The parallel was hard to miss, and it seemed almost certain—in both cases—that the attitudes of the coaches had to either reflect or powerfully influence the attitudes of the players ... and in high-pressure games between supposedly evenly matched teams, pre-game signs like confidence, humor, temper tantrums, and bulging eyeballs are not to be ignored when betting-time comes.
Or at least not by me ... although there is definitely another side to that coin, and it comes up just often enough to keep the game interesting. There is a factor known among players as “flakiness,” which translates roughly as a kind of “team personality,” characterized by moodiness and an almost manic-depressive unpredictability both on and off the field.
Miami is decidedly not a flakey team; they are consistent to the point of tedium. “We’re a money team,” says all-pro defensive back Jake Scott. “When something has to be done, we do it.” And the record is there to prove it: the Dolphins have won two straight Super Bowls and lost only two games in the past two years. One of these was a meaningless, late-season giveaway to Baltimore last season, when Shula was resting his regulars for the play-offs—and the other was a potentially ominous 12–7 loss, in the second game of this season, to the Oakland Raiders—known throughout the league as the flakiest team in pro football.
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Ah yes, Mother Roberts ... I found her card on the bus and jammed it into one of my pockets, thinking that maybe I would give her a call on Monday and make an appointment. I had a lot of heavy questions to lay on her like “Why am I here, Mother Roberts? What does it all mean? Have I finally turned pro? Can this really be the end? Down and out in Houston with—
“No, I was just kidding, Mother Roberts, just putting you on—just working a bit of the test on you, right? Yes, because what I was really leading up to is this extremely central question ... No, I’m not shy; it’s just that I come from way up north where people’s lips are frozen about ten months every year, so we don’t get used to talking until very late in life ... what? Old? Well, I think you just put your finger or your wand or whatever, right smack on the head of the nail, Mother Roberts, because the godawful truth of the whole matter is that I’ve been feeling extremely old this past week, and ... What? Wait a minute now, goddamn it, I’m still getting up to the main question, which is ... What? No, I never curse, Mother Roberts; that was a cry of anguish, a silent scream from the soul, because I feel in serious trouble down here in this goddamn town, and . . . Yes, I am a white person, Mother Roberts, and we both know there’s not a damn thing I can do about it. Are you prejudiced? ... No, let’s not get into that. Just let me ask you this question, and if you can give me a straight and reasonable answer I promise I won’t come out to your place ... because what I want you to tell me, Mother Roberts—and I mean this very seriously—is why have I been in Houston for eight days without anybody offering me some cocaine? ... Yes, cocaine, that’s what I said, and just between you and me I’m damn serious about wanting some . . . What? Drugs? Of course I’m talking about drugs! Your ad said you could answer my questions and lift me out of sorrow and darkness.” Mother Roberts hung up on me at that point.
It was not until Monday afternoon that I actually spoke with Mother Roberts on the telephone, but the idea of going over to Galveston and dealing with the whole Super Scene story from some rotten motel on the edge of the seawall had been wandering around in my head almost from the first hour after I checked into my coveted pressroom at the Hyatt Regency.
And in dull retrospect now, I wish I had done that. Almost anything would have been better than that useless week I spent in Houston waiting for the Big Game. The only place in town where I felt at home was a sort of sporadically violent strip joint called the Blue Fox, far out in the country on South Main. Nobody I talked to in Houston had ever heard of it, and the only two sportswriters who went out there with me got involved in a wild riot that ended up with all of us getting Maced by undercover vice-squad cops who just happened to be in the middle of the action when it erupted.
Ah ... but that is another story, and we don’t have time for it here. Maybe next time. There are two untold sagas that will not fit into this story: one has to do with Big Al’s Cactus Room in Oakland, and the other concerns the Blue Fox in Houston.
There is also—at least in the minds of at least two dozen gullible sportswriters at the Super Bowl—the ugly story of how I spent three or four days prior to Super Week shooting smack in a $7-a-night motel room on the seawall in Galveston.
