March 16, 2022 • 47 mins
Host Andrea Kremer takes us back to 2007 when NFL Films Steve Sabol interviewed Broadcast legend Al Michaels. Steve starts by asking Al about his start in broadcasting and the advice he was given by those around him. Al talks about the art of doing play by play and emulating the voices that he grew up with while looking to avoid tired cliches. In the booth, Al explains what he wants from an analyst and the ability to explain everything you're seeing in a way that the audience can understand. Steve recalls some of the biggest moments of Al's football career such his Super Bowl call of Scott Norwood's 'wide right' FG. Al also walks us through joining Monday Night Football and even being 'traded' from ABC to NBC.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:04):
Welcome to NFL Films Tells from the Vault. I'm your host,
Hall of Fame journalist Andrea Kramer. On this podcast, I
get to do something so cool. I take you inside
the NFL Films Vault to unearth some of the greatest
interviews ever done by the late legendary Steve Sable and
as president of NFL Films for five decades, he conducted
(00:26):
over two hundred interviews with some of football's most iconic figures.
Today's a special one for me, folks. As I've mentioned
to you before, I started my career at NFL Films
as a producer, hence my relationship with Steve Well. Nearly
two decades later, I had the pleasure of working with
Al Michael's on Sunday Night Football. So my world's truly
(00:48):
intersect here as we bring you Steve's two thousand seven
interview with the great Al Michaels. Yea from the gun
(01:08):
Stewy sail gets You're like, tell me gets to the land.
It's picked up. After going along, there's a flag flowing
on the one back James Harrison for one of back
at harrassing his parents, bod Field Harrison going down to
Sawmon Harrison saying his speed Harrison's game to go all
the way. You're waiting for the offasty deep there Falk's
(01:29):
down a signal. I pride myself on being an objective journalist,
but this is one of those oh so rare moments
when objectivity kind of goes off the rails. These days,
we throw around the Appalachian Goat, the greatest of all time,
pretty loosely. There are goat emojis, we have list of
goals about who's the goat, and of course it's all
(01:50):
quite subjective, but I challenge anyone to question that Al
Michaels is the greatest play by play voice of all time.
But he's so uch more than just a voice, even though,
of course when you hear those melofluous tones you always
think big event. When I joined Sunday Night Football in
two thousand six, I've never been a sideline reporter before,
(02:12):
so Al and I had lunch and he told me
you are literally and figuratively somewhere no one else is
bring us there. It was the start of many valuable
lessons I'd learned from Al, but it also illustrated his
deep knowledge and understanding of broadcasting communication with his audience, knowing,
as we say, what makes great TV. Al's career spans
(02:37):
six decades. His first NFL game was in nineteen seventy three,
but beginning in nineties six, when he debuted on Monday
Night Football, Al became synonymous with those big games in
the NFL, and in February he called what's most likely
his last Super Bowl with NBC. The interview you're about
to hear took place the summer following Al's first season
(02:58):
calling Sunday Night foot Ball on NBC, and we begin
today's interview where else at the beginning of Al's remarkable career.
So let's go to the vault for Steve Sable and
Al Michael's. Yeah. I was just thinking when when when
I started in the in the business, I remember somebody
telling me given me advice and they were saying that,
(03:21):
you know when when you your first cut is always
your best, and it was totally wrong. Can you remember
when you started out somebody got ahold of you and said, Al,
you want to be in this business, here's some advice,
and it was totally wrong. Yeah, everybody seems to be
a genius early on in your career and everybody wants
you to, you know, do what they think has has
(03:44):
worked best for them, especially if they've they've been in
the business. And I think most people tell you, you you know,
be yourself, But what does what does that mean? I mean,
you don't even know. Most people don't even a bad
joke someone's that gave him some bad advice be yourself. Well,
you're saying you're not yourself when we see you, or
(04:06):
you are? You know, I am myself now but earlier,
you know. It's it's funny I've been in the business
for so long that that, I mean, people look to
me to give them advice and have for a long time.
Agan I got in as a kid, and I've been
announcing sports since I was a freshman in college, so
I'm seventeen years old, so I'm pretty much learning on
(04:27):
the fly. And I learned from the guys that I
listened to as a kid, going all the way back
to when I was growing up in Brooklyn, and Vince
Scully was there, and Red Barbara was there, and another
great announcer by the name of Connie Desmond who very
few people remember. And Mel Allen is doing the Yankees,
and Russ Hodges is doing the Giants, and Jim Woods
(04:48):
is there as well, so I learned from them. And
I was able to pick up Kurt Goudy on the
radio because he was doing the Red Sox games and
I could pick it up in New York. So that's
how I learned. And what you try to do, I
think when you get into business very young, is to
emulate the people that you really admire and maybe take
the best from from each of them. And I think
I was able to do that. When you say emulate,
(05:09):
you mean they're phrasing, the timber of their voice, how
much they talk, what are the things that you would
have me like all of those things because you you
you listen to how they they structure the game. And
I'm not sure you know when you're sixteen or fifteen
or fourteen years old and you're listening and you're thinking
about wanting to do this, uh down the line, that
you really are that you completely understand what it is
(05:32):
you're trying to listen to. But you do know that
there's a pattern, and there's a rhythm, and there's there's
uh almost an art form, and you're hearing it and
you're absorbing it, and just in the way that certain
things would be described, how they would go about presenting
information and all of that. And consciously, I don't think
(05:52):
you're thinking about what they're doing in terms of structuring
the game, but you're hearing them, and you're hearing them
every night, as I did as a kid. And so
then when you finally go on the air as I
did as a freshman at Arizona State, and I'm announcing
my first ever football game in September of nineteen sixty
two on a campus station Colorado State at Arizona State,
you know, going to about four people who can pick
(06:15):
it up who are near the boiler room in the
women's dorm. I mean, that's about how far our signal
was carried at that point. I'm just trying to in
my in my ear here the announcers that I liked
and pretty much parrot the way they would say things,
And that's how you get started. And then from from
that base, I think you begin to refine certain things,
(06:36):
and then you do become yourself at a certain point.
But when you begin, it's like sitting down to write
something or to narrate something. You you have a template
in mind, and that template very often is going to
come from what you have heard, because otherwise you're reinventing
the wheel. You're doing something that nobody else has ever done,
and you can't do that, especially not at the age
(06:56):
of seventeen. What did you think of the first time
you heard Howard Cosell. First time I heard Howard Coseell,
I think Howard was on the radio in New York,
and I knew it was very different, and uh, he
was unlike any anybody else I had heard, So I
understood what he was doing in the sense that he
wasn't a conventional play by play person, obviously he was.
(07:18):
He he was more of a fellow looking into the
social fabric of sports, and nobody was really doing it
at that particular time. And he was uh confrontational with
very with a lot of his subjects. Uh. And it
is in a way it was when I heard him,
and I was very young, it was a little off
(07:40):
putting to me, because I think when you grow up,
especially in the area in which I grew up, you
want to love sports unconditionally, and you don't want to
see any warts in sports, and you certainly don't want
to see the blemishes or any of the bad things.
I mean, we've we've almost come full circle right now.
I mean, when I think one of the things kids
(08:01):
of my generation uh grew up loving sports for was
the fact that it was so clean and pure, at
least in your mind, because maybe you had a naivete
and you didn't understand all of the permutations. So you
just loved the games, and you loved watching the athletes,
and you loved the competition. And now all of a sudden,
we're in a different era, you know, two generations later,
(08:23):
where we're into every every aspect of every sport, and
a lot of it is very unseemly, but still at
its core, I think people love sports because you're seeing
the best of the best competing at the highest levels.
And so going back to you know, the co Cell situation,
I mean, Howard was very good for for the business.
He was very good for for people to to to
(08:45):
to have as a as a voice to bring to
the for certain things that they needed to to know
to have a better understanding of sport within the fabric
of society. Well, when it came to doing an actual
game itself, a lot people didn't want to hear Howard
Coachell because there comes a point when the game is
being played, when you just want to watch the game,
(09:07):
you don't hear about anything else. Well, do you feel
uncomfortable sometimes now the way sports television is going, Like
you just said that there were things that are that
you and I are from the same era that that
are now brought forth and you just I don't want
to hear that. I don't want to know about that.
But in your position, you're almost required to to sort
of dip into that, into that pulled out and bring
(09:29):
out Do you feel uncomfortable doing that? Or do you say, Look,
this is the way the job is and I've got
to do with that. I think about that a lot, Steve,
and I think that you you you have to understand
that why is somebody watching something? Now? If you're gonna
watch a football game, that means you want to watch
the game. If you want to watch a show like
Outside the Lines on ESPN, that's a different animal. Now
(09:53):
you're watching that because they can take you to places
that is comfortable for the viewer, because that's what you
fact if you if you're going to turn on a
program like that, that's what they deal with. They deal
with the issues, and they have the time to deal
with the issues. If you're doing the game, I find
that I have to get in and out quickly. There
are things that must be addressed because they are important
(10:17):
in the context of the game, but you can't belabor them,
and you can't I can't sit there and say, you
know what, I'm going to devote the next two and
a half minutes to this topic. You can't because in
those two and a half minutes they will run about
seven or eight plays. There'll be a change of possession,
there'll be a six d yard passed down the field,
There'll be a challenge. You can't do that, So it's
(10:37):
very disjointed. There's a frustration for me in this business,
and that is there are so many things that you
want to say, so many stories you want to tell,
so many things that are so important. But once the
game is underway, you have to be able to dart
in and dart out, make it loose it for the viewer,
make it understandable to them, explain why this is important.
