Fear and Loathing at Rolling Stone (53 page)

How long, oh Lord, how long? This is the second year in a row that I have gone to the Super Bowl and been absolutely certain—at least forty-eight hours before game time—of the outcome. It is also the second year in a row that I have failed to capitalize, financially, on this certainty. Last year, betting mainly with wealthy cocaine addicts, I switched all my bets from Washington to Miami on Friday night—and in the resulting confusion my net winnings were almost entirely canceled by widespread rancor and personal bitterness.

This year, in order to sidestep that problem, I waited until the last moment to make my bets—despite the fact that I knew the Vikings were doomed after watching them perform for the press at their star-crossed practice field on Monday afternoon before the game. It was clear, even then, that they were spooked and very uncertain about what they were getting into—but it was not until I drove about twenty miles around the Beltway to the other side of town for a look at the Dolphins that I knew, for sure, how to bet.

There are a lot of factors intrinsic to the nature of the Super Bowl that make it far more predictable than regular season games, or even play-offs—but they are not the kind of factors that can be sensed or understood at a distance of two thousand or even twenty miles, on the basis of any wisdom or information that filters out from the site through the rose-colored, booze-bent media-filter that passes for “world-wide coverage” at these spectacles.

There is a progression of understanding vis-à-vis pro football that varies drastically with the factor of
distance
—physical, emotional, intellectual, and every other way ... Which is exactly the way it should be, in the eyes of the amazingly small number of people who own and control the game, because it is this finely managed distance factor that accounts for the high-profit mystique that blew the sacred institution of baseball off its “national pastime” pedestal in less than fifteen years.

There were other reasons for baseball’s precipitous loss of popularity among everybody except old men and middle-aged sportswriters between 1959 and now—as there will be a variety of reasons to explain the certain decline of pro football between now and 1984—but if sporting
historians ever look back on all this and try to explain it, there will be no avoiding the argument that pro football’s meteoric success in the 1960s was directly attributable to its early marriage with network TV and a huge, coast-to-coast audience of armchair fans who “grew up”—in terms of their personal relationships to The Game—with the idea that pro football was something that happened every Sunday on the tube. The notion of driving eight miles along a crowded freeway and then paying $3 to park the car in order to pay another $10 to watch the game from the vantage point of a damp redwood bench fifty-five rows above the 19-yard line in a crowd of noisy drunks was entirely repugnant to them.

And they were absolutely right. After ten years trying it both ways—and especially after watching this last wretched Super Bowl game from a choice seat in the “press section” very high above the 50-yard line—I hope to Christ I never again succumb to whatever kind of weakness or madness it is that causes a person to endure the incoherent hell that comes with going out to a cold and rainy stadium for three hours on a Sunday afternoon and trying to get involved with what seems to be happening down there on that far-below field.

At the Super Bowl I had the benefit of my usual game-day aids: powerful binoculars, a tiny portable radio for the blizzard of audio details that nobody ever thinks to mention on TV, and a seat on the good left arm of a friend, Mr. Natural ... But even with all these aids and a seat on the 50-yard line, I would rather have stayed in my hotel room and watched the goddamn thing on TV; or maybe in some howling-drunk bar full of heavy bettors—the kind of people who like to bet on every play, pass or run, three to one against a first down, twenty to one on a turnover . . .

When I finally fled Houston, it was a cold Tuesday afternoon with big lakes of standing water on the way to the airport. I almost missed my plane to Denver because of a hassle with Jimmy the Greek about who was going to drive us to the airport and another hassle with the hotel garage-man about who was going to pay for eight days of tending my bogus “Official Super Bowl Car” in the hotel garage ... and I probably would not have made it at all if I hadn’t run into an NFL publicity man who gave me enough speed to jerk me awake and lash the little white
Mercury Cougar out along the Dallas freeway to the airport in time to abandon it in the “Departures/Taxis Only” area and hire a man for dollars to rush my bags and sound equipment up to the Continental Airlines desk just in time to make the flight.

What was easily the most provocative quote of that whole dreary week came on the Monday after the game from Miami linebacker Doug Swift. He was talking in his usual loose “What? Me worry?” kind of way with two or three sportswriters in the crowded lobby of the Marriott. Buses were leaving for the airport, Dolphin supporters and their wives were checking out, the lobby was full of stranded luggage, and off in one of the corners, Don Shula was talking with another clutch of sportswriters and ridiculing the notion that he would ever get rid of Jim Kiick, despite Kiick’s obvious unhappiness at the prospect of riding the bench again next year behind all-pro running back Mercury Morris.

Meanwhile, on the other side of the lobby, Doug Swift was going along with a conversation that had turned, along with Shula’s, to money and next year’s contracts. Swift listened for a while, then looked up at whoever was talking to him and said:

“You can expect to see a lot of new faces on next year’s [Miami] team. A lot of important contracts are coming up for renewal, and you can bet that the guys will be asking for more than management is willing to pay.”

