The Best Super Bowl Ever

I lived in Alaska with my family in those days in a semi-Rip Van Winkled state. None of us had any choice about it. Our delayed access to the news was a fact of life.

Deep into the sixth decade of the 20th Century, Alaskans still had no live TV.

This was a problem! As a teenager hoping to have some kind of life, I already wasn't exactly thrilled when my father's oil company offered him the chance to drag all of us to the Last Frontier. I began 7th grade in Anchorage, Alaska that winter, walking to school in the dark, sometimes in near zero temperatures.

The isolation was annoying, too. With no live TV (because nobody was going to build broadcast towers all the way from Washington state to the far north) you couldn't watch sporting events on weekends. My parents graciously tossed me a bone.

They got me a subscription to Sports Illustrated.

Here's the cover of the first issue I ever received.

I read SI from cover to cover. I didn't even know it, but there were some of the greatest journalists ever writing for the mag in those days. No wonder I lapped up the colorful writing of Tex Maule and Dan Jenkins. These guys could wield a line of prose like nobody's business, even if it was in service of describing big sweaty guys performing an athletic feat or a man in a sweater swinging a golf club.

So I didn't see the football games, football being my main sporting interest, but I read about them. This was a whole different level of involvement. A great game like the 1966 UCLA vs. USC match-up in which Heisman contenders quarterback Gary Beeban and halfback O.J. Simpson created the expected fireworks and then some became, upon reading it, a great short story.

But still...I would have much rather seen the gridiron heroics on TV.

What's the Score?

Before there were iPods...

My Alaskan isolation became pertinent on Super Bowl Sunday January 12, 1969. As I saw it, I had no choice but to secret in my pocket a transistor radio the size of a pack of cigarettes and take it to church.

This was the only way I would know how the game was going as the NFL's Baltimore Colts took on the AFL's New York Jets in the third Super Bowl ever.

Timing was the other problem. In those days the Super Bowl was not about an all-day build-up to the big event in the evening. Kick-off was at 3:05 EST.

In Alaska this meant the first Colt-Jet collision occurred at 10:05 a.m. as I was sitting in Sunday School class at church.

For the next two hours I kept my counsel, the radio burning a hole in my pocket. I couldn't turn it on, even if I used the ear plug. People would see what I was doing. But I just knew the Colts had to be killing the Jets. I wanted to know how bad.

To put it in biblical terms, I was like a Philistine waiting for Goliath to bring back to camp the tiny head of David. In this case the head belonged to a loud mouth guy named Joe Namath.

Earlier in the week, Namath, the Jets young quarterback, said his team would defeat the 11-1 Colts. The Colts were being called the greatest team of all-time. They had allowed a total of 7 touchdowns all season. Their offense was just as potent. The seemingly clueless Namath compounded his sin of hubris by adding to his prediction these words: "I guarantee it."

This guy "guarantees" a win? Over the Colts?
What has he been smoking?

A Tale of Two Leagues
Many people who will tune into the Super Bowl this Sunday weren't even born when the first Super Bowl was played. It might be worth remembering that originally the game was originally marketed as a sort of grudge match, albeit one in which the grudge was being played out to make substantial sums of money via TV broadcast.

In those days the NFL, which had been around for decades, thought they ought to have a lock on lucrative TV contracts in large market cities as well as the high esteem of the American sporting population. But beginning in the early 1960s they were challenged by a new league: The American Football League.

The AFL had "cool" helmets and uniforms...

The AFL set up teams in unexpected places like Kansas City and Denver and Buffalo. They played literally by a different set of rules: for example, a slightly larger football with stripes on it and the option of a two-point conversion. They brought excitement and innovation to a game that had grown stodgy and they carried it, like missionaries, into new venues.

Generally the sports establishment dissed the AFL as a league composed of NFL cast-offs and college talent not good enough to be drafted by the elite league. This was not actually true. The AFL was acquiring talented players the NFL had given up on as well as first round choices and players from all-black colleges that no one had bothered to recruit before.

And the AFL was spoiling for a fight. They had a TV contract with ABC and loyal fans. The NFL, well, they just wanted to crush these guys before they started stealing all their talent and carving up a significant slice of the football pie.

While this was going on, I found a book at the library that told the story of how the AFL survived through pluck and luck, The $400,000 Quarterback: Or the League That Came In From the Cold (1965).

