For someone who prefers to watch sports without announcers, I can’t say that I’ve spent much time thinking about Al Michaels. To me, the best an announcer can do is not take away from the action. I am watching what is happening on the screen, why do I need a person to tell me what I am seeing? I have often said that I would pay extra to have the ability to watch sports with just the ambient sounds. That’s why people go to games, which would be paying extra. Yet, I was curious enough about Michaels’s 40-year career to take a look at You Can’t Make This Up, his autobiography which was published last year.
The two takeaways from the book are that Michaels loves sports almost as much as he likes to drop names. The long-time Monday Night Football announcer has nice things to say about all of the celebrities he encountered (even O.J. Simpson) with a few exceptions, such as Mark Shapiro who was a head honcho at ESPN. He has had a fairly charmed career that included a steady progression up the sports casting ladder. The climb started at Arizona State where he announced the baseball games of future pros such as Reggie Jackson and Sal Bando (Barry Bonds would also be a Sun Devil after Michaels left). After school, he landed a job with a minor league baseball team in Hawaii. Not a bad place to start a career.
Michaels shows a bit of crankiness at his rare career missteps. He was brought on board with the Lakers, but was shut out by Chick Hearn and quickly fired. He appears to hold a grudge about that experience. Later, he moved to Cincinnati to announce for the Big Red Machine teams of Pete Rose and Johnny Bench. He left the Reds for the Giants. While he maintains that he was meant to be objective as an announcer, the fact that the team was not very good seemed to irk him. I guess that speaks to his ambition, which isn’t really a point of self-examination.
In fact, these sports books are generally light on self-examination. They are more about a travelogue of a career rather than why something was engaging. When reviewing sports books, I tend to be negative because they are just gloss. I prefer books that delve deeper into issues. For example, Michaels notes that he was friends with two of the biggest sports criminals: Rose and Simpson. He writes that he liked them both. Rose was always looking for gambling action, but Michaels doesn’t put much thought into whether he bet on baseball or what drove him to it. The friendship with Simpson also isn’t closely examined. Maybe Michaels feared legal action, but his inside access is wasted.
For what it is, the Michaels biography is a pretty decent sports book. Jon Wertheim from Sports Illustrated does a nice job of breezily capturing Michaels’s voice. He has had an amazing career and been at some of the biggest and most memorable sporting events (the USA “miracle” hockey win, the World Series earthquake) and maintained a steady level of enthusiasm for sports throughout. I just hope he doesn’t mind if I put him on mute from time to time.
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