Cover-up

by John Feinstein

  While he was waiting, he heard someone behind him say, “So, even celebrities have to wait in line, eh?”

  The voice was familiar. He turned and saw Joe Theismann standing behind him, a friendly smile on his face.

  “Well, if you’re on line, Mr. Theismann, then I guess celebrities do have to wait,” Stevie answered.

  Theismann laughed and put out a hand. “It’s Joe,” he said. “The only people not waiting in line this week work for CBS.”

  That reminded Stevie that he still hadn’t heard back from his dad about Sean McManus. Maybe he should have waited, he thought. He might have avoided waiting on line.

  “What are you doing this week since ESPN isn’t airing the game?” he asked Theismann.

  “Little of everything. With ESPN, there’s always some kind of show—radio or TV—that they want you on just about twenty-four hours a day. Today I’m supposed to take a crew onto the field and ask the quarterbacks if any of them can remember watching me when I played in the Super Bowl. Given that Eddie Brennan was two years old the last time I played in one, I don’t like my chances.”

  Stevie remembered that Theismann had quarterbacked the Washington Redskins into two straight Super Bowls—winning the first and losing the second.

  “I think I’ve seen tapes of the second one,” he said, then stopped, because what he remembered was an awful interception Theismann had thrown.

  “Yeah, I know, the interception,” Theismann said. “Every year about now people show that again and remind me. Twenty-four years ago and it might as well be yesterday.”

  They had reached the front of the line. Stevie had learned his lesson from the Final Four about needing ID to pick up a credential. He’d had to send a JPEG photo because all Super Bowl credentials had photos on them. Now he showed the young woman working behind the desk his passport—which he had gotten after being hassled in New Orleans—along with his school ID. He waited to be told he needed a driver’s license.

  “I’ve seen your show,” the young woman said. “I’m sorry about what happened, but I’m glad you’re here. Welcome.”

  While she talked, she was pulling out a large envelope and a handsome computer case that said SUPER BOWL XLII—which in English, Stevie knew, meant Super Bowl 42.

  “Your credential is inside the envelope,” she said. “Make sure you keep it around your neck at all times—the security folks are pretty strict about it. And if there’s anything I can do to help you during the week, my name is Valery Levy.”

  She put out her hand and gave him a smile that left Stevie a bit dazzled. Behind him, Stevie heard Theismann say, “Steve, there’s no one better in the league office than Valery. She can solve any problem there is.”

  “Oh, Joe,” Valery Levy said with a laugh, “you say that to all the girls.”

  “Not anymore,” Theismann said, also laughing.

  Kelleher and Mearns were waiting when Stevie thanked Valery Levy and put his credential around his neck. None of them had carried their computers over from the hotel since there would be plenty of time to go back to their rooms and write.

  “The best thing about having the Super Bowl in Indianapolis is the logistics,” Kelleher said as they waited to go through the security checkpoint. “I was worried when they said they were building a new dome that it wouldn’t be as convenient as the old one. But they just put a bigger, more modern building on essentially the same site.”

  Stevie was about to walk through the metal detector when his cell phone rang.

  “Sir, you need to turn the cell phone off to come through here,” a security guard said.

  “Sorry,” Stevie said. He stepped out of line and answered the phone. It was Sean McManus.

  “Can I call you right back? I’m going through security,” he said.

  “Actually, our office is about fifty yards from where you are,” McManus said. “Why don’t you just drop by here for a minute. I talked to your dad.”

  “Okay,” Stevie said. He hung up, turned off the phone, and put it into the tray with his room key and some change. The security man was eyeing him skeptically, the way he was frequently eyed in these situations because of his age.

  “Ever done this before?” he asked as Stevie stepped through the detector.

  “Not at the Super Bowl,” Stevie answered.

  That seemed to work. Stevie picked up his things and told Bobby and Tamara that he had just talked to Sean McManus.

  “There’s their office,” Kelleher said, pointing at a sign on the right side of the curving hallway they were now in. “The players will be on the field in about ten minutes. Don’t take too long in there. You need to wander around, get a feel for all this.”

