In those years when the NFL burst on the national scene, I was working as a reporter for the Nashville Tennessean, 23 in 1957, making $90 a week; I was 26 in the fall of 1960 when I left Nashville, by then making $125. Neither I nor any of my friends owned a television set—I would not own one until 1967, when I returned from Vietnam.
Almost without anyone saying anything, ours was a small football-watching community which simply evolved of itself, a few of us gathering faithfully each Sunday afternoon at a local bar to watch the games. It was all very new. There was no color, no satellite, no instant replay, no FOX channel, no cable. Only CBS carried the games; NBC got into the picture with the coming of the American Football League in 1960. Pat Summerall was still a placekicker with the New York Giants.
We were, I recognize now, a beer commercial before there were beer commercials about people like us. The regulars in our group were my roommate, Fred Graham, then a law student; John Nixon, a college classmate of mine, also a law student; and one of his high school friends, Richard Hawkins, who was an insurance adjustor.
The bar was called Rotier’s, which was its technical name, though we still called it Al’s Tavern, which was the original name. It was located just a few blocks from Vanderbilt, near 24th and West End in Nashville. The name had been changed from Al’s to Rotiers, because Johnny Rotier, who owned it, had done a lot of business with Vanderbilt students, and often cashed their checks from home there.
Apparently, their parents did not like seeing “Al’s Tavern” stamped on the back of the checks. Thus the name change to Rotier’s to make it seem to the folks back home that the young scions of the South were behaving better. Only a few blocks away was Dudley Field, where Vanderbilt played its SEC games, and where, when I left Nashville in 1960, no black football player had ever played.
I do not think it is fair to say that Al’s was seedy, but it wasn’t entirely high class either. Certainly there were not a lot of Vanderbilt coeds around. It was an old-fashioned ’50s bar, pleasantly dark, and it smelled, as well it should have, of beer both drunk and spilled over the years. There was not much decor; my friend John Nixon recalls a painting of Custer’s Last Stand, which was apparently sent free of charge to all taverns by the grateful Anheuser-Busch people.
Johnny Rotier was a quiet man who always wore a sweater. (Some years ago, when he died, his wife laid him out for his funeral in his best suit, but then decided that wasn’t Johnny, and he departed us in an open sports shirt and sweater, Nixon reports.) A man named Moose Malteni was the bartender; he had a golden tooth. Mrs. Rotier did the cooking. Nashville was still quite segregated in those days, and so the only black man allowed in was Johnny, a partially crippled man who cleared tables but was not allowed to serve food. The television set was medium size—small by comparison with today’s sets—and, of course, black and white.
Al’s Tavern served Bud on tap; Jerry’s, a competing tavern a few blocks away, had the Pabst franchise and served Pabst on tap. Apparently, if you had one tap beer, it was considered an exclusive franchise. My memory of the beer is that it was 25 cents a bottle; John Nixon agrees, although he thinks somewhere in those years it might have gone to 35 cents. You could also get a large schooner of tap Bud for 45 cents. We tended to be schooner guys.
Cheeseburgers—I was not much of a food critic in those days, but they seemed more than serviceable—were 45 cents. If you were splurging, you went for the T-bone steak and French fries for $1.25. Blessedly, we could spend much of an afternoon there, eat a meal, drink generously and still depart with a tab of only two or three dollars.
We went religiously every Sunday. The games were very good. We were stunned by the way television caught the power and the fury of the game, the sheer ferocity of the hits. It was not by surprise that, as television became an important part of the equation, the defensive players became stars for the first time; they were the ones making the great hits.
So it was that Time soon put Sam Huff of the Giants on its cover—unheard of a few years earlier, a pro football player making the cover of Time, and a defensive player at that.
Certain players still stand out from that time. In those years, Johnny Unitas was on the rise, cool, confident, above all audacious—the gunslinger as pro football player—coming out there in the late minutes of a game, his team behind, with that slight stoop, working to perfection what would become known as the two-minute drill.
Jim Brown came into the league at almost that exact moment, and he was something completely new, his combination of sheer power, speed and moves, the ability to run outside like a halfback and then inside the tackles like a fullback, on occasion choosing to plow into defenders, and never choosing to run out of bounds. I don’t think we had ever seen a running back quite like him before, and I am not sure I have since—which is not to say that there are no running backs who might be as good, or perhaps better, bigger, faster and perhaps even stronger, but I have never again seen a running back who was so much better than everyone else who did what he did at the time he was doing it. He dominated his field in his era like few athletes ever have, perhaps matched only by Babe Ruth and Bill Russell.
No wonder the game took off nationally in those years, and no wonder, with the NFL so limited, there was soon a second league, and it too was successful. We did not need cheerleaders, or hokey camera shots, or too many announcers to tell us what we were seeing and how good it was; the game spoke for itself, and it soon outdistanced the college game, which on occasion when you went in person looked like it was being played in slow motion. We who fell in love with it knew how to find the others among us who also loved it; that is what forms community, of course.
