It didn't pay to bet against Broadway Joe. Walter Iooss, Jr./SI

The personal memories of covering 37 Super Bowls (why I missed the first) pile onto each other. Sometimes it's hard to separate them. Action on the field fades, plays tend to blend into one another, and besides, the memories of the games involve only watching, not doing, or being part of. So what I will give you are little bon bons from the great feast of Super Bowls through the years, tiny tastes, and, of course, all of them purely personal. So here they are:

Fear and Loathing in Houston

Some years ago I used to run a writers' handicapping pool. A buck a man, closest to the actual score takes it all. In 1974, Dolphins vs. Vikings in Houston, I was in the press room early, putting up my pool sheets on the bulletin board, and I saw this bald-headed guy squinting at the rules of the contest in a not-too-focused fashion.

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"I'm not a regular sports writer. You gonna let me in your pool?" he said. I recognized him as Hunter Thompson, whom I had read was covering that Super Bowl for Rolling Stone.

"Only if you've got a buck," I told him. He assured me he had, so I told him to record his entry on the board.

"How about more than one pick, under different names?" he said. All of a sudden it dawned on me that this was a guy who was going out of his way to seek rejection from authority figures, and that's what I, of all people, must have represented to him.

"A buck a pick," I told him. "Make 'em good names."

He liked that. A fellow outlaw. None of his picks came close, and when his piece came out, he had done a real hatchet job on the writers, "Rozelle's hand maidens," he called them, except for yours truly. "Paul Zimmerman of the New York Post handled the writers' handicapping pool in a professional manner," he wrote. Yaaay!

"You feel like going out tonight?" he said that day in the press room. Sure, why not? Well, he took me to the toughest bar I'd ever been to in my life. Nothing but 250-pound street guys with ponytails. It was the kind of place where you drink your drink and stare straight ahead and speak when spoken to.

So we're sitting there, and Hunter has been quiet and all of a sudden he says, out of the blue, "This place ain't so tough." Oh oh. There's a general stirring around. See, the thing with him was that when he was stoned he got real quiet. I only learned that too late. The bartender leaned over and said to me, "You'd better get your buddy out of here." Hunter overheard.

"No one's running me out of here, I don't care how tough he is."

"Hunter, I'm leaving," I told him. "You can either come with me or stay. I've got two small ones at home, and they'd like to see their daddy again."

"Go on, I don't give a damn," he said, and continued ranting in similar fashion. And yours truly showed the white feather and scrammed. Next day he showed up in the press room with bumps on his head and a few bruises. I never did find out what happened, and he didn't mention it in his Rolling Stone piece, either.