Nobody paid much attention to the decidedly unnatural timing of Swift’s matter-of-fact prediction about “a lot of new faces next year,” but it was not the kind of talk designed to tickle either Shula’s or Joe Robbie’s rampant humours that morning. Jesus, here was the team’s player representative—a star linebacker and one of the sharpest & most politically conscious people in the league—telling anyone who cared to listen, not even twelve hours after the victory party, that the embryo “Dolphin Dynasty” was already in a very different kind of trouble than anything the Vikings or the Redskins had been able to lay on them in two straight Super Bowls.

When Doug Swift made that comment about “a lot of new faces on next year’s team,” he was not thinking in terms of a player revolt against forced urinalysis. What he had in mind, I think, was the fact that among
the Dolphin contracts coming up for renewal this year are those of Larry Csonka, Jake Scott, Paul Warfield, Dick Anderson, and Mercury Morris—all established stars earning between $30,000 and $55,000 a year right now, and all apparently in the mood to double their salaries next time around.

Which might seem a bit pushy, to some people—until you start comparing average salary figures in the National Football League against salaries in other pro sports. The average NFL salary (according to figures provided by players association general counsel Ed Garvey) is $28,500, almost five grand less than the $33,000 average for major league baseball players, and about
half
the average salary (between $50,000 and $55,000) in the National Hockey League ... But when you start talking about salaries in the National Basketball Association, it’s time to kick out the jams: the
average
NBA salary is $92,500 a year. (The NBA Players Association claims that the average salary is $100,000.)

Against this steep-green background, it’s a little easier to see why Larry Csonka wants a raise from his current salary of $55,000—to $100,000 or so, a figure that he’d probably scale down pretty calmly if Joe Robbie offered him the average NBA salary of $92,500.

(A quick little sidelight on all these figures has to do with the price TV advertisers paid to push their products during time-outs and penalty squabbles at the Super Bowl: the figure announced by the NFL and whatever TV network carried the goddamn thing was $200,000 per minute. I missed the telecast, due to factors beyond my control—which is why I don’t know which network sucked up all that gravy, or whether it was Schlitz, Budweiser, Gillette, or even King Kong Amyl Nitrates that coughed up $200,000 for every sixty seconds of TV exposure on that grim afternoon.)

But that was just a sidelight ... and the longer I look at all these figures, my watch, and this goddamn stinking Mojo Wire that’s been beeping steadily out here in the snow for two days, the more I tend to see this whole thing about a pending labor management crunch in the NFL as a story with a spine of its own that we should probably leave for later.

Which is sad, but what the hell? None of this tortured bullshit about the future of pro football means anything anyway. If the Red Chinese invaded tomorrow and banned the game entirely, nobody would really
miss it after two or three months. Even now, most of the games are so fucking dull that it’s hard to understand how anybody can even watch them on TV unless they have some money hanging on the point spread, instead of the final score.

Pro football in America is over the hump. Ten years ago it was a very hip and private kind of vice to be into. I remember going to my first 49ers game in 1965 with fifteen beers in a plastic cooler and a Dr. Grabow pipe full of bad hash. The 49ers were still playing in Kezar Stadium then, an old gray hulk at the western end of Haight Street in Golden Gate Park. There were never any sellouts, but the thirty thousand or so regulars were extremely heavy drinkers, and at least ten thousand of them were out there for no other reason except to get involved in serious violence ... By halftime the place was a drunken madhouse, and anybody who couldn’t get it on anywhere else could always go underneath the stands and try to get into the long trough of a “Men’s Room” through the “Out” door; there were always a few mean drunks lurking around to punch anybody who tried that ... and by the end of the third quarter of any game, regardless of the score, there were always two or three huge brawls that would require the cops to clear out whole sections of the grandstand.

But all that changed when the 49ers moved out to Candlestick Park. The prices doubled and a whole new crowd took the seats. It was the same kind of crowd I saw, last season, in the four games I went to at the Oakland Coliseum: a sort of half-rich mob of nervous doctors, lawyers, and bank officers who would sit through a whole game without ever making a sound—not even when some freak with a head full of acid spilled a whole beer down the neck of their gray plastic ski jackets. Toward the end of the season, when the Raiders were battling every week for a spot in the play-offs, some of the players got so pissed off at the stuporous nature of their “fans” that they began making public appeals for “cheering” and “noise.”

It was a bad joke if you didn’t have to live with it—and as far as I’m concerned, I hope to hell I never see the inside of another football stadium. Not even a free seat with free booze in the press box.

That gig is over now, and I blame it on Vince Lombardi. The success of his Green Bay approach in the Sixties restructured the game
entirely. Lombardi never really thought about
winning
: his trip was
not losing
... Which worked, and because it worked, the rest of the NFL bought Lombardi’s whole style: Avoid Mistakes, Don’t Fuck Up, Hang Tough, and Take No Chances ... Because sooner or later the enemy will make a mistake and then you start grinding him down, and if you play the defensive percentage you’ll get inside his 30-yard line at least three times in each half, and once you’re inside the 30 you want to be sure to get at least 3 points . . .