Mike Tirico is taking over play-by-play duties for Al Michaels in NBC’s Sunday Night Football booth and you can be sure there will be a lot more vegetables eaten in that booth, too.
Tirico appeared on 105.3 The Fan’s Shan & RJ in Dallas on Wednesday and confirmed the more unusual stories about his predecessor: he doesn’t eat vegetables.
“He never did,” Tirico confirmed. “Any time I’ve been with him — which was some of the Sunday nights, some of the Olympic stuff — I never saw Al eat a vegetable. Cris [Collinsworth] can vouch for that over the years.”
Of course, there was that one time Michele Tafoya tricked Michaels into eating brussel sprouts on TV, but aside from that, it does not appear as if anyone has any record of Michaels eating his veggies.
This conversation all sprung up because Tirico was actually asked about his Italian heritage — on his mother’s side — when he revealed the most “un-Italian” thing about him.
“I try not to eat the extra piece of bread,” he said. “When we grew up — my dad’s African-American, not in my life, my mom’s Italian — and her family, my grandmother cooked a lot for us. One of the things you do is you take the extra piece of bread and they usually take the bread plate away from you after the salad. In an Italian household, usually it stays around.
“So the one thing I do is I don’t take the extra piece of bread. I think I did that enough in my past that I need to stop doing that.”
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