Color His Super Bowl Empty, His Face Blush-Red

The vacant parking place should have tipped me off.

After all, I’d always heard there were was no such thing in San Francisco. But my flight had been delayed and I was late for my assignment, so I gratefully pulled into the spot in my rental car.

It was seven years ago this week, and I was in the Bay City to write a colorful piece on the wacky inhabitants of a typical sports bar glorying in the 49ers’ first Super Bowl. Then, as this Sunday, Cincinnati was the opponent.

Knowing nothing of the city, I had phoned the San Francisco Examiner beforehand and the sports department had cheerfully recommended the name of a “great joint.”

Despite the available parking, I walked in expecting to see Super Bowl banners and noise-makers, giant television screens and wall-to-wall enthusiasts uttering quotable things and performing crazy stunts.

Instead, as I stumbled into the darkened interior, I was able to make out the shapes of six motionless, somewhat disheveled figures huddled over the bar, including one man who was crying as the National Anthem played on an aged television set. His friend assured the bartender, “Oh, don’t mind him. He cried all the way through the Jerry Lewis telethon.”

I was taken aback but, with my uncanny affinity for getting people to open up, I decided to get a quote out of the bartender. “So . . . the Super Bowl,” I said.

He glared at me and my blue sports coat. “You want a drink?” he asked.

I ordered a beer. He brought me a can, sans glass.

The game began and I waited, hoping that for some unaccountable reason a horde of Super Bowl enthusiasts would suddenly storm through the door. Instead, another of my seatmates fell asleep.

I was 35 years old, a veteran of 14 years in the business and I’d been hoodwinked by a rival newspaper, tricked into watching the Super Bowl at a Skid Row bar. That no one would care if I also began weeping was of small consolation.

I was unwittingly continuing a mostly vanished tradition dating back to the days when every big city was inhabited by several newspapers, which put out new editions every few hours and employed reporters under orders to use any trick to one-up a competitor.

I’d heard of some of the ploys myself.

There was the young newsman on the old Los Angeles Herald in the 1930s who had arranged with a supposed friend at the rival Express to see the Express’ paper as it came off the press. The Herald man planned to phone the headlines back to his boss. Only an Express photographer suddenly appeared. A photo of the Herald reporter ran on the front page of the Express the next day alongside the headline: “How the Herald Gets Its News.”

There was the Examiner reporter in the 1950s who outraced The Times’ representative to a farmhouse--and the only telephone for miles--with a story on a widely publicized murder case. The Examiner man called in his piece, then paid $50 to the owner of the farmhouse for the privilege of ripping the phone out of the wall. Stepping outside, where The Times man was politely waiting, the Examiner man smiled and said, “Here’s the phone,” and handed it over.

And in the 1960s, there was the reporter on a small daily who made a habit of perusing the unoccupied desks of his rivals in a downtown bureau, occasionally copying down stories they had written--until the day he stole one about a new meat plant in his hometown. Unknown to him, his colleagues had concocted the story and christened the fictitious plant, as well as the plant’s officials, with names that translated as “horse” in various foreign languages.

Now, I could add myself to the list--the Skid Row humor man, victimized by my own lazy research.

I wasn’t sure The Times’ sports editor had an appreciation of such journalistic traditions. So, at the end of the first quarter, I bid adieu to the bartender (who didn’t look up). For the next hour, I slogged through innumerable construction and cable car zones before spotting a lively fern bar with a Super Bowl sign in front.

This time, of course, there was no vacant parking place in sight.

My eventual article, such as it was, gave the appearance that the enthusiasts in the bar had been strangely tight-mouthed until the second half, when they suddenly burst forth with boisterous comments.

And, now, San Francisco and Cincinnati have a Super Bowl rematch Sunday.

Obviously the possessor of a good memory, the sports editor is giving me the day off.

Still, I know that when the National Anthem starts, I’ll feel a slight chill.