I realize I linked the wrong interview; I linked a weekend round up, instead of the whole interview. Relevent parts of the transcript below
http://www.npr.org/2015/01/22/379097673/broadcaster-al-michaels-gets-ready-to-provide-lyrics-for-the-super-bowl
DAVE DAVIES, HOST:
This is FRESH AIR. I'm Dave Davies in for Terry Gross who's off this week. When the Seattle Seahawks and the New England Patriots go at it a week from Sunday in Super Bowl XLIX, the broadcast booth will be anchored by a man who's done play-by-play in eight previous Super Bowls. Al Michaels is currently the announcer for NBC "Sunday Night Football." But that's just the latest assignment in a broadcast career that dates back to the '70s. Michaels is the only broadcaster to have done the World Series, the Super Bowl, the NBA Finals and the Stanley Cup Final - not to mention the Olympics, the Triple Crown and plenty of more obscure events.
We invited Michaels in to talk about the big game, what it takes to do good play-by-play work and his new memoir about his life in sports. It's called, "You Can't Make This Up: Miracles, Memories, And The Perfect Marriage Of Sports And Television."
Well, Al Michaels, welcome to FRESH AIR. Let's start by talking about the craft - what you do - and I thought we'd begin by just listening to a play. This is a couple of weeks ago - the AFC divisional playoff game between the New England Patriots and the Baltimore Ravens. The Patriots pull off a trick play, and let's listen to your call.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
AL MICHAELS: Edelman in motion. Edelman takes the swing pass. Edelman is going to throw. Deep downfield wide open - Amendola - touchdown.
DAVIES: And that's a day at the office for Al Michaels, I guess. You know - but, you know, people take a play-by-play broadcaster - take his work for granted. But there's a lot going on there. I mean, you have to describe the action as the fans see it. You can't stumble. You have to know the names of those two players - Julian Edelman and Danny Amendola - and also kind of let the emotion match that of the audience. You want to just take us inside the booth a bit and talk a bit about what goes into calling a game well?
MICHAELS: Well, Dave, I think you summed it up perfectly by saying, you know, you want the emotion to match what was being said. And I've always felt that the game itself is pretty much a melody, and I am there to provide the lyrics. And so you want the lyrics to match the melody because if you are, you know, composing a song or recording a song, it's cacophonous if they don't match. And I've always kept that in mind.
And I think one of the differences between, for instance, radio and television is that on radio, you can use a lot of verbs because you are painting the entire picture for the listening audience; they can't see anything obviously. But on television, they can see it. So very often you don't need verbs. You don't need the - very descriptive phrases that you would on radio because people can see what they see obviously and you are there to supplement it. So in that particular instance, you just have to be ready for anything.
And I've been around for a number of years and have done a ton of games and not that I was expecting that play necessarily - but you're ready. And when Brady threw it out to Edelman, it was a long enough pass, it gave me time to know exactly what they had intended to do. It was a backward pass, which meant that Edelman could throw it. I could see Amendola streaking down the left sideline, and that was that. So I think what you try to do is match the moment and be economical. And I find myself, as the years go by, speaking more and more in ellipses because I think that helps to match the picture.
DAVIES: Yeah, that's so interesting that you mention that because you don't say Amendola streaking down the sideline - you just say Amendola wide open. And people can see it.
MICHAELS: Yeah, and that's the - the ellipses that I use basically because you don't have to - you know, what on radio might require 50 words, on television might take 15. And so that's the vast - the difference between radio and TV. And of course, I was weaned on radio. I started my career doing radio. And I think almost all of the really good television broadcasters that I have heard through the years came up through radio because it's easier to pare back then it is to, you know, do three times as much. If you go from television to radio, I think that's a much more difficult transition than going the other way around.
DAVIES: I want to talk about one other thing. I'm going to play the clip we just heard, that same touchdown again. And we're going to let it run a little longer. Again, this is a touchdown in a AFC divisional playoff game between the Patriots and the Ravens.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
MICHAELS: Edelman in motion. Edelman takes the swing pass. Edelman is going to throw. Deep downfield wide open - Amendola - touchdown. Fifty-one yards.
DAVIES: Now, what's interesting about that is I counted - after you said touchdown, a full 10 seconds you didn't say anything. There's a time when you just get out of the way, isn't there?
MICHAELS: Yes, and I've talked to a number of players who retire and they want to go into broadcasting. And that's one of the first things I tell them. If you're doing television, let the audience enjoy the moment. Or if you're rooting for the other team, not enjoy the moment, but don't hit them with a ton of facts or information they don't want to hear it at that point. Let the crowd play out. Watch, you know - we'll have probably three or four different shots - maybe the bench, certain players, maybe the other coach, whatever - it might be the fans. And let it play.
I mean, you don't need to say things that people are already seeing. And, you know, my partner Cris Collinsworth who's tremendous, he doesn't come in there either. A lot of times the analyst will, having played the game, see exactly what took place. And then you just want to jump in and say, you know, here's how that play worked. There's plenty of time to do that, and it's not right after the play. Let it play out - let it settle down for a second, and then you go into the analysis.
DAVIES: There's a drama, and you have to let people experience the drama.
MICHAELS: Sure.
DAVIES: The broadcast team is typically a partnership. There's the play-by-play guy. That's you. And then there's a color analyst - typically a former player or coach. And your partner on "Sunday Night Football," Cris Collinsworth, I actually do think you guys are the best on television because I am amazed at what Cris Collinsworth sees in a play without the benefit of a replay or looking at film, just an interior block. I mean, there are 22 guys moving on every football play. It's amazing what he sees.
