SUPER BOWL XXI : DENVER vs. NEW YORK : Event Keeps Getting Bigger and Bigger : And as an Unfortunate Consequence, It Appears the Game Itself Has Become of Secondary Importance

Our baby has come home again but now it’s all grown up. The Super Bowl, played for the first time in the Coliseum in 1967, is about to turn 21. It’s an adult phenomenon now.

This is a natural time for summing up, so we’ll try to answer some basic questions, like:

Just what is it?

How did it get this way?

Can we put it back the way it was?

Nos. 1 and 2 defy short answers, or any answers. The answer to 3 is, not likely.

Whatever it is, however many excesses are perpetrated in its behalf, as an event it’s only getting bigger. By any index--TV ratings, scalpers’ prices, remote parts of the globe demanding coverage--it’s growing by leaps and bounds, swallowing everything in its path like the Blob in the ‘50s movie.

Press disquiet, players’ distaste, fans’disappointment when the game fails to live up totwo weeks of obsessive buildup, these pale before the central fact: The public loves it.

If anything, people seem to prefer it this way, circus-style. Restraint? They had that once. Relaxed? The first one was almost comatose: no media buses or interview sessions. No sellout, either.

Anyone wanting to interview Vince Lombardi in 1967 simply drove up to the Santa Barbara Inn, where the Packers were training. Late in the afternoon, there was a little get-together over cocktails: Vince, sometimes his wife, Marie, some Packer assistants, the newsmen. One day The Times’ Jim Murray and Charles Maher were the only writers--members of the media, they’d be called now--present.

Even this was a lot for Lom bardi, who wasn’t used to being on-site a week early. Pete Rozelle had suggested it, since tickets weren’t moving. The ultimate game ultimately drew 61,946 people, which made it the fourth-biggest football crowd in the Coliseum that season, behind one Ram game and two of USC’s.

LET THE GOOD TIMES ROLL

The NFL threw its first Super Bowl party, not at Dodger Stadium, Disneyland or Diamond Head but in a ballroom at the Biltmore Hotel. Les Brown and his Band of Renown played. It was an unpressured affair and compared to its successors, such as The Night the NFL Almost Sank the Queen Mary, quite unmemorable.

Les is back this year, playing the NFL Alumni dinner (Century Plaza, $1,000 a plate, proceeds to the Boy Scouts, the “Old Hero” award going to Norman Vincent Peale), but he isn’t the only act in town. At various affairs, public or corporate, will be Dionne Warwick, the Beach Boys, the Monkees and Gladys Knight and the Pips.

Chasen’s has been booked for the weekend by Pierre Cosette, the TV producer who helped save the Hollywood sign. Cosette doesn’t seem to mind courting a reputation as Our Town’s Host With the Most. That is, his P.R. firm wasn’t told to keep quiet as so many others were for fear of flaunting their stockholders’ aggregate wealth.

After the CBS special Cosette is producing Saturday night at the Santa Monica Civic Auditorium, the stars and other guests will be taken to dinner.

Or as they say in the industry. . . .

“The party segues to Chasen’s,” says Bill Barron of Mahoney/Wasserman. “The guest list is awesome: Patrick Duffy, Lily Tomlin, Gladys Knight and the Pips, Tim Conway, Felicia and Ahmad Rashad, the Beach Boys. . . .

“The following day is the affair he throws every year. He takes over the parking lot and brings in a truckload of those huge Advent TV screens.

“They serve the kind of food you’d get at the stadium. It’s really a kickback affair. The stars can stroll around and watch the game, there’s nobody with a camera. The only thing you can’t do is make a deal, because everyone wants to watch the game. It’s not like the Polo Lounge, one of those power places.

“Security is tremendous. There are tons of crashers who’d like to make it. The year before last, traffic was jammed down to Robertson Boulevard and up to Doheny.”

That’s a lot of European steel. Meanwhile, back at the stadium, the striped pavilion set will be dining on more than hot dogs. In a roped-off area south of the Rose Bowl will be 12 tents, all themed (a garden party tent, a post-modern tent with neon lighting, etc.), AstroTurfed, wired for sound and catered like nothing you’ve ever seen and won’t unless you know someone strong in the Fortune 400.

You need 100 guests to rent your own tent. Among the enterprises that will are Ford, Nissan, Oldsmobile, Searle Laboratories, Polaroid and Hyatt. Cost-per-person is reckoned to be around $250, so with 100 guests your comptroller can get away with a tab as small as $25,000.

Of course, Ford is bringing in 1,200. Ford is traditionally one of the biggest Super Bowl hosts; for Super Bowl VI, it was reported to have entertained 2,800.

