Michaels Does It All, Including News

Al Michaels is incredible. What else can you say?

As a baseball announcer, he ranks among the top two or three in the country. There are Michaels and Vin Scully, not necessarily in that order, and some people might include Bob Costas in that group.

Michaels also has the most prestigious broadcasting job in football, as play-by-play announcer of “Monday Night Football.”

And Michaels is more than proficient at basketball, boxing or any other sport he’s asked to announce.

Hockey, for instance.

He probably is best known for his work on the U.S. Olympic team’s victory over the Soviet Union in 1980. “Do you believe in miracles?” is a call that ranks up there with Russ Hodges’ “The Giants win the pennant! The Giants win the pennant!” in 1951 and Scully’s “We go to Chicago!” in 1959 as the most memorable in sportscasting lore.

Michaels’ best performance, however, probably came in Game 5 of the American League playoffs in 1986, when the Boston Red Sox, trailing, 5-2, in the ninth inning, beat the Angels, 7-6, in 11 innings. Michaels made an incredibly dramatic game even more dramatic.

Now Michaels has shown his skills as a newsman, stepping in to do live reports for ABC News on the Bay Area earthquake. His work has drawn praise from colleagues Ted Koppel and Peter Jennings, and from television critics throughout the nation.

“It’s been a wild decade for me,” he said from his hotel room in San Francisco Thursday. “It began with the hockey game, and now this.

“But there’s no comparison between the two events. The U.S. Olympic team’s victory over the Soviets was wonderful and thrilling, one of the brightest moments in American sports. This has been a heartbreak, a horrible moment, one of the darkest chapters in contemporary American history.”

Still, Michaels’ work this week as a newsman may be his crowning achievement, his tour de force. “I’ve simply done what I’m trained to do, what I’ve had to do,” he said.

It all began a little after ABC went on the air to broadcast Game 3 of the World Series from Candlestick Park Tuesday night.

“Right before we went on the air I noticed an eerie quiet,” Michaels said. “It was strange.”

The quake struck at 5:04 as partner Tim McCarver was narrating some highlights from Game 2.

Michaels said he has never experienced such fright. “I thought the deck above us was coming down,” he said. “Tim and I had our backs to the field at the time, and I felt myself sliding backward.

“Tim says I grabbed his left knee. Maybe I did. I don’t think so, but I can’t remember what I did.”

Michaels blurted out, “We’re having an earthquake” just as ABC lost its power and went off the air.

The network went to its generators, and Michaels, McCarver and Jim Palmer were back on the air briefly. Michaels made a crack about the telecast beginning with a bang, but he was just trying to maintain his composure and didn’t realize the severity of the earthquake at the time.

Michaels later joined Koppel for live reports until midnight. He was told he’d be back on the air from Candlestick at 3 a.m., when “World News This Morning” was scheduled to begin on the East Coast, where it would be 6 a.m.

“I needed a shave, so I decided to drive back to the hotel,” Michaels said. “I also wanted to check out the area.”

The roads were empty by then, so Michaels only had to deal with closures and detours.

He couldn’t get up to his room, but a member of the ABC crew at Candlestick had given Michaels a razor and a producer somehow came up with some shaving cream. He shaved in a bathroom at his hotel. Then it was back to Candlestick.

As of Thursday afternoon, the elevators at Michaels’ hotel still weren’t working, although the power went back on at 5 a.m.

His room is on the 13th floor--yes, this hotel has a 13th floor--and he has made the trek up and down the stairs six times, he said. One of those trips wasn’t necessary.

“At my hotel, which goes to the top of my Hotel Hall of Fame list because of the way everything has been handled, people on the top floor have been given a second room on a lower floor so they don’t have to always climb so many stairs. We (Michaels and his wife, Linda) also have a room on the second floor.

“For me, the problem with the second floor is there’s too much noise for me to sleep. So last night, Linda was going to sleep on the second floor and I was going to sleep on the 13th. One problem, though. When I got to the 13th floor, I discovered I forgot my key.

“I went down to Linda’s room and decided to sleep there. I didn’t want to make that climb again.”

ABC had a technical advantage in covering the quake Tuesday night since it had equipment, including the Goodyear blimp, in San Francisco for the World Series, along with a crew of about 70 people. So the network should have done a good job, and it did.

But ESPN, the all-sports network, was the first with live shots of the damage.

ESPN had the advantage of going strictly with generator power in the first place. The network wasn’t hooked into the power system at Candlestick Park.

What ESPN needed was additional satellite time, since it wasn’t scheduled to be on the air from Candlestick until after the game. The network got approval for the additional time by 5:15, and Bob Ley was on the air at 5:23 with a live report. ESPN had blimp shots of the collapsed portions of the Bay Bridge and Nimitz Freeway by 5:29, long before anyone else.

ABC let ESPN use the blimp camera since ESPN had earlier offered to help ABC. ABC in turn used Ley’s earlier reports.

ESPN’s rating went from a one to more than a four within a 20-minute span as viewers, apparently flipping dials, discovered the cable network’s coverage. For Ley, as well as Chris Berman and Chris Myers, along with producer John Hamlin, it was a job well done.

TV-Radio Notes

Of the ABC crew of about 70 in San Francisco for the World Series, most went home Thursday. The announcers and producer Curt Gowdy Jr. and director Craig Janoff, were among the few who stayed. Most of those who left will return Sunday, but not all. “We’ve tried to take care of the needs of our crew,” Janoff said. “Some had vacations planned next week since we thought we’d be through with baseball. All our guys have done such a good job for us, we felt we had to be accommodating. We’ll have a couple of different cameramen next week. But that’s OK. This earthquake has helped show us where our priorities should be. There are things more important than baseball.”

Michael Burks, the CBS producer scheduled to work Saturday’s USC-Notre Dame game, owns a home in the Marina District of San Francisco, one of the areas hit hardest by the quake. He was given the week off. Ric La Civita will take his place. . . . La Civita, by the way, has an unpleasant memory of the USC-Notre Dame rivalry. He was working the 1986 game when CBS missed a last-second field goal that gave the Irish a dramatic 38-36 victory. The network was away for a commercial at the time, and La Civita took most of the heat for it.

Kudos to King announcers Bob Miller, Nick Nickson and Randy Hahn for the job they did last Sunday on Wayne Gretzky’s record-breaking night. Miller is in Al Michaels’ class when it comes to making a dramatic situation even more dramatic. . . . Another example of Gretzky’s effect on the Kings’ popularity is that this season the team, for the first time, has a radio network, with six California stations--in Blythe, El Centro, Lompoc, Palm Desert, Paso Robles and Santa Barbara--and three stations outside California--in Houston, Phoenix and Las Vegas.