As a kid I loved the true life tale book told. The AFL was the underdog, David to Commissioner Pete Rozelle's NFL Goliath. But the day the AFL announced they were signing a scruffy quarterback from Pennsylvania who had played for Alabama and giving him the unheard of sum of $400,000 that changed. The AFL was on it's way to what the NFL dreaded. National notice and legitimacy.

That's when everybody began speaking of  "parity." The AFL was coming into its own; however, many people assumed it might take years for the new league to ever achieve this golden parity in quality of players and execution. Then, and only then, would the best AFL team be able to beat the best team in the NFL.

In the meantime, the only way to find out where things stood at this point was to bring the two best teams together from each league and let them fight it out. The Super Bowl was born.

NFL Commissioner Pete Rozelle was smiling: My league can whip your league!
No parity here. The AFL is a bunch of wannabe's!

As predicted, there was to be no parity for the AFL. In the first two Super Bowls the Green Bay Packers breezed to victories over the Kansas City Chiefs and Oakland Raiders.

Which brought us to Super Bowl III. It promised more of the same. I liked underdogs, but this was ridiculous. Why even tune in? The Jets, a so-so but scrappy team that was lucky to have won the AFL championship, would be crushed by the Colts. We were talking total road kill. The Colts were favored by 18. Most people thought the spread ought to be doubled.

I imagined that in 60 minutes against such a juggernaut of a defense as the Colts fielded, the Jets would be lucky to score a field goal.

Church is Over!
I hurried out the front of the building. My dad wasn't a sports fan; he didn't really care what I was doing. One of my brothers, though, was tuned to my urgency. On the steps of the church building which were covered with deicing salt we bent over the radio's tiny speaker.

Out in front of us Anchorage, Alaska looked normal for January: the downtown "parkstrip" was buried in snow, the streets were a glaze of ice, the temperature stood frigidly in the low twenties. Our breath twisted in front of us.

I couldn't believe what I was hearing. Even the announcer sounded befuddled. I listened again. Surely he had inverted the team names. We were into the second half of the game and the Jets were ahead.

We had been singing hymns, listening to a sermon, taking communion from little cups and the world had inverted. We had on our hands one of the most astounding upsets in the history of team sports. It was historic.

I couldn't see it. I could only listen and imagine...how thousands of miles away
things were unraveling for the Colts.

That same year men would land on the moon, but the American Football League had already landed. It had come down hard on Planet Parity. The NFL had already decided it had no choice. If you can't beat 'em, join 'em. The fascinating competition between two styles and ethos of football, the old guys vs. the new ones, was at an end.

The following year the merger of leagues would be realized. Everything would become the NFL with teams ensconced in  two conferences, AFC and NFC. New teams would be added (New Orleans and Cincinnati) and there would be the jarring "realignment" of some of the NFL's most deeply traditional teams, the Steelers and Browns and, yes, the Colts!, as they moved to the AFC.

After that the Super Bowl would never be the same as far as I was concerned. The pigskin sibling rivarlry element would be lost. No more Cain vs. Abel. The Super Bowl would become just a glorified NFL championship game, and the AFL would be mostly forgotten.

But I wouldn't forget the lesson that happened while I was in church, the one that played out on the green grass plains of the Orange Bowl in Miami, Florida as I listened in on a tinny speaker:

- V.W.


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Pass the TV and the Cranberry Sauce

Rabbit ears...they're so 20th century!

For the second time since I began this project I left town.  (see Review of Room 202 post for first instance).

This time my wife, son, and I drove four hours to reach an idyllic country-side setting for the Thanksgiving hoiday. Both of these experiences tempted me to be exposed to all sorts of news, weather, sports and entertainment in the most powerful way. The accommodations offered cable/satellite TV.

Back home we remain an over-the-air, rabbit ear TV-type family. It's almost like being electronically Amish. After all, according to statistics, somewhere between 70-90% of TV watching households have cable these days. Never mind. Being in the minority doesn't bother me most of the time. We are already so little inclined to watch TV that it's hard to imagine how more channels would improve things. Still, whenever I travel and I come across a cable source, I like to channel surf and see what I might be missing.

So I watched some TV...go ahead, sue me!

This time, with the Van Winkle Project hanging in the balance, it was more risky.

