3 Past Superbowl party stories, one for you Eagles fans.
IZENBERG: Remembering the boldest of Superheroes
Monday, January 31, 2005
Jerry Izenberg is one of only five writers who have covered every Super Bowl. After thinking back over the previous 38, Izenberg came to the conclusion that they don't make heroes the way they used to do. Where, he wonders as he heads for Super Bowl XXXIX, have the genuine "free spirits" gone? Now, in their wake, we have pretenders and offenders; post-sack prancers and end-zone dancers.
As the Eagles and the Patriots await the next chapter of Roman Numeral history, here is his look back on the days when some Super Bowl heroes made the kind of history that was tinged in neon and punctuated with swagger.
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Super Bowl I The After-Midnight Man (Packers vs. Chiefs)
Throughout the history of the National Football League, it just may be that nobody -- but absolutely nobody -- broke as many curfews as Max McGee. There were times during his distinguished playing career that you could make the case that if Max ever suffered from heat stroke, it wouldn't have anything to do with temperature. It would be neon-induced.
Vince Lombardi used to consider it a personal challenge to keep Max inside the training camp dorm or the pregame hotel on curfew nights.
On the eve of Super Bowl I. Paul Hornung had a pinched nerve. McGee was 34 years old and had caught just four passes in 14 games. But for most of 12 years, he had led the team in pass receptions and curfew violations. Neither he nor Hornung, his teammate on the field and his running mate off it, were expected to play.
Still, Lombardi fingered Max in his talk at the evening meeting the night before the game.
"We are going to have a curfew," the coach said. "It will be at 10 p.m. and I'm not fooling here. Miss it and it costs you $5,000 (an astronomical sum in those days when the winners' share of the game was just $15,000 a man).
Then he paused, looked directly at Max and said:
"And Max, if you have anything out there worth that much then take me along."
When assistant coach Dave Hanner made his bed check that night, Max asked him if he was planning to swing by again. Hanner said he didn't think so. The wonder is he didn't run up Hanner's back, making his escape.
"I had met this nice blond lady the night before and I thought it only proper that I go back and pay my respects," he told me years later. He arrived back at the team hotel at 7:30 a.m.
He slept on the bus and in the locker room. Then he relaxed (as much as his hangover allowed him) on the bench.
But Boyd Dowler went down early and Lombardi was shrieking, "McGee ... McGee." Suddenly, Max McGee was in a football game.
Head pounding, eyes bleary, Max McGee went out and became the first Super Bowl's reluctant hero. It began like this. Bart Starr threw the ball. Willie Mitchell, a KC cornerback, played the ball instead of Max. McGee, who caught it, went 37 yards for a touchdown. In the second half he caught another one for a score.
If heroes of the future learned anything form this, simply put it was:
There are, indeed, times when sleep is overrated.
Super Bowl III The Warlock of Beaver Falls. Pa. (Jets vs. Colts)
For two years it hadn't been a Super Bowl at all. It had been a con job born of television's bankroll, nurtured with the blood of purple-tinted adjectives that never should have been allowed to jump off the typed page. Based on the two games already played, the wit and wisdom of that old circus huckster, P.T. Barnum, was alive and flourishing in the Super Bowl:
"There's a sucker born every minute."
People who thought the Jets could beat the Colts in Super bowl III also believed in The Tooth Fairy, the Great Pumpkin and the Capt. Midnight Decoder Ring.
When the pairing was set, only two people within the world of football believed the Jets could fool everyone.
The first was Weeb Ewbank, who coached the Jets.
The second was Joe Willie Namath, who quarterbacked them.
The coach had every intention of not voicing his opinion. He preferred to sneak up on the Colts.
But the quarterback never sneaked anywhere. He might as well have been accompanied by the Eureka, Kansas, Drum and Bugle Corps. You couldn't have stopped the quarterback from voicing his opinion with a gun, a whip and a chair.
This was still football, and football's pregame rhetoric dictates that you do not say your team is better, you do not say the other team has no chance and you sure as hell do not follow that last statement with the words:
"I guarantee it."
In some ways, Joe Willie was the lineal Super Bowl descendant of the Max McGee school of "gotta go, gotta go, gotta go." The one major difference was that while Max cut his swath into the neon night on tiptoes, Joe Willie was surrounded by midnight ruffles and flourishes.
He was the outrageous, high-living spirit of the American Football League yet to come. He was Broadway Joe with a girl on each arm, a white llama rug back on the apartment floor; the poster boy of football's future.
