Giant Presence

As a football commentator, Phil Simms has to think quickly, which is what he did recently as a guest on the “Late, Late Show With Craig Kilborn.”

“Use quarterback sneak with a sexual innuendo,” Kilborn requested.

Simms thought for a moment, then came up with something that might have been suitable for late-night television but not for a family newspaper.

The young studio audience loved it and roared its approval.

After the early evening taping at CBS in Los Angeles, Simms got in the limousine that would take him back to his hotel, the Ritz-Carlton in Pasadena.

“It wasn’t that bad, was it?” Simms asked a reporter who’d accompanied him to the taping.

“Yeah, it was,” Simms was told.

“I better call my wife and warn her,” he said. “She’ll be watching tonight.”

Simms called his home in the New York suburb of Franklin Lakes, N.J., and his 20-year-old son, home from college in Texas, answered the phone.

“Christopher,” Simms said, “how you doing?”

They talked for a while, then Simms’ wife, Diana, got on the phone. They made small talk, mostly about Bill Parcells, who that day had announced he was retiring as football operations chief of the New York Jets.

At one point Simms turned to the reporter and said, “My wife says the talk in New York is that Parcells is going to Fox.”

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Simms was about to say goodbye without having said anything about his Kilborn show comment when he was reminded about it.

“Oh yeah, Diana, this writer here with me thinks I’d better tell you what I said on the Kilborn show,” he said. “Well, let’s just say you’ve been warned. Love you, and see you tomorrow. Can’t wait to get home.”

Simms paused. “I just couldn’t tell her.”

He laughed. It was the laugh of a contented man.

Things are good for Simms. Nice family, good job, health, wealth, and a full head of blond hair.

If you were going pick someone’s life to live, Simms’ wouldn’t be a bad one.

All-around athlete as a kid in Louisville, Ky., star quarterback at Morehead State in Kentucky, first- round draft pick, a 15-year NFL career--all with the New York Giants--one marriage, one Super Bowl MVP, two Super Bowl rings and now, at 46, he’ll be working his third Super Bowl as a commentator. And this is only his seventh year in broadcasting.

To top things off, his former team is playing in the Super Bowl.

Simms worked two for NBC with Dick Enberg and Paul Maguire, and he’ll be working this one for CBS with play-by-play announcer Greg Gumbel.

Simms, who recently signed a new multiyear contract with CBS, and some of the other CBS people working the Super Bowl were in Pasadena to meet with national television writers as part of the Television Critics Assn. tour.

On the drive to and from the Kilborn taping, he said he almost chose professional baseball over football.

“I loved baseball,” he said. “When I came home from college for the summer, I played baseball every night.”

He pitched, played third and first base and also the outfield.

“If I had gone pro, I think I would have been a power-hitting third baseman,” he said.

Simms is generally regarded as the best quarterback ever to play for the Giants, although some might give the nod to Y.A. Tittle. Simms finished with 19 team records. He completed 2,329 of 4,247 passes (55%) for 30,424 yards.

He saved his finest performance for Super Bowl XXI at the Rose Bowl in 1987, when he led his team to a 39-20 victory over the Denver Broncos. He completed 22 of 25 passes--still a Super Bowl record for completion percentage--for 268 yards and three touchdowns, and was named the game’s most valuable player.

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After that game, he was the first player to be asked, on camera, what he was going to do next and say, “I’m going to Disneyland.”

“You know where the idea to do that spot came from?” Simms asked. “From Michael Eisner’s wife. She suggested it to him one night. They told me that when I met them at the White House a few months after the game.”

Simms said at first he declined the commercial.

“I’m superstitious and didn’t want to do anything that might jeopardize our chances of winning,” he said. “Then I heard John Elway asked for and got up-front money, win or lose.

“That first year, it was going to be the winning quarterback.

“I figured since Elway accepted, I might as well too. It was good money, really good money.”

It has been reported it was $75,000 that first year, and became $50,000 later on.

“It was more than that,” Simms said. “I don’t think I want to say how much.”

More than $100,000?

“Yes, more than $100,000,” he said.

Simms didn’t retire from football. He was cut in June 1994, at 38. One problem was, because of then-new salary-cap restrictions, he was making too much money. He said, as best as he could recall, he was making $2.8 million.

He also had just had surgery on his right shoulder.

“I wasn’t ready to quit,” he said.

He almost signed with the Cleveland Browns before the 1994 season, but took a job with ESPN as a studio analyst.

Before the next season, NBC hired Simms as a game commentator and put him on its No. 1 team with Enberg and Maguire. That clinched it for broadcasting.

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This will be Simms’ first Super Bowl in which he is the lone commentator.

Asked if that will make him more nervous, he said, “No, not really. You’ve got to realize that I’m working with Greg Gumbel, the loosest guy in the world.

“And, besides, if I can’t think of anything to say I don’t have to say anything. That’s Greg’s responsibility.”

Little chance of Simms not thinking of anything to say.

Asked about the difference between playing in a Super Bowl and announcing one, Simms said, “The great thing about being a player is that you win or lose. For announcers, nobody cares how you did except our little group of producers, directors and technical people. Oh sure, there will be articles written about how we did, but that’s all subjective. All we can do is work hard, prepare, and try to tell the truth.

“As a kid, you dream about playing in the Super Bowl. The reality is even better than the dream. When you’re getting ready to take the field for the first Super Bowl, you say, ‘Oh my God! I’m going to pass out just trying to run out of the tunnel!’ ”

Simms did his first Super Bowl as a commentator in January 1996, the Dallas Cowboys against the Pittsburgh Steelers.

“I said as little as possible and was very guarded in my comments,” he recalled. “I was truly the third player in a three-man booth.”

His second was in San Diego, when the Broncos and Elway finally won a Super Bowl, beating the Green Bay Packers.

“I was much more aggressive,” he said. “I couldn’t wait for the game to start. I was ready to say everything about anything. It was like the difference between a first-year quarterback and a third-year quarterback.”

The other day from Tampa, Fla., he talked about working his third Super Bowl and was asked if this one would be special because his former team would be playing in it.

“There is something there . . . playing for them for 15 years,” he said. “There are the memories, there is the relationship with the owners, both Wellington Mara and Bob Tisch.

“But there are only four players on the team when I played who are still there, and of course they were very young. I think most of them were rookies in 1993, my last year.”

Will the Giants’ presence be a distraction or a source of conflict?

“When you’re a broadcaster, you just react and say the first thing that comes to your mind,” he said. “I’m not concerned about it at all. I haven’t really thought about it that much, and not many people have asked about it that much, which has been a surprise.

“I think that my career as a player has been over so long that people now simply view me as a broadcaster.”