It Wasn’t Always Such a Big Deal

It’s a full-blooded American tribal rite. The modern equivalent of the Christians vs. the lions, chariot races, the tossing of virgins into volcanoes. It’s New Year’s Eve, the Fourth of July and Mardi Gras rolled into one.

If you’re anybody, you’ve got to be there. That’s the way American aristocracy works. We don’t have royalty here. So we substitute sports heroes. We don’t have viscounts, we have quarterbacks. They don’t wear monocles, they wear face masks.

If you don’t watch the game next Sunday, stay home anyway. If you go to the store, they’ll know you’re not a real American. You’re out of the loop. Some kind of a Bolshevik.

People will roam the streets of Pasadena looking like a casting call for “They Died With Their Boots On”--faces painted red, white and blue, Mohawk haircuts, “Go Bills” cut in hairline on their scalps. Looneys on the loose.

One hundred thousand will see the game in the Rose Bowl, and 125 million will watch it on TV.

Chances are, it’ll be a lousy game. There have been 26 Super Bowl games, and only six had any suspense. There have been 55-10 games, 46-10, 42-10, 38-9. Even some that looked close, weren’t. One conference hasn’t won in nine years. It’s a contest only if you consider a lynching a contest. The last half of a Super Bowl game is usually the biggest sports anticlimax this side of a U.S. Open playoff.

None of this deters Homo Americanus Sportsfanicus . He needs his Super Bowl fix. Running back Duane Thomas once said it wasn’t the ultimate game because they played one every year, but the people who throng to it will behave as if they were in the last days of Pompeii. Round-the-clock parties at movie studios, equestrian centers, civic auditoria. Round-the-clock hype.

Athletes will get the treatment usually reserved for Presidential candidates. They won’t give interviews, they’ll give news conferences. Coaches, star quarterbacks, pachydermatous pass rushers will face the media in standing-room-only crowds. Even otherwise anonymous offensive linemen--football’s Secret Service--get a table-full of journalists asking them how they propose to save their chief executive, the quarterback, from the would-be assassins of the pass rush.

It wasn’t always thus. It’s hard to imagine now, but the Super Bowl was once a harder sell than skis in the tropics.

The game didn’t really want a Super Bowl. The game was under one-party rule, the NFL, since its inception on the running board of a car owned by George Halas in 1920, and it liked its monopoly. The American Football League was a collection of wealthy upstarts who, for one reason or another, couldn’t get in the fraternity and--like spurned rich kids everywhere--decided to buy their own.

If every institution is the lengthened shadow of one man, the Super Bowl is Pete Rozelle’s. Pete was the Boy Commissioner of the old established league when the new kids on the block got too obstreperous to ignore. Merger was thrust on him. Pete, never one to command the waves of history to recede, acceded to the inevitable. He went down to Washington to secure the blessings of Congress on what was effectively a monopoly absorbing a weaker rival. The whale, the league, didn’t want this Jonah. But once swallowed, it had to be given Congressional blessing. Pete secured this and an antitrust exemption (at a cost of the New Orleans Saints). The Super Bowl was born.

It’s hard to believe now that this historic encounter could be met with such universal yawns. It almost appeared about to die that first year when Rozelle and staff rolled up their sleeves and went to work turning up the volume on the hype.

First of all, there was a credibility problem. The lordly Green Bay Packers were representing the Establishment, and they were even too good for their own league. Their rivals, the Kansas City Chiefs, came into focus as a kind of semipro version of something like the Decatur Staleys or the Holy Name Society eleven. A 100-0 score was freely predicted.

Rozelle knew he had to get the calliope going. He ordered Packer Coach Vince Lombardi west to Santa Barbara to make his practices available to the national media--or what portion of it bothered to send representatives to this dubious event. He ordered the Chiefs to Long Beach. No one cared where K.C. went. The Galapagos would have been all right.

Ticket sales were sluggish to nonexistent--even though the tariff was only $8 to $12. This year, the cost of a ticket is $175. It is being scalped for up to $500 or more. Corporations, travel tours, social climbers have to have tickets. There was no scalping in 1967. There were 32,000 empty seats at kickoff.

There might have been more if Rozelle’s team hadn’t gone to work.

There has never been an empty or unsold seat at a Super Bowl since. “The game is always a financial success; it became an artistic success when Joe Namath and the (New York) Jets beat the (NFL’s Baltimore Colts) in the third Super Bowl,” Rozelle recalls.

They began to give the games Roman numerals like Popes or World Wars. It was a dynasty all its own.

You want to talk to a coach or a star today, you get a seat on the aisle in the hotel ballroom or the theater complex and raise your hand for a microphone. In 1967, this reporter can remember repairing to Coach Lombardi’s suite nightly for a cocktail and a one-on-one discussion of the day’s events with the coach, his staff or even his wife.

You want a star player today, you come early for one of the front rows at his news conference. This reporter can remember sitting on the sideline at practice with Jim Taylor, Green Bay’s Hall of Fame fullback, conducting a lone interview. The great Paul Hornung was injured that year but as available as an insurance salesman. Bart Starr might have an audience of three.

Rozelle took the game to another level. Determined to make it as big an event as a World Series, an Indy 500 or a Kentucky Derby, he twisted the arms of communities till they agreed to set aside blocks of hotel rooms for media types every year at clerical rates. They wanted the Super Bowl? OK, here are the terms. He scheduled events for wives. He staged a massive commissioner’s party that became almost as hard a ticket as the game itself. It was free but priceless. Scalpers would almost rather have blocks of those tickets.

So, the game is now America’s Fete. Nero would have loved it. Barnum would have exploited it.

Someone once asked the novelist, Robert Ruark, a former sportswriter, why he had left that racket for fiction. “January and February,” Ruark replied. Well, February we still have with us. But January, thanks to the Rozelle and Lombardi and, most of all, Namath, is sportswriting’s biggest, if not finest, hour.

I don’t know if the Cowboys are America’s Team, but the Super Bowl is America’s Game.

* DAILY REPORT

Buffalo Coach Marv Levy gives his players some simple advice on handling the hype leading up to this year’s game. C12