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War is hell Remembering a game inside the game
Updated: Friday January 26, 2001 8:57 AM
I covered the Super Bowl the last time it was held in Tampa, Fla., 10 years ago. I covered it in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia. There was a war that had just started, you might remember, and Sports Illustrated thought an interesting angle would be to have someone "watch the game with the troops" and, well, there I was. I had a different kind of press credential around my neck, one that included my blood type, and I was sitting in some rec room in this improvised military base that once had been a housing project designed to draw the Bedouins out of the desert. The Bedouins, it turned out, had liked living in tents far better and the military had taken their place.
I remember there was a pool, not about how many points the New York Giants and Buffalo Bills would score, but about how soon after kickoff Saddam Hussein would send the first Scud missile hurtling toward the city. (Turned out, there was no winner. No missiles appeared. Saddam apparently was not a football fan.) I remember guys put on jungle paint and took out their weapons, just for the picture with my story. Sort of phony. I remember a lot of giggling at the great patriotic displays from Tampa Stadium. They might have looked great in the U.S., but they seemed sort of silly in Riyadh. I remember the game started at 3 a.m. and seemed to last forever. Soldiers were working 18 hours a day. I remember, at the end, when Scott Norwood missed that field goal, there were only two people left in the rec room. The other one was snoring. Three days later, I was home. War is hell. Sports Illustrated senior writer Leigh Montville appears regularly on CNN/Sports Illustrated. The opinions expressed here are solely those of the writer.
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