  Stevie nodded. He and Bobby had discussed his role for the week. In part, Kelleher wanted Stevie to look for the offbeat story—players, or others, who weren’t getting that much attention, the classic sidebar sort of story. But he had also told him to keep his eyes and ears open for anyone or anything that looked odd or different or out of place. “Generally speaking, there aren’t many real stories here during the week,” Kelleher said. “These teams have been covered to death during the season. That’s why anything—including Stevie Thomas being fired by USTV—can be a story.”

  As he walked through the doors marked CBS COMPOUND, Stevie glanced at his watch. It was 8:53. The Ravens were due to arrive at nine. They would be available for ninety minutes, and then the Dreams would follow them onto the field for their ninety minutes. The teams would also be available on Wednesday and Thursday mornings, but only for sixty minutes. The extra thirty minutes, Stevie guessed, was why this was called “media day.”

  Stevie knew from his football fanatic research that each team would go straight from their meetings with the media to practice and then head off for afternoon film sessions with their coaches after lunch. The coaches liked to say that they wanted Super Bowl week to be like any other week of practice prior to a game. Only there was no way that could be the case. For one thing, there was no other week in which the players were required to meet with 2,000 media members on Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday; and no other week when they were locked into hotels for seven straight nights instead of just the night before the game.

  In past years, Stevie remembered, there had occasionally been problems with restless players showing up at night on Bourbon Street in New Orleans or South Beach in Miami. He guessed that wouldn’t be a problem in Indianapolis.

  Sean McManus was waiting for him just inside the doorway. The CBS compound was actually part of a dimly lit backstage area of the Dome. It looked to Stevie as if a bunch of plywood walls had been thrown up for the week to create temporary office space.

  “Home sweet home, huh?” McManus said, noticing Stevie looking around. “The glamorous world of TV. Come on back. Let’s talk for a couple minutes. I know you need to get onto the field.”

  He led Stevie through a maze of desks. All around, people were shouting at one another about which camera crew was where. He heard someone yelling, “Where is all the talent? We need them outside now for publicity shots!”

  Stevie’s brief TV experience had taught him that “talent” was a term for the people who worked on camera. In CBS’s case that would include Jim Nantz, Phil Simms, Dick Enberg, Lesley Visser, and Greg Gumbel—among others. At USTV, he and Susan Carol had been talent. Now she was still talent, and he was, in the words of his old boss Tal Vincent, “print riffraff.”

  McManus led him into a small room that had a desk, several chairs, and a large-screen TV—which at that moment was showing what Stevie guessed was a closed-circuit picture of the playing field. He could see hundreds—maybe thousands—of media people milling around awaiting the Ravens’ arrival. McManus offered him a chair and sat behind the desk.

  “I think your dad and I have reached an agreement,” he said. “He’s understandably leery of you jumping right back into TV. So I suggested that you do some work for us on Wednesday and Thursday and, if it goes okay, maybe do a p
iece for the pregame show. If it’s too much, I’ll back off. I told your dad I’d pay you the same if you’re on one piece or on three—so there’s no pressure and you can still primarily focus on working for the Herald.”

  Stevie thought that was fair, especially since it meant he had today to get acclimated before he had to do anything for CBS.

  “What do you want me to do exactly?” he asked.

  “I’m not a hundred percent sure,” McManus said. “I’d like to have a crew with you during the time players and coaches are available. See what you find. If nothing else, we could have Dick interview you about what it’s like to be a fourteen-year-old reporter at the Super Bowl.”

  He knew Dick was Dick Enberg, the longtime play-by-play man who would be hosting the late-night show for CBS this week.

  “Well,” Stevie said, “if my dad’s okay with it, I’m willing to give it a try. I’d rather find the stories than be the story, but I hope you aren’t expecting too much. There’s a lot of media out there.”

