Back in booth
After a brief break, NBC’s Al Michaels returns in Minnesota, where he called his first NFL game,
“I feel tremendously fresh now. I don’t want to say necessarily refreshed, because I was doing fine.” Al Michaels, on his brief hiatus from calling games this season
Al Michaels’ NFL broadcast career was born in Minnesota 45 years ago — and when he returns, he’s borne back ceaselessly into the past.
The paraphrase is from F. Scott Fitzgerald, who was born in St. Paul. Michaels will broadcast the Dallas Cowboys vs. Minnesota Vikings at U.S. Bank Stadium in Minneapolis on NBC’s Thursday
Night Football — and his thoughts will be borne back to 1971, when circumstance having to do with the baseball playoffs sent him to Metropolitan Stadium in Bloomington for a Buffalo Bills-Vikings game.
Hardly anyone saw that game on TV. It aired only on a UHF channel in Buffalo, by Michaels’ memory. Fast-forward 41⁄ dec2 ades, and Michaels has broadcast more than 650 NFL games in prime time, including the most watched show in American television history, 2015’s Super Bowl XLIX. Could he have imagined all that when he and Johnny Morris broadcast that desultory Bills-Vikes game?
“No way,” Michaels tells USA TODAY Sports with a hearty laugh. “It seems like some other person did it, not me.”
Michaels had never been to Minneapolis before that little-remembered game, but by now the Twin Cities are an old friend. Thursday will mark his fourth game in Minneapolis since Dec. 27, most for him in any NFL city during that span. He’s broadcast dozens of Twins and Vikings games over a storied career, including the 1987 World Series, plus a U.S. Olympic hockey exhibition game at the old Met Center before the 1988 Calgary Games and 1991’s U.S. Figure Skating Championships at the Target Center.
The cherry on top, Michaels says, is that he took Dennis Miller to his first hockey game at Excel Center in St. Paul — Los Angeles Kings vs. Minnesota Wild — in 2001, when Miller was an analyst on Monday Night Football. One imagines Miller telling Sylvia Plath one-liners as Michaels explains Ian Laperriere one-timers.
Thursday’s NFL game will be Michaels’ first since he took off three games in eight days — Sunday, Thursday, Sunday — over Thanksgiving week. He called it, with characteristic suavity, his bye week. At 72, Michaels figured he deserved a small break from a season’s worth of grinding travel.
“I feel tremendously fresh now,” Michaels says. “I don’t want to say necessarily refreshed, because I was doing fine.”
He’d been facing 17 games in 17 cities over 57 days without getting back to his home in Los Angeles, he says, or getting back only a couple of times for about 36 hours.
“So we looked at the thing and said, ‘Hey, why don’t we give you a little time off ?’ ” Michaels says. “It was my choice at that point. And I said, ‘That sounds good to me.’ Because I just didn’t want to get frazzled to the point where — if you get too tired, and it begins to show on the air, and I have too much pride about Sunday Night
Football and what the show has become.”
So Michaels did what much of the rest of the nation does — he watched. He praises Mike Tirico’s performance in his stead — “Look, I didn’t have to watch these games; I’ve watched Mike for years and he is damn good” — as well as the rest of his esteemed colleagues.
Today, Michaels’ distinctive voice is primarily associated with prime-time football, but he calls baseball his first love. He began his career with the Hawaii Islanders of the Class AAA Pacific Coast League in the late 1960s. When the Cincinnati Reds were looking for a broadcaster, NBC Sports’ Chet Simmons recommended Michaels. When Simmons needed someone to do NFL games during 1971’s baseball playoffs — with Curt Gowdy and Jim Simpson calling MLB rather than NFL — Michaels jumped at the chance.
“It’s way before blackouts were lifted, so the game doesn’t even go to the Minneapolis market,” Michaels recalls. “It goes, point to point, to Buffalo. But the NBC station in Buffalo had to show baseball, so they farmed us out to a UHF channel. … It would be, in the equivalence of today, the No. 5 regional game on CBS or Fox, which would go to a small sliver of the country.”
Michaels, blessed with the gift of instant recall, says he thinks the Vikings won in a shutout and that Bills running back O.J. Simpson had an off day. Let the record show that the Vikes won 19-0 and Simpson ran for 45 yards on 12 carries.
Two weeks later, Michaels broadcast his second NFL game: Bills vs. New York Jets at Shea Stadium in New York.
“All I remember is Buffalo lost that game, too,” he says. “I remember thinking, ‘ I’m doing the NFL. How cool is this?’ ”
Cooler things lay ahead. Do you believe in miracles?
That’s how Michaels called the closing seconds of the U.S. Olympic hockey team’s upset of the mighty Soviet Union in the 1980 Lake Placid Games.
“Not only is it the highlight” of his career, Michaels says, “it’s on a shelf so high that I could never reach it. I couldn’t think of anything that could possibly top that.”
Michaels was on air setting the scene for the 1989 World Series when an earthquake struck. He turned into a newsman for ABC in the ensuing 12 hours.
The most surreal moment of his career, Michaels says, was the low-speed police chase of Simpson’s white Ford Bronco on California freeways in 1994. The man Michaels had covered in his first NFL broadcast had since become a neighbor, colleague and tennis partner — and, now, a murder suspect.
“What’s ironic is, what am I best known for, in the eyes of a lot of people?” Michaels says. “Here I am, baseball is my first love, I’ve done a ton of it” — and now a ton of NFL games, too — “and I’m known for a hockey game, an earthquake and an O.J. chase.”
F. Scott Fitzgerald is a worthy symbol of Michaels’ first NFL broadcast: Fitzgerald spent most of his youth in St. Paul and in Buffalo.
Fitzgerald famously said there are no second acts in American lives. Michaels begins the second act of his NFL season Thursday.
“It is with a great deal of pride,” he says, “that I go back and hit the hamster wheel again.”