The TV Game Plan : For ABC Boss, Kickoff Climaxes Weeks of Anxiety, Work

First, the bad news. Marshall Lopez has started smoking again.

Although the 61-year-old unit manager for ABC Sports actually kicked the habit a year ago, he’s now up to a pack of cigarettes a day.

Not to worry, though. Lopez counts his relapse as just a minor concession to the pressures of making sure everything’s in place for ABC’s $1-million effort to broadcast the Super Bowl.

“This is the second time that ABC has done the Super Bowl, and obviously the network is trying to do one better than the last Super Bowl,” said Lopez, who is in charge of preparations for the telecast.

Now, the good news. Everything’s going smoothly, so far.

With one-upmanship in mind, ABC has undertaken a technological feat that Lopez and other network brass say is equalled or surpassed by the coverage of only a few other sporting events--the Indianapolis 500, the U.S. Open golf tournament and, of course, the Olympics.

Super Bowl XXII will be 10 times more expensive to broadcast than a normal ABC “Monday night Football” game, Lopez said.

And this week, the network’s elaborate planning is coming to fruition as a small army of technicians and producers have landed in San Diego to gear up for a telecast expected to reach 120 million Americans, as well as pigskin fans in 55 other countries.

Under Lopez’s direction, the network has claimed a large patch of the eastern parking lot at San Diego Jack Murphy Stadium for its trailers and vans--a temporary compound that will become the nerve center for Sunday’s telecast.

Inside the stadium, workmen hired by Lopez this week were still putting the finishing touches on several custom features ordered by the network. The features include expanded, specially decorated broadcast booths and temporary steel baskets along the inner rim of the stadium to hold television cameras.

When it comes to the Super Bowl, no detail can be too trivial, Lopez said.

“You just can’t call the portable toilet company and say ‘I want 12 toilets,’ ” he said during a tour of the compound and stadium on Wednesday. “Where are you going to park them? You can’t put them in the center (of the compound) because they can’t be serviced. We decided to put them against the fence.”

While ABC is officially mum on how much it will cost to arrange broadcasting the Super Bowl, Lopez estimated the price will be in excess of $1 million.

Lopez, who is a 25-year veteran with ABC Sports, is no stranger to the televised extravaganza. He has been in charge of broadcast facilities and technicians for selected events at the last four summer Olympics, including the closing ceremonies in Los Angeles in 1984.

Now, Lopez said, the SB XXII may be his last big splash before retirement and he’s been plotting the technical end of the coverage since April, when he and officials from the National Football League walked through the stadium and discussed camera angles.

Since then, there have been 10 more meetings at the stadium, Lopez said, and the network has come up with a plan it hopes will impress the television public.

Consider:

A normal ABC Monday night football game uses about 100 ABC employees. Super Bowl XXII, however, will require the effort of close to 300, including carpenters and electricians hired for just a few days.

Lopez said that for the technical network employees alone, he has reserved 155 rooms at the Doubletree Inn and 24 rooms at the Radisson Hotel in Mission Valley. Rooms have even been alloted to the network’s college-aged errand “runners,” who are so grateful for the chance to work the Super Bowl at $50 a day that they are crowding into the accommodations.

“They just sleep in the bathtubs, all over the room,” Lopez said. “They couldn’t get a room by themselves because this town is booked.”

While ABC uses 13 cameras during a normal Monday night football game, the Super Bowl will require 31 cameras to cover the seven-hour extravaganza.

Twenty of those cameras will be used during the game itself, including a special, remote-controlled “tilt and pan” camera that will be attached to one of the goal posts. “Of course, if a football hits it, that’s the end of that camera,” Lopez said.

Another camera will be trained only on the game clock, two will hover over the stadium on a blimp and a helicopter, and two more “beauty cameras” will be perched near the stadium light grids to give the television audience a panoramic view of San Diego.

Another 11 cameras will be used during the pre-game and halftime shows. They will beam signals from aboard the USS Constellation, as well as Dennis Conner’s Stars & Stripes yacht, which won the America’s Cup.