But how could you believe that when the other team was the Baltimore Colts ... the Colts of Earl Morrall and Johnny Unitas ... the Colts of Tom Matte, Jerry Hill, Willie Richardson, Jimmy Orr ... the Colts with the defense led by "Kill, Bubba, Kill" Smith.
But a week before the game, Namath got into it with Lou Michaels of the Colts in a Fort Lauderdale restaurant. When Michaels said Namath talked too much, he responded with "There's a lot to talk about. We're going to kick the hell out of you."
And then Joe Willie Namath, boy quarterback, became Joe Willie Namath, boy warlock.
A couple of nights after the Michaels Affair, Joe Willie went over to the Miami Springs Villas to accept the Miami Touchdown Award. Namath stepped to the microphone and he stunned the room:
"We are going to win Sunday. I guarantee you."
All hell broke loose during what was left of the week.
But the newly minted warlock had yet another card to play. After granting minimal interviews, he suddenly, by his design, was surrounded at the hotel pool the day after his prophecy. "I studied their secondary. I matched up our receivers against it. It's no contest. We will win."
Within earshot were a dozen of his teammates.
They were smiling.
By game time, all the Jets believed.
Four quarters later, the boy warlock's place in history was assured.
Super Bowl XV The Sorcerer's Apprentice (Eagles vs. Raiders)
They should have come to New Orleans on motorcycles, wearing leather jackets and Prussian helmets. In the eyes of Pete Rozelle and the old-guard NFL survivors, they were pro football's first Evil Empire. They were the foot soldiers in Al Davis' 100-yard army, and should they win this game Rozelle was suddenly faced with the painful fact that they he would have to award the Vince Lombardi Trophy to the man he despised most in all of football.
All that stood between Rozelle and that embarrassing possibility was the Philadelphia Eagles, a team that floated like a mikweed and stung like a gnat. It was no secret that Al Davis' commandos were bigger, stronger, faster and, by far, meaner.
The Raiders were like New York City cab drivers who, having run you down, would back up and make sure they had done the job right. As for Rozelle's nervousness, do not forget that during the war between the leagues, Davis had sued the NFL for $160 million. Pete did not want to have to hand him a trophy.
And what did Pete have going for him in his struggle not to present the trophy to Davis?
The Eagles, in whom nobody believed. They behaved as though they planned to stone the Raiders to death with stale marshmallows.
They were coached by Dick Vermeil, who even before the team arrived in New Orleans, preached to them about clean living. plenty of fiber in their diets and the perils of Bourbon Street.
From the time the Eagles arrived, Vermeil didn't run a football camp; he ran a monastery.
Conversely, the Raiders did everything but hold motorcycle rallies and duel with automobile antennae. They relaxed well into the night without their playbooks and within the lure of Satan's neighborhood, otherwise known as the "Quarter."
Among all those endowed with the hell's fire to last the whole night in that setting, the Raiders' John Matuszak was the pathfinder. He took Al Davis' charge to "win, baby, just win" to a new place because he understood it did not include clean living, curfews and points for neatness. If Davis was the Sorcerer with that formula, The Tooz was the Apprentice.
"I'm going to see that there's no funny business. I've had enough parties for 20 people's lifetimes. I've grown up," the Tooz warned his teammates. "I'll keep our young fellows out of trouble. If any players want to stray, they gotta go through Old Tooz."
Then they caught him at the Old Absinthe House in the Quarter, racing to beat the sunrise, and fined him a grand. When Vermeil heard about that he said if Matuszak were an Eagle, "he'd be on his way back home."
Matuszak was heroic on game day, as were the ret of the Raiders. And after it was over, who was to say how many Eagles told their coach:
"Cleanliness, purity, bull."
The Eagles fans put it a little differently.
And a lot more colorfully.
And the others
They are others too numerous to list, but the name of Jim McMahon leads all the rest. He mooned a TV helicopter hovering over the Bears' practice field before the Bears played the Pats in Super XX. McMahon positively towered over the Quarter and the rest of New Orleans with spiked hair and white-rimmed sunglasses. He was accused by a TV type of telling a Chicago radio show that the women of New Orleans were sluts and most of the people in the city were stupid.
He never said it, but, to his delight, a group of feminists picketed the Bears hotel. McMahon reveled in every minute. There was George Allen, the Washington coach who hired a man to chart the position of the sun in the L.A. Coliseum, and Thurman Thomas of the Bills, who was late getting into the game because he misplaced his helmet.
Small wonder that the best Super Bowl question ever asked came from Dallas running Duane Thomas:
"Well, if this is supposed to be the ultimate game, why are we playing next season?"