But you have to do it very deftly, and you
(10:58):
have to do it very quick. So there's an enormous
difference between the game itself and all of the shows
that surround the game. How do you avoid cliches? Because
that's one thing that all of us at NFL Films
are amazed that that you never hear Al Michael say,
put points on the board, or these guys have to
step up, or you know, all the things that you
hear all the time. I mean, is that just something
(11:20):
that you've erased from your mind there, or is you
make a conscious effort like that, or or is just
it's it's never part of your vocabulary at all. They
say that. You know, see, I've been doing this for
so long that there were times when I I almost
have to consciously figure out a different way to say something.
And as a consequence of if the only thing that
pops into my mind is something that I've heard a
(11:42):
million times and is a cliche, I won't say anything.
I mean, it's like you feel this belt right right right,
and you need a pepto business right now. It's not
to say I mean, there are there are times, I mean,
something will come out and I'll think to myself, how
did I say that? Or why did I say that?
That's ridiculous. It couldn't have found something better. But you know,
(12:02):
when you're dealing with live television, and I've done, you know,
thousands of hours of love of television. It just can't
be perfect. I mean, you're gonna say certain things that
you wish you could have back. And believe me, there
there have been a ton of times in my career
when you know, half a second later you're thinking to yourself,
I couldn't have said that better, or why I missed
this or I missed that. But it's a case of
(12:23):
I guess, you know, through the years, I've seen so
many telecasts of so many games in so many sports,
um and I know what I like and I know
what I don't like. And I guess in growing up,
you know, I've heard every cliche in the world, and
and in a in a way when I hear something
and I'm thinking to myself, no, no, no, don't don't
(12:43):
go there. I just don't let my brain go to
go to to to that, to that phrase, or or
say something that I think I'm gonna be embarrassed by
or or just upset with myself for saying. So it
really just comes comes naturally, and that's how it happens.
What about an opinion that you might have given that
(13:03):
after it comes out. Is there a little voices as oh,
I don't think I should have said that, or or
as an opinion much more considered, even though, as you said,
you're on live television, and uh, there's sometimes has to
be I guess, the speed bump between your brain and
your mouth. But there's gotta been times where you you've
you've felt passionately about something and you said it, You've
(13:26):
given an opinion, and then later maybe he said, I
don't know whether I should have said that or not.
You know less and less so now even the reason
for that is that it's become so much more accepted
to give your opinion in the middle of the game.
And what I'll try to do is if I see
something and I'm not saying it because I want people
(13:47):
to think, well, you know, this is what I think.
It's more in it's more a case of I'm trying
to make something um just seem uh more or annected
to people in the sense that hey, I just saw
something that you might not have seen, so let me
tell you what I think just happened here. And sometimes
(14:10):
that's presumption is sometimes people will have seen it, but
very often you know through the body of experience and
being at the game itself as opposed to being a
viewer at home on your couch. I have access to
and can see certain things that I know other people
may not have seen. And at that point I like
to come in and say, hey, you know what just
happened here, or here's what I think happened, or you know,
(14:31):
here's the background here. So I always try to make
sure if I have an opinion, it's grounded and based
on facts, and I've got the fact straight. And you
may not agree with my opinion, but let me just
tell you this, here's the base, and I'm working from
the base. I'm not just spewing out garbage. Has there
ever been a time when you've got a call from
(14:52):
an owner or a player criticizing something that you've said.
There have been times through the years where what's happened
is very often and I can trace this to, uh,
to the fact that the player in question has almost
never heard what you said. Somebody tells them right. And
(15:13):
in fifteen or twenty years ago, before everybody had a
VCR or access to some sort of a a replay system, UH,
it was hard because you know, you you couldn't say, hey,
go back and look at the tape, or here's the tape.
Now it's easy. Now when when when these these these
things happen? And I go all the way back in baseball,
(15:34):
I remember having done the nineteen World Series between Kansas
City and St. Louis, and Ozzie Smith did not have
a very good World Series. And uh, I can't remember
what the exact numbers. We're going to think at one
point he might have been like one for seventeen. And
the next year we're doing a Monday night baseball game
and he confronts me and he says, hey, he says, uh,
(15:57):
you said I stunk. I said, excuse me, I said,
I gave I gave the numbers as the US. Yeah. Well,
I talked to a lot of people. They said, you
said I stuncked. I said, I didn't say get stunk.
I said, in fact, if you can provide or come
up with a a piece of evidence in which you
hear me say you stunk, I'll give you a million dollars. Well,
(16:18):
you don't want to anyway, you get in, you get
into these things with these and what happens is if
their performance is not what they wanted to be, they
hear something from other people. I know how this thing works,
but you don't wants to you deal with it. And
these days, I mean, there's so much that goes on
on the internet, sports radio and all that stuff. I mean,
(16:38):
we're like pussy cats in that world. I mean, at
least we have there's some semblance of responsibility in what
we do. So I would never get to the point
where I would completely destroy a guy and go into
his personal life and all of the rest. You just
don't do that. But I've always been driven by just
be fair and be honest. Now, it may not be
(17:01):
something that a coach wants to hear, or an executive
wants to hear, or a player wants you to talk about,
but it's there. It's there, and it's important and if
you are accurate, If you're accurate, at least you can
have a discussion with that person or those people and say, hey,
wait a minute, let's go back here and look at this. Okay,
what was wrong? Was it? Was there a fact that
(17:23):
was wrong? And very often there isn't. They're just upset.
And I can understand that because when nobody likes to
be criticized, nobody likes to have the candle held up
to them in a very negative light. I get it,
but sometimes it's necessary. You just don't do it indiscriminately.
It has to be done in a situation where what
you're talking about is germane and relevant to a game,
(17:45):
to a season, to a franchise. Then it's important. I
hate to state the obvious, and I really hope you
feel the same way. But what you're hearing is like
a master class in broadcasting. So I'll talked about cliches,
and it's not just that he hated using them, but
he also disdained using what he called football speak. So
(18:07):
when I was taking over being the analyst on Amazon
Thursday Night Football, of course I talked to Al and
he says to me, the broadcasters and of the audience
have no idea what they're talking about, but they think
it sounds really cool. You know this language of football
a gaps and fire zones and jet sweeps and ghosts motions.
(18:29):
And Al said to me, don't talk about it if
you can't explain it. So guess what I feel like,
I'm always getting a masterclass and broadcasting from the great
Al Michaels. When we come back, we'll share with you
some of Al's most memorable calls. Stay tuned, Welcome back
(18:51):
to Tales from the Vault. I don't usually do this,
but spoiler alert. Steve's next question to Al was how
Al would want someone to describe him to someone who's
never worked with him. Well, as someone who has worked
with Al, there's probably not enough time for me to
describe him. But three things come to mind. Number One,
(19:11):
he's got this incredible facility with language. Secondly, he's got
a memory for the most minute details. And he is
meticulous in both his preparation and in knowing the rules
of the game. I remember back in our first year
on Sunday Night Football two thousand and six was a
wild card game Seattle Dallas. Towards the end of the game,
(19:32):
there was a pretty controversial play. We go to commercial
and as Al is looking at the replace, he's literally
saying out loud, okay, let's take this one step at
a time, and he's going through the progression of the
play with all the rules, just to make sure that
not only was he correct, but that he could communicate
(19:53):
it correctly. If there was a young analyst that was
gonna work with you for the first time I didn't
know you, and I was going to give him a description,
and he's gonna say, geez, I'm gonna work without Michael's
How would you describe him? How would you want me
to describe describe you to this young kid who's gonna
(20:15):
work with you for the first time, that you're demanding
you're a perfectionist, be on time. What would be the
things that you would want this kid to be aware
of if he's gonna work with you for the first time.
I would say, make sure you come thoroughly prepared. I mean, actually,
that's really the most important thing. I don't want to
work ever have to work with somebody who I knew,
I didn't do all of the work. I want you
(20:36):
to come to the booth completely prepared, and there's no
excuse for not being prepared. It would be like going
to play a game. You're a quarterback and you don't
know all of the players, you haven't read all of
the playbook, you haven't done all of the grunt work.
I would say. The other thing is for somebody an
analyst coming off the field in particular, remember one thing.
(20:58):
You're no longer you football player. You are a broadcaster
and The really good analysts in this business are the
guys that have the mindset of I am in the
broadcasting business. I am not in the football playing business anymore.
I've played it. I know a lot about it. I
(21:19):
can bring a lot of things to the table because
of my experience of having played with teams and work
with various coaches and maybe even coached. But now I'm
in the broadcasting business and this is a different animal,
and it's not just good enough to go into the
booth and talk about rotating zones and zone blitzes and
all of the rest. That's fine, that's why you are there.
(21:41):
You're there to describe that, but understand how you should
describe that. Understand what everybody else on that crew is doing.
Understand how the tape truck operates, so that if you
want to talk about something, you have an idea whether
or not they can get to that in time or not.
So it's a matter of and as I say, when
you look at the Kreme Dolla creme, the guys at
(22:01):
the very top of this business, John Madden, of course,
my carent partner, being the prime example. When John stopped coaching,
he thought of himself more as a broadcaster than as
a coach, and that will always be a coach, even
though he hasn't coached for for almost three decades. He's
a Hall of Fame coach. But John is even better
as a broadcaster because he understands the business. He understands
(22:23):
what it is we're trying to do. He understands how
to communicate anybody. You can find ten thousand guys who
can come up and explain the zone blitz to you,
but very few of those ten thousand will be able
to put that into the type of of of containment
that will allow the viewer to get the most from that,
(22:45):
to understand that, to talk on the level whereviewer understands
exactly what's happening, and then presented in conjunction with what
the people in the truck are doing, so that everything
is seamless. Do you teach any courses for broadcasting? I don't.
