America at Large: Scribes attending the "media party" thrown by the Houston Super Bowl host committee on Tuesday night got a taste, for one night, anyway, of what it must be like to be an International Olympic Committee delegate, writes George Kimball.
Ccatered by a dozen of Houston's finest restaurants, the soirée was held at the Downtown Aquarium, and featured a profusion of freely-flowing open bars, along with tons of seafood, shrimp, and crawfish. The festivities took up all three floors of the building and spilled out onto the grounds outside.
As we made our way out later in the evening one of my colleagues remarked how wonderful it had all been.
"Yes," I said, "but I keep wondering one thing. What happened to all the fish?"
"Fish?" he said. "Didn't you see all that seafood?"
"Yeah," I replied, "but this is supposed to be an aquarium. Did you see a live fish anywhere?"
"Gosh," he burped nervously. "I didn't."
While still pondering the mystery of whether Flipper was served up on a platter to the press, we can think of at least XXXVIII other good reasons why Houston hasn't played host to a Super Bowl for the past 30 years, but it's a delicious irony that it's hosting this Sunday's.
When the NFL was still contemplating the addition of a 32nd franchise several years ago, New England's Robert Kraft and the Carolina Panthers' Jerry Richardson - whose teams will meet for the Vince Lombardi Trophy on Sunday - were the co-chairmen of the expansion committee appointed by NFL commissioner Paul Tagliabue.
A couple of days ago Kraft recalled his first meeting with Bob McNair, who proposed to put a team in Houston to replace the Oilers, who had fled to Tennessee a year earlier.
Upon being informed that the price tag was going to be $650 million, Kraft recalled, McNair attempted to remain calm, although beads of perspiration appeared on his brow. With one of his fingers he loosened his collar.
"I, uh, didn't think it was going to cost that much," said McNair.
In truth, the NFL didn't really want to expand to Houston anyway. So earnest was the league about returning to Los Angeles that Disney chairman Michael Ovitz was privately told he didn't even need the high bid: $600 million and Los Angeles it would be.
McNair, able to read the handwriting on the wall, staged a pre-emptive strike. He offered $700 million - if the league would throw in the Super Bowl. So here we are.
When Houston staged Super Bowl VIII in 1974 the nation was still in the throes of an energy crisis. In oil-rich Texas, petrol was selling for 25 cents a gallon less than in the rest of the country, and Houstonian hospitality was best reflected by bumper-stickers which read "Let the Bastards Freeze in the Dark". Then, as now, the Astrodome was considered too small for the Super Bowl. That year's game, between the Miami Dolphins and the Minnesota Vikings, was played at Rice Stadium. The Astrodome, which will hold tomorrow night's commissioner's party, served the same function 30 years ago.
That event remains etched in memory because it was the first and, so far, only Super Bowl party built around a livestock motif, namely live pigs and dead cows. The little porkers scurried about the floor of the Astrodome, while massive steers roasted on spits around campfires. Dave Anderson of the New York Times swears he contracted a case of foot-and-mouth disease from the NFL that night.
There was no "media party" back then, but we made our own. One night an intrepid trio consisting of myself, Boston television reporter Clark Booth and Hunter S Thompson, whose coverage of the event for Rolling Stone would become "Fear and Loathing at the Super Bowl", made our way to a backwater biker bar-cum-strip joint called The Blue Fox, which had been highly recommended by locals.
We'd been there less than an hour when a massive brawl, apparently stemming from a disagreement over a pool game, erupted. I saw the larger of the participants take a roundhouse swing from a billiard cue squarely in the mouth, spit out several teeth, and with a mighty roar go after his attacker, who turned and fled. In short order bottles were flying and chairs were being broken over customers' noggins.
Booth ("That guy has a remarkable instinct for survival," an admiring Thompson said later) had hightailed it out the door at the first sign of trouble, but Hunter and I were trapped in the mêlée. I cowered on the stage, using one of the strippers like an American League umpire's chest protector, to fend off the flying debris, while a serene Thompson watched transfixed.
No sooner had the first pistol been unholstered than a remarkable sight unfolded. Two seemingly innocuous fellows who had been drinking at the bar waded through the crowd, tossing huge tattooed bodies into the air as they made straight for the guy with the gun. He was still trying to decide who to shoot when one of them grabbed him in a choke-hold, disarmed him, and trundled him headlong out the door, not stopping until he had run him, face-first, into the grill of a Cadillac. He then flipped the woozy assailant over, deposited him on the hood, and produced a pair of handcuffs.
"Damn," Thompson whistled before stating the obvious. "Undercover cops."
That wasn't even our only run-in with the constabulary that week. The very next night the Houston vice squad burst into the press room at our hotel and raided a sportswriters' poker game. As the cops flashed their badges, the late Chicago Tribune columnist Rick Talley, noting that we were four cards into a game of seven-card stud, issued the defiant order: "Nobody moves," he said, "until this hand is over."
