You Can't Make This Up: Miracles, Memories, and the Perfect Marriage of Sports and Television by Al Michaels, L. Jon Wertheim Read Free Book Online

deservedly, there’s a statue of Chick outside the Staples Center. When he died in 2002, I was asked to write an appreciation piece for the Los Angeles Times, which I was honored to do. Suffice to say, when Jack Kent Cooke died in 1997, I wrote no such column. It would have been a beauty.
    CHUCK BARRIS STILL HAD a job for me. In fact, his empire was growing. The Newlywed Game, another Barris production, had become a hit. Chuck was now also overseeing a pilot for a series based on variety shows at military installations. I made a trip with the production crew to Eglin Air Force Base, near Pensacola, Florida, and a couple of weeks later we went to Fort Gordon outside Augusta, Georgia.
    So here I am in Georgia on that trip, and Linda calls. Two months earlier, I’d gone with her dad on a trip to Hawaii. He had a vending machine business in Honolulu, and had gotten to know an advertising executive named Frank Valenti, who knew a man named Jack Quinn. Quinn ran the local minor-league baseball team. So my father-in-law asked Valenti to try to set up a meeting for me. I met with Quinn in February and left a tape with him, though he didn’t have a job opening at that point. But he was friendly, and said that he would stay in touch if anything opened up. I flew back and went back to working for Barris.
    Now, two months later, Linda was on the phone telling me that Jack Quinn had called our apartment in Los Angeles asking for me. I was in Georgia, almost five thousand miles away, and when I reached him, he asked if I could fly over ASAP and call a few games on the radio for the Hawaii Islanders.
    “A few games?”
    “I have some issues,” he said. “I’d like you to fill in.”
    It turned out his “issues” were that the Islanders announcer, Marty Chase, was in a military reserve unit that had been called to active duty. It wasn’t entirely clear what Chase’s commitments would be, but Quinn was giving me an opportunity to announce some games.
    I was so excited I could have flown home without a plane. I immediately called Chuck in the hotel—he had always known what my dream was, and he was very excited for me. Then I flew home on the first flight the next morning, Augusta to Atlanta to Los Angeles, packed my bags, went to sleep, and flew to Hawaii the next day. Linda would join me a week later. I would never work in an office again.

CHAPTER 5
    Aloha
    J UST SOUND LIKE VIN SCULLY . That’s what I told myself on the flight to Hawaii. I had heard Vin’s voice in my ears since I was six. The authority, warmth, knowledge, creativity, and maybe most important of all, the rhythm.
    I think it’s the same in most artistic fields. When you’re young and starting out, there are people you idolize, and you are going to imitate their style until you more clearly develop your own. For me, that model was Vinny. Early on, I sounded like him. Similar cadence, similar delivery.
    I was beyond excited for this chance, but there were a few challenges. At the top of the list: In 1968, you couldn’t exactly go on the Internet (which didn’t exist) and immerse yourself in all things Hawaii Islanders. Who are these guys? What’s the manager like? What are the team’s strengths and weaknesses? Jack Quinn, the general manager, understood this, and told me to take a couple of days to watch three or four games in the stands and familiarize myself with the team before I made my on-air debut.
    And if I needed a reminder that this wasn’t quite the big time, all I had to do was look around Honolulu Stadium—which was separated from glamorous Waikiki by the fetid Ala Wai Canal. Termite Palace, as it was called, was a ramshackle stadium that seated about 22,000 and had been jerry-built through the years. They would add 2,500 seats in one section one year, then a thousand more seats down the right field line a few years later. Nothing fit. And it was an all-purpose stadium. Baseball in the summer. University of Hawaii football in the fall. Tons of