Countdown--and Headaches--Begin for NFL’s Advance Man on Super Bowl

The NFL’s advance man hit town Sunday, and starting about 6 a.m. today--when the first sleep-rattling phone call from the East Coast jars him awake--Jim Steeg will go to work. By the time Super Bowl Sunday arrives Jan. 31, 15-hour days will have become routine.

“The hardest thing about working on the West Coast is the phone dominates you during the day, starting with calls from the East, and you find that the time you do your work is at night, after 6 o’clock,” Steeg said on Sunday at the San Diego Marriott Hotel & Marina, where he has transferred his New York City office.

So it’s at least mildly ironic, given that Steeg is on the brink of his three most hectic weeks of the year--when the eruption of small crises become routine--that he says the essence of the game, lest anyone forget, is to “have fun.”

“Sometimes, we tend to take this too seriously,” he says, unconsciously shattering a canon of the National Football League. What the Super Bowl utlimately is, Steeg will tell you, is nothing more than “a football game . . . a time to have fun.”

“There’s nothing you have to do but have a good time,” he says. Even then, he quickly adds, you don’t have to do that, if you don’t want to; like if you’re hung over from a party the night before the game.

Biggest Party of the Year

Which brings Steeg, 37, a friendly fellow--not in a stiff, slick or pushy public relations way--but in a confident gregarious manner, to what soon will become one of his biggest “people problems”: The much-touted Super Bowl party held the Friday night before the game.

If tickets to 74,000-seat San Diego Jack Murphy Stadium are hard to come by, and they are, invitations to the NFL’s biggest bash, for which, according to a vote by team owners, there is room for only 3,060 people, are more elusive than a streaking Anthony Carter.

So what happens, for example, when some of San Diego’s leading socialites find they aren’t invited to the biggest party of the year in their hometown? They track down Steeg, the NFL’s director of special events.

“They are distributed by a formula,” says a resigned Steeg, laughing. “If there’s one number I have committed to memory, its three-thousand and sixty.”

This year’s party is planned for an airplane hangar at North Island Naval Air Station. It’s guaranteed, because of the formula, that most of the guests at the party will be from out of town.

Under the formula, the teams participating in the game receive a certain number, as do the remaining teams in the league. A third go to members of the media. On top of that, party tickets are distributed to the networks, the NFL Players Assn., representatives from NFL Properties, the staff of the NFL and friends of the league. “Our office ends up with 500 for discretionary needs,” Steeg says.

His Ninth Super Bowl

This will be Steeg’s ninth Super Bowl. He has worked for the NFL since 1979, and before that was the Miami Dolphins’ business manager for four years. He earned a college degree in accounting from Miami University in Ohio and did post-graduate work at Wake Forest.

So far, he says, preparations in San Diego are going fairly smoothly, though he really won’t know, barring a major gaffe, the whole story until a few days after the game.

Last year, for example, the Super Bowl was held at the Rose Bowl--where several of the games have been held--yet after the contest, the NFL gave itself a 24-page, single-spaced critique of what it could do better. If the league and the local people helping put on the San Diego game can improve a total “of 11 or 12 pages,” Steeg says he’ll be happy.

Among minor problems that have occurred, he said, is that an effort to obtain seat backs for several thousand of the temporary bleacher seats being erected at the stadium failed. Fans in those seats will have special souvenir cushions to sit on, however, as will all the other fans in the permanent seats.

Right now, there is a worry about the construction at the stadium of a second large video replay screen to augment the one that is now there in the scoreboard. There apparently are some concerns from the city about buildings codes and the like, but Steeg says it can all be worked out. That’s why he’s here, to work things out.

Getting a ‘Lay of the Land’

At 9 a.m. today, for example, Steeg will meet at the La Jolla Marriott with officials from the Denver Broncos. The officials arrived Sunday night, hours after the Broncos beat the Houston Oilers to advance to this weekend’s conference championship game. They will be followed in the next day or so by representatives from the Washington Redskins and Cleveland Browns.

All want to “get a lay of the land,” Steeg said, noting that they will be taken to designated team hotels, practice fields and the stadium. After that, there will be meetings to identify the particular needs of each team, so that the moment after next Sunday’s two championship games, a plan prepared this week goes into motion.

“We try to make plans in the middle of the road for everyone but we have to find out, ‘What does Denver want?’ ‘What does Cleveland want?’ ” he said. Curiously, as of Sunday, the only team not sending someone out was the Minnesota Vikings.

Steeg may be the key advance man, but he is not working alone. Joining him Sunday were two other NFL staff members. Two more will arrive today. By Saturday, the NFL presence in San Diego--the NFL headquarters hotel is the Marriott, at the foot of 5th Avenue--will grow to 12. By the week before the game, the league will have 60 to 70 staff people in town, some of them borrowed from the offices of some of the league’s clubs.

Already here are representatives of Radio City Music Hall, which is organizing the halftime show, and a growing army of people who work for companies helping prepare the city for the game, such as a security company, a firm handling satellite broadcasts, and ABC network technicians, who are scheduled to set up a trailer today at the stadium. ABC is broadcasting this year’s game.

“I’m anxious,” Steeg said, “to see how this city responds to this.” In part, that means the enthusiasm shown by residents for the game. Steeg also wants to see how the local people the NFL has worked with respond.

In the past, he said, “one of the toughest things is trying to get to know people. You hope you made the right decisions . . . some are great on the cocktail circuit and others get the job done . . . now it’s time to deliver.”