Don Mischer brought Michael Jackson into the room for their first meeting with the NFL and NBC, and Michael did what he always did around new people. “Michael… went around the room and introduced himself quietly,” Mischer remembered on The Rich Eisen Show in 2023.
Then everybody sat down at the table. And Michael spoke first.
Mischer had worked with Michael before, so he knew both sides of him. Years earlier he’d been one of the people running “Motown 25,” the TV special where Michael did “Billie Jean.” Getting that song on the air wasn’t simple.
Michael agreed to sing a Jackson 5 medley with his brothers, but he had a condition. “You must let me do a single, a new single I’ve got coming out,” Mischer recalled him saying.
“Initially we said no,” Mischer admitted. He and Suzanne de Passe agreed to “wait and take a look at what Michael does with Billie Jean.”
They got their look at midnight, the night before the show. Smokey Robinson and Linda Ronstadt were in the room, along with Mischer and de Passe. “Michael came out with the fedora, the glove… and did Billie Jean,” Mischer said, “and we looked at each other and said we better put this on the air.” On the night itself, Mischer said, “when he started the moonwalk there was no question about it.”
That’s the Michael he still describes. Offstage, he was quiet. “Michael was a guy who if he came into this room he would just sit in the corner and be very nice and polite,” Mischer said. “But when he gets on a stage he takes control.”
The Super Bowl show at the Rose Bowl in Pasadena needed that kind of control. Mischer said the stage “came out in about 22 pieces” on “soft balloon tires,” with “a little dressing room for Michael” built into it. The crew had “three and a half minutes” to put it together. But the first problem in that meeting wasn’t the stage at all.
Don Mischer tells the Super Bowl story on The Rich Eisen Show
This is The Rich Eisen Show’s own upload, about seven and a half minutes long. Mischer tells the Motown 25 story from about 2:26 and describes the Super Bowl stage at about 4:56. Listen at about 6:03 for the first meeting with the NFL and NBC, and for Michael’s opening line.
Here’s what Michael said once everyone was seated, in Mischer’s telling: “Now the first thing I want to do is move the start of the game four hours later so that my halftime show will be in the dark.” Michael wanted the whole Super Bowl pushed back, kickoff and all, so his show would happen after nightfall.
“There was silence in the room,” Mischer said, and he was the one who broke it. “Michael, you know that means that people are going to be seeing you at midnight in New York,” he told him. “It won’t work.” As Mischer put it on the show, “the Super Bowl halftime is not going to move the kickoff.”
So the kickoff stayed where the NFL had put it. On Jan. 31, 1993, Michael’s show went ahead at the Rose Bowl on the schedule the league had set, on a stage that came out in about 22 pieces on soft balloon tires and went together in three and a half minutes.