Mad Mike and His Merry Pranksters . . .
— Michael Weisman does a graceful somersault onto his bed and then stretches out next to his wife, Carol. He is the innovative executive producer of NBC Sports, an iconoclast whose willingness to attempt the unusual has earned him the moniker Mad Mike, yet on this afternoon just days before the Super Bowl, he is restrained and reflective. The clammy grasp of pregame jitters is embracing him and eventually he looks up and says: ”I hate being here Tuesday. Normally, we come in Saturday, do our meetings, boom, do the game.
”But here, guys start coming in on Sunday and they begin to outthink themselves. There`s the tendency with the week of waiting around to overproduce, to overannounce, to overdo everything. What I try to do this week, instead of getting them up, instead of saying things like `Don`t make mistakes,` I`ve got to try and low-key it. I`ll tell them: `You`re the best people in the business. Relax. Go out. Have fun.` See, what happens to the ball teams happens here with us. In fact, for the next Super Bowl, I think I`ll institute a curfew and keep the crew in Hattiesburg, Miss. What I`m trying to say is it becomes for television people as well as players a tremendously anxious week.”
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Why are you so anxious? I ask.
”You want to take full advantage of the opportunity you have. It`s very rare you get a chance to do something you know will reach this many people. We`re talking potentially staggering numbers, maybe the highest-rated show of all time. Also, you know all your peers are watching. You know everyone at NBC is watching and you feel a sense of responsibility to them. It`s not the fear of failure that will cause me to lose sleep this week. It`s the fear of missing the opportunity. Then, after it`s over, there`s a tremendous letdown. It`s `My God, we have to wait another three years.` All those waking moments you spent thinking about the game, all those sleepless nights, you think, `My God, they`re over.` ”
— Ted Nathanson, who will work his 10th Super Bowl Sunday when he directs NBC`s telecast, will need two full days to get over that experience and won`t sleep well again until Tuesday night. His intensity on the job is legendary, and not many years ago, he found himself with raw and bloody elbows after every event he worked. He began to wear elbow pads then, but the pressure he exerted while leaning forward to stare at the monitors eventually damaged the nerves in his elbows and necessitated an operation. ”Then,” says Weisman, ”he got a pinched nerve in his neck and began to wear a neck brace. He still does wear a neck brace. He`s also been known to drop his trousers during a telecast, and they say I open my shirt. I don`t even know I`m doing that. It`s just a way of letting off steam.”
”I just dropped my pants once and that was a joke,” laughs Nathanson.
”But, yeah, I do open my belt, and Michael, he practically undresses sometimes.”
— The attention now focused on the Super Bowl telecast not only jangles a network`s nerves but also affects its performance. Explains Weisman: ”So many ball teams come in here and approach the game cautiously, and the same thing holds true for the networks. You play it safe and, very often, you don`t have your best broadcast on the Super Bowl.
”What we have in our favor is we have veterans doing the game. There`s no one in a key production position who hasn`t done at least one Super Bowl. Another thing is we`re coming in on a roll. We had a good playoff weekend, an excellent championship game and our people are coming in confident. All week long they`ve been reading good reviews, hearing how good we were, and that helps. Other years, when you haven`t had a good season, you come in feeling different. You come in thinking, `We better not blow it.` ”
— Pause for a quick look at the game plan: Nathanson and Larry Cirillo, who`ll produce Sunday`s telecast, will have 21 cameras to work with and that means more isolated shots than normal. On every play, there will be an iso camera on the quarterback and running backs, but the position of the others will be dictated by circumstance. In normal situations, the wide receivers, the tight end and one defensive player will be isolated. In an offensive situation, they will ignore all defenders to be sure they get all possible receivers. In a defensive situation, they keep an iso on one wide receiver but put four on defenders.
Cirillo charts the number of replays he calls for and, on the average, he shows 25 per quarter. Count for yourself. . . . Former Miami quarterback Bob Griese joins regulars Dick Enberg and Merlin Olsen in the booth, and he will attempt to elucidate plays on his telestrater (CBS calls the same machine John Madden`s Chalkboard). Enberg and Olsen, who usually work alone, were apprehensive about the addition at first and even now Enberg says: ”It could be something that is upsetting. There are a few rare exceptions where three in the booth works, but most of the time it doesn`t and the broadcast becomes clouded by talk. But Bob is the ideal guy to add. He`s not the guy in the classroom who always had his hand up. He`s very comfortable coming in just when the broadcast needs him and that way he becomes a true asset.”
— John Filippelli, the pregame producer, is as irreverent as Mad Mike, and his two-hour show Sunday has received as much attention as the telecast of the game itself. He has guarded its contents as if they were a state secret, yet he is more than happy to expound philosophically on the thinking that went into it. ”I looked at all the programs from the past and I was struck by the sameness of them all,” he says.
”Bar remote, obvious feature, bar remote, obvious feature, self-serving celebrity interview, commercial, commercial, commercial, bar remote. In 19 years, no one tried anything different. I think they had a tendency to be real conservative, real cautious, and the shows became a collage of predictability and boredom. When we got together to plan ours, we said we wouldn`t be afraid to take chances. We said we may fall on our face, but someone has to take a chance. I think we`re going to make you laugh and, in some places, we`ll make you cry. I think we`ll give you some things you`ll remember. Maybe my objectives are too lofty, but I hope we succeed.”
— Pause for a quick look at the pregame plan: Of course, there is the silent minute, the bathroom-break minute, which will actually last a little longer than two minutes. The screen won`t be blank, either, but just what is going to be on it is a bigger secret than the Bears` game plan. . . . The theme is Supe Sunday, an undeclared American holiday, so look for a piece called ”Hands Across America.” . . . In honor of the Supe`s 20th
anniversary, there will be a look back at Vince Lombardi, whose Packers won Supe I, and at ”The Team Time Forgot,” the Kansas City Chiefs who lost to the Packers . . .
Look for Rodney Dangerfield to offer some comic relief and for Bill Cosby to reprise his famous Fat Albert routine in honor of the Fridge. . . . Look for a Pete Axthelm essay on Super Bowl flakes, who now include Jim McMahon, and, closing the show, look for a musical tribute to the veterans in Sunday`s game: Walter Payton and Gary Fencik, John Hannah and Julius Adams.
— Mad Mike is discussing this last feature, which will be accompanied by an old Neil Sedaka song that had a short shelf life when it was released 20 years ago. Weisman heard it played one morning on ”The Regis Philbin Show,” liked it and sent a researcher off in search of a copy. She called Sedaka, who didn`t have the record, and then Sedaka`s mother, who did.
”Now talk about things that keep me awake at night, here`s one,” says Weisman. ”I wake up at night and say to myself: `What am I doing? Sedaka couldn`t sell this record 20 years ago when he was hot and I`m closing my pregame Super Bowl show with it. Am I crazy?`–and here Mad Mike laughs
–”But, what the heck, I love to burst balloons.”