At Least Michaels Still Has Football

The last World Series Al Michaels announced, in 1989, was interrupted by an earthquake.

And now this year’s Series, which he was scheduled to work for ABC, has been canceled by a strike.

But don’t feel sorry for Michaels.

“If I had never worked a World Series, it might be different,” Michaels said. “But this would have been my eighth.

“In this business, I’ve learned you savor what you have done, not what you would have done.

“You never know what is going to happen. I would have been the host of the 1996 Summer Olympics had ABC gotten them, and we just missed out. But that’s the way it goes.

“I still have ‘Monday Night Football,’ which I love more than ever. I have something every week I look forward to very much.”

A World Series after a prolonged work stoppage is something Michaels wouldn’t have savored anyway.

“No, I wouldn’t have wanted the baseball season to resume,” he said. “Once the strike lasted more than a couple weeks, all was lost.”

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Add Michaels: As more than just a casual observer, Michaels believes baseball will be back.

“If there is no settlement by next spring, I think the owners will simply open up the training camps and invite anyone who wants to show up,” he said.

“The owners’ model will be the 1987 football strike, when the teams used replacement players. To get 700 players to toe the line and not cross the line would be asking a hell of a lot.”

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No accord on McCord: The organizers of the first U.S. Presidents Cup golf tournament don’t seem to have any problem with Gary McCord working their event this weekend.

McCord is the new bad boy of golf, if you are to believe the stuffed shirts who put on the Masters.

At last April’s Masters, McCord said the greens were so slick that they seemed to have been groomed “with bikini wax.” He also said that a piece of bumpy ground looked “suspiciously like body bags.”

McCord, who is from Riverside and now lives in Vail, Colo., has done and said a lot of off-beat things in his nine years as a golf commentator for CBS. When he goes a little too far, he says he usually hears about it in his ear in a “nanosecond” from producer Frank Chirkinian.

But there was none of that at this year’s Masters. It was two or three days before Chirkinian called. He said the Masters people weren’t happy, but no way would they knock him off the Masters if Chirkinian had anything to say about it.

McCord said it went back and forth for about three weeks until he volunteered to bow out. Word leaked out last week that McCord had been booted from the Masters, much the same as Jack Whitaker had in 1966 after calling the Masters gallery a “mob.”

“I know the way the media works, and I was planning for four months how to handle this,” McCord said from his hotel room in McLean, Va., near the site of the Presidents Cup. “I knew it would cause quite a stir.”

That it has, with no one on the side of the Masters’ pooh-bahs.

CBS has also taken heat for not backing McCord more.

McCord, meanwhile, has been trying to douse the flames.

“I applaud their decision,” McCord wrote of Masters officials in a first-person story in this week’s Golf World magazine. “In the contract with CBS, they have the right to evaluate the announcers and decide who personifies the muted rituals of restraint.

“I am a loud wail. They are doing what they think is in the best interest of the Masters, and I can’t argue with the decisions they have made to make this a near-spiritual gathering.”

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Add McCord: He has always strived to say things differently and avoid cliches.

Hale Irwin, who along with Paul Azinger is the co-captain of the U.S. team for the Presidents Cup, said of McCord during a conference call this week: “(He) is not one of us. He is from another world, the planet Blothar.”

Said McCord: “He remembers that? Gee, I barely remember it.

“I was leading the Houston Open, I believe it was 1980, and I went into the media tent to try and explain how that could be. I said I wasn’t really Gary McCord, I was By Product 17 from the planet Blothar, and I had entered Gary McCord’s body for a day as an experiment to see what it feels like to lead a golf tournament.”

“How do you spell Blothar?” McCord was asked.

“I have no idea. Let’s go with, oh gee, B-L-O-T-H-A-R,” he said.

McCord said the “body bag” reference was a takeoff on the cliche that a golfer “is dead” after a particularly bad shot.

As for the “bikini wax” comment, he said he was simply looking for another way to describe the greens.

“I came up with, ‘These greens are so fast, I don’t think they mow them, they A) use Nair on them, B) use electrolysis on them, C) pluck them, or D) bikini wax them.’

“Well, we all know that I used D and I’m outta there. Probably any of the four would have gotten me tossed.”

And that’s a shame.

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Add golf: The Presidents Cup on ESPN today and CBS Saturday and Sunday is a Ryder Cup-type competition that has a U.S. team led by Fred Couples, Davis Love III and Corey Pavin facing an international team that includes golfers from countries outside Europe.

Nick Price of Zimbabwe leads the international team. Greg Norman had to drop out this week because of intestinal problems.