I've been guest lecturer for a great course. You can
teach a good retirement that job. There there you go.
(23:07):
So is this a suggestion? But one thing that I
think that that that constantly amazes me about you is
that you're at your best in that two minute drill.
And I don't think anybody in all of football understands
clock management better than you do. And and we watch
(23:28):
games and we say, you know, christ Almos is better
than some of the coaches the way. Have you taken
a special amount of pride in that about understanding that
last two minutes and how the cluck the guys had
to bounce this? And I mean, I've never heard anybody
understand that and explain it as well as you do.
You know, it's it probably comes from I love sports,
and I've always loved sports, and I've always been fascinated
(23:50):
by the strategy of sports. So even when I was
very young, you know, I'd watch things and we think
to myself, well, what are they doing? And very often
you'd have a rooting interest, and if the team that
you were rooting for was doing things that you considered wrong,
I mean you'd be up off the couch going what
are you doing? So I I always tried to put
myself in the coach's head in that regard. And a
(24:13):
lot of this has to do with math and and
understanding you know, concepts of time and how much time
you have and where you want to use the time outs,
and it's a It's a funny thing. When I was
doing the Super Bowl in in Atlanta in nineteen after
the ninety nine season, where you know, Steve McNair got
the ball off for Tennessee, he's going down the field,
(24:34):
they're trying to tie the game would have sent the
Super Bowl into overtime for the first time ever, and
it became it was a very interesting thing where he
should use that time out and I was able to
you know, I went out on a limit. I said,
here's where I think he should use it, Here's where
I think he shouldn't use it. And it kind of
worked out the right way. He said, did get all
the way down to you know, the one yard line
when the game ended on a Mike Jones tackle of
(24:55):
Kevin Dyson. But that was the kind of thing where
it's a lot of fun to do that because you
know you're seeing something and you know they're seeing what
you're seeing, and and and to me, that was that
was a very satisfying thing because all of the things
that you know, I kind of gone out of the
limb about sort of came to fruition. Other times they don't.
And that's where you know, you know, you you were
(25:16):
talking about sometimes what coaches have come up to me
and have I wouldn't say criticized me, but you know
I've been a little harsh in certain situations. PIECEA didn't
work out for him, and I said, but then again,
and he was the situation. And more often than that,
they'll basically say, well, yeah, you know it's but you
know it's it's it's a lot tougher to do with it.
(25:37):
It is from your spot, and I'm going, well, sure
it is. Just want to jump in here with a thought.
I think that Al withstands any criticism because he's basically
the oracle. He's the voice of the NFL. His informed
opinions take on an outsized role. Between his years at
ABC and NBC, Michael's has called eleven Super Bowls. His
(25:59):
first was We're Bowl twenty two Washington versus Denver. Remember
how Washington spoiled the anointing of John Elway by putting
up thirty five second quarter points. Al made the names
Timmy Smith and Ricky Sanders famous. His second Super Bowl
made Buffalo Scott Norwood infamous, as the kicker missed the
potentially game winning field goal in the waning seconds of
(26:22):
Super Bowl and al put the term wide right in
the lexicon of sports. Now, Norwood tries to kick his
longest ever on grass forty seven yards eight seconds low,
(26:55):
No good, wide right. What what's your recollection of the
Norwood field goal? I remember feeling a great deal of
empathy for him, knowing, you know, when when he misses
the field goal, you know, he's going down in history
as a guy who will always have that attachment. And
(27:19):
at seven yards field goal is made probably less than
half the time in the National Football League. So when
people say, well, Scott Norwood blew the Super Bowl, not
not really. He had a chance to be the big hero.
It just didn't work out. It was a pretty good
kick to just you know why to the right. Remember
that Super Bowl. That was a different Super Bowl too,
because that was right after the start of Desert Storm
(27:45):
and the country it was. It was the first it
was the first time I drove up to a stadium
and there were big concrete barriers around the stadium six
or seven days before the game in the old Tampa Stadium,
And and that was a very disconcerting and unerving thing.
I mean, here we were in effect at war um,
(28:06):
we were you know, we did. We had invaded Iraq
to you know, to free the kuwaitis Um, and all
of a sudden, uh, this was you know, a war
that was taking place, of course thousands of miles away,
but you could feel the impact in the United States.
And this is you know, ten years before nine eleven,
so we're not even thinking about scenarios like that. But
(28:27):
it was. It was one of those things where there
were too many guys in uniform, there were too many
concrete barricades. It was a gray and murky day in Tampa.
It just didn't feel right. It didn't feel like the
celebration that the Super Bowl should be. Now, the game
turned out to be very good. The game turned out
to have a dramatic ending, but it was played with
(28:49):
that as as the backdrop. Of course, that was the
Whitney Houston Super Bowl as well, where you know, she
electrified everybody with her rendition of the anthem. But it
was it was a weird It was a weird game
because the rest of the world was in such not
quite disarrayed, but the country was in a different place
at that point, and and and we had it wasn't
(29:10):
it wasn't a case where everybody could sit down as
they do on the national holiday that is the Super
Bowl every year, and so and and get completely into
the game. We were worried about too many other things,
you know, snipers in the stadium and the whole thing.
So and I know that we we were we were
briefed by by federal officials, uh the night before the
game in terms of our Frankiffort and Dan Deduff and
(29:34):
I doing the game about you know what, what what
what we should do if we wound up in a
hostage situation. I'm thinking what I said, first of all,
how are we going to wind up in a hostage situation?
There's too much protection here. But just the fact that
these were some of the things you had to think
about before the game was very underving. You met your
Monday Night Football. What did it mean to you to
(29:55):
take over to become part of that announcing team that's
the most you know, the famous broadcast television the steak
um on the night football. What did that mean to
you when you became became part of that that tradition.
It came out of nowhere because it came at a
time when ABC was bought by cap Cities and we
(30:15):
had new management coming in and they were going to
take uh take control in n And I'd been there
for for ten years at that point, and I was
the number one announcer for baseball, and I was the
number two announcer for college football, and I did a
lot of great stuff on wide world of sports, and
I had the Olympic experience and in Lake Placid and
all of that. But it came out of nowhere and
(30:36):
Dennis Swanson took over for run Oiledge is the head
of ABC Sports. Ruin had been there for twenty years,
but Ruin was now concentrating on on news. Dennis Swantson
had come in and had taken over for Ruin oarlige.
I did not know Dennis Wantson, and I knew ruined
very well and he treated me extremely well. But all
of a sudden, I get a call the day after
(30:56):
Swanson takes over and he says, I'm going to come out,
and Dennis Lewin is gonna come out. Dennis was executive
with us at that time, and we want to talk
to you. And the next thing I know, Dennis comes
out and tells me I'm the announcer from Monday Night Football.
So it was a complete shock. Now, Monday Night was
going into it's seventeenth season at that point, you know,
(31:20):
Coasel had left the show, Meredith had been there, had gone,
had come back and was gone again, and the show
was fraying a little bit in terms of the ratings
and and and the pettina around it. So it was
a case I didn't know if I was taking over
a lame duck or what. I was very excited, but
I didn't know where the show was at that particular point.
(31:42):
And Cap Cities came in and they had a reputation
of being cheap, which they weren't as it turned out.
But at that point one of my good friends called
me up when I got the job and he said, congratulations,
you got invited to the orgy after the girls went
home because it looked like maybe this was going to
be the end of Monday Night Football. And I was
(32:03):
there too to to to bury it, to help to
help the funeral process. Well, as it turned out that,
you know, they renew the Rice in eight seven when
it looked like they might not, and and away we went,
and I got twenty years out of it, and I
gotta tell you, phenomenal. That's the fastest twenty years in
the history of mankind for any human being. It was
(32:24):
a phenomenal run. Uh. There was an excitement that surrounded
that show unlike anything else I've ever done in television.
You just know that when it's Monday Night, uh, that
it's the only game in town, and that people are
very excited about it, and as as exciting as Sunday
is and Sundays that you know, a football day and
a football night for for all of America. When Monday
(32:46):
Night was on ABC, it was very different because it
was it was the only game, and very often it
was it was either the best game of the weekend
or the second or third best game of the weekend.
And some of those games, you know, we're live in forever.
As as as classics, I mean the Giants against the
forty niners where each almost came in undefeated back in
(33:06):
each loss the week before. But the game that did
a phenomenal rating of course before I got there, Chicago
against Miami in highest rated Monday Night game in history.
So this was an American event, communal primetime event, and
there was a feeling in that stadium no matter where
it was on a Monday night, you know, I'd go
down on the field before the game, walk around an
(33:27):
hour and a half, two hours before the game, the
stadium begins to fill up, and there was an electricity
in that place. And it all dealt with the fact
that you know, you knew you were in a venue
were millions and millions of people We're going to gather
around their television sets and watch what was going to
take place on that field. So I, you know, I
look back on the twenty years that I did Monday
Night on ABC as as really an honor I was.
(33:49):
I was fortunate to get the job, and I feel
very honored that I was able to have the job
and wound up doing you know, well over two hundred
games and work with Frank for so many years, and
then with Dan Beuder for so many years, and then
Dan Fouts and John Madden at the end of that run.
But it was something special and I'm not sure they
(34:10):
could ever be recaptured again. Perhaps Al's greatest gift is
capturing the moment in the most memorable and scintillating way,
informing the audience while reflecting the feeling of a fan.
