Dr. Z

by Paul Zimmerman

  On the second floor, they had what they euphemistically called a Press Lounge. A sofa and a few chairs and a table, supposedly with sodas and stuff. It looked like the kind of press lounge they might set up in Bulgaria. I stuck my nose in just once. Three guys in what looked like workingman’s garb were bitching about the lack of bottled water, and a Hyatt lady was telling them, “We’ll bring more.” Adios Press Lounge.

  Yeah, it was lonely. Had a meal at the Hyatt’s rooftop restaurant, going round and round. Paid 14 bucks to watch Forest Whitaker chew up the scenery in The Last King of Scotland on the hotel’s pay TV movie set-up. Well, it beat all those puff pieces and softball interviews on the NFL Network. Front page of The Indianapolis Star carried a story about the ketchup war between Heinz and Red Gold for the use of the term Red Zone. Wish Linda would have been there to read it. Flaming Redhead Zone?

  Sometimes the sports section has stories and items that put you to the test, trying to figure out whether they’re serious or not. The Outside View column in The Star, for instance, talked about “a series of simulations I’ve run this past weekend, with the Colts beating the Patriots five out of 10.” Am I too dense to grasp this?

  • My first two meals in Miami were at Joe’s Stone Crab and the Porcao Churrascaria. I felt like I was tapped for the entire Super Bowl week. I’d been going to Joe’s for about 40 years now, and it hadn’t really changed, except that it was bigger. You didn’t have to wait as long, sometimes not at all. Still the same sensational hash brown potatoes and creamed spinach. The stone crabs? Yeah, they’re good, but I’ve never been a serious devotee. I just don’t understand the magic of them.

  But somebody does because an order of the jumbo sized costs $72 on one of the more wide-ranging menus. Half a broiled chicken, for instance, still costs $5.95. “In 50 years, I think they’ve raised the price by about 35 cents,” a waiter told me. Anyway, the Redhead had a Ginger Salmon for $19.95 that she said was wonderful.

  Porcao is one of those Brazilian Churrascarias where they come around every 30 seconds or so with different cuts of broiled meats, which you load up on until you pass out. Paramedic units are on duty. Outside the place, a group of cardiologists was getting ready to storm the doors. All I kept thinking, as I shamelessly indulged, was how evil I was, how I would pay for all of this, if not in this world, then in the next one.

  We were food-exhausted after only two days, but we still managed to put in an appearance at P.F. Chang’s China Bistro, which always has been one of our favorites and, again, did not let us down, plus Versailles, which, unfortunately, has fallen on bad times. Not financially, judging by the huge mob that was there for this typically festive Cubano Sunday lunch. No, this still remains the focal point of Little Havana and environs. But the quality, which once was good, is now terrible. Everything tasted as if it had been sitting around for half a day and then warmed up. Something unfortunate has happened to this place, an owner dying or retiring, takeover by a son-in-law, something like that? Sad.

  • I was waiting during Tuesday’s Press and Picture Day for someone to ask the dreaded question, the one that always makes me shake my head and begin coughing: “What’s the dumbest (or the weirdest, or strangest) question you’ve been asked?” Ted Hendricks gave it the definitive answer about a million Super Bowls ago: “That one right there,” but it always returns, usually posed by some halfwit who thinks he or she is being so clever and original.

  The perpetrator surprised me this time. ESPN’s Mark Malone, a former Steelers QB no less. “What’s the strangest question you’ve been asked?” He asked the Bears’ Olin Kreutz. The answer was drowned out by the sound of my groaning.

  • Ran into an old friend with the Colts, Howard Mudd, who’s been an NFL offensive line coach for 32 straight years.

  “I’ve got you graded in more than 20 games when you were playing for the 49ers,” I told him.

  “Oh yeah? How’d I do?” he said.

  “Very well,” I told him. He took the news calmly.

  • At the Wednesday interview sessions at the team hotels, I caught up with Chicago defensive coordinator Ron Rivera … this was a day before all the stuff was written about him possibly going to Dallas as head coach. A good guy. Former reserve linebacker on the Buddy Ryan championship defense. I asked him if, when he became a head coach, he’d allow the press to talk to his assistants, or if he were of the Belichick One-Voice school of thought?

