You Can't Make This Up: Miracles, Memories, and the Perfect Marriage of Sports and Television (6 page)

My radio partner was Dick Phillips. He was an infielder who had played parts of four seasons in the majors with the Giants and the Washington Senators. And when he was available, Marty Chase—the announcer who’d been called up to active duty—would join us in the booth as well. Because of the distance to away games—and the expense of airplane tickets—we only worked the Islanders’ home games. When the team was on the road, we would do re-creations of the games, beginning the broadcasts roughly ninety minutes after the first pitch and relying on someone, normally a sportswriter, in the visiting press box to give us the rundowns of each at bat. They’d call in with updates every half hour or so, and then we’d go from there—occasionally taking some creative license. Since there was a considerable time delay, if it was 10–1 in the eighth inning, and we got an account of an inning where every batter had taken a full count, sometimes our audience heard a nice, crisp three- or four-pitch inning. A decade earlier, Les Keiter had done almost real-time re-creations of Giants games for a New York audience after the team moved to San Francisco. We didn’t use a drumstick against a wooden block to simulate a batter connecting like Les did, but we did have the engineer pipe in crowd noise that was appropriate in the flow of the game. Another connection I had to Keiter: His career started when he was in the service in Hawaii in the 1940s, and in 1970 he would move back to Honolulu to run an advertising agency. But shortly thereafter, he would up becoming the sports director at KHON (the NBC affiliate) and eventually replacing me as the Islanders announcer.

The Islanders were in the Pacific Coast League, with the seven other Triple-A clubs located on the mainland. Visiting teams would come to face the Islanders once or twice a season, and the series usually spanned seven games and would last an entire week. Our big rival was the Los Angeles Dodgers’ farm team, the Spokane Indians. In 1970 the Indians came over to Hawaii with a lineup that included Steve Garvey at third base, Bill Buckner at first base, and Bill Russell and Davey Lopes in the outfield. And the team’s manager was a rotund, charismatic Italian by the name of Tommy Lasorda. At the time, the Dodgers’ general manager was Al Campanis and, after every game, Lasorda would call Campanis in Los Angeles to give him a status report.

Well, six games into that series, Lasorda made his ritual postgame call to Campanis. Garvey had three hits, Buckner had two. Then Tommy added something else: “By the way, the Islanders have this kid who does a great job announcing the games. I know that Scully’s the best, but you might want to keep this kid in mind if there’s ever an opening. His name is Michaels—Al Michaels.”

Then Lasorda went back to his recap. Davey Lopes did this. The pitchers did that. He finished, and just before they hung up, suddenly something occurred to Campanis. “Wait a second, Tommy,” he said. “This Michaels guy—the announcer.”

“Yeah,” said Lasorda. “What about him?”

“How do you know that he’s any good?”

“Well, I’ve been thrown out of the last four games and I’ve been in the clubhouse listening to him on the radio.”

It was only a slight embellishment. Lasorda had been thrown out of one game in around the fifth inning. Then he got thrown out of the next game while presenting the lineup card because he was still so flipped off from the night before. He managed to last the entire next game, but the following night, the Indians were getting blown out early, and Lasorda was so crazed, he got ejected from that game, too.

And in Termite Palace, the visiting team’s clubhouse was maybe a hundred feet beyond the center-field fence. So it’s not like if you got thrown out, you could walk back from the clubhouse through a tunnel and sneak peeks at the action and relay instructions from just behind the dugout. Here you had to walk across the field to the center-field fence—which was 430 feet from home plate—and then walk another hundred feet, with the crowd serenading you the whole way. It was the reverse of a relief pitcher coming in from the bullpen. Oh, by the way, the umpiring crew that threw Lasorda out all those nights included Bruce Froemming, who would go on to have a thirty-seven-year career in the majors, the longest tenure of any umpire in history.

Spokane’s best player in 1970 was not Buckner, Garvey, Lopes, or Russell. It was a young, tremendously gifted shortstop with speed and power and a dash of panache who’d been such a great all-around athlete that he’d been recruited to potentially replace O. J. Simpson as USC’s tailback. His name was Bobby Valentine. In 1970, Valentine would be named MVP of the Pacific Coast League. As the season wound down, he was neck-and-neck for the league batting title with Islanders outfielder Winston Llenas (pronounced YAY-nuss).

