The Selling of the Super Bowl

One thousand reporters meet 3,000 stuffed chicken thighs

Surrounded by 20 reporters one day last week, Fred Dryer of the Los Angeles Rams recounted how he and former Teammate Lance Rentzel attended the 1975 Super Bowl as accredited correspondents for Sport magazine. "We acted just like regular beat-reporters would," he said. "We ate and drank free all week, but we were unbelievable tippers. We slept in our suits. We blurted questions. We weren't interested in answers, and we didn't wait for them."

His listeners laughed heartily, if a mite uneasily. Dryer's caricature bore more than a passing resemblance to the 750 reporters and 300 photographers who descended on Los Angeles last week to watch the Rams and Pittsburgh Steelers collide in Super Bowl XIV. For seven days, the National Football League virtually immobilized the journalists in a thick public relations syrup. Upon arriving they were given a designer carryall, a briefcase and enough press handouts to reconstruct a tree. They were bused to mind-numbing press conferences and interview sessions, and courtesy cars were available if they wanted to take a drive. Coffee, juice and pastry were served gratis every morning at press headquarters, and its free bar was open from 2 p.m. to midnight.

On Friday night most of the press corps turned out for the Super Bowl Hop at the Pasadena Center, where 3,000 people listened to Tex Beneke and Woody

Herman while wolfing down 3,000 stuffed chicken thighs, 5,000 barbecued beef ribs and a ton of linguine. On Sunday two brunches and a postgame buffet were booked. Said John Schulian of the Chicago Sun-Times: "These people don't miss a trick."

The N.F.L. provided 110 typewriters and 40 video display terminals at the Los Angeles Marriott Hotel, where most of the journalists were staying. Each day league publicists churned out highlights of the coaches' press conferences and quotes from leading players. During the game, the league p.r. staff was geared to provide play-by-play summaries and a blizzard of statistics, and planned to produce 15 legal-sized pages of player quotes within hours of the final gun. Newcomers were left slackjawed. Says Mike Tierney of the St. Petersburg (Fla.) Times. "You could cover this thing without ever leaving the hotel."

All that flackery once again left the N.F.L. open to charges that it was trying to manage the news. But Jim Heffernan, director of public relations, strongly disagreed: "It's tightly scheduled rather than tightly managed. It's the only way the teams could possibly satisfy 1,000 members of the media. We're not selling the Super Bowl. The game sells itself."

The sale was not, however, accompanied by much hard news. "You don't score scoops out here," said Dick Young of the New York Daily News. Leigh Montville of the Boston Globe described it as "the great American theme contest. There's no story so everyone sits down and tries to manufacture one."

One partially redeeming circumstance was the presence of the Rams, instead of the exhaustively covered Dallas Cowboys. "At least we had a new act," said Dave Anderson of the New York Times. The star was Rams Owner Georgia Rosenbloom, a former showgirl who writes poetry on the side. Her temperamental players, who felt the fans and the writers were belittling their talents, made headlines by threatening to boycott the press. Cracked Frank Dolson of the Philadelphia Inquirer: "My greatest disappointment of the whole Super Bowl was that they didn't."

Many writers tried gamely to avoid Supercliches. No one did it as well as Milton Richman of U.P.I, and Dave Brady of the Washington Post two years ago --they visited a leper colony 50 miles from New Orleans and came across a high school teacher of Viking Coach Bud Grant--but some entertaining yarns were spun nevertheless. Ram Linebacker Jack Reynolds got plenty of ink with successive versions of how he once sawed a car in half ("13 blades and eight hours"), and Teammate Jack Youngblood was, er. cast as a pregame hero because of his decision to play with a hairline fracture in his left shinbone.

Perhaps unavoidably, a pack formed at the first whiff of a fresh angle. One morning a half dozen writers discovered Cliff Stoudt, the third-string Steeler quarterback who has yet to get into a game in his three-year career. ("Just once I'd like to wake up sore on Monday morning.") For the Super Bowl press, it was the equivalent of spotting Lana Turner at Currie's Ice Cream Parlor on Sunset Boulevard. The next day Stoudt had almost as many interlocutors as Terry Bradshaw, the team's all-pro quarterback.

To relieve their ennui, some reporters played cards--one year their traditional game was busted by hotel detectives--or hung out at the Ginger Man in Beverly Hills, ogling California womanhood. The annual Super Bowl hooker invasion left them unscathed for the XIVth consecutive year. "The only guys with any money are giving it to each other in poker games," explained George Kimball of the Boston Herald American. In any case, the scribes can be kinky customers, as one working woman learned not long ago when she approached Woody Paige of Denver's Rocky Mountain News. Said she: "For $100, I'll go back to your hotel room and do anything." Said he: "How 'bout a column and a sidebar."

The writers also relaxed by playing in N.F.L.-sanctioned golf and tennis tournaments and taking N.F.L.-provided buses out to the races at Santa Anita. Their attachment to such warm-weather pursuits has already dampened enthusiasm for the Super Bowl two years hence in Pontiac, Mich. Joked Dave Anderson: "We'll all arrive the morning of the game." But golf or no golf, there probably will be few no-shows. "You've got to be where the action is," said Morris Siegel of the Washington Star. "If they played this game in the holy city of Qum, all the writers would still be there."

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