Each tent will have its own menu. The lucky dealers, et al, will dine on bills of fare like this one:

Jumbo shrimp, oysters on the half shell, rock lobster, smoked Norway salmon and barbecued lamb carved by a chef. That’s the pregame meal. Afterward, there will be white chocolate lemon cake, an international selection of coffees, warm pecan diamonds and truffles.

Kind of makes you look at your nachos in a different light, doesn’t it?

NFL Properties, the boys who sold you your $14 Rams shirt or your $12 silver-and-black Raider hard hat, will host two tents.

What could be missing? You want your MTV? Hey, wherever there’s a party. . . . The VJs will be broadcasting live from one of the NFL Props. tents.

Entertainment in the tents can be big league. The Beach Boys will play one. At Stanford in ‘85, Gladys Knight and the ubiquitous Pips played one, the Fifth Dimension another.

Ford annually throws its big bash the night after the Super Bowl. This year, it’ll be at the Sheraton Premiere, with the Beach Boys--is there any party these guys are going to miss ?

Of course, it’s good to be a Nissan dealer, too.

“In terms of corporations, probably one of the most grandiose parties is the one Nissan does,” an NFL official says. “They’ll fly people in to San Francisco, bring them down to Long Beach in a boat, take them ashore Saturday night so they can get the benefits of the activities the night before. After the game, they sail back.”

The holders of the $1,000-a-night-suites at the Century Plaza will be driven back in complimentary Lincoln town cars. Seven NFL owners and their entourages will be there. Carl Cusato of the four L’ermitage hotels report that all suites, which range up to $1,250, are gone, “and there’s no discount going on, I might add.”

THE BOYS ON THE BUSES

Some day, when the media’s jet helicopter troop transport is taking off from its resort/hotel complex in the next state, or when contact is restricted to a likeness of star quarterback Punky Brewster down-linked by satellite onto the screen of everyone’s portable word processors, these are going to seem like the good old days.

But that’s some time off. For now, the good old days remain Super Bowls I-VI.

Some landmarks in coverage:

Super Bowl I--Packers 35, Chiefs 10. An unremarkable game in that Green Bay seemed every bit as dominant as advertised. The league got a tremendous drum roll from the competition between CBS, the old NFL network, and NBC, which carried AFL games. Both got to televise this one, per the merger agreement.

Appearances notwithstanding, it didn’t get end-of-the-world treatment. The AFL was considered Mickey Mouse, and the game a mismatch. There was room in the press box for coaches such as Norm Van Brocklin and league employees such as Buddy Young. Rozelle, perhaps forgetting how blase his home town could be, seemed surprised when the game failed to sell out.

After that, he got to work making sure it wouldn’t fail again.

Super Bowl II--Packers 33, Raiders 14 in another yawner. This one was in Miami, where the event began to boogie.

Buffalo Evening News columnist Larry Felser:

“I remember Heff (Jim Heffernan, NFL director of public relations) running around, rounding up people to go to a party. It was given by the Bacardi people. There couldn’t have been more than two dozen people. There were strolling violinists, every kind of daiquiri you ever heard of.

“That year, Claude Kirk, the governor of Florida, gave the most lavish party I’d ever seen. The idea of what could be done with parties, I think the tone was set by Claude Kirk. They had it in the lobby of the Doral Hotel. It seemed like he had every violinist in Miami. There were fountains of cocktails, exotic punches.”

Super Bowl III--Joe Namath’s Jets shocked the NFL Colts, 16-7. This was the first real note of competition, and it made the Super Bowl. If Namath hadn’t existed, Rozelle would have been well advised to invent him.

After this game, coverage jumped. For this one, however, everything was still relatively innocent.

Felser: “Weeb (Ewbank, the Jets’ coach) would meet with us in a little bar at their hotel, the Galt Ocean Mile (in Fort Lauderdale). There was room for everybody. We would get Namath at pool-side, sitting in a lounge chair, maybe 20 guys.

“Can you imagine it now? There’d be guys backed up into the ocean.”

The league was doing everything it could think of to make this a premier event, including making it as pleasant and effortless an assignment as possible. There were buses to all functions, rental cars made available for free, social functions laid on. P.R. men from the various teams were brought in to smooth things.

“You could still go to a team’s hotel then and talk to a player in his room,” Felser says. “There’d be 5-6 press guys there, even if the guy was popular. The players just left their doors open. If you had an off-beat idea, maybe it’d be you and one other guy.

“The NFL P.R. department got this idea of hiring a guy with a camera. Dick Connor (Rocky Mountain News) and I were talking to this guy. It was nothing big, but it was semi-exclusive. We’re talking to him, and in walks this guy from the NFL and sticks his camera between us and records the whole thing. Then he goes back to the press hotel, and they show it on a TV screen. Plus, they typed up a transcript of it.”