With the regular season drawing to a close and the team playing well, I went on the road for the first time that year, joining the team in Tucson and Phoenix, where the Islanders—several days before the end of the season—clinched the PCL South Division title. Spokane had clinched the North Division title as well, setting up a matchup in the league championship series. It was Hawaii’s first-ever appearance in the PCL playoffs, and because the team was so popular and drawing so well, the league decided to extend what would normally have been a best-of-five-game series to a best-of-seven. But first, as the regular season wound down, there was still the suspense of the batting title.

Coming down to the last day, our guy, Llenas, and their guy, Valentine, were in a virtual tie. I was now back in Honolulu, again re-creating the final regular season games that had no impact on the standings. On the very last day of the season, we had heard from Spokane—and remember, this is through rudimentary communication—that Valentine had gotten two hits with the help of very liberal hometown official scoring. When I heard about this, I made a big deal of it during our re-creation. “Llenas should have won the batting title, but because of some local-yokel scoring decisions, Valentine has won the batting title!” So to everyone listening in Hawaii, I had helped turn Valentine into a major villain.

A couple of days later, in the championship series to decide the Pacific Coast League title, the Islanders opened in Spokane, and we were televising the games back to Hawaii. The production was so cheap that we had only four cameras, and two of them went caput early in the game. Apollo 11 had sent better-looking pictures back from the moon fourteen months earlier. We lost both games, 5–3 and 12–4.

So the Islanders headed back to Hawaii, down two games to none. The fans were already upset and booed Valentine vigorously every time he came up to bat. Spokane won Game 3, 5–0. Now the bloom was almost entirely off the rose and the Islanders, this team that was so good during the regular season, were about to get swept. And who leads off in Game 4? Bobby Valentine. The crowd continued to take all of its frustrations out on him. We had a pitcher, Greg Washburn, who had appeared in a few games for the California Angels the year before. On the first pitch of the game, Washburn threw a fastball and hit Valentine squarely in the face. To this day, I can still hear that sound in my mind’s ear—it was just sickening. Valentine was splayed in the batter’s box and ended up in a local hospital for several days.

I remember trying to tell myself,
I didn’t create this.
But I felt an overwhelming sense of guilt. I had helped make Bobby Valentine this monster. And now he was laid out in the dirt. Fans would always talk about Bobby’s star-crossed career, and the injuries that cost him the chance to become the player most people thought he would be. This was the start of that. He was twenty years old at the time. I was twenty-four. It made me think about getting everything I would say on the air
exactly
right. It’s so much easier today to collect and validate facts. I had based an assumption on hearsay—there was no video (or other proof) that the official scorer in Spokane had really done anything odious. I had embellished without verifying. It would turn out to be a career lesson for me. Get it right.

ON THURSDAY, FEBRUARY 12,
1970, I had a very nervous wife. Linda was pregnant and though she was three weeks short of her due date, she felt like she was ready to go into labor. She was also superstitious. She either wanted to give birth right then, or hold off until Saturday. She didn’t want to have her baby born on Friday the Thirteenth. But nature ran its course and Steven Scott Michaels—I wanted a Hawaiian middle name, Linda didn’t; as any husband knows, you pick your battles
—
was born on Friday, February 13, 1970, at Kapi’olani Hospital in Honolulu, the same hospital where Barack Obama had been born about a decade earlier. (Whenever the Obama “birther” debate arises, I remind Steven that we
do
have his birth certificate.)

Becoming a father for the first time was incredible. I’d come home and just stare at this infant in the crib. In April, after the baseball season had started, I invited my boss, Jack Quinn, and Chuck Tanner, the Islanders’ manager, to the apartment for dinner. I can still see Chuck, who at that time was forty-one years old, had played in the majors for eight years, and would go on to manage the “We Are Family” 1979 world champion Pirates, cuchee-cooing Steven. We took the baby to the ballpark as well. It’s ironic to realize how much fatherhood and parental norms have changed. If a ballplayer was on the road in those years, and his wife went into labor, the player almost always stayed on the road. Steven was born at 8:30
A
.
M
. that Friday, and ten hours later, I called a high school basketball game. Thank God I wasn’t away. My daughter’s birth, however, would turn out to be a different tale—more on that later.

