on lighting the cauldron in the Opening Ceremony, Tretiak answered in English.
We then talked about the U.S.-Russia game from the afternoon before. We talked about the pressure Russia was under to win the gold medal (they wouldn’t), and then I transitioned to what I really wanted to ask him about. Lake Placid, 1980.
First, I wanted to know more about what may have been the biggest turning point in that game. How did his coach, Viktor Tikhonov, tell Tretiak—the best goalie on the planet—that he was taking him out of the game after the first period? Tretiak said he was told in the locker room and he was stunned. It was the first time in his life that he had ever been pulled. And he also noted, with a small smile, perhaps of satisfaction, that Tikhonov later wrote in a book that it was the worst mistake of his career. They were still friendly, though—“Coaches make mistakes sometimes, too,” Tretiak said wryly.
Then, I got to the question I’d wanted to ask him for thirty-four years. He had played on a team that was so dominant—and so great—that winning was always expected and had become routine. So when the game ended—as Tretiak watched the U.S. team, basically a bunch of college kids the Soviets had crushed, 10–3, just three weeks before, go crazy, literally falling over themselves on the ice, and as he waited with his teammates along the blue line for the ceremonial handshake—what was he thinking about?
For the first time in our interview, Tretiak switched to Russian. He wanted to make sure he had the right words. Posner translated.
“I saw the happiest people in the world. And they deserved it. And I was a little bit envious of them. Because we could have been in their place. But they showed they were tough. Their character.”
Then he added this. “Today in America,” he said, “the juniors, the youngsters, play very good hockey—and it’s thanks to those boys.”
With that, I shook Tretiak’s hand, thanked him, and ended the interview. More than three decades later, I’d gotten his answers to questions I’d wanted to ask.
It’s been an incredible and amazing ride. No day goes by without me thinking, How did I wind up
here,
and then wind up
there,
and meet and get to know some of the most interesting and accomplished men and women of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries? And have a ton of laughs along the way. And still get into the games for free. And work with the best people to ever come down the pike. And be blessed with the most wonderful family.
If the law of averages does have me wind up in that Mongolian sulfur mine in the next life, I’ll still be ahead of the game.
I also know Curt Gowdy would be proud.
I’ve never gotten jaded.
AL MICHAELS
has logged more hours on live primetime network television than anyone in history, including twenty years as the play-by-play voice of
Monday Night Football
. He won his first Sportscaster of the Year award in 1980, became the second sportscaster in history to receive a News Emmy nomination for his coverage of the San Francisco earthquake during the 1989 World Series, and was honored with a lifetime achievement award at the 2011 Sports Emmys. Michaels has covered eight Olympics, and is currently the play-by-play voice of NBC’s S
unday Night Football
, TV’s highest-rated show. He lives in Los Angeles.
L. JON WERTHEIM
, the executive editor of
Sports Illustrated
, is one of the most accomplished sports journalists in America. His work has been cited in
The Best American Sports Writing
anthology four times as well as in
The Best American Crime Writing
. He is the author of seven highly praised books, including the
New York Times
bestseller
Scorecasting
. He is a regular contributor to CNN and National Public Radio and is a commentator for the Tennis Channel.
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Cover photograph by Michael Grecco
YOU CAN’T MAKE THIS UP
. Copyright © 2014 by Eight Twenty Seven Productions. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
FIRST EDITION
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EPub Edition November 2014 ISBN: 9780062314987
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