Of course, that's epitomized most by do you believe in miracles,
A call that transcended sports, a call that certainly defines
his career. But we're talking football here, so we have
(34:33):
to pull from the vault some of Al's best Monday
night football calls. Fake to Martin, then it is Jubble
and todd by Jumbo, Elliott Frits bar lays it up
for Freeman and it's incomplete? Or did he make the character?
(34:53):
What are they gonna roll? And he caught it? Touched out?
He did? What? And bowl? Jackson to the tent and
out in front at the air goes bowl and nobody
captures bow. It is can he get in? No, he cannot.
(35:19):
You know how you always hear that the goats of
the game play their best when it counts the most.
Well so too with Al Michaels. That last call we
heard was from Super Bowl thirty four when the St.
Louis ramsby the Titans. But don't forget that, even when
he was at NBC, he called Santonio Holmes the tiptoe
touchdown catch for the Steelers as they beat the Cardinals.
(35:39):
He called Malcolm Butler's game ceiling interception for the Patriots
when they held on to beat the Seahawks, and of
course this year, the amazing end of the Super Bowl
with Cooper Cups touchdown and Aaron Donald's final pull down
of Joe Burrow when we come back. We know that
Al Michaels tells great stories, but he's also been subject
(36:00):
of quite a few, such as the time he was
traded from ABC to NBC for a mascot. If you
don't know who Oz while the Rabbit is, you gotta
stay tuned for this one. Welcome back to Tales from
the Vault. In my experience, one of the greatest traits
(36:21):
of any broadcaster is his or her ability to sound
the same and be the same person in and out
of the booth. So to hear Al's spin a yarn
is as entertaining as his calls were memorable. Remember how
he mentioned that he has to be tight and concise
calling a game, Well, not so when telling a story
such as how he got to NBC after thirty years
(36:43):
at ABC. Al was under contract with ABC when Monday
Night Football was transitioning to ESPN. NBC was launching Sunday
Night Football and wanted to pair Al Michael's with John Madden,
Al's partner on Monday Night Football for all those years.
So what did NBC do? They orchestrated a trade of
(37:04):
sorts among the assets acquired by ABC in exchange for
Al Michael's four years of Ryder Cup rights, rights to
air Olympic highlights, and of course the right to reacquire
the likeness of Oswald the Rabbit when you were traded
to NBC. How did that work with Oswald the Rabbit?
(37:26):
I mean that Disney sold them the NBC and we're
sold back. How did that whole thing work out? That
was a strange title when you read Michael's Traded for
Oswald the Rabbit. I made the decision to stay with
Monday Night Football because I was given a deadline in
July of five, going into a lame duck season. John
Mann had already signed with with NBC. Our producer director
(37:48):
would subsequently signed with him at the time I had
to make a decision in oh five, I felt I
wasn't ready to make to pully the chord and leave
the Disney Corporation. And I also felt that it would
have been very bad form in a lane duck year
to walk out the door and be walking at the
door with everybody else and we were going into a
(38:09):
season which we were going to do the Super Bowl,
among other things. So I agree to stay when the
season comes to an end. And O five, I realized
that the best place for me would really be Sunday
Night at NBC, and it was available to me at
that point and go back to work with John and
and a lot of other very key people on our crew.
So I worked for ABC for thirty years, and I
(38:35):
went to the right people and I said, look, I said,
I know I'm signed to do Monday night football in
the future. I just don't think it's the right fit.
I would really appreciate the opportunity to go to NBC
and be with the people that I have been with
for a number of years, and I just think it
will work out better for everybody. There was a lot
(38:57):
of reluctance to let me do this, but I continue
to go down that path and and I was able
to get them to understand, Okay, maybe this would be
the best thing. If I don't want to be there
under the circumstances that they had developed to do Monday Night,
I would rather be at Sunday Night, Okay. So, in
(39:18):
conversations between Dick eversol and at NBC, and and the
people at at ABC and ESPN. They agreed to let
me out of my contract at ESPN, and there were
some stipulations where NBC had to give up certain rights
to coverage of the Ryder Cup and the Olympics mill
of that. At the very end of this thing, Bob Iger,
(39:41):
the head of Disney, knowing the Disney family and the
descendants of Walt Disney, had once had a conversation with
Walt's either niece or uh cousin or whatever, and she
had brought up the fact that the one thing that
always frosted the family was that Oswald, the Lucky Rabbit,
(40:05):
who was the predecessor of Mickey Mouse, was still somehow
in the Universal Studios vault, and was there any way
that we could get, you know, the Oswald character brought
back to his true home. So Iger laughed about it.
Ever so laughed about it. And it was the kind
of situation where, you know, it was kind of a
(40:27):
little unwieldy with me having signed with ESPN, now going
to go over to NBC. How did this happen? What's
going on behind the scenes, And to kind of take
the onus off it a little bit. They threw this
thing into the mix, and they talked to me about it,
and I said, what, you know, whatever it takes. I said, look,
I'm all for freeing animals anyway. So you know, my
my animal loving friends will will will enjoy this. And
(40:49):
you know, we don't want this guy locked up in
the vault somewhere. Lit him out. So we had a
lot of fun with it. I mean, it was just
kind of a little thing off on the side. The
press loves to run with stuff like this and winds
up on page piece and in the l a times
we all had, you know, it was it was all.
It was a lot of fun, it was. It was
a goof is what it was. But how much did
it have to do with the deal zero? I have
(41:11):
two more questions, and this is about the mechanics of
what goes through your mind when you're doing play by play,
because to me it seems so complex, and yet when
you're listen to you in the air, it seems so simple.
You know. Well, the key is preparation, any anticipation. You
have to go and prepared. You gotta have all your
ducks in a row and your facts in order. You
(41:32):
didn't have to anticipate what's going to happen. You have
to have a tremendous amount of clarity. I mean, all
of a sudden, you put the blinders on your like
a horse going into the store and gait and all
you're doing is looking straight ahead. It requires a lot
of concentration, requires a degree of communication with the people
around you, in particular the producer, who you're speaking back
(41:55):
and forth with a lot of the times. But I
think one of the I think really the key. The
key is too as you're doing this, trying to put
yourself in the position of the viewer. So you're doing
the game, but you're also viewing the game and very
often during a telecast, in addition to doing all of
(42:15):
the things that we have to do. And it's it
is going at warp speed. There's a lot of stuff
going on. And I can do it because I've done
this for years and years and years. But I also
trying to say to myself, Okay, the guys at home,
sitting back in his barka lounger, what does he need
to know right now? What is it that he's thinking about,
What is he interested in? What's overkilled? What's what? What?
(42:39):
What doesn't he know that that I can bring to
him that will enhance his enjoyment of the game, that
will be elucidating. So it's a subconscious thought, but it's there,
and I'm always trying to to do it's it's it's
it's a two way operation. I mean, I'm on this side,
but I'm trying to be on that side because when
I sit at home and I watch a game, I mean,
(43:01):
I am the viewer and I'm thinking, hey, look if
I'm in the booth, this is what I'm doing at
that point. So I always try to put myself in
the viewers position and try to figure out what it
is that will be beneficial to him, interesting, educational, and annoying,
and try obviously to stay away from that. So it's
(43:21):
it's a complex thing. It sounds more complex, I guess
than it is, only because I mean, to me, it's
all it's a second nature situation. But I think the key, Steve,
the key is really to be in the game, because
there's a lot of stuff going on around you, but
there is a game going on, So stay inside the
(43:41):
game and also pay a lot of attention, especially these
days more than ever with HDTV coming in right now,
and the quality that the technological quality is so good
that you have to pay a lot of attention to
what's on that screen at all times because if you're
looking away, somebody might he's something that you didn't see
(44:02):
and what was that? And you will not have seen it.
So I'm probably watching the monitor more than I ever
have in my career right now. What I wanted one
more question. If if al Michaels was a product and
we went into a grocery store and it's on the shelf,
what what what guarantee would would go along with that product?
(44:24):
You know, every product has a guarantee about it. What
what would al Michael's guarantee if I bought that product?
I'd like to say it was a money back guarantee,
but as long as it didn't come out of my pocket,
it would be UM. I would hope it would be Uh,
you'd be satisfied, You'd be it would be top quality.
(44:45):
It would be made from the best ingredients. The people
that worked on the product took a lot of pride
in making that product and uh, and it wouldn't be
necessarily top of the line, but it would be something
that you could buy and and enjoy, and it wouldn't
fall apart, and there wouldn't be any built in obsolescence. Okay,
(45:09):
I think they got everything. That's it. Indeed, Al Michael's,
even at age seventy seven, is still version one point
oh no built in obsolescence for this goat. I want
to end on two very disparate stories about Al. The first, look,
we all have our idiosyncrasies. Right. You may have heard
that Al has never eaten a vegetable. Okay, I was
(45:34):
there when he inadvertently consumed a vegetable. We were at
an event. He had food on his plate and there
was a breaded and fried piece of okra. He put
it in his mouth and ate it. When we later
told him what it was, the look on his face
was as though he was poisoned. To this day, he
(45:57):
still will not admit to eating that piece of okra,
even though I did see it with my own two eyes.
The last thing I want to talk about with Al
is actually kind of ironic since we are recording this
on International Women's Day. What does that have to do
without Michael's Let me tell you from my personal experience,
I have never come across a man, especially of his generation,
(46:22):
who is so supportive of women in particular, so supportive
of me, And where does that come from? His wife
of fifty five years, Linda, who would put up with
nothing less. Linda travels without to most games and observing
them over the years. You know what, folks, it makes
you admire Al Michael's even more. Thank you so much
(46:45):
for listening, And next week we bring you to the
Windy City for an interview with one of the true
characters of the game, the Punky QB himself, Jim McMahon,
as he and Steve talk all things eighty five Bears.
