At the Super Bowl I had the benefit of my usual game-day aids: powerful binoculars, a tiny portable radio for the blizzard of audio details that nobody ever thinks to mention on TV, and a seat on the good left arm of a friend, Mr. Natural ... But even with all these aids and a seat on the 50-yard line, I would rather have stayed in my hotel room and watched the goddamn thing on TV; or maybe in some howling-drunk bar full of heavy bettors—the kind of people who like to bet on every play, pass or run, three to one against a first down, twenty to one on a turnover . . .
When I finally fled Houston, it was a cold Tuesday afternoon with big lakes of standing water on the way to the airport. I almost missed my plane to Denver because of a hassle with Jimmy the Greek about who was going to drive us to the airport and another hassle with the hotel garage-man about who was going to pay for eight days of tending my bogus “Official Super Bowl Car” in the hotel garage ... and I probably would not have made it at all if I hadn’t run into an NFL publicity man who gave me enough speed to jerk me awake and lash the little white Mercury Cougar out along the Dallas freeway to the airport in time to abandon it in the “Departures/Taxis Only” area and hire a man for dollars to rush my bags and sound equipment up to the Continental Airlines desk just in time to make the flight.
What was easily the most provocative quote of that whole dreary week came on the Monday after the game from Miami linebacker Doug Swift. He was talking in his usual loose “What? Me worry?” kind of way with two or three sportswriters in the crowded lobby of the Marriott. Buses were leaving for the airport, Dolphin supporters and their wives were checking out, the lobby was full of stranded luggage, and off in one of the corners, Don Shula was talking with another clutch of sportswriters and ridiculing the notion that he would ever get rid of Jim Kiick, despite Kiick’s obvious unhappiness at the prospect of riding the bench again next year behind all-pro running back Mercury Morris.
Meanwhile, on the other side of the lobby, Doug Swift was going along with a conversation that had turned, along with Shula’s, to money and next year’s contracts. Swift listened for a while, then looked up at whoever was talking to him and said:
“You can expect to see a lot of new faces on next year’s [Miami] team. A lot of important contracts are coming up for renewal, and you can bet that the guys will be asking for more than management is willing to pay.”
Nobody paid much attention to the decidedly unnatural timing of Swift’s matter-of-fact prediction about “a lot of new faces next year,” but it was not the kind of talk designed to tickle either Shula’s or Joe Robbie’s rampant humours that morning. Jesus, here was the team’s player representative—a star linebacker and one of the sharpest & most politically conscious people in the league—telling anyone who cared to listen, not even twelve hours after the victory party, that the embryo “Dolphin Dynasty” was already in a very different kind of trouble than anything the Vikings or the Redskins had been able to lay on them in two straight Super Bowls.
When Doug Swift made that comment about “a lot of new faces on next year’s team,” he was not thinking in terms of a player revolt against forced urinalysis. What he had in mind, I think, was the fact that among the Dolphin contracts coming up for renewal this year are those of Larry Csonka, Jake Scott, Paul Warfield, Dick Anderson, and Mercury Morris—all established stars earning between $30,000 and $55,000 a year right now, and all apparently in the mood to double their salaries next time around.
Which might seem a bit pushy, to some people—until you start comparing average salary figures in the National Football League against salaries in other pro sports. The average NFL salary (according to figures provided by players association general counsel Ed Garvey) is $28,500, almost five grand less than the $33,000 average for major league baseball players, and about half the average salary (between $50,000 and $55,000) in the National Hockey League ... But when you start talking about salaries in the National Basketball Association, it’s time to kick out the jams: the average NBA salary is $92,500 a year. (The NBA Players Association claims that the average salary is $100,000.)
Against this steep-green background, it’s a little easier to see why Larry Csonka wants a raise from his current salary of $55,000—to $100,000 or so, a figure that he’d probably scale down pretty calmly if Joe Robbie offered him the average NBA salary of $92,500.