When the writers doing the actual interviewing complained, the league dropped the roving cameraman.

Super Bowl VI--The Duane Thomas game, a blip on the radar screen of happiness. A moody young man, Thomas hadn’t talked all season and wasn’t going to let a little awkwardness change anything.

“Picture day, he goes off and sits in the bleachers,” says Ray Didinger of the Philadelphia Daily News. “Forty writers follow him over there. He just sits and looks at us. A couple of guys ask questions, and he never bats an eye. Everybody is just sitting there. This goes on for about 20 minutes.

“Then he says, ‘What time is it?’ That was the most-quoted line that week. It was the lead story in the papers the next day. Everybody looked at their watches and told him. Then he just sat there the rest of the time without saying anything. It was the goofiest thing I’d ever seen. I was embarrassed to be part of it, but my paper had asked me to do a Duane Thomas story.”

Thomas ran for 95 yards, and the Cowboys beat the Dolphins, 24-3. CBS’ Tom Brookshier was doing interviews in the Dallas locker room when Jim Brown led Thomas up onto the platform. Thomas looked as forbidding as usual. Brookshier managed an observation to the effect that when Duane ran he must have been moving faster than he looked.

“Evidently,” Thomas said.

That replaced “What time is it” as the most-quoted line from that game.

Super Bowl VII--We’re up to 1973 when George Allen’s Over-the-Hill Gang, media darlings in spite of themselves, met the unbeaten Dolphins, producing another quantum leap in coverage. The Dolphins won, 14-7 in the game’s first return to the Coliseum.

Felser: “That was the first big turnout. The party got out of hand. They had it on the Queen Mary. It was an absolute ship of fools scene. People were sitting on the floor because there were no chairs. I saw Ben Bradlee (editor of the Washington Post) and Joe DiMaggio sitting on the floor, balancing plates on their knees. That’s when they started having them in convention centers and marinas.

“That was the year they went to tables (at interview sessions, with one for each player and attendance mandatory). Up until then, you never heard the players complain. Not that they’d tell you everything, but they were always so excited to be there.

“That game, a lot of Mexican writers came up and they all wanted Manny Fernandez. Mexicans or not, Fernandez grunted at them, let them know he was unhappy at having to come down from his card game. The same thing for Larry Csonka, all those guys.

“I said to myself, ‘The bloom has worn off the rose.’ ”

Super Bowl VIII--The rose withered and died after another game capable of launching 200 million naps: Dolphins 24, Vikings 7.

The game was in Houston, the first in a city outside the Los Angeles-Miami-New Orleans triangle.

Wrote Larry Merchant, then of the New York Post:

“Los Angeles had a scent of glamour, New Orleans offered the hurly-burly of the French Quarter, Miami gave us the sun. Houston showed us what the Super Bowl is really about . . . a television show, a business convention and a football game.

“Walter Cronkite--for a reported fee of $5,000--gave a short informal address at one (party given by American Express). . . . Alex Karras got a larger fee for a private pregame analysis. . . . In the midst of the energy crisis, the Houston airports were so crowded with private jets that some of them had to park in nearby Beaumont and San Antonio.”

In the New Yorker, Roger Angell described a reporter at Rozelle’s annual state-of-the-union press conference asking why, if this was the public’s game, the identities of fined players were secret.

“Only one major question went unanswered,” Angell wrote. “Where in the world did that reporter get the notion that this game belonged to the public?”

Ensuing Super Bowls were enlivened by Steeler and Raider teams, which were loaded with talkers, or burdened with the Vikings, who had problems with the week, not to mention the game itself. Key Vikings leaned toward cool detachment, Fran Tarkenton once suggesting that he could answer the question posed, but it would be too complex for his audience.

“C’mon Fran,” Tom Callahan, now of Time magazine, is supposed to have answered. “It’s only football, we’re not asking you how to split the atom.”

Steeler players, on the other hand, talked and talked and talked.

“Ray Mansfield was telling old Steelers stories” Didinger says. “They told the writers to get on the bus, and he’s running after us, yelling, ‘Hey, come back! I’m not done yet!’ ”

Whether it was pulling teeth or seeing if you could write as fast as Lyle Alzado bared his soul, whether the games were good or bad, the event kept getting bigger.

Super Bowl XVII--Redskins 27, Dolphins 17 in the Rose Bowl. By now, you could get famous without reaching a Super Bowl, and the Redskins, loaded with Hogs, Smurfs, the Fun Bunch and Joe Theismann, had.

Actually the surest way to the top was to keep it zipped up until the right time.

Enter Riggo.