I hope you'll join us. I'm Andrea Kramer.
Welcome to NFL Films Tells from the Vault. I'm your host,
Hall of Fame journalist Andrea Kramer. On this podcast, I
get to do something so cool. I take you inside
the NFL Films Vault to unearth some of the greatest
interviews ever done by the late legendary Steve Sable and
as president of NFL Films for five decades, he conducted
(00:26):
over two hundred interviews with some of football's most iconic figures.
Today's a special one for me, folks. As I've mentioned
to you before, I started my career at NFL Films
as a producer, hence my relationship with Steve Well. Nearly
two decades later, I had the pleasure of working with
Al Michael's on Sunday Night Football. So my world's truly
(00:48):
intersect here as we bring you Steve's two thousand seven
interview with the great Al Michaels. Yea from the gun
(01:08):
Stewy sail gets You're like, tell me gets to the land.
It's picked up. After going along, there's a flag flowing
on the one back James Harrison for one of back
at harrassing his parents, bod Field Harrison going down to
Sawmon Harrison saying his speed Harrison's game to go all
the way. You're waiting for the offasty deep there Falk's
(01:29):
down a signal. I pride myself on being an objective journalist,
but this is one of those oh so rare moments
when objectivity kind of goes off the rails. These days,
we throw around the Appalachian Goat, the greatest of all time,
pretty loosely. There are goat emojis, we have list of
goals about who's the goat, and of course it's all
(01:50):
quite subjective, but I challenge anyone to question that Al
Michaels is the greatest play by play voice of all time.
But he's so uch more than just a voice, even though,
of course when you hear those melofluous tones you always
think big event. When I joined Sunday Night Football in
two thousand six, I've never been a sideline reporter before,
(02:12):
so Al and I had lunch and he told me
you are literally and figuratively somewhere no one else is
bring us there. It was the start of many valuable
lessons I'd learned from Al, but it also illustrated his
deep knowledge and understanding of broadcasting communication with his audience, knowing,
as we say, what makes great TV. Al's career spans
(02:37):
six decades. His first NFL game was in nineteen seventy three,
but beginning in nineties six, when he debuted on Monday
Night Football, Al became synonymous with those big games in
the NFL, and in February he called what's most likely
his last Super Bowl with NBC. The interview you're about
to hear took place the summer following Al's first season
(02:58):
calling Sunday Night foot Ball on NBC, and we begin
today's interview where else at the beginning of Al's remarkable career.
So let's go to the vault for Steve Sable and
Al Michael's. Yeah. I was just thinking when when when
I started in the in the business, I remember somebody
telling me given me advice and they were saying that,
(03:21):
you know when when you your first cut is always
your best, and it was totally wrong. Can you remember
when you started out somebody got ahold of you and said, Al,
you want to be in this business, here's some advice,
and it was totally wrong. Yeah, everybody seems to be
a genius early on in your career and everybody wants
you to, you know, do what they think has has
(03:44):
worked best for them, especially if they've they've been in
the business. And I think most people tell you, you you know,
be yourself, But what does what does that mean? I mean,
you don't even know. Most people don't even a bad
joke someone's that gave him some bad advice be yourself. Well,
you're saying you're not yourself when we see you, or
(04:06):
you are? You know, I am myself now but earlier,
you know. It's it's funny I've been in the business
for so long that that, I mean, people look to
me to give them advice and have for a long time.
Agan I got in as a kid, and I've been
announcing sports since I was a freshman in college, so
I'm seventeen years old, so I'm pretty much learning on
(04:27):
the fly. And I learned from the guys that I
listened to as a kid, going all the way back
to when I was growing up in Brooklyn, and Vince
Scully was there, and Red Barbara was there, and another
great announcer by the name of Connie Desmond who very
few people remember. And Mel Allen is doing the Yankees,
and Russ Hodges is doing the Giants, and Jim Woods
(04:48):
is there as well, so I learned from them. And
I was able to pick up Kurt Goudy on the
radio because he was doing the Red Sox games and
I could pick it up in New York. So that's
how I learned. And what you try to do, I
think when you get into business very young, is to
emulate the people that you really admire and maybe take
the best from from each of them. And I think
I was able to do that. When you say emulate,
(05:09):
you mean they're phrasing, the timber of their voice, how
much they talk, what are the things that you would
have me like all of those things because you you
you listen to how they they structure the game. And
I'm not sure you know when you're sixteen or fifteen
or fourteen years old and you're listening and you're thinking
about wanting to do this, uh down the line, that
you really are that you completely understand what it is
(05:32):
you're trying to listen to. But you do know that
there's a pattern, and there's a rhythm, and there's there's
uh almost an art form, and you're hearing it and
you're absorbing it, and just in the way that certain
things would be described, how they would go about presenting
information and all of that. And consciously, I don't think
(05:52):
you're thinking about what they're doing in terms of structuring
the game, but you're hearing them, and you're hearing them
every night, as I did as a kid. And so
then when you finally go on the air as I
did as a freshman at Arizona State, and I'm announcing
my first ever football game in September of nineteen sixty
two on a campus station Colorado State at Arizona State,
you know, going to about four people who can pick
(06:15):
it up who are near the boiler room in the
women's dorm. I mean, that's about how far our signal
was carried at that point. I'm just trying to in
my in my ear here the announcers that I liked
and pretty much parrot the way they would say things,
And that's how you get started. And then from from
that base, I think you begin to refine certain things,
(06:36):
and then you do become yourself at a certain point.
But when you begin, it's like sitting down to write
something or to narrate something. You you have a template
in mind, and that template very often is going to
come from what you have heard, because otherwise you're reinventing
the wheel. You're doing something that nobody else has ever done,
and you can't do that, especially not at the age
(06:56):
of seventeen. What did you think of the first time
you heard Howard Cosell. First time I heard Howard Coseell,
I think Howard was on the radio in New York,
and I knew it was very different, and uh, he
was unlike any anybody else I had heard, So I
understood what he was doing in the sense that he
wasn't a conventional play by play person, obviously he was.
(07:18):
He he was more of a fellow looking into the
social fabric of sports, and nobody was really doing it
at that particular time. And he was uh confrontational with
very with a lot of his subjects. Uh. And it
is in a way it was when I heard him,
and I was very young, it was a little off
(07:40):
putting to me, because I think when you grow up,
especially in the area in which I grew up, you
want to love sports unconditionally, and you don't want to
see any warts in sports, and you certainly don't want
to see the blemishes or any of the bad things.
I mean, we've we've almost come full circle right now.
I mean, when I think one of the things kids
(08:01):
of my generation uh grew up loving sports for was
the fact that it was so clean and pure, at
least in your mind, because maybe you had a naivete
and you didn't understand all of the permutations. So you
just loved the games, and you loved watching the athletes,
and you loved the competition. And now all of a sudden,
we're in a different era, you know, two generations later,
(08:23):
where we're into every every aspect of every sport, and
a lot of it is very unseemly, but still at
its core, I think people love sports because you're seeing
the best of the best competing at the highest levels.
And so going back to you know, the co Cell situation,
I mean, Howard was very good for for the business.
He was very good for for people to to to
(08:45):
to have as a as a voice to bring to
the for certain things that they needed to to know
to have a better understanding of sport within the fabric
of society. Well, when it came to doing an actual
game itself, a lot people didn't want to hear Howard
Coachell because there comes a point when the game is
being played, when you just want to watch the game,
(09:07):
you don't hear about anything else. Well, do you feel
uncomfortable sometimes now the way sports television is going, Like
you just said that there were things that are that
you and I are from the same era that that
are now brought forth and you just I don't want
to hear that. I don't want to know about that.
But in your position, you're almost required to to sort
of dip into that, into that pulled out and bring
(09:29):
out Do you feel uncomfortable doing that? Or do you say, Look,
this is the way the job is and I've got
to do with that. I think about that a lot, Steve,
and I think that you you you have to understand
that why is somebody watching something? Now? If you're gonna
watch a football game, that means you want to watch
the game. If you want to watch a show like
Outside the Lines on ESPN, that's a different animal. Now
(09:53):
you're watching that because they can take you to places
that is comfortable for the viewer, because that's what you
fact if you if you're going to turn on a
program like that, that's what they deal with. They deal
with the issues, and they have the time to deal
with the issues. If you're doing the game, I find
that I have to get in and out quickly. There
are things that must be addressed because they are important
(10:17):
in the context of the game, but you can't belabor them,
and you can't I can't sit there and say, you
know what, I'm going to devote the next two and
a half minutes to this topic. You can't because in
those two and a half minutes they will run about
seven or eight plays. There'll be a change of possession,
there'll be a six d yard passed down the field,
There'll be a challenge. You can't do that, So it's
(10:37):
very disjointed. There's a frustration for me in this business,
and that is there are so many things that you
want to say, so many stories you want to tell,
so many things that are so important. But once the
game is underway, you have to be able to dart
in and dart out, make it loose it for the viewer,
make it understandable to them, explain why this is important.
But you have to do it very deftly, and you
(10:58):
have to do it very quick. So there's an enormous
difference between the game itself and all of the shows
that surround the game. How do you avoid cliches? Because
that's one thing that all of us at NFL Films
are amazed that that you never hear Al Michael say,
put points on the board, or these guys have to
step up, or you know, all the things that you
hear all the time. I mean, is that just something
(11:20):
that you've erased from your mind there, or is you
make a conscious effort like that, or or is just
it's it's never part of your vocabulary at all. They
say that. You know, see, I've been doing this for
so long that there were times when I I almost
have to consciously figure out a different way to say something.