I remember telling that story one night in the press lounge at the Hyatt Regency, just babbling it off the top of my head out of sheer boredom ... Then I forgot about it completely until one of the local sportswriters approached me a day or so later and said: “Say, man, I hear you spent some time in Galveston last week.”
“Galveston?”
“Yeah,” he said. “I hear you locked yourself in a motel over there and shot heroin for three days.”
I looked around me to see who was listening, then grinned kind of stupidly and said, “Shucks, there wasn’t much else to do, you know—so why not get loaded in Galveston?”
He shrugged uncontrollably and looked down at his Old Crow and water. I glanced at my watch and turned to leave. “Time to hit it,” I said with a smile. “See you later, when I’m feeling back on my rails.”
He nodded glumly as I moved away in the crowd ... and although I saw him three or four times a day for the rest of that week, he never spoke to me again.
Most sportswriters are so blank on the subject of drugs that you can only talk to them about it at your own risk—which is easy enough, for me, because I get a boot out of seeing their eyes bulge; but it can be disastrous to a professional football player who makes the casual mistake of assuming that a sportswriter knows what he’s talking about when he uses a word like “crank.” Any professional athlete who talks to a sportswriter about “drugs”—even with the best and most constructive intentions—is taking a very heavy risk. There is a definite element of hysteria about drugs of any kind in pro football today, and a casual remark—even a meaningless remark—across the table in a friendly hometown bar can lead, very quickly, to a seat in the witness chair in front of a congressional committee.
Ah ... drugs; that word again. It was a hard word to avoid in NFL circles last year—like the “missle gap” in the 1960 Kennedy-Nixon election, or “law and order” in 1968.
Nineteen seventy-three was a pretty dull press-year for congressmen. The Senate’s Watergate Committee had managed, somehow, to preempt most of the ink and air-time ... and one of the few congressmen who managed to lash his own special gig past that barrier was an apparently senile sixty-seven-year-old ex-sheriff and football coach from West Virginia named Harley Staggers.
Somewhere in the spastic interim between John Dean and “Bob” Haldeman, Congressman Staggers managed to collar some story-starved sportswriter from the New York Times long enough to announce that his committee—the House Subcommittee on Investigations—had stumbled on such a king-hell wasps’ nest of evidence in the course of their probe into “the use of drugs by athletes” that the committee was prepared—or almost prepared, pending further evidence—to come to grips with their natural human duty and offer up a law, very soon, that would require individual urinalysis tests on all professional athletes and especially pro football players.
Ah, Jesus ... another bad tangent. Somewhere in the back of my mind I recall signing a contract that said I would never do this kind of thing again; one of the conditions of my turning pro was a clause about swearing off gibberish . . .
But, like Gregg Allman says: “I’ve wasted so much time ... feelin’ guilty . . .”
There is some kind of back-door connection in my head between Super Bowls and the Allman Brothers—a strange kind of theme-sound that haunts these goddamn stories no matter where I’m finally forced into a corner to write them. The Allman sound, and rain. There was heavy rain, last year, on the balcony of my dim-lit hotel room just down from the Sunset Strip in Hollywood ... and more rain through the windows of the San Francisco office building where I finally typed out “the story.”
And now, almost exactly a year later, my main memory of Super Bowl VIII in Houston is rain and gray mist outside another hotel window, with the same strung-out sound of the Allman Brothers booming out of the same portable speakers that I had, last year, in Los Angeles.
The floor of the Hyatt Regency men’s room was always covered, about three inches deep, with discarded newspapers—all apparently complete and unread, except on closer examination you realized that every one of them was missing its sports section. This bathroom was right next to the hotel newsstand and just across the mezzanine from the crowded NFL “press lounge,” a big room full of telephones and free booze, where most of the 1,600 or so sportswriters assigned to cover The Big Game seemed to spend about sixteen hours of each day during Super Week.