  “I would owe it to them to let them get as much publicity as they could,” he said, “to let the writers know all about them.”

  Yaaay! C’mon Dallas. You’re not gonna find a better head coach than him.

  • Sitting on the dais and addressing the room at large, Brian Urlacher was asked how he felt about being the “face of the Chicago Bears.” “If I didn’t have to talk to the media, I’d be real good with it,” he said. I got up and left.

  “You jumped the gun, as usual,” Don Pierson of the Chicago Tribune told me later. “He was just kidding.” Oh, comma, I see.

  • Someone at one of the players’ tables was reading the story about Andy Reid’s son Britt getting busted for waving a weapon around. A veteran writer turned to me and asked, “Trivia question. Who was Britt Reid?” An easy one. The Green Hornet, on the old radio drama. “Kato, warm up the Black Beauty.” “All right, Mister Reid.”

  • Mexican radio and Mexican TV was everywhere. “Do you know Spanish?” TV Azteca asked Colts’ linebacker Rob Morris. “Only the bad words,” he said.

  • Wednesday afternoon I did my last She Says, Z Says video with Brooklyn Decker, the swimsuit model. Our first one outdoors. By the swimming pool. I push her in at the end. Tee hee. On Friday, as a favor to Sports Illustrated’s publicity director, I made the rounds with her at an area that I sincerely loathe, Radio Row in the Press Center. Hee Haw Central, Yahoo Valley.

  “Well, Zim, it should be a great game Sunday …”

  “Either that or it won’t.” Blank stare. Interview is winding down before it’s started. Get this stiff outta here!

  So on Friday, Brookie and I toured the place. Let me tell you something about Brooklyn Decker. Last year, when she was in the swimsuit issue, she was 18. She had recently turned 19 when we started doing the video in October. I kid you not, when I was 19, I was an unruly thug with an IQ about 40 points lower than Brooklyn’s. She is one sharp cookie. Funny, too. A lot of fun to work with, to bounce lines off of, and vice-versa, much of it unrehearsed.

  She handled herself well during the radio stuff. I was, as usual, an obnoxoid. The best interviews were by three women from something (didn’t catch the first word) Chix. They focused on Brooklyn’s career, a refreshing change from all the football stuff. I got a couple of easy questions and then was given a felt tip and asked to sign some stuffed animal thing, as all their guests were. Sure, why not, but why get out of character and be a nice guy?

  I inscribed it, “Keep punching … your pal, Franz Kafka …”

  One idiot in a pseudo football jersey asked me if I “tried to get it going” with Brooklyn. I told him it would be like trying to “get it going” with my granddaughter. Interview over. See ya around.

  • Blood was flowing at the Hall of Fame enshrinement meeting Saturday morning. I don’t want to go too deeply into this thing because there were heavy repercussions. The Paul Tagliabue discussion set a record of 58 minutes. Two speakers began matters by endorsing him. I was the first of the anti voices. One of my points was that under his stewardship, and without his intervention, the rights of the press were eroded almost beyond recognition. Later I was told that I was a bit over the top. Maybe so. He didn’t, as you know, reach level two, composed of 11 candidates.

  • It always amazes me that when I come back from a Super Bowl, people always want to ask me about the halftime show, sometimes even the national anthem. OK, Billy Joel’s rendition of the anthem was no
t the worst one I ever heard. But it was among the worst five. The halftime show? How’s that again? Is that what you asked? Once again, please?

  I think my hearing is coming back, slowly, but I’m not quite sure. Just to be safe, I’m learning sign language. Halftime with Prince was LOUD! Never heard anything that loud. And that’s all I can tell you about it.

  • After the locker room stuff was over, I was walking back to the press bus, in the rain, and a security guy from the host committee offered to walk me over to the bus, under his umbrella, so I wouldn’t get wet. People who have been whipped and kicked by authority figures all their lives are not used to this form of kindness. I was stunned. I politely declined, since the rain actually was refreshing after the locker room sweatshop, but this gesture will not be forgotten.

