Why profile Michaels:
He simply may be the best and most familiar voice in sports broadcasting these days. OK, Joe Buck is right up there, too. But Michaels has a wider, more varied background, plus he is credited with uttering the immortal words, “Do you believe in miracles?” at the 1980 Lake Placid Olympics as a bunch of American collegians knocked off the mighty Soviet hockey team.
He has called that broadcast the highlight of his career, a fortuitous development considering his very limited experience doing hockey games. In fact, his only previous hockey assignment came eight years earlier in Japan at the 1972 Sapporo Olympics.
In this era of blanket TV sports coverage, the airwaves are filled with quality broadcasters, but Michaels is a pro’s pro who was Hawaii’s Sportscaster of the Year in 1969 long before most of today’s rising young talents were born. Upon returning to the mainland, the Brooklyn native became the lead announcer for the Cincinnati Reds during the Big Red Machine era and also worked UCLA basketball games when John Wooden was still coaching the Bruins.
Michaels can lay sole claim to being the only sportscaster to assigned to the Olympics, World Series, Super Bowl, NBA Finals, and Stanley Cup finals. He also been the voice of Monday Night Football for nearly 20 years, working first with John Madden and now Cris Collinsworth. And what other broadcaster can say he was traded (from ABC to NBC) for the rights to a Disney cartoon character (Oswald the Lucky Rabbit)?
