The Great Shark Hunt: Strange Tales From a Strange Time

  What follows, then, is a random commentary by some pro football players just a few games away from the Super Bowl, watching a film of a game between two teams -- one of which they will have to beat on Sunday, to make the playoffs, and another they might have to beat in the Super Bowl itself. The film we were watching was the Denver-Dallas game on December 2nd. Dallas won, 22-10 -- which hardly matters, because pro football players don't watch game-films to see who won or lost. They watch for patterns, tendencies and individual strengths or weaknesses. . . and in this case they were trying to translate their reactions into language I could get a personal grip on, which accounts for some of the awkward moments.

  Under normal circumstances I'd identify all of the voices in this heavily-edited tape transcript -- but for reasons that will soon become obvious if they aren't already, I decided that it would probably be more comfortable for all of us if I lumped all the player voices under one name: "Raider." This takes a bit of an edge off the talk, but it also makes it harder for the NFL security watchdogs to hassle some good people and red-line their names for hanging around with a Dope Fiend.

  III

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  Ah yes, Mother Roberts. . . I found her card on the bus and jammed it into one of my pockets, thinking that maybe I would give her a call on Monday and make an appointment. I had a lot of heavy questions to lay on her like "Why am I here, Mother Roberts? What does it all mean? Have I finally turned pro? Can this really be the end? Down and out in Houston with --

  "No, I was just kidding. Mother Roberts, just putting you on -- just working a bit of the test on you, right? Yes, because what I was really leading up to is this extremely central question. . . No, I'm not shy; it's just that I come from way up north where people's lips are frozen about ten months every year, so we don't get used to talking until very late in life. . . what? Old? Well, I think you just put your finger or your wand or whatever, right smack on the head of the nail, Mother Roberts, because the godawful truth of the whole matter is that I've been feeling extremely old this past week, and. . . What? Wait a minute now, goddamnit, I'm still getting up to the main question, which is. . . What? No, I never curse, Mother Roberts; that was a cry of anguish, a silent scream from the soul, because I feel in serious trouble down here in this goddamn town, and. . . Yes, I am a white person, Mother Roberts, and we both know there's not a damn thing I can do about it. Are you prejudiced?. . . No, let's not get into that. Just let me ask you this question, and if you can give me a straight and reasonable answer I promise I won't come out to your place. . . because what I want you to tell me, Mother Roberts -- and I mean this very seriously -- is why have I been in Houston for eight days without anybody offering me some cocaine?. . . Yes, cocaine, that's what I said, and just between you and me I'm damn serious about wanting some. . . What? Drugs? Of course I'm talking about drugs! Your ad said you could answer my questions and lift me out of sorrow and darkness. . . Okay, okay, I'm listening. . . Yeah, yeah. . . But let me tell you something, Mother Roberts: My name is Al Davis and I'm the Editor of Reader's Digest. . . Right, and I can have you busted right now for false advertising. . . Yeah, well I think I might pick up some of my people and come out to see you later on today; we want some explanations for this kind of anti-christ bullshit. This country's in enough trouble, goddamnit, without people like you running around selling drugs like cocaine to people in serious trouble. . ."

  Mother Roberts hung up on me at that point. Christ only knows what she thought was about to come down on her when dusk fell on Houston. . . Here was the Editor of the Reader's Digest coming out to her house with a goon squad, and all of them apparently stone mad for cocaine and vengeance. . . a terrible situation.

  It was not until Monday afternoon that I actually spoke with Mother Roberts on the telephone, but the idea of going over to Galveston and dealing with the whole Super Scene story from some rotten motel on the edge of the seawall had been wandering around in my head almost from the first hour after I checked into my coveted press-room at the Hyatt Regency.

  And in dull retrospect now, I wish I had done that. Almost anything would have been better than that useless week I spent in Houston waiting for the Big Game. The only place in town where I felt at home was a sort of sporadically violent strip joint called the Blue Fox, far out in the country on South Main. Nobody I talked to in Houston had ever heard of it, and the only two sportswriters who went out there with me got involved in a wild riot that ended up with all of us getting maced by undercover vice-squad cops who just happened to be in the middle of the action when it erupted.

  Ah. . . but that is another story, and we don't have time for it here. Maybe next time. There are two untold sagas that will not fit into this story: One has to do with Big Al's Cactus Room in Oakland, and the other concerns the Blue Fox in Houston.

  There is also -- at least in the minds of at least two dozen gullible sportswriters at the Super Bowl -- the ugly story of how I spent three or four days prior to Super Week shooting smack in a $7 a night motel room on the seawall in Galveston.

  I remember telling that story one night in the press lounge at the Hyatt Regency, just babbling it off the top of my head out of sheer boredom. . . Then I forgot about it completely until one of the local sportswriters approached me a day or so later and said: "Say man, I hear you spent some time in Galveston last week."

