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 Page A
Authors: Al Michaels, L. Jon Wertheim
high school football games, too. Occasional concerts. It was in constant use. There was one deck and the broadcast booth was a wooden cubbyhole up behind home plate.
But the conditions didn’t matter to me. It was thrilling—the golden opportunity. I was a lot like many of the players: hoping to get to the majors one day, but for the moment, happy just to be there, getting paid to do something I would have done for free. My Islanders salary was $15,000 a year, but shortly after I started, the Islanders gig led to me getting another job at local television station KHVH (the ABC affiliate), where I made another $15,000–$18,000.
Linda and I started out in a modest apartment. Then, when it became clear that we were going to be there awhile, we got a much nicer apartment at the foot of Diamond Head, owned by an undertaker in Spokane, Washington, who was renting it out for four hundred dollars a month. The undertaker hadn’t been there in years, and didn’t realize he could have rented it for three times as much. It was tiny, but it was on the eleventh floor and came with a wraparound lanai and a view of the Pacific Ocean and Waikiki. There was a swimming pool downstairs, and just beyond the pool you could climb down a ladder into the ocean. It was heaven. The air smelled like a flower garden. There were these perfect evening breezes. We were barely in our mid-twenties. I suggested to Linda that when we had children, we should give them Hawaiian middle names. We laughed when we thought that even if we would wind up in the majors, it might seem we’d be going downhill. Life was fabulous.
My radio partner was Dick Phillips. He was an infielder who had played parts of four seasons in the majors with the Giants and the Washington Senators. And when he was available, Marty Chase—the announcer who’d been called up to active duty—would join us in the booth as well. Because of the distance to away games—and the expense of airplane tickets—we only worked the Islanders’ home games. When the team was on the road, we would do re-creations of the games, beginning the broadcasts roughly ninety minutes after the first pitch and relying on someone, normally a sportswriter, in the visiting press box to give us the rundowns of each at bat. They’d call in with updates every half hour or so, and then we’d go from there—occasionally taking some creative license. Since there was a considerable time delay, if it was 10–1 in the eighth inning, and we got an account of an inning where every batter had taken a full count, sometimes our audience heard a nice, crisp three- or four-pitch inning. A decade earlier, Les Keiter had done almost real-time re-creations of Giants games for a New York audience after the team moved to San Francisco. We didn’t use a drumstick against a wooden block to simulate a batter connecting like Les did, but we did have the engineer pipe in crowd noise that was appropriate in the flow of the game. Another connection I had to Keiter: His career started when he was in the service in Hawaii in the 1940s, and in 1970 he would move back to Honolulu to run an advertising agency. But shortly thereafter, he would up becoming the sports director at KHON (the NBC affiliate) and eventually replacing me as the Islanders announcer.
The Islanders were in the Pacific Coast League, with the seven other Triple-A clubs located on the mainland. Visiting teams would come to face the Islanders once or twice a season, and the series usually spanned seven games and would last an entire week. Our big rival was the Los Angeles Dodgers’ farm team, the Spokane Indians. In 1970 the Indians came over to Hawaii with a lineup that included Steve Garvey at third base, Bill Buckner at first base, and Bill Russell and Davey Lopes in the outfield. And the team’s manager was a rotund, charismatic Italian by the name of Tommy Lasorda. At the time, the Dodgers’ general manager was Al Campanis and, after every game, Lasorda would
But the conditions didn’t matter to me. It was thrilling—the golden opportunity. I was a lot like many of the players: hoping to get to the majors one day, but for the moment, happy just to be there, getting paid to do something I would have done for free. My Islanders salary was $15,000 a year, but shortly after I started, the Islanders gig led to me getting another job at local television station KHVH (the ABC affiliate), where I made another $15,000–$18,000.
Linda and I started out in a modest apartment. Then, when it became clear that we were going to be there awhile, we got a much nicer apartment at the foot of Diamond Head, owned by an undertaker in Spokane, Washington, who was renting it out for four hundred dollars a month. The undertaker hadn’t been there in years, and didn’t realize he could have rented it for three times as much. It was tiny, but it was on the eleventh floor and came with a wraparound lanai and a view of the Pacific Ocean and Waikiki. There was a swimming pool downstairs, and just beyond the pool you could climb down a ladder into the ocean. It was heaven. The air smelled like a flower garden. There were these perfect evening breezes. We were barely in our mid-twenties. I suggested to Linda that when we had children, we should give them Hawaiian middle names. We laughed when we thought that even if we would wind up in the majors, it might seem we’d be going downhill. Life was fabulous.
My radio partner was Dick Phillips. He was an infielder who had played parts of four seasons in the majors with the Giants and the Washington Senators. And when he was available, Marty Chase—the announcer who’d been called up to active duty—would join us in the booth as well. Because of the distance to away games—and the expense of airplane tickets—we only worked the Islanders’ home games. When the team was on the road, we would do re-creations of the games, beginning the broadcasts roughly ninety minutes after the first pitch and relying on someone, normally a sportswriter, in the visiting press box to give us the rundowns of each at bat. They’d call in with updates every half hour or so, and then we’d go from there—occasionally taking some creative license. Since there was a considerable time delay, if it was 10–1 in the eighth inning, and we got an account of an inning where every batter had taken a full count, sometimes our audience heard a nice, crisp three- or four-pitch inning. A decade earlier, Les Keiter had done almost real-time re-creations of Giants games for a New York audience after the team moved to San Francisco. We didn’t use a drumstick against a wooden block to simulate a batter connecting like Les did, but we did have the engineer pipe in crowd noise that was appropriate in the flow of the game. Another connection I had to Keiter: His career started when he was in the service in Hawaii in the 1940s, and in 1970 he would move back to Honolulu to run an advertising agency. But shortly thereafter, he would up becoming the sports director at KHON (the NBC affiliate) and eventually replacing me as the Islanders announcer.
The Islanders were in the Pacific Coast League, with the seven other Triple-A clubs located on the mainland. Visiting teams would come to face the Islanders once or twice a season, and the series usually spanned seven games and would last an entire week. Our big rival was the Los Angeles Dodgers’ farm team, the Spokane Indians. In 1970 the Indians came over to Hawaii with a lineup that included Steve Garvey at third base, Bill Buckner at first base, and Bill Russell and Davey Lopes in the outfield. And the team’s manager was a rotund, charismatic Italian by the name of Tommy Lasorda. At the time, the Dodgers’ general manager was Al Campanis and, after every game, Lasorda would
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