Free You Can't Make This Up: Miracles, Memories, and the Perfect Marriage of Sports and Television by Al Michaels, L. Jon Wertheim

majors, they’re ecstatic. No one would agonize whether to stay in Triple-A. This was my call-up to the bigs. But I was all over the map. The Hawaiian Islands were an elixir. Still, in the end, there was absolutely no decision.
    It was on to Cincinnati, the Big Red Machine, and the big time.

CHAPTER 6
    Rose, Bench, Sparky, and the Machine
    A T THE END OF January 1971, Linda, Steven, and I moved to Cincinnati and settled into a townhouse (on the Ohio side of the river, of course). On one very cold night a couple of weeks later—only two weeks removed from wearing aloha shirts in Honolulu—it was time for our fireplace to make its debut. Having spent years in Southern California, Arizona, and Hawaii, I had never lit a fire before. No problem. There were some logs already in the fireplace, and I covered them with paper and threw in a match. Five minutes later, the room was filling with smoke. Fortunately, one of our new neighbors smelled smoke, came over, assessed the situation, and said to me, “You do know you have to open the flue, right? It lets the smoke out.”
    I had no idea what a flue was.
    Acclimating to other parts of our new life went more smoothly. The Reds had an annual off-season regional tour known as the Reds’ Caravan. In mid-February, as the new voice of the Reds, I would join this off-season’s edition. Several of the team’s players lived in the area full-time, and on the Reds Caravan, which included some of those players and manager Sparky Anderson, we visited cities like Indianapolis, Lexington, Louisville, Columbus, and Huntington, West Virginia, among others over a three-day span to meet and greet fans and talk up the Big Red Machine. On that swing, I got to know the guys and began to get a sense of the fan base. I’d always loved geography and maps, and this was a brand-new part of the country to explore. Apart from the November trip when I was hired, I’d never been to that part of the country.
    I had seen Joe Nuxhall pitch when I was a kid. He was also a local legend, and couldn’t have been more gracious, introducing me around town and making sure people knew I had his stamp of approval. In Cincinnati, where the Reds are almost like a public trust, his support made a huge difference.
    Each of the three network television affiliates in Cincinnati had a local daily morning talk show. The ABC show was hosted by Phil Donahue, but he was based in Dayton. I was a guest a couple of times on the NBC show, hosted by Bob Braun. But the man who was most helpful in getting me accepted quickly was the host of the CBS show. His name was Nick Clooney. He had a young son named George. A few years ago, I was playing in a charity golf tournament in Las Vegas, and at the tournament dinner, my wife noticed that George Clooney was in the room. “You have to go and say hello to him,” Linda said excitedly. Of course she wanted to meet him—what else is new? “I can’t do that,” I told her. “I don’t know him.” A couple of minutes later, Clooney spotted me and came straight over to our table—in what I thought must be a case of mistaken identity. The first thing he says is “I’ve always wanted to ask you. Why did you leave Cincinnati?” George was one of those kids who went to bed with a transistor radio pressed to his ear, listening to Reds games, much like I had done with the Brooklyn Dodgers. For the next hour, we reminisced about the Big Red Machine. He couldn’t get enough stories.
    In early March 1971, it was on to spring training in Tampa. Ironically, the first game I was to call was our exhibition season opener against the White Sox in Sarasota—in other words, the team I was with, versus the team I was almost with. We had a pregame show that began a little after 1:00, followed by an opening segment for the game itself at 1:30, then a commercial break, with the game itself scheduled to start at 1:34. Except on this day, the umpires were ready to begin at 1:31. It was my first broadcast