(A quick little sidelight on all these figures has to do with the price TV advertisers paid to push their products during time-outs and penalty squabbles at the Super Bowl: the figure announced by the NFL and whatever TV network carried the goddamn thing was $200,000 per minute. I missed the telecast, due to factors beyond my control—which is why I don’t know which network sucked up all that gravy, or whether it was Schlitz, Budweiser, Gillette, or even King Kong Amyl Nitrates that coughed up $200,000 for every sixty seconds of TV exposure on that grim afternoon.)
But that was just a sidelight ... and the longer I look at all these figures, my watch, and this goddamn stinking Mojo Wire that’s been beeping steadily out here in the snow for two days, the more I tend to see this whole thing about a pending labor management crunch in the NFL as a story with a spine of its own that we should probably leave for later.
Which is sad, but what the hell? None of this tortured bullshit about the future of pro football means anything anyway. If the Red Chinese invaded tomorrow and banned the game entirely, nobody would really miss it after two or three months. Even now, most of the games are so fucking dull that it’s hard to understand how anybody can even watch them on TV unless they have some money hanging on the point spread, instead of the final score.
Pro football in America is over the hump. Ten years ago it was a very hip and private kind of vice to be into. I remember going to my first 49ers game in 1965 with fifteen beers in a plastic cooler and a Dr. Grabow pipe full of bad hash. The 49ers were still playing in Kezar Stadium then, an old gray hulk at the western end of Haight Street in Golden Gate Park. There were never any sellouts, but the thirty thousand or so regulars were extremely heavy drinkers, and at least ten thousand of them were out there for no other reason except to get involved in serious violence ... By halftime the place was a drunken madhouse, and anybody who couldn’t get it on anywhere else could always go underneath the stands and try to get into the long trough of a “Men’s Room” through the “Out” door; there were always a few mean drunks lurking around to punch anybody who tried that ... and by the end of the third quarter of any game, regardless of the score, there were always two or three huge brawls that would require the cops to clear out whole sections of the grandstand.
But all that changed when the 49ers moved out to Candlestick Park. The prices doubled and a whole new crowd took the seats. It was the same kind of crowd I saw, last season, in the four games I went to at the Oakland Coliseum: a sort of half-rich mob of nervous doctors, lawyers, and bank officers who would sit through a whole game without ever making a sound—not even when some freak with a head full of acid spilled a whole beer down the neck of their gray plastic ski jackets. Toward the end of the season, when the Raiders were battling every week for a spot in the play-offs, some of the players got so pissed off at the stuporous nature of their “fans” that they began making public appeals for “cheering” and “noise.”
It was a bad joke if you didn’t have to live with it—and as far as I’m concerned, I hope to hell I never see the inside of another football stadium. Not even a free seat with free booze in the press box.
That gig is over now, and I blame it on Vince Lombardi. The success of his Green Bay approach in the Sixties restructured the game entirely. Lombardi never really thought about winning: his trip was not losing ... Which worked, and because it worked, the rest of the NFL bought Lombardi’s whole style: Avoid Mistakes, Don’t Fuck Up, Hang Tough, and Take No Chances ... Because sooner or later the enemy will make a mistake and then you start grinding him down, and if you play the defensive percentage you’ll get inside his 30-yard line at least three times in each half,
and once you’re inside the 30 you want to be sure to get at least 3 points . . .
Wonderful. Who can argue with a battle plan like that? And it is worth remembering that Richard Nixon spent many Sundays, during all those long and lonely autumns between 1962 and ’68, shuffling around on the field with Vince Lombardi at Green Bay Packer games.
Nixon still speaks of Lombardi as if he might suddenly appear, at any moment, from underneath one of the larger rocks on the White House lawn ... And Don Shula, despite his fairly obvious distaste for Nixon, has adopted the Lombardi style of football so effectively that the Dolphins are now one of the dullest teams to watch in the history of pro football.
But most of the others are just as dull—and if you need any proof, find a TV set some weekend that has pro football, basketball, and hockey games on three different channels. In terms of pure action and movement, the NFL is a molasses farm compared to the fine sense of crank that comes on when you get locked into watching a team like the Montreal Canadiens or the Boston Celtics.