And as a consequence of if the only thing that
pops into my mind is something that I've heard a
(11:42):
million times and is a cliche, I won't say anything.
I mean, it's like you feel this belt right right right,
and you need a pepto business right now. It's not
to say I mean, there are there are times, I mean,
something will come out and I'll think to myself, how
did I say that? Or why did I say that?
That's ridiculous. It couldn't have found something better. But you know,
(12:02):
when you're dealing with live television, and I've done, you know,
thousands of hours of love of television. It just can't
be perfect. I mean, you're gonna say certain things that
you wish you could have back. And believe me, there
there have been a ton of times in my career
when you know, half a second later you're thinking to yourself,
I couldn't have said that better, or why I missed
this or I missed that. But it's a case of
(12:23):
I guess, you know, through the years, I've seen so
many telecasts of so many games in so many sports,
um and I know what I like and I know
what I don't like. And I guess in growing up,
you know, I've heard every cliche in the world, and
and in a in a way when I hear something
and I'm thinking to myself, no, no, no, don't don't
(12:43):
go there. I just don't let my brain go to
go to to to that, to that phrase, or or
say something that I think I'm gonna be embarrassed by
or or just upset with myself for saying. So it
really just comes comes naturally, and that's how it happens.
What about an opinion that you might have given that
(13:03):
after it comes out. Is there a little voices as oh,
I don't think I should have said that, or or
as an opinion much more considered, even though, as you said,
you're on live television, and uh, there's sometimes has to
be I guess, the speed bump between your brain and
your mouth. But there's gotta been times where you you've
you've felt passionately about something and you said it, You've
(13:26):
given an opinion, and then later maybe he said, I
don't know whether I should have said that or not.
You know less and less so now even the reason
for that is that it's become so much more accepted
to give your opinion in the middle of the game.
And what I'll try to do is if I see
something and I'm not saying it because I want people
(13:47):
to think, well, you know, this is what I think.
It's more in it's more a case of I'm trying
to make something um just seem uh more or annected
to people in the sense that hey, I just saw
something that you might not have seen, so let me
tell you what I think just happened here. And sometimes
(14:10):
that's presumption is sometimes people will have seen it, but
very often you know through the body of experience and
being at the game itself as opposed to being a
viewer at home on your couch. I have access to
and can see certain things that I know other people
may not have seen. And at that point I like
to come in and say, hey, you know what just
happened here, or here's what I think happened, or you know,
(14:31):
here's the background here. So I always try to make
sure if I have an opinion, it's grounded and based
on facts, and I've got the fact straight. And you
may not agree with my opinion, but let me just
tell you this, here's the base, and I'm working from
the base. I'm not just spewing out garbage. Has there
ever been a time when you've got a call from
(14:52):
an owner or a player criticizing something that you've said.
There have been times through the years where what's happened
is very often and I can trace this to, uh,
to the fact that the player in question has almost
never heard what you said. Somebody tells them right. And
(15:13):
in fifteen or twenty years ago, before everybody had a
VCR or access to some sort of a a replay system, UH,
it was hard because you know, you you couldn't say, hey,
go back and look at the tape, or here's the tape.
Now it's easy. Now when when when these these these
things happen? And I go all the way back in baseball,
(15:34):
I remember having done the nineteen World Series between Kansas
City and St. Louis, and Ozzie Smith did not have
a very good World Series. And uh, I can't remember
what the exact numbers. We're going to think at one
point he might have been like one for seventeen. And
the next year we're doing a Monday night baseball game
and he confronts me and he says, hey, he says, uh,
(15:57):
you said I stunk. I said, excuse me, I said,
I gave I gave the numbers as the US. Yeah. Well,
I talked to a lot of people. They said, you
said I stuncked. I said, I didn't say get stunk.
I said, in fact, if you can provide or come
up with a a piece of evidence in which you
hear me say you stunk, I'll give you a million dollars. Well,
(16:18):
you don't want to anyway, you get in, you get
into these things with these and what happens is if
their performance is not what they wanted to be, they
hear something from other people. I know how this thing works,
but you don't wants to you deal with it. And
these days, I mean, there's so much that goes on
on the internet, sports radio and all that stuff. I mean,
(16:38):
we're like pussy cats in that world. I mean, at
least we have there's some semblance of responsibility in what
we do. So I would never get to the point
where I would completely destroy a guy and go into
his personal life and all of the rest. You just
don't do that. But I've always been driven by just
be fair and be honest. Now, it may not be
(17:01):
something that a coach wants to hear, or an executive
wants to hear, or a player wants you to talk about,
but it's there. It's there, and it's important and if
you are accurate, If you're accurate, at least you can
have a discussion with that person or those people and say, hey,
wait a minute, let's go back here and look at this. Okay,
what was wrong? Was it? Was there a fact that
(17:23):
was wrong? And very often there isn't. They're just upset.
And I can understand that because when nobody likes to
be criticized, nobody likes to have the candle held up
to them in a very negative light. I get it,
but sometimes it's necessary. You just don't do it indiscriminately.
It has to be done in a situation where what
you're talking about is germane and relevant to a game,
(17:45):
to a season, to a franchise. Then it's important. I
hate to state the obvious, and I really hope you
feel the same way. But what you're hearing is like
a master class in broadcasting. So I'll talked about cliches,
and it's not just that he hated using them, but
he also disdained using what he called football speak. So
(18:07):
when I was taking over being the analyst on Amazon
Thursday Night Football, of course I talked to Al and
he says to me, the broadcasters and of the audience
have no idea what they're talking about, but they think
it sounds really cool. You know this language of football
a gaps and fire zones and jet sweeps and ghosts motions.
(18:29):
And Al said to me, don't talk about it if
you can't explain it. So guess what I feel like,
I'm always getting a masterclass and broadcasting from the great
Al Michaels. When we come back, we'll share with you
some of Al's most memorable calls. Stay tuned, Welcome back
(18:51):
to Tales from the Vault. I don't usually do this,
but spoiler alert. Steve's next question to Al was how
Al would want someone to describe him to someone who's
never worked with him. Well, as someone who has worked
with Al, there's probably not enough time for me to
describe him. But three things come to mind. Number One,
(19:11):
he's got this incredible facility with language. Secondly, he's got
a memory for the most minute details. And he is
meticulous in both his preparation and in knowing the rules
of the game. I remember back in our first year
on Sunday Night Football two thousand and six was a
wild card game Seattle Dallas. Towards the end of the game,
(19:32):
there was a pretty controversial play. We go to commercial
and as Al is looking at the replace, he's literally
saying out loud, okay, let's take this one step at
a time, and he's going through the progression of the
play with all the rules, just to make sure that
not only was he correct, but that he could communicate
(19:53):
it correctly. If there was a young analyst that was
gonna work with you for the first time I didn't
know you, and I was going to give him a description,
and he's gonna say, geez, I'm gonna work without Michael's
How would you describe him? How would you want me
to describe describe you to this young kid who's gonna
(20:15):
work with you for the first time, that you're demanding
you're a perfectionist, be on time. What would be the
things that you would want this kid to be aware
of if he's gonna work with you for the first time.
I would say, make sure you come thoroughly prepared. I mean, actually,
that's really the most important thing. I don't want to
work ever have to work with somebody who I knew,
I didn't do all of the work. I want you
(20:36):
to come to the booth completely prepared, and there's no
excuse for not being prepared. It would be like going
to play a game. You're a quarterback and you don't
know all of the players, you haven't read all of
the playbook, you haven't done all of the grunt work.
I would say. The other thing is for somebody an
analyst coming off the field in particular, remember one thing.
(20:58):
You're no longer you football player. You are a broadcaster
and The really good analysts in this business are the
guys that have the mindset of I am in the
broadcasting business. I am not in the football playing business anymore.
I've played it. I know a lot about it. I
(21:19):
can bring a lot of things to the table because
of my experience of having played with teams and work
with various coaches and maybe even coached. But now I'm
in the broadcasting business and this is a different animal,
and it's not just good enough to go into the
booth and talk about rotating zones and zone blitzes and
all of the rest. That's fine, that's why you are there.
(21:41):
You're there to describe that, but understand how you should
describe that. Understand what everybody else on that crew is doing.
Understand how the tape truck operates, so that if you
want to talk about something, you have an idea whether
or not they can get to that in time or not.
So it's a matter of and as I say, when
you look at the Kreme Dolla creme, the guys at
(22:01):
the very top of this business, John Madden, of course,
my carent partner, being the prime example. When John stopped coaching,
he thought of himself more as a broadcaster than as
a coach, and that will always be a coach, even
though he hasn't coached for for almost three decades. He's
a Hall of Fame coach. But John is even better
as a broadcaster because he understands the business. He understands
(22:23):
what it is we're trying to do. He understands how
to communicate anybody. You can find ten thousand guys who
can come up and explain the zone blitz to you,
but very few of those ten thousand will be able
to put that into the type of of of containment
that will allow the viewer to get the most from that,
(22:45):
to understand that, to talk on the level whereviewer understands
exactly what's happening, and then presented in conjunction with what
the people in the truck are doing, so that everything
is seamless. Do you teach any courses for broadcasting? I don't.
I've been guest lecturer for a great course. You can
teach a good retirement that job. There there you go.