  “I have no expectations,” McManus said. “But I know your work pretty well. I have very high hopes.” He reached into his desk, pulled out a credential, and slid it across to him. Stevie picked it up and did a double take. It had his name and picture on it, but instead of having the word MEDIA across the top in black letters, it had CBS in the network’s trademark blue and gold.

  “I wanted to be prepared if things worked out,” he said. “The NFL PR office had your photo already, so it was pretty easy to get it done quickly.”

  He pointed at the credential around Stevie’s neck. “That will get you a lot of places,” he said. “Ours will get you almost anyplace—including being able to come and go back here without checking in at reception or anything like that.”

  Stevie was putting the new credential around his neck when McManus stood up and put his hand out. “I’m looking forward to this, Steve,” he said. “I have two goals: one, for people to say I’m a genius for signing you up for the week, and two—more important—for you to tell me when the week’s over that you’re glad you did it.”

  Stevie stood and shook his hand. “I’ll try to make you happy you did it too, Mr. McManus,” he said.

  “Everyone who works for me calls me Sean,” McManus said. “Go on and get out there. You are about to witness the greatest media circus of your young life.”

  As soon as he walked through the revolving doors that led to the field area, Stevie knew McManus wasn’t exaggerating. He had been in the Superdome in New Orleans, but the new Hoosier Dome—negotiations to stick a corporate name on the building were apparently still ongoing—made the Superdome look like a high school gym.

  Stevie had read that it seated 82,000 people, but there were so many corporate boxes about a third of the way up in the stands that the upper deck appeared to be above several clouds. There was a wide expanse of turf between the first row of seats and the field. They were cleverly raised high enough so that spectators could see over the heads of the players on the sidelines. But even in the front row, fans were pretty far from the action. And in the upper deck? Stevie wasn’t sure if they could even see one of the JumboTron screens. The place was massive.

  It was also, he noticed, kind of cold out on the field. He knew the game-day temperature would be seventy-two degrees inside, but that would be with 82,000 people in the place. Now, with a couple thousand people milling around on the field and no one in the stands, it was considerably cooler. Since only a few of the lights were turned on, the floor of the Dome felt almost bleak. It was chilly and overcast—not much different from the weather outside.

  Everywhere Stevie looked there were people with microphones, tape recorders, and TV cameras. He had done some research when he thought he was going to be doing a daily TV show from the Super Bowl, and he knew that the NFL credentialed more than 2,000 media members for the game. Doing the math, Stevie realized that meant there were about forty media members for each of the fifty-three players from each team. The numbers got a little worse when you figured that only forty-five of the fifty-three players on the roster would actually be in uniform for the game.

  Platforms had been set up for some of the Ravens’ bigger names—Coach Brian Billick; Ray Lewis, the star linebacker; Steve McNair, the starting quarterback; and Todd Heap, the tight end. Other players were in roped-off areas while some others—the nonstars—were seated at tables with name cards in front of them. Stevie was trying to figure out exactly where he should start when he heard a familiar voice behind him.

  “Why, Stevie Thomas, look at you with not one but two credentials. You really are a star!”

  It was, predictably, Susan Carol. Only she wasn’t alone. In fact, she had what amounted to an entourage. There was a cameraman, a guy carrying sound equipment, someone he didn’t recognize in a suit, a makeup woman, a couple of large men he guessed were bodyguards of some sort, and, walking with a young woman he guessed was another PR person, someone who could only be Jamie Whitsitt. He was about six feet tall, and had sandy blond hair, blue eyes that Stevie figured most girls would consider dreamy, and a bored look on his face.

  Turning to face Susan Carol and company, Stevie smiled. “At least I work alone,” he said.

  She twirled his CBS credential to get a better look and laughed. “Not if you’re working for these guys, you won’t be,” she said. “I guess you said yes.”

  “They made me an offer I couldn’t refuse,” he said. “I don’t start till tomorrow, though.”

  “Susan Carol, I’m sorry, but we need to get you guys to work here,” the suit said.

