Cris Collinsworth’s famous smooth “slide” in the NBC broadcast booth was actually born out of necessity.
Collinsworth has since retired the move but it was a topic brought up by Eli Manning on ESPN’s “ManningCast” during Cowboys-Bengals on Monday night.
Reacting to the former Giants quarterback’s deadpan introduction, Collinsworth revealed he started doing the slide into the screen because Al Michaels had a contractual stipulation that NBC’s “Sunday Night Football” would begin with the legendary play-by-play broadcaster alone on-screen.
“You know how that all got started, right? So Al’s got it in his contract that he’s the only one on camera for the first minute of the broadcast,” Collinsworth said.
“I don’t care! It’s less I got to try and remember. I’m happy about it. I got no problem at all.”
Collinsworth then went over the mechanics of how it worked.
“So they would say, ‘Alright, Cris, Al’s gotta be the only one on. You gotta get out of the shot,’” Collinsworth said.
“I was like, ‘Well you put a piece of tape down for my legs to be on either side to do it. What do you want me to do, have my legs around this piece of tape? Or do you want me to get out of the shot?’ [The producer] goes, ‘Well, just lean out of the shot. Just lean out!’ So I’m like, ‘What are you talking about?’”
Collinsworth explained with an illustrative gesture that he would get out of the shot by lying on a table off-screen “while Al’s waxing poetic on the other side, and then he goes to his partner, ‘Come on in.’”
Thus the slide was born.
Collinsworth still marvels over what a phenomenon it became.
“This whole thing becomes a totally crazed sort of thing … and I don’t know what the heck happened, but it made me famous,” Collinsworth mused.
Speaking with The Post’s Justin Terranova in 2019, Michaels explained that Collinsworth’s slide would be more properly described as “angling in.”
Michaels and Collinsworth worked together on “SNF” for 13 years before Michaels left for Amazon and Mike Tirico joined Collinsworth in the NBC booth.