Go argue with that.
IZENBERG: Remembering the boldest of Superheroes
Monday, January 31, 2005
Jerry Izenberg is one of only five writers who have covered every Super Bowl. After thinking back over the previous 38, Izenberg came to the conclusion that they don't make heroes the way they used to do. Where, he wonders as he heads for Super Bowl XXXIX, have the genuine "free spirits" gone? Now, in their wake, we have pretenders and offenders; post-sack prancers and end-zone dancers.
As the Eagles and the Patriots await the next chapter of Roman Numeral history, here is his look back on the days when some Super Bowl heroes made the kind of history that was tinged in neon and punctuated with swagger.
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Super Bowl I The After-Midnight Man (Packers vs. Chiefs)
Throughout the history of the National Football League, it just may be that nobody -- but absolutely nobody -- broke as many curfews as Max McGee. There were times during his distinguished playing career that you could make the case that if Max ever suffered from heat stroke, it wouldn't have anything to do with temperature. It would be neon-induced.
Vince Lombardi used to consider it a personal challenge to keep Max inside the training camp dorm or the pregame hotel on curfew nights.
On the eve of Super Bowl I. Paul Hornung had a pinched nerve. McGee was 34 years old and had caught just four passes in 14 games. But for most of 12 years, he had led the team in pass receptions and curfew violations. Neither he nor Hornung, his teammate on the field and his running mate off it, were expected to play.
Still, Lombardi fingered Max in his talk at the evening meeting the night before the game.
"We are going to have a curfew," the coach said. "It will be at 10 p.m. and I'm not fooling here. Miss it and it costs you $5,000 (an astronomical sum in those days when the winners' share of the game was just $15,000 a man).
Then he paused, looked directly at Max and said:
"And Max, if you have anything out there worth that much then take me along."
When assistant coach Dave Hanner made his bed check that night, Max asked him if he was planning to swing by again. Hanner said he didn't think so. The wonder is he didn't run up Hanner's back, making his escape.
"I had met this nice blond lady the night before and I thought it only proper that I go back and pay my respects," he told me years later. He arrived back at the team hotel at 7:30 a.m.
He slept on the bus and in the locker room. Then he relaxed (as much as his hangover allowed him) on the bench.
But Boyd Dowler went down early and Lombardi was shrieking, "McGee ... McGee." Suddenly, Max McGee was in a football game.
Head pounding, eyes bleary, Max McGee went out and became the first Super Bowl's reluctant hero. It began like this. Bart Starr threw the ball. Willie Mitchell, a KC cornerback, played the ball instead of Max. McGee, who caught it, went 37 yards for a touchdown. In the second half he caught another one for a score.
If heroes of the future learned anything form this, simply put it was:
There are, indeed, times when sleep is overrated.
Super Bowl III The Warlock of Beaver Falls. Pa. (Jets vs. Colts)
For two years it hadn't been a Super Bowl at all. It had been a con job born of television's bankroll, nurtured with the blood of purple-tinted adjectives that never should have been allowed to jump off the typed page. Based on the two games already played, the wit and wisdom of that old circus huckster, P.T. Barnum, was alive and flourishing in the Super Bowl:
"There's a sucker born every minute."
People who thought the Jets could beat the Colts in Super bowl III also believed in The Tooth Fairy, the Great Pumpkin and the Capt. Midnight Decoder Ring.
When the pairing was set, only two people within the world of football believed the Jets could fool everyone.
The first was Weeb Ewbank, who coached the Jets.
The second was Joe Willie Namath, who quarterbacked them.
The coach had every intention of not voicing his opinion. He preferred to sneak up on the Colts.
But the quarterback never sneaked anywhere. He might as well have been accompanied by the Eureka, Kansas, Drum and Bugle Corps. You couldn't have stopped the quarterback from voicing his opinion with a gun, a whip and a chair.
This was still football, and football's pregame rhetoric dictates that you do not say your team is better, you do not say the other team has no chance and you sure as hell do not follow that last statement with the words:
"I guarantee it."
In some ways, Joe Willie was the lineal Super Bowl descendant of the Max McGee school of "gotta go, gotta go, gotta go." The one major difference was that while Max cut his swath into the neon night on tiptoes, Joe Willie was surrounded by midnight ruffles and flourishes.
He was the outrageous, high-living spirit of the American Football League yet to come. He was Broadway Joe with a girl on each arm, a white llama rug back on the apartment floor; the poster boy of football's future.
