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

to get information was to build relationships with players, managers, coaches, and executives.
    It was easy to become close to Sparky Anderson. Each day before every spring training and regular season game, we would tape a ten-minute pregame show called The Main Spark. And those ten minutes would often lead to anywhere from another five to thirty minutes where I had a private audience with the man who was such a great manager that he’d be inducted into the Hall of Fame in 2000. I was receiving a Ph.D. in baseball. I was also developing close relationships with the coaches, including Alex Grammas, George Scherger, Larry Shepard, and the hitting coach, Ted Kluszewski. I remembered watching this huge first baseman, Big Klu, playing for the Reds when I was seven or eight. Now I’m with him nearly every day for six months. And you know what he was? A big, giant teddy bear.
    I also became good friends with a number of the players. Most of them were around my age. First baseman Lee May was the player who lived nearest to me, and I would often drive with him to the ballpark. Johnny Bench became a good pal. So did Tommy Helms, Bernie Carbo, Gary Nolan, Tony Perez, and a utility infielder by the name of Jimmy Stewart who had been with the Hawaii Islanders in 1968.
    And I became fast friends with Pete Rose. When spring training opened in 1971, Pete didn’t report on time. Why? He was holding out. The team was offering him $105,000 and he wanted $110,000. They eventually settled on $107,500, which sounds like a joke now. There are players today—a lot of whom couldn’t carry Rose’s luggage—who make fifty times that.
    Pete and I hit it off right away. After he’d reported for camp, the Reds had an off day, but Pete being Pete, he wanted to go out to the facility to take extra batting practice in the morning. Then, Pete Rose being Pete Rose, he had arranged that we would make the thirty-minute drive over to what was then Florida Downs (now called Tampa Bay Downs), near Clearwater, for a day of thoroughbred racing. Bob Hertzel, the Reds beat writer for the Cincinnati Enquirer , came with us.
    When the races concluded in late afternoon, we got back into the car and drove the twenty-five minutes to Derby Lane in St. Petersburg for a full card of greyhound racing. (The Cardinals and the Mets both trained at the same facility in St. Pete, and the Phillies were up the road in Clearwater, so the place was often filled with major-league ballplayers, coaches, front office people, and broadcasters on any given night.) After the last race, we drove back across the Gandy Bridge to Tampa. At the other end of the bridge was a jai alai fronton. The fronton featured a late daily double. So where do you think we ended up? We were pulling off a pari-mutuel trifecta.
    By the way, as a newspaper guy, Hertzel wasn’t exactly flush with cash. In fact, he had only $7 in his pocket when we left the greyhound track. At the jai alai fronton, he then had the option of boxing an exacta for $6—giving him three separate combinations—or getting a cocktail for $1.75 and then splitting the box by picking only two combinations. He opted for the cocktail and the split box. And you guessed it—the third combination came in.
    Rose had had a big day and night and won around a thousand bucks. Hertzel got dropped off back at the hotel with $1.25.
    The Reds lost their first four games in 1971, and never made it above .500 the entire season. It was the one bad year in the Big Red Machine’s run. But I was having the time of my life. Driving to work for home games, I’d come around the last bend of Columbia Parkway—an insanely dangerous road, which had been a WPA project, and ran parallel to the Ohio River leading into downtown Cincinnati—and see Riverfront Stadium. It was a beautiful sight—and a daily reminder that I was in the big time. Then the Reds would go on the road, and I’d get to explore all of these great American cities. One night I could be