It’s Not All Super Down Yonder

NEW ORLEANS — You’re not going to believe this, but can I tell you that the “media crush” at the first Super Bowl was so nonexistent I actually sat on a helmet on the practice field in Santa Barbara and had a one-on-one with Green Bay’s star fullback, Jim Taylor. I talked to Bart Starr on a folding chair at midfield. There wasn’t a cameraman in sight.

Each night, at the headquarters motel, we went up to Coach Vince Lombardi’s suite for cocktails and shop talk.

You think anybody this week is going to mosey up to Coach Bill Parcells’ hotel room, knock on the door and sit down and have a cocktail chitchat with him? You think anybody’s going to sit on a helmet and have a dialogue with Brett Favre or Reggie White?

Quarterbacks give interviews in theaters full of media at Super Bowls nowadays. There are more cameras on the quarterback than there are on an Oscar winner. He’s America’s flavor-of-the-month. The president of the United States moves to a back page. It’s not a sporting event anymore; it’s an American tribal rite.

There are about 3,000 media types on hand recording everything from what the starting quarterback had for breakfast to what kind of a car the backup tight end drives. No detail is too small. About 400 of the news types come from abroad, countries where they have no more idea what a punt is than a Tibetan monk, or they think a tight end is a guy who’s had too much to drink.

The press is herded into buses at dawn each morning and ferried to the team hotels where doughnuts and beignets will be served and the players stationed at tables with their names prominently displayed. Coaches and quarterbacks have rooms of their own for the general questioning, but star players are given stand-up mikes to accommodate the crush that will assemble around them.

Occasionally you will find the player so unknown and unstarred he will sit through the one-hour interview staring balefully ahead, not caring or pretending not to. He is usually an offensive lineman, an important but not very exciting position populated by the great anonymities of our civilization. They are like the guys who shovel coal in the hold of the ship.

Almost everyone else has a throng around his table. You fight to get your question in, you lean forward to hear your answer.

Is all this hype necessary? I mean, it isn’t as if we don’t already know what’s going to happen in the game. What always happens. To wit:

1. A team that had to struggle and strain will find itself trailing with two minutes to play and will suddenly be able to march the ball downfield almost at will and tie the score or go ahead. Then, the other team will get the ball (if it survives the onside kick) and will similarly score with ease. A game that had a total of two touchdowns and a field goal or so scored in the first 58 minutes will find 21 to 28 points scored in 58 seconds. The reason will be obvious to everyone who ever bought a ticket or watched a replay: The defense will put in a two-man rush on the passer versus the five-man or blitzing rush of earlier in the game. Give a Super Bowl passer time in the pocket, and he will put the ball in the eye of a squirrel for you. The prevent defense is as outmoded and unworkable as the Maginot Line.

2. A team that has moved downfield cleverly mixing passes and pitchouts and wide play will get to the opponents’ three-yard line. There, it will promptly start hurling a 195-pound running back into a pile of massed humanity weighing, oh, say, two tons. It won’t work, of course, and the team will end up settling for a field goal. The sad truth is, as everyone knows, that if the team sent a running back wide on first down, he would be able to walk into the end zone. Backward.

3. Someone will punt the ball out of bounds on the other team’s one-yard line and the partisans will go crazy with joy. They forget a good quarterback would almost rather operate where the other team’s coverage is 99 yards than in the “red zone” where coverage is bunched.

4. Two lineups of 300-pound giants will pound and bleed and pass out compound fractures and sprained ankles and concussions--and then the game will be decided by some 165-pound ex-soccer kicker who has never touched a ball with anything but his foot and faints at the sight of blood.

What will be said is even easier to predict. It’s the Super Bowl of cliches. The following should be done away with in the interests of improving the language:

1. The first guy who says “This is what it’s all about!” whether on television or in postgame interview should have his mouth taped or, if he’s in television, should be put on the weather.

2. The player who says “We’re trying to stay focused” should be demoted to holder for kicks. Or given a camera, not a football.

3. The Pollyanna who says “It doesn’t get any better than this!” should be reminded it’s just a game. And reminded that when Duane Thomas was asked if it wasn’t “the ultimate game,” replied, “Naw! They play it again next year.” And the year after that.

4. The stock TV query “What was going through your mind when you saw the ball?” asked of a guy who just made a key interception or returned a punt for a score should be answered, “Nothing was going through my mind--if something were, I would have dropped the ball.”

It’s just a football game. It’s not, as Tad Jones once suggested, Armageddon in cleats. Jones was the Yale coach famous for telling his team on the eve of the Harvard game one year, “Gentlemen, you are about to play a football game against Harvard. Nothing you do in life will ever again be so important as what you do here today.”

For the 3,000 at the Super Bowl waving cameras, notebooks, tape recorders, pens and microphones, it might be well to remember there probably was a future president (of the United States, the stock exchange or General Motors) listening to Jones that day.