Cronkite’s Opinion May Not Fly in Las Vegas

Dave Kindred, writing in the Sporting News: “Walter Cronkite believes the wonderful thing about the Super Bowl is that so many people can get together in a common cause for ‘something that means absolutely nothing.’

“As wise as Uncle Walter always is, he must know nothing about any football coach. To say the game means nothing is to say the Lombardis and Landrys, the Shanahans and Johnsons, do work that is meaningless.

“‘If a carpenter builds a house and it falls down, do you say, “It’s only a house”?’ Joe Paterno once asked. The coach asked the question because his Penn State football team had lost an important game and someone suggested he shouldn’t take the defeat to heart because, after all, it is only a game.”

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Trivia time: Who holds the Super Bowl record for yards gained rushing in a game?

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Very bad taste: Dan Shaughnessy of the Boston Globe, writing from New Orleans: “Super Bowl media day is preposterous. Players are forced to be available for an hour and it’s soon clear why they think most members of the media are morons.

“Decades ago, the ultimate media day question was posed by a dolt who asked Jim Plunkett, ‘Jim, let me get this straight--is it your mother who is dead and your dad who is blind, or is it the other way around?’”

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It stays with you: Marv Levy coached the Buffalo Bills to four consecutive Super Bowls--all defeats. He’s a broadcaster with Fox television now after retiring as a coach. Aaron Kuriloff of the New Orleans Times-Picayune asked him about his Super Bowl experience: “There’s no devastation worse than losing the game. Even though you feel the great exhilaration when you win and great despair when you lose, the exhilaration never exceeds the intensity of the despair.”

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Fun guy: Rick Morrissey in the Chicago Tribune: “How dull is Bill Belichick? I’m glad you asked. Cadavers pick up cell phones and pretend to be in deep conversation whenever the Patriots’ coach approaches. At rave parties, Belichick has been known to say, ‘What does a guy have to do to get a game of Yahtzee going around here?’”

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Extra benefit: From the Caught on the Fly column in the Sporting News: “Fly’s pal Jason Kapono had this take when Arizona State nickelheads tossed coins on the court during a(nother) loss to UCLA: ‘I saw a quarter, a nickel and a dime. I could have made 40 cents, but it probably would have been an NCAA violation.’”

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Mat motive: The University of Minnesota wrestling team wants to break a national attendance record today when it meets perennially strong Iowa at Target Center, which holds 19,000. The record attendance for a wrestling match is 15,291, set in Iowa City when Iowa and Iowa State met in 1992.

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Trivia answer: Timmy Smith of the Washington Redskins, 204 yards against Denver in 1988.

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And finally: It has been reported that the Rams once traded nine players for Ollie Matson. But that isn’t an NFL record. The record trade was also made by the Rams in 1952--11 players and draft choices to Dallas for linebacker Les Richter.

After two years in the service, Richter, an All-American at California, joined the Rams in 1954 and played nine seasons before retiring.

Mal Florence