It was just 38 years ago that I had my first Super Bowl experience of any consequence.
It was Super Bowl XIV at the Rose Bowl in Pasadena, California, where the Pittsburgh Steelers (12-4) met the Los Angeles Rams (9-7). I was not among the 103,985 people who attended that game to watch the Steelers prevail 31-19.
That meant, of course, that I also did not have to endure the 12-minute halftime performance of 430 incessantly smiling Up With People folks dressed like Perry Como as the performed their tribute to Sixties music. It should be noted that the show had to have been better than at the very first Super Bowl, where the halftime entertainment was a polka band with sixteen Miss Wisconsin contestants churning butter on the back of a hay wagon.
But in the weeks of manic lead-up to the Big Game I attended many events as a newspaper color commentator of stuff only football wives appreciate.
While I’ll admit that that might sound sexist, it didn’t at the time. Today, I’ll bow to the pressures I place upon myself to be oh-so-PC (yeah, right) and amend the comment to “stuff nobody appreciates” and add, “or even cares about.”
My colleagues in the sports department of the Los Angeles Daily News—where I wrote about jazz music and interviewed two-headed turtles and other anomalies—got to interview great players with names like Terry Bradshaw, Franco Harris and Lynn Swann of the Chuck Noll-led Steelers. They wrote critically analytical stories about Pat Haden, Cullen Bryant, and Elvis Peacock, a first-round draft pick who is best remembered for having the coolest name in all of professional sports history.
They hobnobbed with team owners Art Rooney (Pittsburgh) and Georgia Rosenbloom, a former lounge singer who inherited controlling interest in the Rams after her sixth husband, Carroll, drowned in the Atlantic surf somewhere in Florida just months before. She soon thereafter (perhaps a little too “soon thereafter,” the tabloids whispered) made an accordion-playing Hollywood music bigwig named Dominic Frontiere her seventh husband. No less a publication than the National Enquirer suggested that Georgia might have been in Florida at the time of Carroll’s drowning, as did one of the Rosenbloom sons with whom Geri and I threw darts in a Redondo Beach bar one night.
The circumstances of Carroll Rosenbloom’s death remain a nagging question, but no more nagging than this one: “Why were Geri and I at a bar in Redondo Beach throwing darts?”
In the middle of all of this, Dominic Frontiere, whose accordion prowess eclipsed that of Lawrence Welk’s, was busy scalping as many as 16,000 tickets to the 1980 Super Bowl, raking in a cool half-million dollars for his efforts.
For the record, the accordion player served nine months in a minimum-security federal prison that may or may not have had tennis courts and room service. He was fined $15,000 by the IRS for failing to report his take as income. There was no restitution provision. Do the math. Dominic netted $485,000, which works out to $59K per month for time served. (I’d like that deal now.) He basically disproved the adage that crime doesn’t pay but lent some credibility to the spirit behind the meaning of one of my favorite bumper stickers that I just happened to have mentioned last week: USE AN ACCORDION/GO TO JAIL.
In the great lead-up to that XIVth Super Bowl I got to go to the Rose Bowl and observe scores of technicians from CBS television run cables and wires and cords all over the place and then pass on to my eager-to-know readers that it takes as many miles of television cables to broadcast a Super Bowl as there are miles of highway between Pasadena and Poughkeepsie. (I forget the actual number, but, oh well…I trust that you get the point.)
I had done a similar story about the multiple miles of telephone lines the Secret Service had installed when President Gerald Ford wanted to have lunch with a farm family near Champaign, Illinois, during the 1976 primary campaign. Little did I know that this kind of reportage would become something of a specialty for me. Sharing that information about the telephone lines with Hunter S. Thompson on the press bus might have been what kept us from becoming close friends on the campaign trail.
PACOIMA, A NOT-SO-TIDY COMMUNITY tucked into the northeast corner of the San Fernando Valley, seemed an unlikely place to tend to pre-Super Bowl business, but that’s where I found myself one January afternoon.
