While rolling home from Dallas on Monday, I was trading e-mails with PFT Live producer Matt Casey, and we decided to roll the dice and ask NBC’s Al Michaels if he’d join the show.
We got lucky -- he was available and he was interested, and little did we know that Monday was the five-year anniversary of his arrival at NBC.
The move from ESPN came in an intriguing way. He was, in essence, “traded” to NBC for a variety of rights-related concessions and the inclusion of Oswald the Rabbit, a Mickey Mouse-style creation of Walt Disney who had been the property of Universal for decades.
There was far more to the deal than Oswald, but it ended up being a great deal for NBC. But for a tweet from ESPN’s Bill Hofheimer, we wouldn’t have realized that it was the “wood” anniversary for the marriage between Al and NBC.
Here’s Al talking about -- and finding out about -- the fact that five years have passed since he joined NBC.
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