One of the few sharp memories I still have from the soggy week in Houston is the sight of the trophy that would go to the team that won the Big Game on Sunday. It was appropriately named after Vince Lombardi: “The Lombardi Trophy,” a thick silver fist rising out of a block of black granite.
The trophy has all the style and grace of an ice floe in the North Atlantic. There is a silver plaque on one side of the base that says something about Vince Lombardi and the Super Bowl ... but the most interesting thing about it is a word that is carved, for no apparent or at least no esthetic reason, in the top of the black marble base:
“Discipline.”
That’s all it says, and all it needs to say.
The ’73 Dolphins, I suspect, will be to pro football what the ’64 Yankees were to baseball, the final flower of an era whose time has come and gone. The long and ham-fisted shadow of Vince Lombardi will be on us for many more years . . . But the crank is gone . . .
Should we end the bugger with that?
Why not? Let the sportswriters take it from here. And when things get nervous, there’s always that smack-filled $7-a-night motel room down on the seawall in Galveston.
Fear and Loathing in Limbo: The Scum Also Rises
October 10, 1974
. . . before I could come to any conclusion it occurred to me that my speech or my silence, indeed any action of mine, would be a mere futility. What did it matter what anyone knew or ignored? What did it matter who was manager? One gets sometimes such a flash of insight. The essentials of this affair lay deep under the surface, beyond my reach, and beyond my power of meddling.
—Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness
Well ... this is going to be difficult. That sold-out knucklehead refugee from a 1969 “Mister Clean” TV commercial has just done what only the most cynical and paranoid kind of malcontent ever connected with national politics would have dared to predict . . .
If I followed my better instincts right now, I would put this typewriter in the Volvo and drive to the home of the nearest politician—any politician—and hurl the goddamn machine through his front window ... flush the bugger out with an act of lunatic violence, then soak him down with Mace and run him naked down Main Street in Aspen with a bell around his neck and black lumps all over his body from the jolts of a high-powered “Bull Buster” cattle prod.
But old age has either mellowed me or broken my spirit to the point where I will probably not do that—at least not today, because that blundering dupe in the White House has just plunged me into a deep and vicious hole.
About five hours after I’d sent the final draft of a massive article on The Demise of Richard Nixon off on the Mojo Wire and into the cold maw of the typesetter in San Francisco, Gerald Ford called a press conference in Washington to announce that he had just granted a “full, free, and absolute” presidential pardon, covering any and all crimes Richard Nixon may or may not have committed during the entire five and a half years of his presidency.
Ford sprung his decision with no advance warning at 10:40 on a peaceful Sunday morning in Washington, after emerging from a church service with such a powerful desire to dispense mercy that he rushed back to the White House—a short hump across Lafayette Park—and summoned a weary Sunday-morning skeleton crew of correspondents and cameramen to inform them, speaking in curiously zombielike tones, that he could no longer tolerate the idea of ex-president Nixon suffering in grief-crazed solitude out there on the beach in San Clemente, and that his conscience now compelled him to end both the suffering of Nixon and the national angst it was causing by means of a presidential edict of such king-sized breadth and scope as to scourge the poison of “Watergate” from our national consciousness forever.
Or at least that’s how it sounded to me when I was jolted out of a sweat-soaked coma on Sunday morning by a frantic telephone call from Dick Tuck. “Ford pardoned the bastard!” he screamed. “I warned you, didn’t I? I buried him twice, and he came back from the dead both times ... Now he’s done it again; he’s running around loose on some private golf course in Palm Desert.”
I fell back on the bed, moaning heavily. No, I thought. I didn’t hear that. Ford had gone out of his way, during his first White House press conference, to impress both the Washington press corps and the national TV audience with his carefully considered refusal to interfere in any way with Special Prosecutor Leon Jaworski’s legal duty to proceed on the basis of evidence and “prosecute any and all individuals.” Given the context of the question, Ford’s reply was widely interpreted as a signal to Jaworski that the former president should not be given any special treatment ... And it also meshed with Ford’s answer to a question in the course of his confirmation hearings in the Senate a few months earlier, when he’d said, “I don’t think the public would stand for it,” when asked if an appointed vice president would have the power to pardon the president who’d appointed him, if the president were removed from office under criminal circumstances.
