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Saturday Night Fever
Charged with soliciting an undercover cop, Eugene Robinson put the XXX in Super Bowl XXXIII.
Posted: Tuesday February 09, 1999 10:31 AM
Play pinochle.
Catch up on your thumb-twiddling. Guess the exact number of
cashews in the hotel-room mini-bar. Knit. Scratch.
Levitate. Any of these are fine things to do the night
before a Super
Bowl.
An example of what's
not a fine thing to do: Leave your
gorgeous wife, two kids, father, uncles, aunts and teammates, jump
in your rental car, drive to the fishnet
side of town and attempt to purchase $40 worth of oral sex from
a female cop posing as a street-corner
trollop.
Honey, I'm just going out for a quart of milk. Would you
have two
twenties?
Atlanta Falcons free safety Eugene Robinson was charged by
Miami police with doing exactly that last Saturday night,
thereby putting the XXX in Super Bowl XXXIII. Not that it
was a
distraction
or anything. He just had to be bailed out at 11 p.m. by
Atlanta's general manager, try to explain the episode to
his wife and family
(See, I've got this
superstition), not sleep the entire night, keep his teammates up stewing
about the incident and keep his
sore-hearted coach up
hours fretting about it.
But a
distraction? Nah. Robinson was able to go right out and contribute all
he could to the Denver Broncos' easy 34-19 win. He missed
more tackles than the extras in
The Galloping
Ghost, twice was faked out of his shorts (O.K., bad example) by
Terrell Davis and got burned in the crushing play of the
game, an 80-yard sting operation from John Elway to Rod
Smith that gave the Broncos a 17-3 lead. As one Denver
fan's sign read:
Eugene Robinson for
President.
Why this guy
wasn't benched, I'll never know. Because he was innocent?
In a bit of fluent Clintonese, Robinson said after the game
that he thought he was "innocent in this deal, not
righteous in this deal." Say what? Then he spent the
next 15 minutes
begging forgiveness from Jesus Christ, his wife, his family,
his teammates and his coaches. "I will have to make
amends with everyone that knows me," he said. Does
that sound like an innocent man to
you?
Denver coach Mike Shanahan
wouldn't have benched him. He'd have killed
him.
No, I take that back. Robinson
wouldn't have been in jail on Saturday night because he
never
would've gotten out of Broncos lockup on Saturday night.
Here was Denver's Saturday night: dinner at 7, meeting at
8, meeting at 8:30, mandatory snack at 9,
curfew at 11. Now, here was Atlanta's Saturday night: no team
dinner, no team meetings, no
restrictions except a midnight curfew. The Falcons coaches might as
well have said, "Gentlemen, Miami,
Florida, is one of the most dangerous, hypersexed, drug-riddled
cities in all of North America. Have fun out
there!"
Robinson's idea of fun allegedly centered around the
good-time intersection of N.E. 22nd Street and Biscayne
Boulevard. On one side of Biscayne there's a restaurant, a stereo shop, a check-cashing place and, about a hundred yards from one corner is the Miami Police
Edgewater
Mini-Station. Some sneaky undercover work by the crack Miami vice
squad, no? Makes you wonder what other warning signals
Robinson might have missed that
night.
Hey, big boy, can I see your
... license and
registration?
On the other corner is a vacant
lot. Perhaps someday the NFL Historical
Society will put up a plaque:
on this spot Eugene Robinson blew the Super Bowl. The
hooker community would point with pride to
it.
Atlanta coach Dan Reeves probably
would've rather had his sutures ripped out with a fire ax
than not have Robinson in this game. Robinson was his team
motivator, the only member of the Falcons who had won a
Super
Bowl, the man who has intercepted more passes than any
defensive back playing today, the man who knows Elway
better than any other defensive back because he's played
more games against Elway than any other defensive
back. "Anybody but Eugene," Atlanta linebacker Henri
Crockett said Sunday
morning.
You'd think so. Robinson,
36, is Calvin
Klein handsome,
well-spoken and active in charitable affairs. "It's my
personality to reach out to the community," he says.
In fact, the day
before his arrest for reaching out to one too many members of the
community, Robinson's "high moral character" won
him the Bart Starr Award from Athletes in Action. Next week
he's scheduled to accept the James Worthy Award from
Athletes Looking for
Action.
The whole thing is sad, really. It's sad when a man arrives
at his big night, determined to fulfill his ultimate quest,
only to be
denied.
Then, to lose a football game the
next night,
well....
Issue date: February 8, 1999
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