  "Galveston?"

  "Yeah," he said. "I hear you locked yourself in a motel over there and shot heroin for three days."

  I looked around me to see who was listening, then grinned kind of stupidly and said "Shucks, there wasn't much else to do, you know -- why not get loaded in Galveston?"

  He shrugged uncontrollably and looked down at his Old Crow and water. I glanced at my watch and turned to leave.

  'Time to hit it," I said with a smile. "See you later, when I'm feeling back on my rails."

  He nodded glumly as I moved away in the crowd. . . and although I saw him three or four times a day for the rest of that week, he never spoke to me again.

  Most sportswriters are so blank on the subject of drugs that you can only talk to them about it at your own risk -- which is easy enough, for me, because I get a boot out of seeing their eyes bulge; but it can be disastrous to a professional football player who makes the casual mistake of assuming that a sportswriter knows what he's talking about when he uses a word like "crank." Any professional athlete who talks to a sportswriter about "drugs" -- even with the best and most constructive intentions -- is taking a very heavy risk. There is a definite element of hysteria about drugs of any kind in pro football today, and a casual remark -- even a meaningless remark -- across the table in a friendly hometown bar can lead, very quickly, to a seat in the witness chair
in front of a congressional committee.

  Ah. . . drugs; that word again. It was a hard word to avoid in NFL circles last year -- like the "missile gap" in the 1960 Kennedy-Nixon election, or "law and order" in 1968.

  1973 was a pretty dull press-year for congressmen. The Senate's Watergate Committee had managed, somehow, to pre-empt most of the ink and air-time. . . and one of the few congressmen who managed to lash his own special gig past that barrier was an apparently senile 67-year-old ex-sheriff and football coach from West Virginia named Harley Staggers.

  Somewhere in the spastic interim between John Dean and "Bob" Haldeman, Congressman Staggers managed to collar some story-starved sportswriter from the New York Times long enough to announce that his committee -- the House Subcommittee on Investigations -- had stumbled on such a king-hell wasps' nest of evidence in the course of their probe into "the use of drugs by athletes" that the committee was prepared -- or almost prepared, pending further evidence -- to come to grips with their natural human duty and offer up a law, very soon, that would require individual urinalysis tests on all professional athletes and especially pro football players.

  These tests would be administered by professional urinalysists -- paid by the federal government, out of tax-monies -- and if any one of these evil bastards passed urine that turned red (or green, or blue, or whatever), they would be. . . ah. . . well. . . the Staggers Committee is still mulling on the question of penalties.

  Maybe studying is a better word. Or pondering. . . That's right, they're still pondering it. . . and God's mercy on any muscle-bound degenerate whose piss turns red if Harley ever passes his law. The rumor on Capitol Hill is that Rep. Staggers is even now in the process of arranging for the construction of a model, medium security JOCK/DRUG PENITENTIARY AND REHABILITATION CENTER on the site of an abandoned missile base near Tonopah, Nevada.

  Meanwhile, the Vice President of the United States has been lashed out of office and disbarred in his home state of Maryland, the President himself is teetering on the brink of a Burglary/Conspiracy indictment that will mean certain impeachment, and the whole structure of our government has become a stagnant mockery of itself and everybody who ever had faith in it.

  What all this means to Harley Staggers is hard to say. I am tempted to call him: It is 7:02 in Washington and I suspect he's wide awake, administering the daily beating to his pit-bulls in the backyard garage and waiting for calls from reporters:

  "What's up Harley? Who's gonna get it?"

  "Well. . . let me say this: We know, for a fact, that the situation is out of control and I mean to put a stop to it or fall down trying. . ."

  "A stop to what, Harley?"

  "Nevermind that. You know what I mean." (pause) "Let me ask you something: Does a phrase like 'The playing fields of West Virginia' mean anything to you?" (pause) "Wait a minute -- where were you raised? What's wrong with --" (click). . .

  Ah, Jesus. . . another bad tangent. Somewhere in the back of my mind I recall signing a contract that said I would never do this kind of thing again; one of the conditions of my turning pro was a clause about swearing off gibberish. . .

  But, like Gregg Allman says: "I've wasted so much time. . . feelin guilty. . ."

  There is some kind of back-door connection in my head between Super Bowls and the Allman Brothers -- a strange kind of theme-sound that haunts these goddamn stories no matter where I'm finally forced into a corner to write them. The Allman sound, and rain. There was heavy rain, last year, on the balcony of my dim-lit hotel room just down from the Sunset Strip in Hollywood. . . and more rain through the windows of the San Francisco office building where I finally typed out "the story."

  And now, almost exactly a year later, my main memory of Super Bowl VIII in Houston is rain and grey mist outside another hotel window, with the same strung-out sound of the Allman Brothers booming out of the same portable speakers that I had, last year, in Los Angeles.