Redskin fullback John Riggins hadn’t been talking, but he agreed to do one mass shot. The NFL secured him his own ballroom, which was packed with more press than the President gets. Riggins proceeded to do a half-hour of stand-up comedy. It went over so well, he did it again at Tampa a year later.

A new precedent had been set: Ordinary players are interviewed at tables, stars get tables on little stages for greater access, but really big guys get ballrooms.

Super Bowl XVIII--Raiders 38, Redskins 9.

By now, press coverage of itself was a traditional feature angle, and all angles had the same problem: since the great majority were being done annually and by a cast of thousands, they were thus devalued. Irreverence was similarly undermined; when so many are doing it, it ain’t irreverent any more.

Tom Goldstein, a journalism professor at the University of Florida, once New York Times legal affairs writer and later press secretary to Mayor Ed Koch, applied for credentials. He was writing a book and was granted one. He said it was easier getting accredited by the White House.

“Hodding Carter was doing Inside Story on PBS,” Goldstein said recently. “He was down there reporting on how the thing was being reported. And reporters were interviewing him.”

The NFL party featured a circus theme, courtesy of Ringling Bros., which winters in nearby Sarasota. Trapeze acts performed overhead while live animals slept in their cages.

“They were afraid some drunk was going to put his hand through the bars,” Didinger says. “We walked by a lion who was laying on its side, with its tongue hanging out and his eyes meeting at the bridge of his nose. A friend of mine says, ‘I haven’t see a lion so drugged since. . . . ‘ “

You’ll have to finish this one yourself.

Once again, the game realized the anti-Establishment dream: Rozelle obliged to present the trophy to his arch-nemesis, Al Davis. Davis said, “Just win, baby,” words which got into more headlines than “That’s one small step for a man, one giant leap for mankind.”

Super Bowl XX--Bears 46, Patriots 10 in New Orleans.

Another great leap. The Bears were a godsend for the league, since they were not only great but colorful. The Boston Globe and Chicago Tribune sent crews of 26 and 24, respectively. Tribune staffers recalled that the paper never had more than two people in Vietnam and had four at the Geneva arms talks.

Blood appeared in the water, but much of it was the press corps’ own.

Bear quarterback Jim McMahon argued with his coach and management over bringing his acupuncturist, then mooned a helicopter. Then he was accused of having called the local women “sluts.” Upon examination, it was found that TV anchor Buddy DiLiberto got it from radio DJ Boomer Rollins, who got it from several callers, who said they heard it on a Chicago radio station and nobody was prepared to stand behind it for an instant.

Buddy D retracted, apologized and was suspended.

McMahon first refused to attend the interview session but after a talk with his agent, relented since, he said, all newsmen weren’t at fault. Befitting his new status, he got an entire ballroom for his press conference. Within hours, headbands with “Sluts” on them were seen in the press room.

Said Rozelle at his press conference:

“The Super Bowl, a few people say, ‘Well, it’s hype . . . ‘ But I think it’s tremendous. I’ve often said if the American public didn’t have an entertaining emotional outlet, we’d have trouble. We’d be a sick society.

“We don’t say the Super Bowl is the end of the world, but naturally, we feel it gives half the country a chance to think of something else other than our domestic troubles and our international troubles.”

THE WAY WE ARE

What’s the cost of all this?

It’s hard on the participants and they pass it on.

Felser: “Super Bowl press strategy is that you must be there picture day (Tuesday) to grab the guys you want before they get punchy from hearing all the same questions all week. By the end of the week, they don’t want to hear another question, even good ones.”

Picture day actually might be too late. The image remains of Bear tackle Steve McMichael grumping his way through the Superdome session last year. McMichael had been a delight until then, telling of rattlesnake hunts in his native Texas, but he was plainly tired of it. The next guy who mentioned reptiles was going to be in trouble.

“They say, just try to think how bad it can get and then double it and that’s how bad it’ll be,” John Elway said last week in Denver. “I’m going to try to take it a day at a time.”

It’s hard on rationality.

Is it a coincidence that every year, the winner is nominated as the best team in history? Wouldn’t it be nice if just one of these immortals was good enough to win the next season, too?

Did Jimmy the Greek say the Giants have the best defense ever? What about what’s-their-names last year, whom Patriot quarterback Steve Grogan predicted were about to abolish offense? That was the Bears, of course, who still ranked No. 1 in fewest yards allowed this season to the Giants’ No. 2.

Did Craig Morton say John Elway was “the only quarterback I’ve ever seen” who could have pulled off that 98-yard drive at Cleveland? How about the 10 who ranked higher than Elway this season?

The price of your next car might be up a couple of bucks. Someone has to pay for that tent.

You might be disappointed anew on Super Sunday.

Of course, you might hit the office pool, too. Hope springs eternal in the Super Bowl breast. Evidently.