Players Have Fun During Super Bowl Kick Off

In the very early days of the Super Bowl, the event was a blip on the calendar and not the epicenter of mass hysteria. Sports writers covering the game generally just knocked on the hotel room doors of the players they wanted to interview. Joe Namath, at Super Bowl III, held court at poolside in Miami.

Now, with 5,000 credentialed media flooding Minneapolis this week for Super Bowl LII and the bacchanalia surrounding it, the process is far more managed by the NFL, stilted and (too often) inclined toward the ridiculous.

USA Today curated a number of the dopier inquiries of players and coaches at Super Bowl past. Your Friendly Neighborhood Blog (FNB), as a reporter for USA Today, was there to hear many in the course of covering 30 of these affairs.

Washington Redskins defensive end Dexter Manley, back in the 1980s, was hit with an all-time classic: “If you were a tree, what kind of tree would you be?” Imagine, someone on an expense account to the Super Bowl got paid to ask that.

“Why do they call you Boomer?” was one that San Francisco 49ers quarterback Joe Montana heard at Super Bowl XXIII. No one called him that – the opposing Cincinnati Bengals, however, were quarterbacked by Norman “Boomer” Esiason.

At Super Bowl XX, your FNB asked New England Patriots center Pete Brock if 1,000-yard running back Craig James had done anything special for the linemen who made that possible.

Brock: “He bought us a television.”

As many locker rooms at that time had only TV in them, your undaunted FNB was uncertain what this meant, pressed for clarity and said: “One TV?”

Brock stared, then snorted. “Yeah, (unprintable name goes here). One TV. We have to share it.”

Ah, OK, everyone got a television. Every last one of those offensive linemen. Thank you for straightening me out.

Sometimes it’s hard to get the picture.

 
 
Post By: Larry Weisman, a longtime sportswriter for USA TODAY, blogs for Twistity.com. Follow him on Twitter @MrLarryWeisman