The legendary Al Michaels begins his latest regular season on Thursday night. It will end with Amazon’s first-ever playoff game.
Will that contest in early January be Michaels’s last hurrah?
“The reality is, I’ve trained myself to live in the present,” Michaels told Ryan Glasspiegel of the New York Post. “I have for a long period of time. I don’t like to go into the past. People love to hear stories about the old days — I’m bored with it.”
He’s not bored with his current gig. Still, as he starts the last year of his contract, he’s not thinking about next year.
“Down the line, I don’t know what’s going to happen,” Michaels said. “Nobody does. Right now I feel great. I’m looking forward to the start of the season. I’ve made no decision in terms of what will happen in the future. I suspect that some time during the year I’ll have a better feeling of what it’s like. But my feeling is, if I can live up to the standard I expect from myself, then I’ll want to continue. If I can’t, then I’ll have to think about it another way. I don’t want to go out, as Howard Cosell used to say, ‘a shadow of your former self.’”
Michaels said last year that he doesn’t want a farewell tour. He doesn’t want it to be about him; he never has. So even if he’s thinking about walking off into the sunset after the coming season, he most likely won’t breathe a word of it until it’s time for him to say, simply and decisively, “It’s time.”
It’s very hard to think of watching NFL games without him. Don’t think about that. Think about enjoying the comfort of his voice, once that has become familiar and iconic.
We’ll all get to hear it again tomorrow night, when the Dolphins host the Bills in a significant early-season contest that carries plenty of story lines, drama, and (hopefully) points.