  • On the plane home, Linda told me of an unusual thing. Seems that there’s this company that had been granted the rights to manufacture a couple of hundred winning team hats and T-shirts, you know, things that said, “World Champion Colts,” etc. These were handed out, in the postgame locker room to all people connected to the team, which meant that an equal number had to be made up in advance for the other team as well. So what happens to all those World Champion Bears items?

  “Donated to charity,” The Flaming Redhead told me, “but usually sent to some far off place. The article I read said that they’d turn up in places such as Romania and the African countries.” Wow! What a great collection to have. Super Bowl I, World Champion Chiefs. Or maybe World Champion Falcons in Super Bowl XXXIII.

  Maybe some day they’ll appear on eBay. And I’ll place the first bid.

  7. All-Time Teams

  Editor’s note: This all-time team was selected in 2007.

  This is ground I’ve plowed many times. But I’m always finding something new. First, bear with me for a moment while I tell you why I don’t like All-Star teams, Pro Bowl teams, Coach of the Year awards, Super Bowl MVP trophies. Because they’re just promotions, NFL gimmicks to sell more T-shirts.

  Pro Bowl voting is a popularity contest. I have seen high vote getters who spent two-thirds of the seasons on injured reserve. Players don’t take the voting seriously, coaches are always busy with something else and fans pack the ballots. Very seldom is the Coach of the Year the Super Bowl winner because the balloting takes place at all levels, just about when the playoffs are starting. So it’s always the guy who, amazingly, takes his team from 4-12 to the playoffs and many times not much further. Super Bowl MVP ballots are collected before the final whistle.

  And as for All-Star teams by such organizations as the AP or the Pro Football Writers, well, these are better than most, but there’s still the subliminal pull of the superstar, the comfort in the known entity. And that’s why, and this will sound like the utmost in arrogance, I have faith in my own All-Pro team every year, compiled by so much tape breakdown that you would start laughing if I laid it all out for you … my own team and very few others.

  But unfortunately I must admit to the demon prejudice, that most personal of all human failings. I’m more careful about this than I used to be and I try to isolate it and eradicate it before it becomes an embarrassment, but let’s face it. If you become passionate about something, sooner or later you’re going to play favorites. The heroic run, the spectacular defensive play, especially on behalf of the team you happen to be rooting for, will take on a disproportionate significance. An example:

  In 1985 I had picked Cincinnati, an eventual 7-9 team, to upset Dallas, which eventually won its division championship, in a late-season game. The affair wasn’t close, 50-24, Cincy, and the Bengals ran for a million yards and especially notable was the job Cincy’s 23-year-old, 300-pound left guard, Brian Blados, did on Hall of Famer Randy White. I didn’t much like the Cowboys anyway … America’s Team and so forth … and to see them beaten like that, and to watch the way the fat kid took on White, the most feared interior lineman in the game, just flipped me.

  So I picked Blados on my Sports Illustrated All-Pro team, the only All-Star honor of any kind he ever achieved. And I left off John Hannah, one of the greatest offensive linemen in history, but a player, who after 13 seasons, had reached the end of the trail. And Hannah, with whom I had been fairly friendly, stopped talking to me.

  “I mean Blados?” he said in our last conversation. “Are you kidding? Brian Blados?”

  But picking an all-time All-Pro team is different. It’s etched in marble. It’s for the ages. It’s something in which I’ve had a lot of practice because I’ve been doing it for, oh, about 63 years, ever since I got my first taste of the game in the World War II-era-Giants vs. the wartime combination of the Steelers and Eagles, nicknamed the Steagles, on Oct. 24, 1943, the day after my 11th birthday. The tickets were my father’s birthday present to me.

  Next year we went to the Polo Grounds on Oct. 22, the day before my birthday. Giants vs. the Cards-Pitts combination, referred to as the Carpets — they don’t name ’em like that anymore. I started jotting down names of my favorite players, beginning with Al Blozis of course. The 6-6 tackle was the personal favorite of all New York kids who liked football. He’d been drafted into the army in December of ’43, but he played three games in ’44 while on furlough. I remember the deafening roar of the Polo Grounds fans when his name was announced. I remember reading about how he broke the army record for the hand grenade throw when he heaved one almost 100 yards at Fort Benning, Ga. I cut out the article and kept it.