These days I think fondly of those years, and the inexpensive steak and the 25-cent beer, and of the informal community we constituted. I live in New York and still as I did then root for the Giants. Fred Graham is an anchor for Court TV, lives in Washington, roots for the Redskins and occasionally we can still watch the game together. John Nixon is a federal district judge in Nashville, newly advanced to senior judge status, and he roots for the home town, because Nashville, unlikely though it might have seemed 40 years ago, has its own professional team now, and a very good one.
We have not watched a game all together in years, though we still talk about the game over the phone. Our friend Richard Hawkins died tragically some years ago when he was cutting down a tree, and the tree fell on him. Rotier’s, which was, I guess, a sports bar before there were sports bars, still exists in a new, milder incarnation today—what is called a family restaurant. Ironically, the most popular sports bar in town is owned by Eddie George, a young black millionaire who, Judge Nixon reminds me, would not have been allowed to play against Vanderbilt in those days. Nor, for that matter, to wait on tables in Rotier’s.
INTRODUCTION
From Super Bowl XL Opus, 2006
When I was much younger, some XXXVII years ago, I did something that was either un-American or very American—I am still not sure which. Even though I was a moderately obsessed football fan, I turned down a chance to go to Super Bowl III. I was in Miami that weekend in 1969 when the Jets were to play the Colts. I had lectured there on Saturday and one of the members of the lecture committee offered me a free ticket to the game. A very good seat, he assured me. I did not doubt his word, but I turned him down because I wanted to fly back to New York early Sunday morning and watch the game with my pals, Gay Talese, Michael Arlen and the other regulars at our weekly football sessions.
All of us, given the era and our ages, were nominally Giants fans, but in this new age of more flexible loyalties (an outgrowth of the sudden expansion of televised sports) we had committed to the Jets in that season of their remarkable ascent, which coincided with the continued, almost tragic, descent of our Giants. We always convened at Talese’s apartment for a number of reasons, not the least of which was that he was the first in our group to get a color television, and he had the largest set, maybe 30 inches across. For every game during that
season, we each took what had become in effect our assigned seat in the den, the same seat we’d sat in all season. I sat on the main couch, to the far right. I used to call the den Talese Stadium, befitting a sports gathering place in this modern era when television was still so new and so important, and where the game came to us, rather than our having to go to the game. For the Jets–Colts game that day we were going to have chili and beer. We were, in other words, like millions of other American men—football-centric, beer-centric, pals-centric—depicted in those regular-guy commercials of the era; you know, the one in which you only go around once.
The great new American age of home entertainment, when we no longer had to seek entertainment but entertainment sought us, had just begun. Instant replay was available only in your mind, as you re-ran critical plays from memory alone. ESPN did not exist, and a satellite was still a small East European country controlled by the Soviet Union. Sports hype was also in its infancy—Vince Lombardi was still just a coach, not a demi-god or a trophy, and Chris Berman had not yet made Howard Cosell look shy and modest by comparison. Nor was the Super Bowl yet all that super. Though it was the last game of the year, it was still considered somewhat anticlimactic by many of the fans and by the players themselves. A Green Bay team that had no identifiable weaknesses, or at least none discovered as yet by its opponents, won the first two Super Bowls by methodically grinding down anybody in its way. After their second victory, over the Raiders, several Packers said the game had been something of a disappointment, that beating Dallas for the NFC title—one of the very best title games in the history of the league—had felt more like the real championship game. The idea of the Super Bowl as the ultimate contest had not yet taken hold.
Then came Super Bowl III, the Namath Game. On that Sunday back in 1969 the Colts were an 18-point favorite, primarily because they were the NFL’s champions. When Joe Namath guaranteed a Jets victory the press was appalled—it was a violation of the league and the media’s unwritten modesty rules under which a quarterback’s ego was supposed to exist, but was never to be evident. Namath, as brash as he was talented, not only promised to deliver a victory but had the audacity to say that there were five or six quarterbacks in the AFL better than the Colts starter, Earl Morrall. This was the kind of thing you were never supposed to say, even though it was obviously true. I agreed, I thought the betting line was way off—dumb, really. As such I have never thought of the game as such a stunning upset. I believed then as I believe now that in a big game one should never bet against the team with the demonstrably better quarterback, and the immensely talented Namath was just reaching the peak of his powers. Morrall—though he’d been the NFL’s MVP that season—was, at best, a high-end journeyman, and his back-up was the estimable but now greatly diminished John Unitas, the quarterback against whom I still measure all others. It is hard now, all these years later, to remember how good Namath was before his body betrayed him. He was at his best when the game was on the line—probably the closest thing at that time to a direct lineal descendant of the great Unitas, with the same kind of I’ve-come-to-clean-up-this-town-even-if-I-have-only-two-minutes-left-on-the-clock iciness. He read defenses well, could throw deep and had so much arm strength that he could throw off his back foot if need be, and he was good at picking up blitzes. He also had very good receivers, and the speed of flanker Don Maynard meant that the Jets would be able to stretch the field against the Colts.
