NEWSWEEK: Could you imagine this “grand slam” as a youngster?

Al Michaels: When I was kid my dream was to do the World Series before I was 30, because when you’re 12, you never think you’ll live past 30.

Has your NBA debut come too late? Has the league lost its luster? My first Major League Baseball job was the Cincinnati Reds. It’s 1971, the beginning of the Big Red Machine with Pete Rose entering his prime and a young Johnny Bench. I’m thinking this team is going to be viewed as one of the greatest in history. What did I get from the people in Cincinnati who were 50 years old and beyond? “You should have been here when …” It’s all about memories, all about nostalgia.

So the NBA game is as good as ever?

I think every sport is played at a higher level than it has ever been. I don’t buy for a second that I missed the NBA golden years. The golden years are always 20 years ago. In 2024 the golden year will be 2004.

But it’s a fact that ratings are way down.

In a universe with a gazillion choices, ratings mean next to nothing compared to the ’70s and ’80s. Ratings are bogus. How do you rate college dorms? How do you rate bars? They say they have all this methodology. I think it’s a bunch of crap.

Still, were you at all reluctant to take on the NBA at this point?

I went in with a certain amount of trepidation this year because I hadn’t done basketball in such a long time. With football, there’s a five-second burst and 35 to 40 seconds of replays and analysis in which to tell the rest of the story. Basketball does not afford you that opportunity. You have to weave everything inside the game as opposed to during the natural pauses. It’s a rhythm thing. When I started my career I did a lot of basketball, and I thought I had a pretty good affinity for it. But when you don’t play a musical instrument for 20 years, you wonder can I just pick it up and still hit the right notes.

What have you learned doing NBA?

The way sports are covered on television these days, everybody talks about breaking it down. Well breaking it down is fine if you have 15 minutes on a postgame show. You can break things down to the point where they’re just pebbles of sand. I look at sports as drama and you can begin to ruin things by examining them too closely. [The Lakers’] Derek Fisher’s last-second game winner was a phenomenal moment. In the aftermath of that game, I didn’t need a 20-minute treatise on every option that Derek Fisher had. Let the drama play out. Just try to stay in lock step with it. I’m learning how to do that better and better.

What has surprised you about the most about NBA basketball?

How physical the game is. It’s football without pads. It’s a rough, tough but elegant game.

There’s so much hype on the air. How do you avoid it, especially when the game is lousy and you’re at risk of losing your audience?

I think we try like hell in those situations to give people reasons to keep watching. You come outside the game a little bit and you go into the peripheral areas. It can become more human-interest oriented. But you’ll never hear me say, “they’re down by 17, they really have a good chance to win the game.”

You said earlier that sports is all about nostalgia. So is it nostalgia, too, when we recall your “Do you believe in miracles?” as the pinnacle of sports moments?

No, because nothing like that will ever happen again. Super Bowls and World Series are great sustaining moments, but nothing like what happens at [the] Olympic Games. In 1980 you had archenemies with missiles lined up against each other. The cold war was pretty cold. Now the enemy is a bunch of punks running around with chemical weapons in suitcases.

Can the Olympics remain special?

I know we live in a far more jaded, scary world than when I first did the Olympics back in Sapporo [Japan] in 1972. But you really have to keep doing things like [the Olympics] on an international level so people can try to learn about each other.

Do today’s NBA players–our latest Dream Team–appreciate what they will represent this summer in Athens?

I didn’t know jack when I was 20. So a kid who’s 20 can’t really understand the enormity of this. When I was growing up, representing your country in the Olympics was gigantic. Now it’s a little more about merchandising.