  And then in January, 1945, Lieutenant Blozis was killed in the Vosges Mountains in Alsace, venturing out, alone, to find a sergeant and private in his command who had gone out on patrol and failed to return. He immediately joined my all-time All-Pro squad, alongside Giant stars such as Mel Hein, the center-linebacker, and known entities such as Don Hutson and Sammy Baugh and remained on what became an ongoing list of All-Stars for a few years. It was only when the cold analysis of the dispassionate chartist, aged 17 or 18 or so, roughly elbowed sentiment aside, that Big Al became a former all-time All-Pro.

  Actually I started charting games in 1947, and although players such as Blozis and Hein were at the time untouchable on the all-time list, the charts helped me pick my yearly All-Pro teams. For me they were significant because I was combining the NFL with the AAFC (All-American Football Conference). The bulk of the positions, at least on my club, were filled by AAFC players, which might have been a little unfair because those were the guys I was always watching in the flesh. In my neighborhood, at least, we dug the AFC and our Yankees, with the great triple threat, single wing tailback, Spec Sanders, and tiny Buddy Young, who would bring you out of your seat every time he touched the ball, and tough as nails Bruiser Kinard — now THAT’s the kind of nickname a lineman should have — and in the last year of the league’s existence, a tough, rawboned cornerback, defensive halfback is what they called them in those days, whose strangling style of pass coverage made him an immediate favorite of any New Yorker who loved football, and that was Tom Landry.

  So those were the people who populated my All-Pro team, keyed, of course, to the magnificent Cleveland Browns, whom, in our hearts we just knew were better than anything the NFL had to offer. But I wasn’t a fanatic on the subject. I understood, of course, the majesty of such people as Slingin’ Sammy and Sid Luckman and Steve Van Buren, whom we would occasionally catch via one of the very early TVs, but it really couldn’t compare to going out to Yankee Stadium and watching the Browns work behind Otto Graham and Marion Motley, who remained for many years the greatest player I’d ever seen, and Bill Willis, whose lightning moves brought a whole dimension to defensive line play.

  When the leagues merged, it seemed as if the old boys club of the NFL deliberately tried to destroy the heritage of the AAFC. For many years statistics from that league were ignored on individual players’ career totals, and it was only years later, when the AFL joined the NFL, bringing their statistics with them, that the AAFC num
bers were allowed in by the back door. Thus many interesting statistics already had been mothballed. In 1947, for instance, Van Buren set the all-time single season rushing record of 1,008 yards. Sanders, though, topped it by 400, finishing with 1,432, a number that stood up for 11 years, except that it remained an asterisk number.

  Do you know who the all-time leading punter is in pro football history, based on highest average? Well, if you said Baugh, because of all those quick kicks, you were right until 2003, when Shane Lechler forged ahead and eventually lifted Sammy’s record a full yard, up to a gaudy 46. But you still haven’t answered the question, and I doubt if you will because the answer is Glenn Dobbs, Brooklyn Dodgers and then L.A. Dons, in the old AAFC. His average for four years in that league stands at 46.4. A fluke, you say? An aberration? Oh no, a magnificent, 6-4, 215-pound, run, pass and punt tailback who worked out of a formation especially designed for him, an early version of the shotgun. He’s not in the books because his 231 career punts fell 19 short of the minimum the NFL requires. And after his league merged, he played four years in Canada. But he missed some AAFC playing time because of injury one year, and just say he hadn’t been hurt and would have gotten those 19 extra boots. What would the NFL records people have done? Probably increased the minimum requirement.

  Way afield, I’m going way afield here, which is what happens once your hair has turned the color of the snows. My all time All-Pro team. Yes, it’s here, the whole thing, based on more or less 64 years of pro football watching. At Sports Illustrated I have been asked for my all-time team at least half a dozen times, usually in connection with some spread they were planning or some promotion, and each occasion produced a spirited argument. “Eleven offensive players, please, 11 on defense, plus a streamlined special teams contingent, got that? Eleven, plus eleven, plus whatever.”