First came episodes of Mythbusters. That was okay, I guess, because you can't tell which are new episodes and which not, and none of it told me anything that updated what has come to pass in the world since I became Van Winkled on Sept. 11. The main thing was that the show was enjoyable. How can you not want to know what happens when Jamie and Adam ignite one million matchheads?

A rerun of The Incredibles, was fine, too. An old movie, already saw it. But I have to say that when no one was around I did something a little more dicey.

I got busy with the remote.

"...incentives!"

Within a few minutes I saw Sarah Palin's now familiar bespectacled, lipsticked image in front of an Alaskan backdrop. My nostalgia for my days living in the 49th State or something must have kicked in and I stopped. I listened to her for thirty seconds.

The former half-term governor said that what made America "great" was "incentives." She said the current administration was "deincentivizing" everyone. Okay, did I learn anything newsworthy from Ms. Palin and violate the terms of the Van Winkle Project? Not so much. I moved on, still feeling almost as pure as the fresh fallen Alaskan snow.



Don't worry. The air force jet is NOT cleared for take-off.

 More danger lay ahead, though. On a Fox channel Bill O'Reilly was interviewing our most recent former president whom I remembered had a memoir scheduled to come out after I went to "sleep."

I listened to O'Reilly's question, something about the Iraq surge being the correct strategy...

I clicked the remote. Safe again!

Surfing, I saw a lot of Nikon ads
starring you know who...

Of course, E! was dangerous, but ten seconds of listening to it and I realized my celebrity IQ is so low I don't even recognize most of the names. I'm still stuck back in time when Demi Moore is the world's most sought after actress, Bruce Willis has hair (and  a wife named "Demi"), and a kid named Ashton Kutcher is wearing diapers.

After I got past those channels I was pretty much a free man. I forwarded myself through a blur of football games without even being able to identify who was on the field.

I did notice from commercials that The Voyage of the Dawn Treader and a movie called Love and Other Addictions are coming to a theater near you, but that's all I know about them.

In the end I emerged from my cable spree with my window on the world still fairly tightly shut. I don't even know how the Black Friday sales went other than the first-hand evidence when we went into the nearby town in the afternoon and rubbed elbows with the crowds happily rubbing elbows as they wound through the little gift shops and fingered jam jars and enough Christmas paraphernalia to celebrate the holiday into the next millenium.

My ignorance more or less intact, I felt like an alchoholic that had strolled into a bar and made it out without doing any more than inhale the fumes. I had proved just how resolved I was to remain Van Winkled.

Disincentivized by Cable TV

My holiday cable browsing showed me something else. I was reminded once again why cable and I never got together on permanent basis.

I remember the days when cable was a new product and touted as 1) offering perfect reception and 2) being commercial free. We know how Number 1 turned out. A joke. In fact, in 1996 a movie could be made, The Cable Guy, and everyone immediately knew just from the title that it was a comedy. As for being commercial free, that visual Eden didn't last long before there came the Fall courtesy of Madison Avenue.

Still, cable was a place where initially one could watch movies that had appeared in the theaters. This was good if you missed them when they came out or wanted to see them again. Thus we had HBO and Cinemax as raisons d'etres. Then along came the VCR. Cable lost another advantage.

Ted Turner was one of the saviors of cable. He came up with the idea of around the clock news and CNN was born. The arrival of MTV in the 1980s gave cable another distinctive.

Eventually cable would discover that it could succeed by offering niche programming. Cable, unlike network TV which tried to have something to appeal to most everyone in the room,  would be almost like a place where you could shop for the television equivalent of a magazine devoted to your special interest. Entire channels for people who were into home decor and remodeling, channels about food, channels about history, channels about animals, channels about fashion and celebrities, not to mention channels for kids and sports fans.

They could also spend big bucks and produce original series and movies the same as the networks or Hollywood. Shows like The Sopranos, Sex and the City, The Wire, Six Feet Under, Deadwood, Madmen, and others have led some critics to assert that cable have given us a "new golden age of TV." And perhaps they have a point. Such shows take on mature themes, enough money is spent that the production and design are on the level of a major film release, and the series format allows for character development on par with what we find in great novels.

Isn't it about time
I got one of these, i.e., TV on Viagra?

So finally there ought to be enough reason for me to sign up for Dish or Satellite Network and get one of those cool looking devices ornamenting the brow of my roof? Even the commercials ought not to hold me back. Another innovation, called the digital video recorder, takes care of that. I can record shows and fast forward past the commercials.