(23:07):
So is this a suggestion? But one thing that I
think that that that constantly amazes me about you is
that you're at your best in that two minute drill.
And I don't think anybody in all of football understands
clock management better than you do. And and we watch
(23:28):
games and we say, you know, christ Almos is better
than some of the coaches the way. Have you taken
a special amount of pride in that about understanding that
last two minutes and how the cluck the guys had
to bounce this? And I mean, I've never heard anybody
understand that and explain it as well as you do.
You know, it's it probably comes from I love sports,
and I've always loved sports, and I've always been fascinated
(23:50):
by the strategy of sports. So even when I was
very young, you know, I'd watch things and we think
to myself, well, what are they doing? And very often
you'd have a rooting interest, and if the team that
you were rooting for was doing things that you considered wrong,
I mean you'd be up off the couch going what
are you doing? So I I always tried to put
myself in the coach's head in that regard. And a
(24:13):
lot of this has to do with math and and
understanding you know, concepts of time and how much time
you have and where you want to use the time outs,
and it's a It's a funny thing. When I was
doing the Super Bowl in in Atlanta in nineteen after
the ninety nine season, where you know, Steve McNair got
the ball off for Tennessee, he's going down the field,
(24:34):
they're trying to tie the game would have sent the
Super Bowl into overtime for the first time ever, and
it became it was a very interesting thing where he
should use that time out and I was able to
you know, I went out on a limit. I said,
here's where I think he should use it, Here's where
I think he shouldn't use it. And it kind of
worked out the right way. He said, did get all
the way down to you know, the one yard line
when the game ended on a Mike Jones tackle of
(24:55):
Kevin Dyson. But that was the kind of thing where
it's a lot of fun to do that because you
know you're seeing something and you know they're seeing what
you're seeing, and and and to me, that was that
was a very satisfying thing because all of the things
that you know, I kind of gone out of the
limb about sort of came to fruition. Other times they don't.
And that's where you know, you know, you you were
(25:16):
talking about sometimes what coaches have come up to me
and have I wouldn't say criticized me, but you know
I've been a little harsh in certain situations. PIECEA didn't
work out for him, and I said, but then again,
and he was the situation. And more often than that,
they'll basically say, well, yeah, you know it's but you
know it's it's it's a lot tougher to do with it.
(25:37):
It is from your spot, and I'm going, well, sure
it is. Just want to jump in here with a thought.
I think that Al withstands any criticism because he's basically
the oracle. He's the voice of the NFL. His informed
opinions take on an outsized role. Between his years at
ABC and NBC, Michael's has called eleven Super Bowls. His
(25:59):
first was We're Bowl twenty two Washington versus Denver. Remember
how Washington spoiled the anointing of John Elway by putting
up thirty five second quarter points. Al made the names
Timmy Smith and Ricky Sanders famous. His second Super Bowl
made Buffalo Scott Norwood infamous, as the kicker missed the
potentially game winning field goal in the waning seconds of
(26:22):
Super Bowl and al put the term wide right in
the lexicon of sports. Now, Norwood tries to kick his
longest ever on grass forty seven yards eight seconds low,
(26:55):
No good, wide right. What what's your recollection of the
Norwood field goal? I remember feeling a great deal of
empathy for him, knowing, you know, when when he misses
the field goal, you know, he's going down in history
as a guy who will always have that attachment. And
(27:19):
at seven yards field goal is made probably less than
half the time in the National Football League. So when
people say, well, Scott Norwood blew the Super Bowl, not
not really. He had a chance to be the big hero.
It just didn't work out. It was a pretty good
kick to just you know why to the right. Remember
that Super Bowl. That was a different Super Bowl too,
because that was right after the start of Desert Storm
(27:45):
and the country it was. It was the first it
was the first time I drove up to a stadium
and there were big concrete barriers around the stadium six
or seven days before the game in the old Tampa Stadium,
And and that was a very disconcerting and unerving thing.
I mean, here we were in effect at war um,
(28:06):
we were you know, we did. We had invaded Iraq
to you know, to free the kuwaitis Um, and all
of a sudden, uh, this was you know, a war
that was taking place, of course thousands of miles away,
but you could feel the impact in the United States.
And this is you know, ten years before nine eleven,
so we're not even thinking about scenarios like that. But
(28:27):
it was. It was one of those things where there
were too many guys in uniform, there were too many
concrete barricades. It was a gray and murky day in Tampa.
It just didn't feel right. It didn't feel like the
celebration that the Super Bowl should be. Now, the game
turned out to be very good. The game turned out
to have a dramatic ending, but it was played with
(28:49):
that as as the backdrop. Of course, that was the
Whitney Houston Super Bowl as well, where you know, she
electrified everybody with her rendition of the anthem. But it
was it was a weird It was a weird game
because the rest of the world was in such not
quite disarrayed, but the country was in a different place
at that point, and and and we had it wasn't
(29:10):
it wasn't a case where everybody could sit down as
they do on the national holiday that is the Super
Bowl every year, and so and and get completely into
the game. We were worried about too many other things,
you know, snipers in the stadium and the whole thing.
So and I know that we we were we were
briefed by by federal officials, uh the night before the
game in terms of our Frankiffort and Dan Deduff and
(29:34):
I doing the game about you know what, what what
what we should do if we wound up in a
hostage situation. I'm thinking what I said, first of all,
how are we going to wind up in a hostage situation?
There's too much protection here. But just the fact that
these were some of the things you had to think
about before the game was very underving. You met your
Monday Night Football. What did it mean to you to
(29:55):
take over to become part of that announcing team that's
the most you know, the famous broadcast television the steak
um on the night football. What did that mean to
you when you became became part of that that tradition.
It came out of nowhere because it came at a
time when ABC was bought by cap Cities and we
(30:15):
had new management coming in and they were going to
take uh take control in n And I'd been there
for for ten years at that point, and I was
the number one announcer for baseball, and I was the
number two announcer for college football, and I did a
lot of great stuff on wide world of sports, and
I had the Olympic experience and in Lake Placid and
all of that. But it came out of nowhere and
(30:36):
Dennis Swanson took over for run Oiledge is the head
of ABC Sports. Ruin had been there for twenty years,
but Ruin was now concentrating on on news. Dennis Swantson
had come in and had taken over for Ruin oarlige.
I did not know Dennis Wantson, and I knew ruined
very well and he treated me extremely well. But all
of a sudden, I get a call the day after
(30:56):
Swanson takes over and he says, I'm going to come out,
and Dennis Lewin is gonna come out. Dennis was executive
with us at that time, and we want to talk
to you. And the next thing I know, Dennis comes
out and tells me I'm the announcer from Monday Night Football.
So it was a complete shock. Now, Monday Night was
going into it's seventeenth season at that point, you know,
(31:20):
Coasel had left the show, Meredith had been there, had gone,
had come back and was gone again, and the show
was fraying a little bit in terms of the ratings
and and and the pettina around it. So it was
a case I didn't know if I was taking over
a lame duck or what. I was very excited, but
I didn't know where the show was at that particular point.
(31:42):
And Cap Cities came in and they had a reputation
of being cheap, which they weren't as it turned out.
But at that point one of my good friends called
me up when I got the job and he said, congratulations,
you got invited to the orgy after the girls went
home because it looked like maybe this was going to
be the end of Monday Night Football. And I was
(32:03):
there too to to to bury it, to help to
help the funeral process. Well, as it turned out that,
you know, they renew the Rice in eight seven when
it looked like they might not, and and away we went,
and I got twenty years out of it, and I
gotta tell you, phenomenal. That's the fastest twenty years in
the history of mankind for any human being. It was
(32:24):
a phenomenal run. Uh. There was an excitement that surrounded
that show unlike anything else I've ever done in television.
You just know that when it's Monday Night, uh, that
it's the only game in town, and that people are
very excited about it, and as as exciting as Sunday
is and Sundays that you know, a football day and
a football night for for all of America. When Monday
(32:46):
Night was on ABC, it was very different because it
was it was the only game, and very often it
was it was either the best game of the weekend
or the second or third best game of the weekend.
And some of those games, you know, we're live in forever.
As as as classics, I mean the Giants against the
forty niners where each almost came in undefeated back in
(33:06):
each loss the week before. But the game that did
a phenomenal rating of course before I got there, Chicago
against Miami in highest rated Monday Night game in history.
So this was an American event, communal primetime event, and
there was a feeling in that stadium no matter where
it was on a Monday night, you know, I'd go
down on the field before the game, walk around an
(33:27):
hour and a half, two hours before the game, the
stadium begins to fill up, and there was an electricity
in that place. And it all dealt with the fact
that you know, you knew you were in a venue
were millions and millions of people We're going to gather
around their television sets and watch what was going to
take place on that field. So I, you know, I
look back on the twenty years that I did Monday
Night on ABC as as really an honor I was.
(33:49):
I was fortunate to get the job, and I feel
very honored that I was able to have the job
and wound up doing you know, well over two hundred
games and work with Frank for so many years, and
then with Dan Beuder for so many years, and then
Dan Fouts and John Madden at the end of that run.
But it was something special and I'm not sure they
(34:10):
could ever be recaptured again. Perhaps Al's greatest gift is
capturing the moment in the most memorable and scintillating way,
informing the audience while reflecting the feeling of a fan.
Of course, that's epitomized most by do you believe in miracles,
A call that transcended sports, a call that certainly defines
his career. But we're talking football here, so we have
(34:33):
to pull from the vault some of Al's best Monday
night football calls. Fake to Martin, then it is Jubble
and todd by Jumbo, Elliott Frits bar lays it up
for Freeman and it's incomplete? Or did he make the character?
