Tripping down memory lane

Posted: Thu January 22, 1998

Super Bowl memories from a writer who has covered all but the first. Yes, I remember that one because that's the one that got away. My paper, the New York Post, sent only Al Buck, the regular pro football writer, to Los Angeles. Despite all my begging, I stayed home. So I cranked up for the game on TV, lining up a dozen sharpened pencils of all colors, and more intricate charts than I've ever kept. And then three hours before kickoff my paper called.

Someone had gotten sick and they wanted me to fly up to Boston to cover the Celtics-76ers game. I don't even remember what I told them. I was incoherent...babbling non-stop...my wife wasn't feeling well...and the car, my God, the car...and her father, you know about him...and...

"OK, relax, we'll get someone else," they told me.

I was a Jets beat writer when they upset the Colts in Super Bowl III. We traveled with the team, stayed in the same hotel, got all the inside stuff. It wasn't the circus it is today. I remember on Picture Day, Tuesday, talking to Baltimore kicker and defensive end Lou Michaels for a feature I was doing on Louie and his brother Walt, a Jets' defensive coach. It was the day after Lou had had his confrontation with Joe Namath in a Fort Lauderdale bar.

Lou talked about growing up with Walt, and about their father, a coal miner who died before he could see them play in the NFL. He got more and more emotional, and pretty soon tears started streaming down his face. People around us were backing off.

Afterward I went over to Jimmy Orr, the wideout, who'd been watching the whole thing. "Did you see that?" I said. "He was crying."

"You'd be crying, too," Orr said, "if you'd been drinking vodka till 5 a.m."

The week before the Kansas City-Minnesota game in 1970, Chiefs quarterback Len Dawson's name surfaced in a Justice Department gambling probe (he was never charged with any wrongdoing). It happened late Tuesday afternoon. Ken Denlinger of Philadelphia and I hustled over to the Chiefs' hotel to get Dawson before they put him in quarantine. I tell this story because to me, it represents the finest moment a PR man has ever had during a Super Bowl week.

We got upstairs, where the team was quartered, and Jim Schaaf, the Kansas City PR director, was sitting at a table, his head in his hands. "How many of you do you think there'll be?" he said. I told him, "a lot."

Without pausing, Jimmy—and I have to love the instincts—got on the phone and said, "Room service? Send up five pounds of shrimp remoulade. We're gonna have some hungry writers here."

Today there would be two dozen security people there, plus a few riot squads.

The Super Bowl is no fun now, with its mobs of writers and TV idiots with their minicams and sound bites. Nevertheless, my favorite Super Bowl line comes from one of those great cattle-drive scenes.

It happened in '85, when the 49ers played the Dolphins in Palo Alto, Calif. The first big indoor press conference was held at the Amfac Hotel in Burlingame. Finally it broke up, and out we came, hundreds of writers carrying our tote bags, a mooing, lowing herd. Two young women in Amfac uniforms were standing in the hall and one of them kept saying, "This is incredible, it's incredible."

"What's incredible?" I asked.

"I've never seen so many straight guys in my life," she said.

Worst memory: writing a quickie book, with Lyle Alzado, during the '78 Broncos-Cowboys Super Bowl in New Orleans. The publisher wanted it done in eight days—and I had to cover the game. I asked Dave Anderson of The New York Times, who had done a few quickie books, "Is it physically possible to write a book in eight days?"

"Yeah, it's possible," he said, "but you'll wind up in the hospital."

Lenox Hill Hospital in New York, to be exact. The old back went out. They took me off the plane in a wheelchair.

Every night after practice, I went up to Alzado' s room with my tape recorder. He'd lie on the bed, spinning yarns, and I'd sit on a chair and record it. The last two days he was on the chair and I was on the bed with the recorder.

The proceeds from the book were $8,500. I needed the cash because my wife had totaled the car.

Happy Super Bowl memories.

Tuesday: Looking back at the Pack | Wednesday: A roundup of great Broncos