  There was not much else worth remembering from either game-- or at least not much that needs writing about, and the clock on the wall reminds me, once again, that a final deadline looms and there is hungry space to fill out there in San Francisco. . . Which means no more thinking about rain and music, but a quick and nasty regression to "professionalism."

  Which is what it's all about.

  Indeed, I tend, more and more, to forget these things. Or maybe just to ignore them.

  But what the hell? Retirement is just around the corner, so why not wander a bit?

  "You grow up fast in Texas

  and you got to lay it down

  Or you'll be working for somebody

  way cross town."

  -- Doug Sahm

  The floor of the Hyatt Regency men's room was always covered, about three-inches deep, with discarded newspapers -- all apparently complete and unread, except on closer examination you realized that every one of them was missing its sports section. This bathroom was right next to the hotel newsstand and just across the mezzanine from the crowded NFL "press lounge," a big room full of telephones and free booze, where most of the 1600 or so sportswriters assigned to cover The Big Game seemed to spend about 16 hours of each day, during Super Week.

  After the first day or so, when it became balefully clear that there was no point in anybody except the local reporters going out on the press-bus each day for the carefully staged "player interviews," that Dolphin tackle Manny Fernandez described as "like going to the dentist every day to have the same tooth filled," the out-of-town writers began using the local types as a sort of involuntary "pool". . . which was more like an old British Navy press gang, in fact, because the locals had no choice. They would go out, each morning, to the Miami and Minnesota team hotels, and dutifully conduct the daily interviews. . . and about two hours later this mass of useless gibberish would appear, word for word, in the early editions of either the Post or the Chronicle.

  You could see the front door of the hotel from the balcony of the press lounge, and whenever the newsboy came in with his stack of fresh papers, the national writers would make the long 48-yard walk across to the newsstand and cough up 15 cents each for their copies. Then, on the way back to the press lounge, they would stop for a piss and dump the whole paper -- except for the crucial sports section -- on the floor of the men's room. The place was so deep, all week, in fresh newsprint, that it was sometimes hard to push the door open.

  Forty yards away, on comfortable couches surrounding the free bar, the national gents would spend about two hours each day scanning the local sports sections -- along with a never-ending mass of almost psychotically detailed information churned out by the NFL publicity office -- on the dim chance of finding something worth writing about that day.

  There never was, of course. But nobody seemed really disturbed about it. The only thing most of the sportswriters in Houston seemed to care about was having something to write about. . . anything at all, boss: a peg, an angle, a quote, even a goddamn rumor.

  I remember being shocked at the sloth and moral degeneracy of the Nixon press corps during the 1972 presidential campaign -- but they were like a pack of wolverines on speed compared to the relatively elite sportswriters who showed up in Houston to cover the Super Bowl.

  On the other hand, there really was no story. As the week wore on, it became increasingly obvious that we were all "just working here." Nobody knew who to blame for it, and although at least a third of the sportswriters who showed up for that super-expensive shuck knew exactly what was happening, I doubt if more than five or six of them ever actually wrote the cynical and contemptuous appraisals of Super Bowl VIII that dominated about half the conversations around the bar in the press lounge.

  Whatever was happening in Houston that week had little or nothing to do with the hundreds of stories that were sent out on the news-wires each day. Most of the stories, in fact, were unabashed rewrites of the dozens of official NFL press releases churned out each day by the League publicity office. Most of the stories abo
ut "fantastic parties" given by Chrysler, American Express and Jimmy the Greek were taken from press releases and rewritten by people who had spent the previous evening at least five miles from the scenes described in their stories.

  The NFL's official Super Bowl party -- the "incredible Texas Hoe-Down" on Friday night in the Astrodome -- was as wild, glamorous and exciting as an Elks Club picnic on Tuesday in Salina, Kansas. The official NFL press release on the Hoe-Down said it was an unprecedented extravaganza that cost the League more than $100,000 and attracted people like Gene McCarthy and Ethel Kennedy. . . Which might have been true, but I spent about five hours skulking around in that grim concrete barn and the only people I recognized were a dozen or so sportswriters from the press lounge.

  Anybody with access to a mimeograph machine and a little imagination could have generated at least a thousand articles on "an orgy of indescribable proportions" at John Connally's house, with Allen Ginsberg as the guest of honor and 13 thoroughbred horses slaughtered by drug-crazed guests with magnesium butcher knives. Most of the press people would have simply picked the story off the big table in the "workroom," rewritten it just enough to make it sound genuine, and sent it off on the Wire without a second thought.

  The bus-ride to the stadium for the game on Sunday took more than an hour, due to heavy traffic. I had made the same six-mile drive the night before in just under five minutes. . . but that was under very different circumstances; Rice Stadium is on South Main Street, along the same route that led from the Hyatt Regency to the Dolphin headquarters at the Marriott, and also to the Blue Fox.