Finally, Good Old Days Are Coming Back

Are you a traditionalist? Like the tried and true, do you? Yearn for the predictable, the comfortable? Pine for the good old days when you knew who the bad guys in the movies were, the ones who wore the black hats and mustaches, and who the good guys were--they wore white and never shot first--and endings were happy?

Think things were better when the old guard ran them? Sick of change, newness, unorthodoxy?

Like baseball better when the Yankees were winning? Think sports’ golden age was when the Yankees were winning in baseball, Notre Dame in football and a guy named Joe or Jack was the heavyweight champion of the world and there was only one? Keep track of tennis better when an American was winning it and being bashful about it? Was the world a better place then or does it only seem like it through a haze of legend?

Like music you could hum, dances you could hold onto someone while you did them? Like skies to be blue, brides to wear white, shirts to be cotton, suits wool and people to have manners, crime to be punished and virtue rewarded?

Well, if that’s your bag, you have to like the turn pro football seems to have taken of late, a turn so to speak, to the right.

I know one who would have applauded. My late lovely friend, Tex Maule, the magazine sports editor, would have been enormously cheered.

Tex, you may or may not know, was a man who believed in his heart (and in print) that football was not only better in the good old days but was played better to this day by teams who were holdovers from those days.

Tex pooh-poohed the Super Bowl when it first burst on the scene. Tex thought it was a great waste of time and a hoax on the public. It was not a contest, it was a travesty. It would be as one-sided as a bullfight. The old established firms of the National Football League would put the upstarts of the American Football League firmly in their place.

The first two games made Tex appear dead right. The lordly Green Bay Packers made it look like the lord of the manor thrashing poachers as they haughtily horse-whipped the Kansas City Chiefs and Oakland (then) Raiders.

But, then, things got out of hand. The peasants not only took over, they began to humiliate the ruling class.

For the next 8 years, the old order only won once; for the next 12, only twice.

It was shocking to the Establishment. First of all, they had made the new group on the block pay dearly, millions, for inclusion in the high society. The thinking was, it would take them the rest of the century to really belong, to find out what fork to use, so to speak, and not to show up in brown shoes and a tuxedo.

The whole point in including them was that they were demonstrably inferior.

The old order made fun of everything they did. They played sandlot football, it sneered. They had these silly gimmicks like zone defenses and moving pockets, bump-and-run routes, play-action passes. Everyone knew it wouldn’t work against old rock-steady pillars of the community like the NFL. It would backfire on them. The Super Bowl was just to be a kind of complicated burning at the stake.

Well, it was the old, established fuddy-duddy league that started to get burned.

It was not the first time the butlers turned out to be smarter than the lords of the manor, but this was embarrassing.

But, what no one seemed to take into consideration was that much of the success of the “new” conference was being posted by “old” teams who had been lured out of their own society by massive bribes of money.

Of the clubs enticed over--Pittsburgh, Cleveland and Baltimore--two of them accounted for five of the Super Bowl wins in their salad period. Only 5 other teams in the 14-team conference ever even went to a Super Bowl. And what is happening to the Super Bowl tournament this year would gladden the heart of any traditionalist altogether.

First of all, there is a good chance that, for the sixth time since realignment, the two finalists will be teams that were in the grandfather conference to begin with. If the Cleveland Browns, who beat the New York Jets Saturday, win next week, they will complete the circuit of having all three stepover teams victorious in the chase to the Super Bowl.

But what is even more heartening to the die-hard NFL ancestor worshipers is the makeup of the three teams left in the NFC bracket of the tournament. They are the real old first families. The New York Giants and the Washington Redskins are to the game what the Lees are to Virginia and the Cabots and Lowells to Massachusetts. Your blood doesn’t get much bluer than the Giants and the ‘Skins.

The 49ers, of course, did not come over, so to say, on the Mayflower but they (like the Cleveland Browns) predated the AFL by plenty. You can ask them to the ball without being ostracized by the neighbors.

Your true NFL snob does not even recognize some of its color-bearers in the Super Sunday cotillion. The Dallas Cowboys (5) and the Minnesota Vikings (4) and the San Francisco 49ers (2) are Johnny-Come-Latelies of a sort themselves.

But this year, if you close your eyes, it’s 1940 again. Wherever you look, there’s a social registerite, old money elite. Even the Bears, who got eliminated by Washington Saturday, were socially correct.

If the New York Giants or the Washington Redskins play the Browns in Super Bowl XXI, the peasants will have been put in their place again. That is to say, it won’t be a real AFL team. It won’t be, like, the (ugh!) Buffalo Bills, or the Seattle Seahawks or the Houston Oilers. Neither will it be the (gimme a break!) Tampa Bay Buccaneers, Atlanta Falcons or New Orleans Saints (“Higgins, do we know these people?!”).

Traditionalists everywhere can take comfort. The ones whom J.P. Morgan once identified as “people who count” are taking over again. The day of the locusts--and the tradesmen, coachmen and nouveaux riches--is over. Order has been restored. The aristocracy is back in charge. Tex would say, “See?!” So would George Halas, George Preston Marshall, Bert Bell, Tim Mara--and Vince Lombardi.