But I still don't feel compelled to join the majority. The whole subscription thing feels wasteful and time consuming like being forced to buy an entire store's inventory when you actually only want a handful of items. Or it's like having to own the whole library when you're only interested in certain books in certain sections of the library. I think I await the day when all TV content arrives from the Internet and everything is on demand. I want to see what I want to see at a given moment and I don't even want to catch a glimpse of the dross, which for me and Bruce Springsteen ("57 Channels and Nothin' On" 1992) is about 98%.

I'm honest enough to admit, however, that there is a down side.

I will continue to miss serendipitous moments where I press the channel advance and hit the high crest of a video cable surf moment that can tell me so much about the state of American culture such as...

Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke may
have a "situation" on his hands...

- Snooki and The Situation and the cast of Jersey Shore preparing to ring the New York Stock Exchange opening bell (here) while great economic minds wonder whether this will send a signal to the global markets to rise, fall, or belch.

- Finding out whether Adam Richman on Man vs. Food can really eat the flame-throwing Bushido's SpicyTuna Roll without smoke coming out his ears or (more likely) going to the emergency room.



You call it "little," I call it "giant"!

 - Watching a guy named Hal Wing on an infomercial for the multi-functional Little Giant stepladder showing me how to set up the ladder to hang a painting over the mantel while simultaneously drawing a blank on the name for a fireplace hearth and, adeptly, last second, like a a true pro, calling it "that elevated area in front of your fireplace." (I have to say the Little Giant looked like a pretty great invention, especially if I were to have go way up high on my roof to fix a shingle and change a light bulb in the living room all on the same day.)

Oh, yes. I don't mind doing this kind of labor intensive watching for an hour at a time, twice a year when I'm on vacation. It's only afterwards that I become troubled. Who is really asleep? Van Winkle? Or is it the version of me reclined on the couch, staring at a screen, making thumb twitches in the direction of the remote every couple of minutes? I'm all the way up to Channel 99 and I'm still trying to decide if this much TV is good or bad. 

I do know one thing, though. A Little Giant could sure make decorating the Christmas tree next week a breeze... - V.W.


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Walter Cronkite in a Can

It’s Walter Leland Cronkite’s birthday. The legendary CBS news anchor would have been 94 years old today.

Though we lost Walter last year I still think about him during my current newsless state. He goes back to the very beginning of my strong desire to want to know about what is going on in the world.

My Alaskan Daze

My father was an oil man, which led to our family moving to Anchorage, Alaska in 1966. In those days Alaska was only seven years removed from statehood and it remained a very isolated place. I felt in many ways as if we had landed in a foreign country. Happily everyone spoke English, but we were in a city that contained one-half the state's population and we had exactly one mall (called  by everyone “The Mall”), no McDonalds, and a large swath of vacant lots downtown where shops and bars had been swallowed up in the Great Earthquake two years earlier.

Kids cruised Northern Lights Boulevard on Saturday night as if it were 1955, honking their horns at DJ Ron Moore who broadcast the Top 40 countdown from “high atop the Bun Drive-In.” The records played on the radio were ones that had come out in the Lower 48 weeks ago. Strange, psychedelic things were starting to happen in places like San Francisco, but I hardly knew about them that first winter as I stomped back and forth to school in my canvas surplus Army snow boots .

Alaska was all about time delay. Alaskans took whatever news they could get when they could get it, then went on with their lives. We were resigned to the fact that Christmas specials (Dean Martin, Dinah Shore, Bob Hope) were taped and mailed to our television stations which didn’t get around to airing them until January. Bizarre as it was, we watched Santa, elves, and reindeer long after our Christmas trees had been hauled to the dump. For an ear on the world we had radio, of course, which could give us news hourly, but for an eye we only had two TV channels.

Walter Enters the Picture

Until the early 1970s when a satellite was placed in orbit and a live broadcast signal was bounced off it and down to Alaska, the network evening news was treated as a luxury item. It was taped in Seattle, slapped in a canister, and rushed to the airport to be flown up aboard a commercial airliner. Fifteen hundred miles and four hours later, if everything went well, which often was not the case because of weather, my parents and I got ready for bed, turned on the TV in the bedroom and watched the CBS Evening News with Walter Cronkite. It was 10 p.m. Alaska Standard Time and 2 a.m. in New York City where our journalist hero was likely sound asleep.

