My slightly screwed-up Super Bowl memories

Here's something to read while you wait for the game to start...

These days, the first thing I do when I wake up in the morning is check my phone to find out how cold it is outside and this morning my phone said it was 7 degrees, but felt like -9.

A trip to the sidewalk to retrieve my newspaper confirmed my initial impression that I won’t be do anything much outside today, so with nothing better on my calendar I decided to settle in and wait for the Super Bowl to start and since that won’t be for another five hours, (unless you count the pregame show which started sometime in mid-December) I’m killing time by writing down some of my memories about past Super Bowls and you can kill time by reading them. (Or you could go outside and make snowballs and lose two of your fingers to frostbite — your call.)

Assuming you said, “Y’know a little light reading sounds pretty good instead of that frostbite-involved activity” we’ll start with…

Super Bowl I

OK, first off there was no Super Bowl I because back then it was called the AFL-NFL World Championship Game because people had yet to realized what a pain in the ass it was going to be to repeat “AFL-NFL World Championship Game” over and over.

They didn’t start calling it the Super Bowl until Super Bowl III and I’m guessing using Roman Numerals seemed like a cute idea until they played enough of them, because today’s game is Super Bowl LV and unless your name is Spartacus you might have to look that up to see what number it is in English.  

The first Not-The-Super-Bowl-Yet took place on January 15th, 1967 which would have made me a freshman in high school and I dimly remember watching it on a black & white TV.

According to Wikipedia, the halftime show was trumpeter Al Hirt and a couple of marching bands which was pretty standard halftime fare back then and I’m guessing nobody but the parents of the marching band members watched their performance because the rest of us went to the bathroom or made sandwiches because listening to a bunch of kids stomp the life out of By the Time I get to Phoenix isn’t all that entertaining.

(Actually, I have no idea what songs the marching bands played that day, but whatever tune a marching band decides to fuck up it always comes out sounding like it’s being played by the Hitler Youth Marching Kazoo Band on their way to a Beer Hall Putsch and if you don’t get those historical references, I think it’s pretty much your fault not mine.)

On the other hand…

They did have two guys flying around in rocket packs, which was the best we could do until show business became much more sophisticated and showed us Prince’s guitar having an orgasm and Janet Jackson’s right breast. Here’s a video about that and I mean the rocket packs not Janet Jackson’s right breast, although now that I think about it, that Janet Jackson video would probably be way more interesting.

Nevertheless…

The Green Bay Packers beat the Kansas City Chiefs 35-10 and the most memorable thing about the game is KC defensive back Fred “The Hammer” Williamson bragging that he was going to use his “Hammer” – (a forearm blow to the head…which tells you just how serious the NFL took concussions in those days) – to take care of the Packer receivers. Back then you could not only hit receivers in the head, you could brag about it first.

But the Hammer was knocked out in the fourth quarter when he got hit in the head by Packer running back Donny Anderson’s knee and then for good measure, someone fell on Fred’s arm and broke it.

So Fred’s Hammer got busted.

According to the internet Fred is still alive and I’ve got no more smart-ass remarks to make because I’m pretty sure he could still kick my ass even though he’s 82 years old. For instance: Heavyweight Champ Jack Dempsey was born in 1895 and sometime in the late 1960s or early 70s – the story is a little vague – two guys tried to mug him and Jack knocked them both out. So imagine the story those guys had to tell in jail: “Yeah, the two of us jumped this senior citizen…”

It never ceases to amaze me when someone has a few too many, decides to get in a professional athlete’s face and then finds out why the guy was a professional athlete.

Super Bowl III

This was the first Super Bowl I cared about (that’s an ‘i’ not a Roman Numeral) because it was my generation (Joe Namath, long hair and white, low-top shoes) versus the older generation (Johnny Unitas, crew cut and black, high-tops) which might be an over-simplification, but let’s face it, over-simplifying is what I’ve done for a living since 1976 and it’s worked out pretty well so far.

Also, QB Earl Morrall actually started the game for the Colts, but got pulled after throwing three interceptions which reminds me of a Johnny Unitas story told by one of his receivers, Raymond Berry, assuming I remember all this correctly, but it’s good story either way because somebody told it about Unitas even if it wasn’t Raymond Berry.

If Unitas threw a ball letter-high out in front of a receiver it meant the receiver had a clear field in front of him and could run for extra yardage, but if Unitas threw the ball low that meant the receiver needed to get down because some defensive back was about to rip his head off.

Back when men were men and couldn’t remember all their kids’ names after a football game.

These days you can get penalized for giving a star player a hard look ‘cuz losing star players to injury costs everybody money, but they still let the linemen butt heads and if you don’t know the name of Tampa Bay’s left tackle (and I know I don’t) I think I’ve made my point.

Super Bowl IV

The Vikings lost to the Chiefs and more importantly I lost a $20 bet with the manager of the place I worked – Sam’s Stagecoach Inn – which was a pretty big deal at the time ($20, not Sam’s Stagecoach Inn) because as I recall my weekly paycheck was something like $47 for a 40-hour week which is what I worked my last two years of high school which seems insane now, but back then meant I could own a car and go on dates and I probably would have signed up for gladiator death matches to make that possible.