That day the Super Bowl as we know it was born. The Jets were well-coached, they had a sound (if conservative) game plan and they carried it out with a kind of surgical precision. On offense, they played very shrewd ball control with their vastly under-rated back, Matt Snell. Namath took exactly what the Colt defense gave him—a lot of short passes to his receivers and quick drop-offs to his backs. On defense, the Jets secondary cheated, packed in close to the line, dared Morrall to go deep, and intercepted him three times in the first half. The game was something of an execution: the final score was 16–7, but the Jets had been in complete control. What Namath and the Jets proved was that there was now enough parity between the leagues to make this game entertaining. That Sunday the game started the long journey to becoming what is today The Event, not just in American sports, but in American life, where anyone who seeks society’s measure of his importance can have it confirmed, can go To See and, even more important, To Be Seen. In terms of marking the success of a career, it is the defining moment for most American men in the Age of Entertainment.
That alone puts it somewhere up on the level of soccer’s World Cup (held once every four years) as the ultimate sporting event on Earth, because we Americans have such a powerful hold on the world of entertainment: We do not seek merely to entertain ourselves, we seek to entertain the world. If television has made the world a global village, then we sing and we dance and we act and we even play sports for the rest of the world to watch and hear. We do not do it just for fun, it’s our real day job; and that’s why young people around the world tend to envy our culture—we appear to be having more fun than anyone else—and why their parents, more dour about the balance between work and play, often despise us. We look like we are at play, even as we work harder and put ourselves under more pressure than ever before. Our greatest export is not cars or machine tools or software, but our popular culture—our music, our movies, our television shows, even our sports. As a nation we live to be entertained, and in the process we have ended up entertaining the world.
The natural, almost inevitable corollary is that, in the process, we have become the world’s experts in marketing, and it stands to reason that our ultimate sporting event is also the ultimate marketing event. If anyone is foolish enough to do a remake of The Graduate, the man at the cocktail party button-holing the young Dustin Hoffman character should advise him to think “marketing” not “plastics.” In this age even the coaches, who at the beginning of the Entertainment Era made perhaps $100,000 a year and were almost anonymous outside their own zip code (and often within it), can now make $5 million a year or more in several different sports and are more often recognizable (and more popular) than their state’s senators.
The fact that America’s ultimate event for spectators is a game makes sense, and that it’s a football game is no surprise. Politics won’t do. It’s allegedly a non-contact sport and certainly no longer much of a spectator sport—our political conventions are, by and large, devoid of drama and suspense, the outcome decided long in advance, the balloons released at exactly 8:49 P.M., just after the network returns from a commercial break. Besides, while it’s all right to go there to peddle influence, you don’t want to peddle it too openly.
The Oscars won’t do—it’s not really a Guy kind of event, and the resident egos out there in Hollywood are too big for their own good, even bigger than those in the corporate world. A good, true-blue CEO, even if he could score the right number of good tickets for Oscar night, does not want to stand around essentially on the outside looking in on people whose work he does not necessarily admire, whose films he probably has not seen, whose lives he does not emulate, and worst of all, who have no interest in him and what he represents. Nor—and this is important—do many of his most significant customers admire Hollywood people that much. Besides, what happens that night is all too predictable—it is not the land of the upset.
Baseball won’t do either—it’s a great sport, but there are as many as seven games to a World Series, and the league does not control the venue for the event. Ditto basketball, still something of an arriviste sport in terms of big-brand commercial labeling and magnetic pull for CEOs. Boxing long ago lost its magic, in no small part because the men who might have been the great heavyweights of today—the men with speed, power, exquisite reflexes and ferocity of purpose—are instead the NFL’s great middle linebackers.
So it’s football—one game, one city, ticket of tickets, winner take all. Just as important, the league picks the site far in advance, so it’s possible to plan an outing months i
n advance, take five days to celebrate with the right people, be invited to the right parties, a chance for them to use the new Gulfstream and to bring along their most favored clients and to flex a certain kind of social and commercial muscle. It’s the perfect package: You get a vacation, a game of almost unparalleled significance and a tax break.
Pete Rozelle was the prophet of it all, the man who saw the future and understood the possibilities of a marriage between sports, television and the corporate world. He was the visionary NFL commissioner who saw pro football’s brightest future and understood that he was selling not just a ticket to a Super Bowl game, but the ticket to a certain kind of Super status. Who else could get away with sticking Roman numerals on a sporting event? Rozelle was the first great entrepreneur-marketer of the modern sports era, a man whose roots were in public relations and marketing. He was a smart, intuitive man, liked by almost all who dealt with him, who caught and rode the great wave of our era—the coming of network television. The Super Bowl game of today is, more than anything else, what Rozelle wrought. It began as a byproduct of the merger between the AFL and the NFL, which was Rozelle’s most pressing business at that moment, but he foresaw the game’s astonishing possibilities almost immediately. Rozelle’s ultimate goal was not merely a merger of leagues, but one between football and American business, between the NFL and America’s elite, its most successful men. While the players on the field are celebrating their win in a championship game, there are players of a different sort looking down from the stands and the luxury boxes, the winners in American life.
Everything They Had Page 25