(34:53):
What are they gonna roll? And he caught it? Touched out?
He did? What? And bowl? Jackson to the tent and
out in front at the air goes bowl and nobody
captures bow. It is can he get in? No, he cannot.
(35:19):
You know how you always hear that the goats of
the game play their best when it counts the most.
Well so too with Al Michaels. That last call we
heard was from Super Bowl thirty four when the St.
Louis ramsby the Titans. But don't forget that, even when
he was at NBC, he called Santonio Holmes the tiptoe
touchdown catch for the Steelers as they beat the Cardinals.
(35:39):
He called Malcolm Butler's game ceiling interception for the Patriots
when they held on to beat the Seahawks, and of
course this year, the amazing end of the Super Bowl
with Cooper Cups touchdown and Aaron Donald's final pull down
of Joe Burrow when we come back. We know that
Al Michaels tells great stories, but he's also been subject
(36:00):
of quite a few, such as the time he was
traded from ABC to NBC for a mascot. If you
don't know who Oz while the Rabbit is, you gotta
stay tuned for this one. Welcome back to Tales from
the Vault. In my experience, one of the greatest traits
(36:21):
of any broadcaster is his or her ability to sound
the same and be the same person in and out
of the booth. So to hear Al's spin a yarn
is as entertaining as his calls were memorable. Remember how
he mentioned that he has to be tight and concise
calling a game, Well, not so when telling a story
such as how he got to NBC after thirty years
(36:43):
at ABC. Al was under contract with ABC when Monday
Night Football was transitioning to ESPN. NBC was launching Sunday
Night Football and wanted to pair Al Michael's with John Madden,
Al's partner on Monday Night Football for all those years.
So what did NBC do? They orchestrated a trade of
(37:04):
sorts among the assets acquired by ABC in exchange for
Al Michael's four years of Ryder Cup rights, rights to
air Olympic highlights, and of course the right to reacquire
the likeness of Oswald the Rabbit when you were traded
to NBC. How did that work with Oswald the Rabbit?
(37:26):
I mean that Disney sold them the NBC and we're
sold back. How did that whole thing work out? That
was a strange title when you read Michael's Traded for
Oswald the Rabbit. I made the decision to stay with
Monday Night Football because I was given a deadline in
July of five, going into a lame duck season. John
Mann had already signed with with NBC. Our producer director
(37:48):
would subsequently signed with him at the time I had
to make a decision in oh five, I felt I
wasn't ready to make to pully the chord and leave
the Disney Corporation. And I also felt that it would
have been very bad form in a lane duck year
to walk out the door and be walking at the
door with everybody else and we were going into a
(38:09):
season which we were going to do the Super Bowl,
among other things. So I agree to stay when the
season comes to an end. And O five, I realized
that the best place for me would really be Sunday
Night at NBC, and it was available to me at
that point and go back to work with John and
and a lot of other very key people on our crew.
So I worked for ABC for thirty years, and I
(38:35):
went to the right people and I said, look, I said,
I know I'm signed to do Monday night football in
the future. I just don't think it's the right fit.
I would really appreciate the opportunity to go to NBC
and be with the people that I have been with
for a number of years, and I just think it
will work out better for everybody. There was a lot
(38:57):
of reluctance to let me do this, but I continue
to go down that path and and I was able
to get them to understand, Okay, maybe this would be
the best thing. If I don't want to be there
under the circumstances that they had developed to do Monday Night,
I would rather be at Sunday Night, Okay. So, in
(39:18):
conversations between Dick eversol and at NBC, and and the
people at at ABC and ESPN. They agreed to let
me out of my contract at ESPN, and there were
some stipulations where NBC had to give up certain rights
to coverage of the Ryder Cup and the Olympics mill
of that. At the very end of this thing, Bob Iger,
(39:41):
the head of Disney, knowing the Disney family and the
descendants of Walt Disney, had once had a conversation with
Walt's either niece or uh cousin or whatever, and she
had brought up the fact that the one thing that
always frosted the family was that Oswald, the Lucky Rabbit,
(40:05):
who was the predecessor of Mickey Mouse, was still somehow
in the Universal Studios vault, and was there any way
that we could get, you know, the Oswald character brought
back to his true home. So Iger laughed about it.
Ever so laughed about it. And it was the kind
of situation where, you know, it was kind of a
(40:27):
little unwieldy with me having signed with ESPN, now going
to go over to NBC. How did this happen? What's
going on behind the scenes, And to kind of take
the onus off it a little bit. They threw this
thing into the mix, and they talked to me about it,
and I said, what, you know, whatever it takes. I said, look,
I'm all for freeing animals anyway. So you know, my
my animal loving friends will will will enjoy this. And
(40:49):
you know, we don't want this guy locked up in
the vault somewhere. Lit him out. So we had a
lot of fun with it. I mean, it was just
kind of a little thing off on the side. The
press loves to run with stuff like this and winds
up on page piece and in the l a times
we all had, you know, it was it was all.
It was a lot of fun, it was. It was
a goof is what it was. But how much did
it have to do with the deal zero? I have
(41:11):
two more questions, and this is about the mechanics of
what goes through your mind when you're doing play by play,
because to me it seems so complex, and yet when
you're listen to you in the air, it seems so simple.
You know. Well, the key is preparation, any anticipation. You
have to go and prepared. You gotta have all your
ducks in a row and your facts in order. You
(41:32):
didn't have to anticipate what's going to happen. You have
to have a tremendous amount of clarity. I mean, all
of a sudden, you put the blinders on your like
a horse going into the store and gait and all
you're doing is looking straight ahead. It requires a lot
of concentration, requires a degree of communication with the people
around you, in particular the producer, who you're speaking back
(41:55):
and forth with a lot of the times. But I
think one of the I think really the key. The
key is too as you're doing this, trying to put
yourself in the position of the viewer. So you're doing
the game, but you're also viewing the game and very
often during a telecast, in addition to doing all of
(42:15):
the things that we have to do. And it's it
is going at warp speed. There's a lot of stuff
going on. And I can do it because I've done
this for years and years and years. But I also
trying to say to myself, Okay, the guys at home,
sitting back in his barka lounger, what does he need
to know right now? What is it that he's thinking about,
What is he interested in? What's overkilled? What's what? What?
(42:39):
What doesn't he know that that I can bring to
him that will enhance his enjoyment of the game, that
will be elucidating. So it's a subconscious thought, but it's there,
and I'm always trying to to do it's it's it's
it's a two way operation. I mean, I'm on this side,
but I'm trying to be on that side because when
I sit at home and I watch a game, I mean,
(43:01):
I am the viewer and I'm thinking, hey, look if
I'm in the booth, this is what I'm doing at
that point. So I always try to put myself in
the viewers position and try to figure out what it
is that will be beneficial to him, interesting, educational, and annoying,
and try obviously to stay away from that. So it's
(43:21):
it's a complex thing. It sounds more complex, I guess
than it is, only because I mean, to me, it's
all it's a second nature situation. But I think the key, Steve,
the key is really to be in the game, because
there's a lot of stuff going on around you, but
there is a game going on, So stay inside the
(43:41):
game and also pay a lot of attention, especially these
days more than ever with HDTV coming in right now,
and the quality that the technological quality is so good
that you have to pay a lot of attention to
what's on that screen at all times because if you're
looking away, somebody might he's something that you didn't see
(44:02):
and what was that? And you will not have seen it.
So I'm probably watching the monitor more than I ever
have in my career right now. What I wanted one
more question. If if al Michaels was a product and
we went into a grocery store and it's on the shelf,
what what what guarantee would would go along with that product?
(44:24):
You know, every product has a guarantee about it. What
what would al Michael's guarantee if I bought that product?
I'd like to say it was a money back guarantee,
but as long as it didn't come out of my pocket,
it would be UM. I would hope it would be Uh,
you'd be satisfied, You'd be it would be top quality.
(44:45):
It would be made from the best ingredients. The people
that worked on the product took a lot of pride
in making that product and uh, and it wouldn't be
necessarily top of the line, but it would be something
that you could buy and and enjoy, and it wouldn't
fall apart, and there wouldn't be any built in obsolescence. Okay,
(45:09):
I think they got everything. That's it. Indeed, Al Michael's,
even at age seventy seven, is still version one point
oh no built in obsolescence for this goat. I want
to end on two very disparate stories about Al. The first, look,
we all have our idiosyncrasies. Right. You may have heard
that Al has never eaten a vegetable. Okay, I was
(45:34):
there when he inadvertently consumed a vegetable. We were at
an event. He had food on his plate and there
was a breaded and fried piece of okra. He put
it in his mouth and ate it. When we later
told him what it was, the look on his face
was as though he was poisoned. To this day, he
(45:57):
still will not admit to eating that piece of okra,
even though I did see it with my own two eyes.
The last thing I want to talk about with Al
is actually kind of ironic since we are recording this
on International Women's Day. What does that have to do
without Michael's Let me tell you from my personal experience,
I have never come across a man, especially of his generation,
(46:22):
who is so supportive of women in particular, so supportive
of me, And where does that come from? His wife
of fifty five years, Linda, who would put up with
nothing less. Linda travels without to most games and observing
them over the years. You know what, folks, it makes
you admire Al Michael's even more. Thank you so much
(46:45):
for listening, And next week we bring you to the
Windy City for an interview with one of the true
characters of the game, the Punky QB himself, Jim McMahon,
as he and Steve talk all things eighty five Bears.
I hope you'll join us. I'm Andrea Kramer.
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