Al Michaels

Al Michaels (born November 12, 1944, Brooklyn, New York, U.S.) American sports broadcaster considered by some to be the best in his field. He has covered the most major prime-time sports events of any announcer, including the championships of all four major American sports: the Super Bowl (football), World Series (baseball), NBA Finals (basketball), and Stanley Cup (hockey). He made his most famous call when the U.S. hockey team upset the Soviet Union squad at the 1980 Olympics in Lake Placid, exclaiming: “Do you believe in miracles? Yes!”

Early life and family

Michaels is the eldest of three children born to Lila (née Roginsky) Michaels, a game-show contestant coordinator, and Jay Michaels, a sports talent agent (and later TV producer) who, in 1960, helped put together the original American Football League (AFL) TV contract with ABC. Al Michaels grew up a fan of the Brooklyn Dodgers and was an admirer of their announcer, Vin Scully. Michaels and his younger brother, David, would do mock TV shows in their living room.

The family moved to Los Angeles in 1958, the same year the Dodgers relocated there. By that time, Michaels was determined to become a sports broadcaster, and he sometimes would do a play-by-play of the housekeeper or gardener working. In 1960 he saw every home game of the AFL’s Los Angeles Chargers, and his father introduced him to several league owners and top officials as well as quarterback Jack Kemp. When he was in 10th grade, Michaels met Linda Anne Stamaton, and the couple married in 1966. They later had two children.

From fired to first World Series

While attending Arizona State University, Michaels announced several hundred games, covering such sports as baseball, football, and basketball. After graduating in 1966, he worked as a talent coordinator for the TV show The Dating Game. In 1967 he landed a job as a radio colour commentator with the Los Angeles Lakers basketball team, pairing with legendary broadcaster Chick Hearn. After several regular-season games, however, Michaels was fired. A few months later, the Hawaii Islanders, a minor league baseball team in the Pacific Coast League, made him their announcer.

Michaels began to garner attention, and in 1971 the Cincinnati Reds of Major League Baseball hired him to call their games. The following year the team advanced to the World Series, which Michael covered. He went on to work seven other World Series. In 1974 Michaels became an announcer for the San Francisco Giants, but two years later he left to join ABC. There he continued to cover baseball, and he worked on such shows as Wide World of Sports.

Monday Night Football and the “Miracle on Ice”

In 1986 Michaels became the play-by-play announcer on ABC’s high-profile Monday Night Football telecast. The following season he worked his first of many Super Bowls. In 2022 Michaels said that although he gets anxious before broadcasting a game watched by more than 100 million Americans, one way he copes is by realizing that 230 million people in the country are not watching. His style is relatively understated—he is not a fan of broadcasters who scream or yell on air. Michaels is also known for his preparation and is quick with a humorous remark.

In 1980 ABC tapped Michaels to do play-by-play for the Olympic hockey showdown between the United States and the Soviet Union. At the time he was the only announcer at the network to have broadcast a hockey game—and just one at that; he had called a game at the 1972 Olympic Winter Games in Sapporo, Japan, during a brief assignment for NBC. The U.S. team’s improbable win in 1980—a squad of college players knocking off the heavily favoured Soviets, who had won the last four gold medals in the event—was dubbed the “Miracle on Ice” after Michaels’s iconic “Do you believe in miracles? Yes!” call.

Years later Michaels told the New York Post:

It was pure emotion. You can’t make a call like that in the Super Bowl, where half of the audience is going one way and the other half is going the other. But this was you have 99.9 percent of the audience with you on the call. The one-tenth of one percent are probably spies from Kiev or something.

The United States went on to win the gold medal by defeating Finland. While Michaels never became a regular hockey announcer, from 2000 to 2002 he covered the NHL’s Stanley Cup finals for ABC.

Another iconic call by Michaels occurred when he was the play-by-play announcer for the 1989 World Series. After an earthquake caused a postponement of game three at Candlestick Park in San Francisco, he said, “Well, folks, that’s the greatest open in the history of television, bar none!” Michaels then helped cover the disaster as a news story. In 1994 he worked as a newsman again, this time with the slow-speed chase of his friend O.J. Simpson, who was charged with a double murder.

Activities in the 21st century

In 2004 Michaels was assigned to his first NBA Finals, and he also announced the championship series the following year. In 2006 Monday Night Football moved from ABC to ESPN (both owned by the Disney Company). Michaels was unhappy with the direction of the broadcast under ESPN, and that year he left the company after 30 years to work for NBC, which had acquired the rights to Sunday Night Football. In 2022 he joined Amazon as the play-by-play announcer for the streaming network’s Thursday Night Football, while taking on an emeritus role at NBC. In the latter capacity, he covered the channel’s high-profile events, such as the NFL playoffs.

Michaels has been the recipient of numerous honours throughout his career. In 2011 he received a Sports Emmy for lifetime achievement, and in 2013 he was inducted into the Sports Broadcasting Hall of Fame. He later won the Baseball Hall of Fame’s 2021 Ford C. Frick Award for broadcasters. Michaels cowrote (with L. Jon Wertheim) the autobiography You Can’t Make This Up: Miracles, Memories, and the Perfect Marriage of Sports and Television (2014).