TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/020590/0205260.000

Text File | 1992-08-28 | 5.2 KB | 128 lines

                                                                                SPORT, Page 57

Super Bowl Field of Dreams


An interview with a grilled snapper, and other wonderments

By JOHN SKOW


    Outlined against a blue-gray October sky (in storage since
1924, trucked in to New Orleans for the occasion and fixed to
the underside of the Superdome roof with 17,432 twist ties),
the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse watch the Broncos and the
49ers prepare for Super Bowl XXIV. Joe Montana lazily solves
the Savings and Loan Crisis. At half speed, without pads, John
Elway construes Greek.

    1,260 reporters in red tutus dance right; 1,720
photographers in blue tutus dance left.

    Montana helps a crippled child engineer a hostile takeover
of IBM. Sweating lightly, Elway confounds Manuel Noriega's
lawyers. In the locker rooms, impartial observers from the
National Bureau of Standards watch all the other players put
on their pants, one leg at a time. Reporters dance left;
photographers dance right.

    Montana does card tricks, and the Four Horsemen -- Miller,
Stuhldreher, Crowley and Layden -- are baffled. Elway conducts
the Boston Symphony Orchestra, which has been trucked in for
the occasion. The Four Horsemen start to applaud between
movements of Debussy's L'Apres-Midi d'un Faune and are
embarrassed. Stuhldreher frowns, then whispers something to
Crowley. From two rows back, Fielding Yost shushes him. Nearby,
Knute Rockne is worried he will not have enough money to pay
his hotel bill. New Orleans seems a lot fancier than South
Bend.

    Rockne is uneasy. Last night at a party he met Brent
Musburger, who seemed to be a nice fellow. But Rockne's suit
was afraid of Musburger's suit, and kept trying to bend the
wrong way at the knees and elbows. Rockne's suit is wrinkled
and brown. Musburger's is the finest in town, but others nearly
as rich and dark trap the light of distant stars in the lobbies
of the Hilton and the Hyatt Regency.

    Not only are all the sachems of the nation's football
tribes, living and dead, on hand for the Super Bowl, but bull
corpocrats, not-yet indicted politicians and assorted
overweeners from every power nexus in the nation have massed
here, drawn to sport's most relentless weeklong party by forces
they do not understand. They wear suits that are the worsted
equivalent of stretch limos. Around these grandees, trophy
wives orbit glossily. Some of them know the names of the teams

the occasion balance vaselike on bar stools.

    An observer learns all this by interviewing a plate of
superior grilled snapper at an amiable neighborhood restaurant
called La Riviera, out in the 'burbs of Jefferson Parish. The
snapper is the liveliest football interview in a town that has
other important matters, such as the onrush of Mardi Gras, on
its mind. "Joe Billy," the observer asked, "how will Elway do
against the nickel, three pennies, car keys and a couple pieces
of pocket-lint defense?"

    "He'll pick apart the seams," said the snapper, "unless the
lint gets too bad."

    "Then how come Joe Montana is America's sweetheart?"

    "Well, first, he's named for the right state. Joe North
Dakota, he'd probably be a bus driver. Then he's got those
gunfighter's eyes. Deadly in publicity stills. Blam, blam,
you're haddock pate." The observer wanted to ask this fine fish
why this year everyone, even the players, seemed more bored
with football than is usual at Super Bowl time. But the last
of the snapper was gone.

    A bartender in the French Quarter says the wrong teams are
in town. San Francisco fans are so cool they're hypothermic,
and Denver fans try hard to act as if they were from San
Francisco. Now if the Steelers had made it, you would have
naked Pittsburghers whooping through the streets in body paint
and feathers, yes sir you would.

    Then again, maybe John Madden, the rumpled gent who whoops
the game for CBS, is right about mud. Why not haul a few dozen
tons of good, dirty dirt into the Superdome, the way they do
for those tractor pulls that ESPN broadcasts at 3 a.m.?

    If football has become a slick, indoor imitation of itself,
jazzy old New & Slightly Used Orleans somehow remains the real
thing, or nearly. On Bourbon Street in the French Quarter, a
minicam crew stalks tourists, trying to find someone wearing
a Broncos feed cap. The visitor ducks around the corner into
Preservation Hall, a magnificently funky storefront that looks
as if it has been flooded and drained a few times, where a $2
donation lets you stand and listen to some grand old
Dixielanders wail the stuffing out of St. James Infirmary and
Muskrat Ramble.

    Munch lunch, Italian sausage and hot pickled onions, at the
Home Plate Inn out on Tulane Avenue. Some retired cops there
say, nah, they're not interested in the game, too much hype,
but they've got two cards of a hefty betting pool filled
anyway. Head for the big N.F.L. pregame monster rally at the
Convention Center. Then on to Pat O'Brien's, where they serve
a drink called the Hurricane. Note the immediate lowering of
atmospheric pressure. Try a cheer: "Go, Pittsburgh!" "Joe
Billy, the Steelers are a lock."