Looking back, my manager didn’t seem all that upset about taking my money, either.

Super Bowl X or XIII – AKA “The Barney Bowl”

Pretty sure it was Super Bowl X because the Steelers and Cowboys were playing and I went over to my best friend Phil’s house to watch the game and his dad Barney came in the den and informed us that he and Phil’s mom were going to church and that’s what we should be doing instead of popping beers before noon, laying around on the couch and watching a football game.

Barney – who was one of those Greatest Generation guys who helped save America by being a tank commander in WWII – was awesome and I liked him a lot, but he wasn’t going to talk me or Phil into abandoning the Super Bowl to go to church despite the steady religious harangue he kept up throughout the entire pregame show.

So Barney and Phil’s mom went out to the garage, we heard the garage door go up, the car leave and the garage door come back down.

A few minutes later – probably working up his courage to face the well-deserved barrage of ridicule he was about to receive – Barney came back in the den with a look on his face that should be right next to the word “sheepish” in the Mirriam-Webster dictionary.

We laughed our asses off.

After all his sermonizing, Barney blew off church to watch the Super Bowl with us. No idea who won the game, but I’ll never forget the look on Barney’s face coming back through the door.

Super Bowl XIV

These days a free trip to the Super Bowl is supposed to be a lifetime dream come true, greeted with shrieks and hugs and plans to abandon the kids in a homeless shelter for the weekend, but don’t feel bad if you never get to go to one, because I went to one Super Bowl and it pretty much sucked.

This was back before the Super Bowl became this weird pageant of capitalism in which the game itself is somewhat of an afterthought and you go to the bathroom while the game is being played so you don’t miss any of the commercials.

I was living in San Diego at the time and a friend of mine was covering the game which was being held in the Rose Bowl and he offered me a couple tickets like it was no big deal and back then it really wasn’t.

I brought along a date and went to my friend’s hotel to pick up the tickets and on the way out was offered what seemed like a huge amount of money for the tickets, which I turned down because it seemed like a dick move* (*patent pending) to profit off a friend’s kindness. Future events would prove that wasn’t even close to the worst thing I’d ever do in my life and if I’d known that I might have cashed in.

Moving on…

We decided to take a bus the hotel had hired to deliver people to the Rose Bowl because it seemed way easier than driving and finding parking, so after a long ride the yellow school bus dropped a bunch of us right outside the Rose Bowl.

I said let’s find our seats and then I’ll go get something from the snack bar, but it turned out our “seats” were just painted numbers on benches and the numbers were so close together the crowd would have had to been made up of anorexic fashion models to fit in the assigned spaces. Plus, those tunnels you see about halfway up the Rose Bowl are small and claustrophobic and were so packed with people, a trip to the snack bar was going to take close to an hour so we just stayed in our “seats” the entire time.

Don’t remember it, but the internet informs me the halftime show was “Up With People” which the internet also informs me turned out to be something of a cult, so I guess it could have been worse:

“And now for your halftime entertainment…The Manson Family!”

Absolutely no memory of whatever song the Up with People group castrated, but here’s a video and I’m about halfway up the stands:

The videos over 12 minutes long, but it will only take about 30 seconds before you realize Charles Manson’s Greatest Hits might have been preferable.

The highlight of the game was realizing Julie Newmar – Catwoman on the Batman TV series – was sitting a few seats, or in this case numbers, away.

The Steelers beat the Rams 31-19 and upon leaving the game we realized the yellow school bus that dropped us off in front of the Rose Bowl was now parked with hundreds of other yellow school buses in the parking lot and some of them were leaving so it was a race to find the right one before we got stranded in Pasadena and forced to get a ride back to LA with the Up With People dancers and wind up in a cult against our will because who would want to look like that big a dork voluntarily?

The bus was full on the way to the game and about half-full driving back so if someone went missing in 1980 you might want to check the Up With People roster.

To top it all off, my friend the sportswriter told me I was an idiot for turning down the money for the tickets and we would have been welcome to watch the game in his room and spend some of that Super Bowl $ on room service.

Live and earn.  

So if you’re thinking how awesome it would be to win a trip to the Super Bowl, trust me, you’re having a way better experience at home…unless you happen to live with a former Up With People performer who wants to relive his or her glory days by performing some of their Greatest Halftime Show hits.

Super Bowl XIV through LIV

The Kansas City Chiefs won last year, but other than that most of my memories are haphazard and hazy because the game itself has become overshadowed by events surrounding the game.

For example:

I remember Janet Jackson’s breast, but have no idea which teams played in that Super Bowl and if you can name them without looking them up you’re a better man and/or woman than I am, which fits the “Damning with faint praise” cliché to a T.

I’d love it if the Chiefs won again, but it’s an honor just to be nominated and I’ll do my best to enjoy the commercials and the game and whoever wins, be OK with it as long as the halftime show star – a guy from Canada known as “The Weekend” – doesn’t have a wardrobe malfunction or Fred Williamson shows up at my house and slams me with an 82-year-old Hammer.

Enjoy the game, everybody.