Al Michaels didn’t just see the writing on the wall, he heard the words and felt their disrespect.
Toward the end of his 20-year run as the lead voice of ABC’s “Monday Night Football,” he thought the franchise had the “bastard child” package of NFL games among the networks.
“We were told, we’ve got ‘Desperate Housewives,’ we’ve got all this other stuff, and then football is just there to promote every other show,” Michaels said. “We sorta got treated like that.”
Meanwhile, Dick Ebersol wanted to do the exact opposite at NBC, where he was in charge of sports programming, by building the network around the NFL.