After the first day or so, when it became balefully clear that there was no point in anybody except the local reporters going out on the press bus each day for the carefully staged “player interviews” that Dolphin tackle Manny Fernandez described as “like going to the dentist every day to have the same tooth filled,” the out-of-town writers began using the local types as a sort of involuntary “pool” ... which was more like an old British navy press gang, in fact, because the locals had no choice. They would go out each morning to the Miami and Minnesota team hotels and dutifully conduct the daily interviews ... and about two hours later this mass of useless gibberish would appear, word for word, in early editions of either the Post or the Chronicle.
You could see the front door of the hotel from the balcony of the press lounge, and whenever the newsboy came in with his stack of fresh papers, the national writers would make the long forty-eight-yard walk across to the newsstand and cough up fifteen cents each for their copies. Then, on the way back to the press lounge, they would stop for a piss and dump the whole paper—except for the crucial sports section—on the floor of the men’s room. The place was so deep, all week, in fresh news-print that it was sometimes hard to push the door open.
Forty yards away, on comfortable couches surrounding the free bar, the national gents would spend about two hours each day scanning the local sports sections—along with a never-ending mass of almost psychotically detailed information churned out by the NFL publicity office—on the dim chance of finding something worth writing about that day.
There never was, of course. But nobody seemed really disturbed about it. The only thing most of the sportswriters in Houston seemed to care about was having something to write about ... anything at all: a peg, an angle, a quote, even a goddamn rumor.
I remember being shocked at the sloth and moral degeneracy of the Nixon press corps during the 1972 presidential campaign—but they were like a pack of wolverines on speed compared to the relatively elite sportswriters who showed up in Houston to cover the Super Bowl.
On the other hand, there really was no story—as the week wore on, it became increasingly obvious that we were all “just working here.” Nobody knew who to blame for it, and although at least a third of the sportswriters who showed up for that super-expensive shuck knew exactly what was happening, I doubt more than five or six of them ever actually wrote the cynical and contemptuous appraisals of Super Bowl VIII that dominated about half the conversation around the bar in the press lounge.
Whatever was happening in Houston that week had little or nothing to do with the hundreds of stories that were sent out on the newswires each day. Most of the stories, in fact, were unabashed rewrites of the dozens of official NFL press releases churned out each day by the league publicity office. Most of the stories about “fantastic parties” given by Chrysler, American Express, and Jimmy the Greek were taken from press releases and written by people who had spent the previous evening at least five miles from the scenes described in their stories.
The NFL’s official Super Bowl party—the “incredible Texas Hoe Down” on Friday night in the Astrodome—was as wild, glamorous, and exciting as an Elks Club picnic on Tuesday in Salina, Kansas. The official NFL press release on the Hoe Down said it was an unprecedented extravaganza that cost the league more than $100,000 and attracted people like Gene McCarthy and Ethel Kennedy ... Which might have been true, but I spent about five hours skulking around in that grim concrete barn, and the only people I recognized were a dozen or so sportswriters from the press lounge.
It is hard to say, even now, exactly why I was so certain of an easy Dolphin victory. The only reason I didn’t get extremely rich on the game was my inability to overcome the logistical problems of betting heavily, on credit, by means of frantic long-distance phone calls from a hotel room in Houston. None of the people I met in that violent, water-logged town were inclined to introduce me to a reliable bookmaker—and the people I called on both coasts, several hours before the game on Sunday morning, seemed unnaturally nervous when I asked them to use their own credit to guarantee my bets with their local bookies.
Looking back on it now, after talking with some of these people and cursing them savagely, I see that the problem had something to do with my frenzied speech pattern that morning. I was still in the grip of whatever fiery syndrome had caused me to deliver that sermon off the balcony a few hours earlier—and the hint of mad tremor in my voice, despite my attempts to disguise it, was apparently communicated very clearly to all those I spoke with on the long-distance telephone.
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.
Fear and Loathing at Rolling Stone: The Essential Hunter S. Thompson Page 35