I recalled these things Ford had said, but I was not so sure I’d heard Dick Tuck correctly—or if I’d really heard him at all. I held my right hand up in front of my eyes, trying to remember if I’d eaten anything the night before that could cause hallucinations. If so, my hand would appear to be transparent, and I would be able to see all the bones and blood vessels very clearly.
But my hand was not transparent. I moaned again, bringing Sandy in from the kitchen to find out what was wrong. “Did Tuck just call?” I asked.
She nodded: “He was almost hysterical. Ford just gave Nixon a full pardon.”
I sat up quickly, groping around on the bed for something to smash. “No!” I shouted. “That’s impossible!”
She shook her head. “I heard it on the radio, too.”
I stared at my hands again, feeling anger behind my eyes and noise coming up in my throat: “That stupid, lying bastard! Jesus! Who votes for these treacherous scumbags! You can’t even trust the dumb ones! Look at Ford! He’s too goddamn stupid to arrange a deal like that! Hell, he’s almost too stupid to lie.”
Sandy shrugged. “He gave Nixon all the tapes, too.”
“Holy shit!” I leaped out of bed and went quickly to the phone. “What’s Goodwin’s number in Washington? That bonehead Rotarian sonofabitch made a deal? Maybe Dick knows something.”
But it was twenty-four hours later when I finally got hold of Goodwin, and by that time I had made a huge chart full of dates, names, and personal connections—all linked and cross-linked by a maze of arrows and lines. The three names on the list with far more connections than any others were Laird, Kissinger, and Rockefeller. I had spent all night working feverishly on the chart, and now I was asking Goodwin to have a researcher check it all out.
“Well,” he replied, “a lot of people in Washington are thinking along those same lines today. No doubt there was some kind of arrangement, but—” He paused. “Aren’t we pretty damn close to the deadline? Jesus Christ, you’ll never be able to check all
that stuff before—”
“Mother of babbling god!” I muttered. The word deadline caused my brain to seize up momentarily. Deadline? Yes. Tomorrow morning, about fifteen more hours ... With about 90 percent of my story already set in type, one of the threads that ran all the way through it was my belief that nothing short of a nuclear war could prevent Richard Nixon’s conviction. The only thing wrong with that argument was its tripod construction, and one of the three main pillars was my assumption that Gerald Ford had not been lying when he’d said more than once, for the record, that he had no intention of considering a presidential pardon for Richard Nixon “until the legal process has run its course.”
Cazart! I hung up the phone and tossed my chart across the room. That rotten, sadistic little thief had done it again. Just one month earlier he had sandbagged me by resigning so close to the deadline that I almost had a nervous breakdown while failing completely ... And now he was doing it again, with this goddamn presidential pardon, leaving me with less than twenty-four hours to revise completely a fifteen-thousand-word story that was already set in type.
It was absolutely impossible, no hope at all—except to lash as many last-minute pages as possible into the mojo and hope for the best. Maybe somebody in San Francisco would have time, when the deadline crunch came, to knit the two versions together ... But there was no way at all to be sure, so this will be an interesting article to read when it comes off the press . . .
Indeed ... cast your bread on the waters ... why not?
I have very dim memories of Tuck’s call. Less than five hours earlier, I had passed out very suddenly in the bathtub, after something like 133 hours of nonstop work on a thing I’d been dragging around with me for two months and revising in ragged notebooks and on rented typewriters in hotels from Key Biscayne to Laguna Beach, bouncing in and out of Washington to check the pressure and keep a fix on the timetable, then off again to Chicago or Colorado ... before heading back to Washington again, where the pressure valves finally blew all at once in early August, catching me in a state of hysterical exhaustion and screeching helplessly for speed when Nixon suddenly caved in and quit, ambushing me on the brink of a deadline and wasted beyond the help of anything but the most extreme kind of chemotherapy.