I had actually been to Pacoima once before to interview a kindergarten teacher who moonlighted as a stripper. I thought this might be an interesting story just because my kindergarten teacher happened not to be a stripper—and for many a good reason. I was wrong about the Pacoima stripper being a good story. I did, however, find it mildly amusing that the strip club where she worked nights was in a strip mall replete with a Thai restaurant (the best Thai restaurants are always in strip malls, by the way), a tire store, and a beauty salon called Curl Up and Dye. I made that last part up or maybe I borrowed it. There was no beauty shop, but isn’t that a great name for one?
Anyway, it was in a nondescript bar on Van Nuys Boulevard in Pacoima that I met this Pittsburgh Steelers Super Fan whose name I’ve long since forgotten. He was about seven feet tall and weighed—soaking wet—about 108 pounds. He wore a tuxedo and danced at Steelers’s games in a style reminiscent of a spasmodic Tommy Tune, or perhaps a Marionette with a couple of strings missing. He flailed his arms like he was battling killer bees. He was the antithesis of your typical cheerleader and the reason I was sent to interview him was because—basically—he was an alcoholic football fan who ate glass and had a press agent.
He wanted the fifteen minutes of fame that Andy Warhol had promised.
For two or three hours I sat in this seedy little bar watching a tuxedo-clad moron throw back shots of cheap Canadian whiskey and then eat the shot glasses (I am not making this up), washing down the shards of well-chewed glass with squat brown bottles of Lucky Lager, famous for being the worst beer brewed since those produced in 11,000 BC Sumeria. Between really disturbing bites of glass he spoke of the Steelers as if they alone knew the dark secrets of the universe.
Outside of the political arena I have yet to meet a bigger idiot. Just to be on the safe side, I never made a return trip to Pacoima.
The Super Bowl Party was the biggest ticket in town. Passes to the Grammys, Oscars, Emmys and the Big Game itself, were easy to get, comparatively.
But I had been assigned to cover the party and I could not get a ticket, a frustrating situation that led to my learning an important lesson that journalism school hadn’t taught.
“I’ll just write a story about how hard it is to get a ticket,” I told one of the sportswriters who had a ticket and planned on using it only to get drunk and talk to people off the record.
I was channeling my inner Hunter S. Thompson.
“They know how hard it is to get a ticket,” he scowled, looking at me as if at that very moment I was eating a shot glass. “Reading about it is as close as they’re going to get. They don’t care about your problems.”
He was right, of course. To brace myself, I threw back a shot or two (or was it three?) of Wild Turkey. I scrambled, I begged, I what-evered. I was probably slurring. I finally got a ticket. I went to the party, saw the glass-eating imbecile in a distant corner, and wrote about the open bars and a table laden with shrimp that reached from Pasadena to Poughkeepsie.
For the record, the Grammys, the Oscars and the Emmys were much better.
As for the Big Game? I just go for the food.
Super Bowl LII Menu
For today’s big game it’s chili (see “Don’t Mess With Texas” for my recipe) and East L.A. Nachos (see “Double Dribble” for Courtney’s recipe).
If you’re an Eagles fan then salted soft pretzels with mustard, Rolling Rock beer, and Philly Cheesesteaks Whiz Wit are a must. For the cheesesteaks, saute six ounces of Steak-umm Sliced Steaks; stuff into soft hoagie rolls and smother with tons of sauteed onions and huge dollops of Cheez Whiz.
You will jinx the game if you use provolone cheese or peppers. Ketchup is OK.
If you’re a Patriots fan, lobster rolls, clam dip with pita chips, and Samuel Adams Boston Lager should fill the bill. For four lobster rolls, combine 1-1/2 pounds of chopped cooked lobster, with 1/2-cup Hellman’s mayonnaise, 3 Tbs. fresh lemon juice, 2 chopped stalks of celery and 2 Tbs. chopped fresh parsley. Stuff the mixture into soft hoagie rolls. In the New England tradition, you can cheat and substitute the lobster meat with crab meat.
Open the Sam Adams early in the day to make sure it’s flat by game time.
Photography by Courtney A. Liska