MICHAELS: Let me tell you, it's amazing to me, too, Dave, because I've worked with a lot of people and over the last, well, 13 years I've been lucky enough to work with maybe the two best of all time - John Madden who really changed the role of the analyst when he started out and created a template and then spawned a whole bunch of imitators, and Cris Collinsworth who to me, is as good as it's ever gotten.
And Cris has the ability, you're right, to see things that nobody else sees. And one of the reasons he's able to do that is that he doesn't watch the ball. That's - he lets me do that. I will describe the play. The audience is watching that. He's watching other things. And I know one of the things he's talked about is watching the offensive line because the offensive line, when the play begins and - not only that, even before the play begins - the way they're set up sometimes, it's an unbalanced line - they will tell you what's going to happen. So right off the bat, he knows where to look. He looks at that. He looks at what the line is going to do and then kind of fans out from there. But he has a tremendous ability to see everything, to understand everything. And I've said this before, if Cris Collinsworth wanted to be an NFL coach, he'd be one of the five best in the league right off the bat.
DAVIES: You've worked with a lot of color analysts. Tell me what a bad color analyst is like. You can mention names if you want to.
MICHAELS: (Laughter) Well, fortunately, you know, I've been doing the prime time on the NFL for the last 29 years. So when you get to that point, you're not going to get somebody who really doesn't have a certain amount of goods. But you know what? You have to learn to communicate. And the greatest people - I mean, the most successful people in broadcasting - no matter whether it's sports or talk radio or comedy or whatever - they know how to connect to the audience. And fortunately, most of the guys I have worked with - and women - have understood that. They know how to connect. They know how to take very complicated things and make them understandable without insulting the intelligence of the people who do understand the complicated aspects of football.
And what really makes some of these people tremendous is they understand what everybody else on the crew is doing. We have 70 people every week at minimum who are involved, from tape operators, obviously the producer and the director, to associate directors, to sound people. There are a lot of people who go into making "Sunday Night Football" what it is and what it looks like and what it sounds like. And the great thing about - you take somebody like Cris as an example here. If he wants to go someplace on a replay, he can almost code it to the extent when he begins to talk, they're so smart in the truck - and the - Fred Gaudelli, our producer, and Drew Esocoff, the director, the tape folks and all of that - they can hear Cris say three or four words and know, hey, you know what? Cris wants to go here. And they can get him there within a few seconds...
DAVIES: Like if he's saying - if he's saying look at this great block right by the pulling guard, they will go to that piece of tape...
MICHAELS: ...Even before he - he doesn't even have to say that. He can begin to talk about something that may have happened in the matchup. He says, you know, one of the more interesting matchups here was so-and-so against so-and-so. Right off the bat, when he says the matchup, in the truck they're going, hey, we know where he wants to go. And they get him there very quickly. And that's something that very few people at home really understand or know about. But boy, when that happens and everybody is folded in together, I mean, that's the essence of this business. It's phenomenal.
DAVIES: Al Michaels's new book is called "You Can't Make This Up." We'll continue our conversation in just a moment. This is FRESH AIR.
(MUSIC)
...
DAVIES: ... What sports are the hardest to do?
MICHAELS: Well, I think the hardest... Hockey is actually the hardest sport, I think, to announce.
DAVIES: I would think so.
MICHAELS: It is because there's so little scoring. I mean, hockey on radio I think is the most difficult because - in basketball, you know that one team has possession. And you can see a game that is being called on radio in your - in your mind's eye. In hockey, the puck is moving so quickly, and it's going from one zone to the other. And you might have four or five different players touching it over a 10-second span - you know, two or three guys from one team, two or three guys from the other team. That's difficult. So I would say hockey is the most difficult of the sports to do. Now, I've also done, you know, crazy stuff like motorcycles on ice, which we did in Inzell, West Germany, which featured a lot of Eastern Europeans at that time, Soviet riders. And I'd say the arena, or the rink where they had speed skating competitions normally, would hold, oh, about 15,000 people. And so you had 15,000 wild and woolly West Germans, and Austrians would come across the border. And tailgating for motorcycles on ice, which began at 8 o'clock at night, would start at about 2 o'clock in the parking lot. And it's the Schnapps capital of the world. So by the time the riders get going at 8 o'clock, I mean, everybody's pretty well lubricated. And what you have is a bunch of guys riding motorcycles on an ice track. And spikes are protruding. So it was wild...
DAVIES: So wait. Wait...
MICHAELS: It was the craziest thing I ever saw.
DAVIES: Spikes are protruding from what?
MICHAELS: From the tires. So you'd have...
DAVIES: That's how they grip the ice. OK.
MICHAELS: That's how you grip the ice. You have spikes coming out of the tires. And then the guys are going around a speed skating track. It was - as I recall, it's a quarter-mile and probably eight or nine guys in a race. It was crazy. And I remember thinking, this would be great in America. I even thought about hey, I've got to get a hold of somebody and see if we can promote this thing in the United States. But it's probably one of those things where, you know, you watch it one time and go, oh, my God, this is fabulous. The second time, it's not so fabulous. And the third time, you're done with it.
DAVIES: Al Michael's new memoir is "You Can't Make This Up: Miracles, Memories, And The Perfect Marriage Of Sports And Television." He'll be back in the second half of the show. I'm Dave Davies, and this is FRESH AIR.
(MUSIC)