Courtesy Washington Post

(September 23, 2009) George Michael picked up the telephone Monday morning to call Sonny Jurgensen, his friend and former Channel 4 colleague, to rehash the Redskins' 9-7 victory over the woebegone St. Louis Rams on Sunday. They spoke for 40 minutes, and when they finished, Michael said he told Jurgensen, "If that [conversation] had been on the air, it would have been some great television."

Sadly, that chat will never see the light of day. Nor will Michael's face be seen or his blustery "now hear this" be heard anytime soon on local television, doing what he always did better than most -- asking provocative questions and often eliciting interesting and occasionally outrageous, newsmaking responses from anyone within range of his booming voice.

That memorable voice is mostly silent these days over the Washington airwaves, heard only occasionally when a local radio sports-talk host gets him as a guest for a quick hit, as WTEM's Tony Kornheiser did last week. But as for local television, which Michael often dominated as Channel 4's sports director from 1980 to 2007, he's been a TV no-show since his last "Redskins Report" aired in December.

Michael, 70, still lives in Montgomery County and spends most of his time these days researching old baseball photographs, a longtime passion that includes purchasing old newspaper photo libraries with several partners. He still watches a lot of football, the better to stay up on the sport whenever radio hosts from around the country call him for an on-air opinion.

Two years ago, Michael was the victim of an industry-wide budget-slashing movement in the local broadcasting business. Never mind that his nightly sportscasts at 6 and 11 and his popular weekly football and basketball shows often produced high ratings, not to mention more than occasional must-see television, a major reason Channel 4 has been No. 1 in the local TV news market for years.

"Everything has changed," Michael said in a telephone interview Monday afternoon. "Why has it changed? Because whatever you do, quality doesn't really matter. It's whether you kept the cost down. Management doesn't worry about ratings. They worry about the dollars, and I guess I can't argue with that. That's just the way it is now."

Michael left the daily grind at Channel 4 two years ago when he was told his budget would be slashed and he'd have to let go of a number of key people in his sports operation. He still kept his hand in the business with his highly acclaimed "Redskins Report" show featuring panelists Jurgensen, John Riggins and Michael Wilbon during the NFL season, as well as his day-after-game interviews (along with Jurgensen) of the Redskins head coach du jour.

These days, Jim Zorn gets grilled on Comcast SportsNet by Chick Hernandez, a perfectly competent interviewer in his own right. Still, for this viewer, at least, it's just not the same without Michael asking the questions. Obviously all good things eventually come to an end, but Michael's outsize ego and bodacious bluster still ought to be on display -- whether on TV or talk radio -- on a regular basis in this town.

One of the first day-after questions Michael said he would have loved to ask Zorn involved that brutal halfback option play from the Rams 5-yard line midway through the third quarter, when Clinton Portis overthrew Chris Cooley in the end zone and the Redskins had to kick another field goal.

(By the way, much to his credit, Jurgensen did exactly that in his postgame radio locker room interview with Zorn. Jurgensen told the head coach that if he'd been the quarterback and that play came through his headset, he'd have ignored it and switched to something else. Why pay a quarterback all that money to throw touchdown passes, Jurgensen wondered, then take it out of his hands and allow a running back to heave it in a critical situation?

Just a tad perturbed, Zorn told Jurgensen that he would have benched him for disobeying a direct order, an almost laughable response from a novice play-caller to a Hall of Fame quarterback who called most of his plays over the course of his brilliant career. But it also was must-listen radio, a response that was aired several more times on the radio the next day.)

"If I were doing it, I would say to Zorn before we went on the air, 'There are three things today I'm going to ask you that you're probably not going to like,' " Michael said. "But these are the same questions the fans would be asking, and I wouldn't be doing my job if I didn't ask you for an answer."

Michael said he shopped "Redskins Report" to stations all around town in an attempt to keep it on the air, and came close to striking a deal with Fox-owned Channel 5. In the end, as always, "it came down to money, and that's just the way it goes in television these days.

"The problem is, if I'm going to do it, I'm only going to do it right," Michael said. "I wanted to do it with Sonny, Riggins and Wilbon, but [Channel 5] did not want to spend the money it would have taken to do it. We took so much pride in that show, things like the Jim Zorn show, and I wasn't going to compromise the product."

When Michael arrived here in 1980, money clearly was no object. He had a station manager, the late John Rohrbeck, whom he described as "a visionary. He once told me, 'You take care of the content and the quality and I'll take care of making a profit.' John's idea was 'just win. Be number one.' "

That's exactly what happened. Michael not only had a healthy budget for all those years, he was given large blocks of time for his sportscasts at 6 and 11, 10 minutes or more on the 6 p.m. broadcast the day after a Redskins game and six or seven minutes at 11. These days, sportscasts on most local over-the-air stations are lucky to get three minutes a night, if that much, barely enough to show a few highlights and interviews and rarely enough precious seconds for any sort of hard-hitting commentary.

It may be fashionable to lunch with Lindsay Czarniak, but if this is what passes for innovative local sports programming these days, pardon me if I don't leave the tip.

Asked about the current state of local sports television, Michael diplomatically preferred not to comment other than to say "I'd never have believed we are where we are now. Back then, I'm going against [Channel 9's Glenn] Brenner, the guys at 5 and 7 and we're trying to beat our brains out. We had wars and we were going at it every night trying to top each other.

"It's just different today, that's all."

But is it better, he was asked.

"Different."

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