Then, as now, to make it in broadcasting it was important to get “reps”—to get on the air as much as possible. It’s like a baseball player getting at bats. Simulated games aren’t the same as real games. The more you’re out there—under the lights, in real game situations—the more comfortable you get, the more nuances of the trade you learn, the more skilled you get at handling curveballs—literally for a ballplayer, and figuratively for a broadcaster.

In Hawaii, I got plenty of reps on radio and television. The Islanders played seventy-three home games each season. I did five high school and/or University of Hawaii football games a weekend for three months in each of my three years there. That’s around 180 games. If you were working for an NFL team, that’s a decade’s worth of work. And when you factor in high school, University of Hawaii, and Armed Forces League contests, I called roughly seventy-five basketball games a year as well. I often worked by myself, but worked from time to time with a popular figure in Honolulu, Chuck Leahey.

There were times I would call four straight games during the Hawaii state high school basketball tournament. We would stay on the air between games and during halftimes, so when I was on my own, I would yack for ten straight hours. Invariably, Ephraim “Red” Rocha, the University of Hawaii head basketball coach, would be at the games, scouting local prospects. He was a former NBA player whom I remembered watching when he was on the Syracuse Nationals (who in 1963 became the Philadelphia 76ers). He was also a nonstop talker who could give a woodpecker a headache. So when I needed a bathroom break or wanted to get a hot dog, I would grab Red, have him put on a headset, and tell him to keep talking until I came back to the table. Couldn’t have done it without him.

One night in 1969, Long Beach State was in town to play the University of Hawaii and they had a young coach on the rise. Before the game, the coach came up to me and introduced himself. “You’re doing a great job,” he said. I was thrilled, but wondered how he had any idea. How did he know about me? It turned out he had been driving around the island the night before and happened to tune in to a high school game on the car radio. It was a reminder—you
never
know who is listening or watching. The coach’s name: Jerry Tarkanian.

I was also working at a local television station, KHVH, the ABC affiliate in Honolulu, delivering the sports report on the six and ten o’clock news every night. I would do the six o’clock show, race to the stadium or arena, depending on the time of year, to do baseball, football, or basketball, and then head back to the studio for the late news.

Hawaii natives have an expression for Californians, “dumb coast haole” (HOW-lee), which basically translates to “outsider.” I didn’t want that to be me. One thing I did to win favor with the locals: I went to great lengths to pronounce every name correctly. You lose credibility with the audience if you call LeBron James
Lee Bron,
or Robert Griffin III
Robert Griffith III
. But lots of Samoan or Filipino or native Hawaiian names aren’t that easy or obvious to pronounce correctly. So I’d often call a parent of a high school player to have them pronounce the name for me. When you’re doing a McKinley High School basketball game, with turnovers galore and possessions changing every few seconds, and you can identify five Samoan players running a fast break—and get it right—it’s a beautiful melody. What I learned was if you screwed it up, you’d often hear from the family. On the flip side, they would really appreciate that you took the extra effort to get it right.

Looking back on my work schedule in Hawaii, it was crazy, and should have been exhausting. But I loved every minute of it. I got reps. I got experience. I was getting a nice reputation. I got better. And while talent is important, it helps to have good fortune. I thought the job with the Lakers was my Big Break. It turned out to be a mini-disaster. But ultimately, I wound up in the right place at the right time. One call from Hawaii and next thing I knew, I was not only with Islanders and working for a great boss, Jack Quinn, but also announcing dozens of other basketball and football games and appearing on television twice a day. I was getting the equivalent of five years’ experience for every one year on the calendar.

Some other opportunities came my way, too. In 1969 the show
Hawaii Five-O
was in its second season and starting to gain widespread popularity. The exteriors were filmed all over Oahu and many of the interior scenes shot at Diamond Head Studios. CBS had to consider the expense of flying cast members back and forth between Hawaii and the mainland. Jack Lord and James MacArthur were in Hawaii the majority of the time. To fill other small roles, though, they would often “borrow” members of the local media.