Al Michaels Giving His Side Of The "Miracle" Call From 1980 Will Give You Chills All Over Again
(Source)–“It was pure emotion,” Michaels said. “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.”
Michaels stuck the landing — and those words are as memorable or more so than anything that happened in that semifinal.
“If I’m on a golf course, someone will yell out, ‘Do you believe in miracles?’” said game-winning-goal scorer Mike Eruzione, sounding as enthusiastic about an event as anyone could four decades later. “If I’m at an airport and someone recognizes me, they say, ‘Do you believe in miracles?’ It was fitting.”
“This is 1980, so this is a time where you could have technical difficulties,” Michaels said. “The tape machine could break — boom, boom, boom — when they replay the game at 8:00. So we had to stay and do the Finland-Sweden game into a tape machine.
“The whole country is going crazy, and we are doing this game that goes to nowhere.”
The only way to have a spoiler was if you heard the result on a radio or TV newscast.
“And remember, in those days, no Twitter and no internet,” Michaels said. “No semblance to where we are today. I would say 95 percent of the people had no idea what happened.”
I have watched “Miracle” roughly 10,000 times and consumed just about every piece of content available on the 1980 Olympic hockey team(side note quickly: there was a bonus DVD on the original release of Miracle that had Herb Brooks talking to the Disney staff about everything around that team for over an hour at a hotel conference room. It is an absolute gem. If you can find it, it is a must watch) and I don’t think I have ever come across the Al Michaels perspective on that call. That moment was so legendary. The play by play call in the moment wouldn’t have ruined it, but Michaels NAILED to the point that he effectively coined the Miracle On Ice. He didn’t get in the way, and he added to the moment 10fold. Incredible call of the greatest moment in sports history.
We are approaching the 40th anniverasy of the 1980 Olympic Team and we are going to be FLOODED with Miracle content and I can’t wait. Give it all to me. While writing this blog I fired up “Miracle” on Netflix. I know the story. I know the finish. It never gets old. I want Jack O’Callahan, former Blackhawk great, on Redline Radio so badly. He lives in Chicago. I need to ask him about ’76. I need to ask him about Herb. I need to ask him about two monkeys humping a football. I need to know how it felt when Herb let him know he was playing vs the USSR