Stakes in Berlin Lower Than on His First Visit

Bill Grandholm is the National Football League’s advance scout on Berlin, having beaten the Rams and the Chiefs here by 45 years.

You could say his first visit was part of a tour.

“I got here a week to 10 days after the city had fallen,” Grandholm says. “There were dead horses in the streets, bodies on the sidewalks, babies dying of typhoid because the water system had been contaminated by the bombing.”

Grandholm arrived via armored tank as a sergeant in Gen. George S. Patton’s Third Army. It was May, 1945. The Allies had just knocked Germany out of the second World War and Grandholm was there to tie up some loose ends.

“We were trying to track down a Russian defector,” Grandholm recalls. “He had been posing as a refugee, but once he disappeared, they sent me to Berlin because I knew what he looked like. I’d only known him as a dishwasher. He turned out to be a lot more than that.”

Grandholm didn’t get his man, but he did get a good look at Berlin, his first of about 30. After the war and 18 years as equipment manager for the Rams, Grandholm was hired by Pete Rozelle as the NFL’s director of special projects, a fancy title that embarrasses Grandholm a bit.

“Just say I take care of the nuts and bolts,” he says.

It’s some hardware stores, though. Grandholm’s special projects have taken him around the world--to Vietnam for USO shows, to Turkey, France and Greece for clinics and, lately, to Japan, England and Germany for exhibition games. If Paul Tagliabue is quarterback of the NFL’s world-wide expansion team, Grandholm helps run interference, checking out hotels and facilities in potential testing-ground cities.

Knowing what he does about Berlin, Grandholm admits he wasn’t sure football would fly here.

“They’d been talking about playing here for years,” Grandholm says. “Of course, they’ve been talking about playing in Hong Kong, Israel and everywhere else. We listened to different groups, die-hard football guys now living in Germany who really wanted to see a game here.

“Timing-wise, Berlin became the choice because it’s such a visible place right now. But we may--we may --have done better in Frankfurt. There’s a good combination in Frankfurt--a lot of military football teams there and a lot of Americans living there.”

And, more hotels there.

“Here, Berlin is kind of an island in the middle of East Germany, and because of all the tourists, there’s a lack of hotel space,” he says. “It’s relatively easy to get here but once you’re here, it’s very difficult to get housing.”

There’s still a lot of space available at Olympiastadion, the 76,000-seat facility where Saturday night’s Ram-Chief game will be played. Maybe too much. The west side of Berlin has been lukewarm to the idea of spending up to 60 deutsche marks (roughly $40) for this football without goalkeepers, but Grandholm is hopeful of a late ticket drive in the east.

“We are certainly trying to get the word out to the East Berliners,” he says. “Gee, for them to come here and see a part of western culture they’ve never seen before--a band, a halftime show, cheerleaders. Especially cheerleaders.

“When a European guy thinks football, he thinks cheerleaders. If you bring two teams over without the cheerleaders, he’s going to think you cheated him.”

Grandholm knows East Berlin. Two months ago, while wrapping up some advance work for American Bowl ‘90, Grandholm went on a guided tour of the city, which he found to be sorely misguided.

“When we got over in the East, the tour guide was really screwing up,” Grandholm says, “so I took the mike from him and ended up doing the rest of the tour.

“When we got back, he went up to me in the lobby, put an arm around me and said, ‘Thanks, you know a lot more about East Berlin than I do.’ It’s because West Berliners never see the east. Until recently, there was never any interest to see the other side.”

They don’t know what they have missed, Grandholm says. In his view, East Berlin carries a bad rap.

“The cultural part is in the East,” he says. “When they divided up Berlin after the war, the Americans, smart guys that we are, took the part with the zoo. ‘You Russians take the museums and the opera houses, we’ll take the zoo.’ ”

Maybe the U.S. Army just wanted to make sure the zoo wasn’t loaded anymore.

“The Germans put anti-aircraft towers in the zoo at the end of the war,” Grandholm says. “Hey, these guys got bombed day and night for 400 straight days. We bombed them in the day, the British in the night and the Russians whenever they could get their planes started.”

After the war, Grandholm helped stage one of the first American football games in Germany, in Nuremberg in 1945, with teams comprised of GIs and civilians. First, though, the game required some special preparation.

“The stadium still had the Nazi emblem--an eagle above a swastika,” Grandholm says. “The eagle was OK, but the swastika had to be covered up, so they painted an A over it.”

Today, Grandholm is 67 but, in a way, still doing the work of a 22-year-old. Another stadium for another football game in Germany must be readied--only this time, they’re only painting Ram and Chief logos onto the playing field.

“I kind of think of myself as the Johnny Appleseed of football in Germany,” Grandholm says with a grin. “It’s great to see it come to this.

“Dick Enberg and I were kidding the other day and I said to Dick, ‘In the old days, when you were working with Bob Kelly, did you ever think you’d be covering the Rams overseas?’ Dick said, ‘Heck, I didn’t think I’d ever get out of L.A.’ ”

But now the Rams are here, Enberg is here and Grandholm is here. It’s a smaller world. Berlin is just another stop on the preseason schedule.

And, in many ways, it’s a better world.

Saturday night, the only bombs over Berlin will be the ones thrown by Jim Everett and Steve Pelluer.