Hayes’ enviable spot with NBC crew
What a football fairy tale: Imagine 50-yard-line seats to two dozen NFL games every season — not just any matchups, but NBC’s star-studded Sunday night slate, a schedule more loaded than a Scorsese mob movie.
“Malibu” Kelly Hayes would like to think he’s earned it — after all the airports and the nondescript hotels. But he still pinches himself now and then, knowing he somehow landed in the NFL version of Camelot.
The way a surgeon is surrounded by assistants, so is Al Michaels. There’s stat man George Hill, and the affable and sneaky-wise Cris Collinsworth. In his earpiece, producer Fred Gaudelli and director Drew Esocoff.
And at the announcer’s left elbow there’s also Hayes, who’s been quietly assisting Michaels through 11 Super Bowls, helping him “spot” the receivers and tacklers who made the play, in the microburst moments of live football.
In fact, Thursday night starts the 30th season of his NFL partnership with Michaels, a run that Hayes says has not featured a harsh word despite what hit shows can do to couples (think Lucy and Desi, Hawkeye and Trapper John).
“It isn’t so much the preponderance of information, it’s playing the right song,” Hayes explains of “Sunday Night Football’s” success. (The NFL season opener will see Michaels and crew on a weeknight.)
“It’s quality control,” Michaels says of Hayes’ role as his second set of eyes. “We pretty much started out with the fundamentals ... who carried the ball, who made the tackle. What Kelly does now is before the play, helping me keep track of who’s in and out of the game.”
Hence, the split-second call of Malcolm Butler’s Super Bowl interception, an announcer’s equivalent of spotting a rufous-headed hornbill. Not that Michaels needs more accolades, but who nails that but him? And it came with a key assist from his seeing-eye sidekick.
“Still, to this day, when you say ‘Malibu’ Kelly Hayes, they’re still looking for an 18-year-old blond girl,” Hayes jokes about how evocative his name is of sand and sea.
Indeed, Hayes, 59, is as California as high surf. Raised in Malibu Canyon, he came of age playing Pop Warner in Venice, then wide receiver at Palisades High, against the likes of Warren Moon and Wendell Tyler.
As a youngster, Hayes would also spend autumn evenings peering through binoculars at USC games, developing an eye for football’s feints and misfires.
He went on to Boston University, where he managed to earn a shot spotting for Michaels at a college game.
“So I showed up in Lincoln,” Hayes says. “Game was Penn State versus Nebraska. ... I remember being scared to death.”
Test passed. The college senior did well enough to earn a weekly job. Four decades later, his long run is part of broadcasting lore.
To pay the rent, Hayes had a series of day jobs, selling ads for magazines, including Penthouse, then starting his own sports production company. On weekends, he’d jet off to the best part-time gig a football fan could ever have, becoming famous during the end-of-telecast thank-you’s.
“And thanks to ‘Malibu’ Kelly Hayes, our spotter in the booth” became such a staple that Barry Switzer once used it as a funny reference in a postgame news conference.
In 1993, Hayes cashed out of the successful production company and moved with his wife, Linda, to Colorado, where he would fill his days skiing and penning wine columns for the Aspen Times.
Wait — what? Timeout. A wine column in Aspen? Don’t you almost hate this guy? What an absurdist series of lucky breaks. I mean, in college he met a girl on Halloween night; she moved in the next day, and they’ve been married 37 years.
As Michaels likes to say: “You can’t make this up.”
Admittedly obsessive, Hayes also jogs every day, including pregame runs around stadiums. By gawd, Kelly Hayes might be a real-life Forrest Gump.
But lots of guys catch a break, then muck it up. In Hayes’ case, he’s worked 650 straight games without a miss — or a major miscue. In Super Bowl XXXIV’s tense final moments, when the Rams’ Mike Jones chased down the Titans’ Kevin Dyson on the one-inch line, Hayes managed to grab their names and license plates.
“Point is, I’m very consistent,” he says.
And what a gig he has locked into — the franchise among franchises. Not since “The Ed Sullivan Show” have families had something to rally around on Sunday evenings. “Sunday Night Football” is such a well-crafted hit that it could last forever.
Like Hayes, running, running, running — in perpetuity, as fairy tales often do.