TV AND THE GULF WAR : Game’s Benign Mayhem a Refuge From Real Danger Lying Beyond

Whatever the reason, there were no Iraqi Scud attacks on Israel or Saudi Arabia during Sunday’s Super Bowl, resulting in a Persian Gulf War-shadowed telecast on ABC that proceeded without an alarm or intrusion.

Aiming missiles at civilians, sure. Turning the gulf into an oil slick, sure. Putting POWs on TV, sure. But there are some rules of protocol that even a brutal bully like Hussein doesn’t violate.

So the New York Giants were allowed to edge the Buffalo Bills, 20-19, in Tampa Stadium without interruption.

Oh, there were plenty of war reminders during the afternoon and early evening, including excerpts from a Disney-produced halftime program featuring a stirring tribute to allied troops in the gulf and a taped greeting from President and Mrs. Bush.

ABC’s pregame show included Judd Rose’s story from Saudi Arabia, where soldiers vowed to watch the game despite its kickoff at 2:18 a.m., Saudi time.

“If we get attacked by Scuds, which is a fair possibility,” one of them said, “we’ll just hit the ground, put our masks on and keep on watching.”

Rose returned at halftime with tape of about 75 troops cheering the game in front of a set at a Saudi air base. Given their hunger for any kind of escapism, they probably would have cheered Ping Pong.

In any event, this was part of an ABC News gulf update featuring pool coverage of an officer lecturing U.S. troops on the dangers of Iraqi mines. Pick up one like he held in his hand, the officer warned, and “you eat five pounds of explosive.” Yes, somewhere beyond the stadium, there was a war.

Actually, this was not the first wartime Super Bowl. By the time of the first Super Bowl in 1967, the U.S. already had nearly 400,000 troops in South Vietnam, and other Super Bowls would be played before the Vietnam War drew to a close.

But who worried about real warriors interrupting Super Bowl warriors then? Even with extensive TV coverage of the Vietnam conflict, war then was still relatively remote for those on the home front compared with today. That was because TV hadn’t yet the capacity to jolt us with live combat and air alerts as it does now.

It was ABC’s worldly sportscaster Jack Whitaker Sunday who noted the “split-screen week” preceding this latest Super Bowl, and he added that this was an important football game, “but that’s all.”

Indeed, unprecedented security precautions at Tampa Stadium triggered memories of “Black Sunday,” the 1977 film about an Arab terrorist plot to wipe out the President and other spectators at a Super Bowl with a device detonated from a blimp above the stadium.

Yet, on this side of the TV screen, the opening kickoff seemed to sweep it all away, affirming the special place of sports in our culture, whether the Americana-steeped World Series or Madison Avenue-driven Super Bowl. Despite everything occuring on the outside, Sunday’s Super Bowl was its own isolated impregnable world, a seamless, Scudless, Saddamless chamber where one could focus on the benign violence on the field without dwelling on the bigger violence looming elsewhere.

Actually, Sunday was not the first time the world of sports has intruded on the Gulf War. Sports metaphors for the conflict abound.

There’s boxing: Military experts have wondered if Hussein can “take a punch” concerning his ability to withstand that air bombardment of Iraq. And his no-offense strategy has been likened to Muhammad Ali’s “rope-a-dope” guise of luring an opponent into punching himself out.

Then there’s football: ABC’s Peter Jennings is now using a tele-strator to chart military movements on gulf maps, much like the one analyst John Madden pioneered on CBS football telecasts.

And referring at once to the conference championships preceding Sunday’s Super Bowl and those U.S. antimissile missiles that have knocked down so many Scuds, NBC/Mutual Radio reporter Steve Futterman said from Saudi Arabia: “There were three winners last week, the Bills, the Giants and the Patriots.”

On Sunday, the winner was sports.