Legendary broadcaster Al Michaels has had many career milestones. On Tuesday, Al reached an important personal one.
The best person to ever narrate sports action into a microphone turns 80 today.
We’ll all get there, if we’re lucky. And that specific destination is far better than the alternative.
Born in Brooklyn and raised in L.A., he’s been broadcasting sports for more than 50 years. He gained national fame with his call of the Miracle on Ice in the 1980 Winter Olympics, but he did so much more than that. Every sport. The biggest platforms.
He debuted on Monday Night Football in 1986, where he remained for two decades before landing with NBC for Sunday Night Football. In 2022, he joined Amazon Prime’s Thursday Night Football.
That’s nearly 40 years of having Al supply the soundtrack to some of the biggest games in football. You don’t realize how much you’ll miss him until he’s gone, because most of you have never had to make it through a football season without Al working one of the biggest games of the week.
So appreciate him while you can. And hopefully, like other high achievers (like Warren Buffett) who just keep going and going and going beyond reaching octogenarian status, we’ll keep seeing and hearing from Al, for many years to come.
And if you want to know more about Al’s journey, you can get the whole story (through about 10 years ago) in his book, You Can’t Make This Up: Miracles, Memories, and the Perfect Marriage of Sports and Television.
