Another Quarterback Also Had a Big Day

Roone Arledge was right. Joe Theismann was terrific on Sunday’s Super Bowl telecast. He offered good comments, didn’t talk too much and avoided cliches. He’s got quite a future in this business after he retires from pro football. He’s a natural.

It was still a cold shot to knock O.J. Simpson out of the booth for just one game. Having Theismann there instead didn’t make all that much difference, although you have to admit Theismann is more glib than Simpson.

But Simpson did a fine job on the pregame, halftime and postgame shows, as did Tom Landry, Jim Lampley and Al Michaels.

Frank Gifford and Don Meredith deserve high marks as well. It was a fine day for both the 49ers and ABC.

Theismann made his first appearance on camera 45 minutes into the pregame show, and said that the 49ers’ defense would be the key. He also said that the 49ers, with Joe Montana at quarterback, could keep the ball for six or seven minutes at a time and that was a big plus. Insightful comments.

The second time he was on camera was just before the kickoff. After being asked if the quarterbacks had butterflies at this point, he said: “I know one quarterback that has butterflies for sure. This one.”

He was off and rolling. He was hot the rest of the game. He even picked the 49ers. At one point in the third quarter, when the 49ers were in a third-and-short situation in Miami territory, he said to look for a play-action pass, and that’s what the 49ers ran.

Theismann is good-looking, a good talker and a sports star. And later this year he’ll marry Cathy Lee Crosby. Not bad.

Going into the telecast, Frank Gifford was once again overshadowed. People used to talk about Meredith and Howard Cosell. This time they were talking about Theismann, Simpson and Meredith.

Gifford does most of the work and gets little of the credit. And that’s a shame.

But Gifford emerged as a star Sunday. Like the 49ers’ Roger Craig, he was the unsung hero.

Gifford opened the pregame show, on which he had a fairly major role, then did all the nitty-gritty work on the game telecast. A yeoman job. He came into the telecast well prepared. And he made it click.

Gifford got off one of the better lines of the day. Leading into a commercial, he said: “Stanford Stadium was built in 1922 for $500,000. Now we’re going to match that in the next 30 seconds. That’s about what these spots go for.”

Gifford wasn’t perfect, however. He made a couple of slips. Once, when the score was 21-10, he said: “This one is far from over, what with the Miami Dolphins’ explosive defense.” He meant to say offense, but you could argue that Sunday the offense was about as explosive as the defense.

The only bad part of the telecast came at the end of the first half. Director Chet Forte, not once but four times almost in succession, put the viewers in the cheap seats with end-zone camera shots of live action.

He said afterward that since the Dolphins, deep in San Francisco territory, were in obvious passing situations, he wanted to give viewers a different look at the pass patterns and defensive coverages.

Thank goodness Forte didn’t go back to the end-zone shots in the second half.

Maybe the biggest flub came during halftime. Lampley could be heard talking with Landry when he obviously didn’t know he was on the air. An ABC spokesman said later that Lampley had missed a communication from the production truck that he was soon going on. A little embarrassing maybe, but no big deal.

The coin flip was impressive, mostly because it came off rather smoothly. It was a complicated affair involving various hookups. It’s amazing nothing went wrong.

Having a camera on the President was a good idea.

And after the game, for once the President’s congratulatory speech to the winning coach could be heard clearly.

Even though Reagan’s jokes were panned last year, he still couldn’t resist. This time on the postgame show, he told Bill Walsh: “I have to go up the hill in a few days and deal with Congress. Now that your season is over maybe your team can find time to go with me. I could use a front line four.” Say what?

At least that wasn’t as bad as last year when he made cracks about MX missiles, silos and dismantling Marcus Allen.

The pregame show was, as usual, too long, but ABC put together some nice features, particularly Stone Phillips’ report on how Stanford got the game and the profiles on Montana and Dan Marino.

It was somewhat surprising that ABC, which doesn’t like to talk about its in-house business, let reporter Jeff Greenfield tell viewers that ABC paid $15 million for the rights to the game and will bring in $30 million in advertising rights. The only thing Greenfield didn’t mention was how much the network was spending on production costs.

Another good thing about the pregame show was no bar-room scenes. Having reporter Bill Retaker at Camp Kasey, a U.S. Army base in South Korea, was a different touch.

Tough break dept.: A reader called from West Hollywood to say Group W cable subscribers in his area lost their television picture after the first half. “Now the City Council has three things to deal with--rent control, gay rights, and the cable problems,” the reader said. “We lost the picture during the second game of the World Series, too.”

In Bluefield, W.Va., the cable system went dead because of frozen transmission lines. What will be Group W’s excuse--if indeed they had a problem?

Best commercial of the day was for Apple computers. It was aired only once--during the fourth quarter. Apple took out full-page ads in major Sunday newspapers asking viewers not to go to the bathroom in the fourth quarter. They didn’t want them to miss the commercial.

Worst commercial was the promo for ABC’s Peter Jennings, which was run about a hundred times. Over and over viewers heard him say: “The best thing said about me is I’m fair.” The promos for “MacGruder and Loud” were overdone, too. Enough to make you not watch the show.

Meredith concluded the telecast with a memorable line: “It ain’t easy to be easy.”

Well, Mr. Easy succeeded this time. Oh, he muffed one, saying, “All right, Wendell” after Carl Monroe scored the 49ers’ first touchdown. But he, too, had a much better day than the Dolphins did.