Al Michaels calls Candlestick Park ‘the worst stadium of all-time’ for broadcasters

Al Michaels had some thoughts about Candlestick Park during his appearance on The Dan Patrick Show on Thursday.

None of them were good.

The voice of Prime Video’s Thursday Night Football called the old 49ers and Giants home the worst stadium he had ever worked at. He went into detail about just how miserable it was calling games from a press box that sat so absurdly high that he once joked on Monday Night Football about looking down on the blimp.

“The worst of all-time and, of course, it’s the worst stadium of all-time, as well, is Candlestick Park in San Francisco,” Michaels told Dan Patrick. “It was cold. It was windy. You know, I did Giants for three years. But, calling football, you were in a press box that was so high. One night — I think on Monday Night Football — I said it’s the only place where you look down on the blimp. That was the worst of all time.”

Candlestick opened in 1960 as a baseball stadium, which meant the football press box was always an afterthought. The wind whipped in off San Francisco Bay. The press box sat so high that broadcasters couldn’t see the field properly. When Michaels worked Giants games there in the mid-1970s, the franchise was in bankruptcy, and the crowds were pathetic.

“When I was doing the Giants and they were a moribund franchise and they had Chapter 11 (Bankruptcy) and a man named Bob Lurie — no relation to Jeff — came in and saved the team in 1976,” Michaels continued. “It was so bad at Candlestick that one night they handed me a slip of paper with an attendance figure. We had an intern. His name was Larry Bear, who’s now the president of the team. He was an intern in the press box. He gave me a slip of paper and I looked at it, went, ‘You know what, tonight’s attendance, why don’t I just tell you who’s here?’ … Those were the days, my friend.”

That intern, Larry Baer, still runs the Giants. Candlestick was demolished in 2015.

The Patrick interview aired hours before Michaels called Thursday night’s game from SoFi Stadium. The irony is that Michaels struggled Thursday from what he called one of the best broadcasting setups in sports. He was late identifying a roughing-the-passer penalty in the first quarter, confused about why the 49ers were at their own 41-yard line when simple math would’ve told him 26 plus 15 equals 41. Late in the game, he fumbled the call on Kyren Williams’ goal-line fumble, seeming unsure what had happened even as players celebrated and officials signaled San Francisco ball.

Michaels is 80 years old and in his 40th year of calling prime-time football. During the same interview with Patrick, he discussed Howard Cosell, with whom he worked on Monday Night Football in the 1980s.

“He got – toward the end of his career and life – just became bitter,” Michaels said. “And it became very, very difficult to work with him in 1984 and 1985, and finally, that was the end of Howard’s broadcasting career.”

Cosell was 68 when ABC ended his broadcasting career in 1985. Michaels is 12 years his senior now in 2025, and just hours after complaining about Candlestick’s impossible sight lines, he struggled to see what was happening at SoFi.

Sometimes the problem isn’t the press box.