Al Michaels, the Miracle on Ice Voice Who Still Won’t Leave the Booth

Al Michaels

Photo: Keith Allison from Hanover, MD, USA / CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Born	November 12, 1944 Brooklyn
Occupation	Sports Commentator
Awards	Sports Lifetime Achievement Award · Walter Cronkite Award for Excellence in Journalism

There are two Al Michaels. The first never ages. He lives inside a few seconds of hockey audio from Lake Placid, a voice climbing as the clock runs out on the Soviet team and then asking the most quoted question in American sports broadcasting: “Do you believe in miracles? Yes!” The second works Thursday nights on Prime Video with Kirk Herbstreit beside him, and lately spends Friday mornings reading that he should retire. They are the same man, and the hard part of his late career is that the first one keeps grading the second.

Nothing about the start pointed at a booth. A Brooklyn native who finished high school in Los Angeles, Michaels studied radio and television at Arizona State University, and his first job in television had no ball in it: at Chuck Barris Productions he helped choose the women who appeared on The Dating Game. The sports came through the minor leagues, calling games for the Hawaii Islanders of the Pacific Coast League, and then through the Cincinnati Reds, who hired him for radio and put him on NBC as a Reds voice for a World Series. A stint with the San Francisco Giants followed before ABC Sports brought him in.

Those steps ran from Honolulu in 1968 to Cincinnati in 1971 and the 1972 World Series, and by the mid-1970s he was at ABC, which sent him to call hockey at the 1980 Winter Olympics. On February 22, the American college team beat the Soviet Union 4-3. It was a medal-round game rather than the final, the United States still had to beat Finland two days later for the gold, and much of the country saw it on tape delay that evening. None of that matters to the memory. The call did what good play-by-play rarely gets the chance to do: it named the feeling of the people watching at the exact second they had it.

Nine years later he was in the booth at Candlestick Park for Game 3 of the 1989 World Series between the Giants and the Oakland Athletics when the Loma Prieta earthquake hit, minutes before the first pitch. Michaels, who knew the Bay Area from his Giants years, stopped being a baseball announcer and reported on the disaster from the ABC production truck. That coverage earned him an Emmy nomination for news broadcasting, an odd line on a sportscaster’s résumé.

From 1986 to 2005 he called Monday Night Football, the most visible job in the sport. The booth around him changed with the decades: Frank Gifford and Dan Dierdorf, then Boomer Esiason and Dan Fouts, then the comedian Dennis Miller in an experiment ABC ended after two seasons, and finally John Madden. When Madden left for NBC’s new Sunday Night Football, Michaels wanted to follow him, but he was under contract to ABC and ESPN. On February 9, 2006, NBC confirmed the release, and the price included a cartoon. Disney, ESPN’s parent, received the rights to Oswald the Lucky Rabbit, the character Walt Disney had created and then lost to Universal in the 1920s, along with cable rights to the Ryder Cup and more Olympic highlights for ESPN. Bob Iger wanted Oswald back. Michaels became the only broadcaster ever traded for a rabbit.

The NBC years were the long plateau. He called Sunday Night Football from 2006 to 2021, with Madden until 2009 and with Cris Collinsworth after that, and his Super Bowl count across ABC and NBC reached eleven, the last of them in February 2022. He had by then called the Super Bowl, the World Series, the NBA Finals and the Stanley Cup Final. The Pro Football Hall of Fame gave him the Pete Rozelle Radio-Television Award in 2013, and the Baseball Hall of Fame added the Ford C. Frick Award in 2021, a double that few broadcasters own.

Then came the part the statue does not cover. In 2022 Michaels moved to Amazon‘s Thursday Night Football, while NBC kept him in an “emeritus” role for playoff games. In December 2023 it was reported that NBC had dropped him from its postseason coverage. At Prime Video the reviews of the 2025 season were harsh: critics pointed to a botched goal-line call and a Week 16 Rams-Seahawks game he did not rise to. This season the complaints have become specific and repetitive. During the Steelers-Browns game on October 1, 2026, he identified Cleveland defensive tackle Mason Graham as a Michigan State product while Graham was down with a knee injury. Graham played at Michigan. He waved off the Deshaun Watson story with “we don’t have to go through the whole Deshaun Watson thing”, and analysts including Warren Sharp, Sam Monson and Sports Illustrated’s Conor Orr joined the pile. Michaels set his own standard in January, telling Sports Business Journal: “I’ll go as long as I can or I’m wanted, but I have to know that I can do the game at the level that satisfies me.” The question his critics keep raising is whether he is still the right judge of that level.

There is an irony in the fact that his voice no longer strictly needs him. For the 2024 Paris Olympics, NBC and Peacock trained an artificial intelligence model on his past commentary and used it to narrate personalized highlight packages in Your Daily Olympic Recap. Michaels agreed after a demonstration, and later described the result to Vanity Fair: “Frankly, it was astonishing. It was amazing. And it was a little bit frightening.” A network can now keep the sound of Al Michaels in rotation without asking whether Al Michaels has a bad night.

He told his own version in You Can’t Make This Up, a 2014 memoir written with L. Jon Wertheim. Away from the booth his life has been unusually stable for a job built on travel. He married Linda Anne Stamaton in August 1966, and the couple has two children, Jennifer and Steven. His brother David Michaels works as a television producer. Born on November 12, 1944, he turns 82 this November, in the middle of a season.

Prime Video confirmed in January that Michaels would return for 2026, his fifth season on Thursday nights alongside Herbstreit and sideline reporter Kaylee Hartung, and both sides describe the arrangement the same way: one year at a time. The next decision is the one he has said belongs to him. Whether he makes it on his own terms, or the Friday mornings make it for him, is the last open question in a career that started with the most famous one.

Tags: sports, athletes, Monday Night Football, Al Michaels, John Madden, sports broadcasters

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