ABC is even sending a television camera down to Tecate, Mexico, to pan an audience of Mexicans watching the Super Bowl being televised in Spanish. ABC plans to supply the four television sets Tecate residents will be watching.

To accommodate even more camera angles, the National Football League has agreed to construct four steel baskets to suspend network cameramen at strategic points around the field. The NFL baskets, Lopez said, will be at the 50-yard line, at each 20-yard line, and in the west end zone, opposite the huge scoreboard.

ABC itself is paying for a fifth steel basket to be built in the east end zone, along the side of the scoreboard. The 16-square-foot basket will cost ABC $13,000, but will be considered “scrap” metal and torn down after the game, Lopez said.

ABC will be using three broadcast booths, instead of the usual one booth. A network art director from New York has already outfitted one of the booths with a backdrop that features photographs of players, live plays and tickets from past Super Bowls. Additional ABC backdrops will be supplied for the remaining two booths and interview areas in the locker rooms.

ABC’s Super Bowl village in the stadium’s eastern parking lot consists of 34 truck vans and temporary trailers, including 10 ABC network vans that are housed in New York. The vans and trailers will serve as the network’s production headquarters, where camera shots, statistics and special effects are coordinated.

Normally, a Monday night football game requires only three vans and trailers parked by the stadium.

The network will pay approximately $20,000 this week to feed its employees at the compound, Lopez said.

ABC has installed 225 telephone lines between the compound, the stadium, their hotels and the scene of remote camera shots. A Monday night football game usually requires 10 lines.

Usually, ABC employees arrive two days early to prepare for a Monday night game.

For the Super Bowl, however, Lopez has been in town since Jan. 11, and he said his workdays are now stretching into more than 12 hours.

It will cost $100,000 for ABC to make sure it has enough electricity for the Super Bowl broadcast, Lopez said. The network paid San Diego Gas & Electric about $25,000 to install a transmitter in the east parking lot--a transmitter that will be removed after the game. Tapping into underground power lines, the transmitter provides enough energy to supply 300 homes, a SDG & E spokesman said.

In addition, ABC has rented a large diesel generator as a back-up power source. The engine, powerful enough to run a locomotive, will kick on in the event of a blackout.

One of the three broadcast booths will be a temporary structure in the stands. The booth, made out of steel scaffolding covered by tarp, is on a stadium walkway in Section 47, just to the south of the giant scoreboard.

Lopez said the network’s production employees wanted the booth in the stands because it would be closer to the field than the other two, which are on the press box level. The temporary booth will be used during the two-hour pregame show.

But there is one problem with the booth--at 12 feet high, it blocks the vision of at least 13 rows of seats.

“This is the challenge,” Lopez said. “We’ve got approximately 10 minutes to get rid of this whole thing before the game starts. Otherwise, imagine the people who paid their $100 and couldn’t see the field because of this monstrosity.

“Every available body, including myself, will be working to take this down and put it away,” Lopez said.

And if the fans want to see the festivities on the field before the game? Months of planning, and it was a thought that apparently didn’t occur to Lopez until Wednesday.

“Oh God! If there is pre-game stuff, we’re going to have problems,” he said, moaning.

That may not be the only problem that ABC will encounter with Super Bowl fans, either. Lopez said he was mildly worried about a Tecate newspaper article published earlier this month that erroneously announced the network would set up 12 big-screen televisions in the town square--instead of the four normal televisions that the network intends to supply.

Those concerns, however, pale in comparison to the “high” of excitement that Lopez feels building as game day draws near.

The same nervousness that has started him smoking again, will peak when the Denver Broncos and Washington Redskins take to the turf at the stadium and provide fare for millions of television watchers, Lopez said.

And when the network wraps up the last locker room interview, when the last statistic is reviewed, and ABC signs off from San Diego, Lopez says he already knows what he’s going to feel.

Emptiness.

“All of a sudden, it’s over,” Lopez said. “Everybody takes off in different directions. No goodbyes. No kudos. No slap on the back, ‘You’ve done a good job . . . . ‘

“All that’s left is clearing up the garbage.”