But how could you believe that when the other team was the Baltimore Colts ... the Colts of Earl Morrall and Johnny Unitas ... the Colts of Tom Matte, Jerry Hill, Willie Richardson, Jimmy Orr ... the Colts with the defense led by "Kill, Bubba, Kill" Smith.
But a week before the game, Namath got into it with Lou Michaels of the Colts in a Fort Lauderdale restaurant. When Michaels said Namath talked too much, he responded with "There's a lot to talk about. We're going to kick the hell out of you."
And then Joe Willie Namath, boy quarterback, became Joe Willie Namath, boy warlock.
A couple of nights after the Michaels Affair, Joe Willie went over to the Miami Springs Villas to accept the Miami Touchdown Award. Namath stepped to the microphone and he stunned the room:
"We are going to win Sunday. I guarantee you."
All hell broke loose during what was left of the week.
But the newly minted warlock had yet another card to play. After granting minimal interviews, he suddenly, by his design, was surrounded at the hotel pool the day after his prophecy. "I studied their secondary. I matched up our receivers against it. It's no contest. We will win."
Within earshot were a dozen of his teammates.
They were smiling.
By game time, all the Jets believed.
Four quarters later, the boy warlock's place in history was assured.
Super Bowl XV The Sorcerer's Apprentice (Eagles vs. Raiders)
They should have come to New Orleans on motorcycles, wearing leather jackets and Prussian helmets. In the eyes of Pete Rozelle and the old-guard NFL survivors, they were pro football's first Evil Empire. They were the foot soldiers in Al Davis' 100-yard army, and should they win this game Rozelle was suddenly faced with the painful fact that they he would have to award the Vince Lombardi Trophy to the man he despised most in all of football.
All that stood between Rozelle and that embarrassing possibility was the Philadelphia Eagles, a team that floated like a mikweed and stung like a gnat. It was no secret that Al Davis' commandos were bigger, stronger, faster and, by far, meaner.
The Raiders were like New York City cab drivers who, having run you down, would back up and make sure they had done the job right. As for Rozelle's nervousness, do not forget that during the war between the leagues, Davis had sued the NFL for $160 million. Pete did not want to have to hand him a trophy.
And what did Pete have going for him in his struggle not to present the trophy to Davis?
The Eagles, in whom nobody believed. They behaved as though they planned to stone the Raiders to death with stale marshmallows.
They were coached by Dick Vermeil, who even before the team arrived in New Orleans, preached to them about clean living. plenty of fiber in their diets and the perils of Bourbon Street.
From the time the Eagles arrived, Vermeil didn't run a football camp; he ran a monastery.
Conversely, the Raiders did everything but hold motorcycle rallies and duel with automobile antennae. They relaxed well into the night without their playbooks and within the lure of Satan's neighborhood, otherwise known as the "Quarter."
Among all those endowed with the hell's fire to last the whole night in that setting, the Raiders' John Matuszak was the pathfinder. He took Al Davis' charge to "win, baby, just win" to a new place because he understood it did not include clean living, curfews and points for neatness. If Davis was the Sorcerer with that formula, The Tooz was the Apprentice.
"I'm going to see that there's no funny business. I've had enough parties for 20 people's lifetimes. I've grown up," the Tooz warned his teammates. "I'll keep our young fellows out of trouble. If any players want to stray, they gotta go through Old Tooz."
Then they caught him at the Old Absinthe House in the Quarter, racing to beat the sunrise, and fined him a grand. When Vermeil heard about that he said if Matuszak were an Eagle, "he'd be on his way back home."
Matuszak was heroic on game day, as were the ret of the Raiders. And after it was over, who was to say how many Eagles told their coach:
"Cleanliness, purity, bull."
The Eagles fans put it a little differently.
And a lot more colorfully.
And the others
They are others too numerous to list, but the name of Jim McMahon leads all the rest. He mooned a TV helicopter hovering over the Bears' practice field before the Bears played the Pats in Super XX. McMahon positively towered over the Quarter and the rest of New Orleans with spiked hair and white-rimmed sunglasses. He was accused by a TV type of telling a Chicago radio show that the women of New Orleans were sluts and most of the people in the city were stupid.
He never said it, but, to his delight, a group of feminists picketed the Bears hotel. McMahon reveled in every minute. There was George Allen, the Washington coach who hired a man to chart the position of the sun in the L.A. Coliseum, and Thurman Thomas of the Bills, who was late getting into the game because he misplaced his helmet.
Small wonder that the best Super Bowl question ever asked came from Dallas running Duane Thomas:
"Well, if this is supposed to be the ultimate game, why are we playing next season?"
Go argue with that.