  “Right,” Susan Carol said. She turned toward Whitsitt and said, “Jamie, I want to introduce you to my friend Steve Thomas.”

  Whitsitt didn’t look all that eager to meet Stevie, but he walked over, hand extended. “Hey, dude, no hard feelings, I hope,” he said.

  At least, Stevie thought, he knows who he replaced. “None where you’re concerned,” Stevie said, accepting the handshake. “Just make sure you’re nice to Susan Carol.”

  Whitsitt grinned. “I don’t think that will be too painful, huh, dude?”

  Stevie wondered if Whitsitt could complete a sentence without the word dude. He was tempted to keep the conversation going to find out, but the suit was frowning and the PR person was waving at someone upfield to get their attention.

  “Gotta go, kids,” the PR guy said, unwilling or unable to look at or acknowledge Stevie.

  “Hey, nice talking to you too,” Stevie said to the PR guy and the suit, who looked at him blankly and started walking.

  “I’ll talk to you later,” Susan Carol said quietly.

  “Oh yeah, absolutely, dude,” Stevie said.

  She half made a face at him. “He’s not a bad guy.”

  That surprised—and disappointed—Stevie. “Yeah, he’s great. But, dude, are you sure English is his native language?”

  “Don’t be mean, Stevie,” she said. “This isn’t his fault and he really is nice.”

  Stevie watched her jogging to catch up with her posse. All of a sudden, surrounded by several thousand people, he felt entirely alone.

  5: FIRST AND TEN

  “STEVIE! HEY, STEVIE! Earth to Stevie!”

  The third time Bobby Kelleher called his name, Stevie caught on that someone was trying to get his attention. He had been staring down the field where Susan Carol and Whitsitt were being set up next to one another, each holding a microphone with two cameras trained on them. He was thinking that they looked like the perfect teenage couple: she with long brown hair and a dazzling smile, he an inch or two taller with wavy hair, bright blue eyes, and a charming crooked grin.

  “You still with us?” Kelleher asked as Stevie turned around when he approached from behind.

  “Huh? Oh yeah, I’m fine. Just trying to, you know, figure out what I want to do.”

  Kelleher looked down the field in the direction Stevie had been staring and smiled.

  “Kinda sucks seeing her with the rock s
tar, doesn’t it?”

  Stevie shook his head. “I can handle that. It’s just that…”

  “What?” Kelleher asked.

  “I think she likes him. How in the world can she like him? The guy calls everyone dude!”

  Kelleher gave him a sympathetic smile and put his arm around his shoulder. “Listen to me, Stevie,” he said. “Susan Carol is about as smart and mature as any fourteen-year-old girl you’re going to meet, but she’s still a fourteen-year-old girl. You can’t blame her for being a little bit starry-eyed around a teen idol.”

  “She’s smarter than that,” Stevie said.

  “Of course she is. And she’ll come to her senses very soon. Try to be patient with her.”

  Stevie smiled. “Easy for you to say.”

  “True,” Kelleher said.

  Stevie took a deep breath and gathered himself. “Okay, I’m just not going to think about it for now. I’m ready to get to work.”

  “Good,” Kelleher said. “Follow me.”

  Kelleher led Stevie across the field, zigzagging through various clusters of media members and around roped-off areas and platforms with stars on them. When they reached the far sideline, he pointed at a guy wearing a purple Ravens sweatshirt who was opening a large box that appeared to have footballs inside.

  “There’s your guy for today,” Kelleher said.

  “An equipment guy?” Stevie said. He had expected to do a story on an obscure player—maybe the long-kick snapper from one of the teams—but not on someone who dealt with uniforms and footballs.

  “That’s Darin Kerns,” Kelleher said. “He’s from Summit, New Jersey. Played high school football there. Wide receiver.”

  “And this is a story because?”

  “Oh, come on, Stevie, think for a minute. I know you’re up on stuff like this.”

  Stevie was stumped. Even worse, he knew that if Susan Carol had been there, she would have picked up on why Darin Kerns’s being from Summit, New Jersey, was significant.