And at the Screen We Stared...

It was the sixties. Student radicals, Viet Cong in black pajamas, Civil Rights marchers with linked arms, transcendence from a guitar and a little dot of chemical on blotter paper, all this stood in amazing contrast to the Alaskan life. Once a week I could turn on my radio at night and listen to the Mukluk Telegraph show where the announcer read messages to people living in the remotest part of the Alaskan bush. It sounded like some kind of weird, seriously intoned poetry.

 “To Joe at Willow Lake, Ross will fly the Cub in on Tuesday with your pump and three-quarter inch eye bolts.”

“To Hattie at Ross Point, we’ll see you after break-up, hope you get that moose, we love you, the Schmidts.”

The main newspaper, which my brothers and I delivered winter evenings in total darkness and subzero weather, tended to echo the prevalent Alaskan provincialism The Anchorage Times was run by Bob Atwood who believed the purpose of his paper was to boost community spirit and encourage Alaskans to develop their vast natural resources, regulators and environmental nambie pambies be damned. Every day The Times had a banner front-page headline, being unfamiliar with the concept of reserving such prime page space for only important events such as the beginning or end of a war. I still remember my frustration with a front-page headline in World's-About-to-End font size. It was for a weekend event The Times sponsored.

Ann Chow Wins Spelling Bee

We did have as an alternative in the trouble makers at the Anchorage Daily News, our morning paper. The News was an impertinent bunch operating on a shoestring budget. They were real news people who had figured out that they were in the midst of one of the most exciting stories in America—all of us were witnesses to the development of a brand-new state from the ground up, including the mistakes, discoveries, and hubris and corruption attendant to such an undertaking. The News didn’t want to boost our spirits, it wanted to tell the truth. Eventually they would dodge death threats and win a Pulitzer Prize for reporting on the graft system within the Teamsters Union during the North Slope oil boom.

[There's a great book about the above, the publication of which was overseen by a high school classmate of mine; her mother was Alaska's version of Ben Bradlee. See: Kay Fanning's Alaska Story.]

As good as The News’ intentions were they couldn’t afford to print many pages, and what news they had to offer was already more than a day old by the time it appeared on our front porch.  If I wanted to know what was going on in America with as little time lag as possible I had to rely on a guy with a moustache. Walter Cronkite.

Digging Walter

Walter wasn’t about being fashionable, though as the sixties progressed I thought I detected some sideburn enlargement. But what never changed was his take on the news. You could tell he loved it. His voice much more animated than the dead-pan Chet Huntley’s or David Brinkley’s. Those two, who anchored NBC’s top rated news half-hour, sounded so sober that they might have been serving communion in church. It wasn’t that Walter was excited per se, but you always knew from his voice, which was far from smooth (bumpily cadenced, one might say), that he was engaged.

At the same time, Walter was a stickler for objectivity. The story was never about him. This is why out of all the stories Walter brought to us from 1962-1981 people always mention his work on the day of the Kennedy assassination. The pause as he held on to his glasses and read the bulletin, with the lump in throat, and announced it was official, the President was dead. This was the exception. For a few seconds we saw Walter the man, standing ahead of Walter the reporter. And it felt right. This wasn’t just news. As anyone who lived through that day can tell you, it was like a body blow to every one of us. The closet thing since was how all of us felt on September 11, 2001.

PWE or The Post-Walter Era

Reflections like the above seem quaint in the age of the Internet and iPads and streaming video. Talking about people eagerly huddled around their black and white TV set sounds akin to cave people sitting around a fire. It’s hard to imagine. Today if something happens right on the other side of the world I can know about it within seconds by just flicking my fingers a few times. That’s good.

Or is it?

The funny thing is that when something comes to me easily, I don’t cherish it. It's like the Casanova who always has women trailing after him and respects and loves none of them. Or the child with so many toys that he keeps breaking them and shrugging his shoulders because he has plenty more. Or the woman with a closet full of dresses and you know the rest, she never has anything to wear. There seems to be a rigorous supply and demand pleasure principle that applies to our species. It dictates that I can be moved by and truly value only what is scarce and hard to access.

As momentous as some of the events of the sixties were I’m no longer sure that these early years of the 21^st century are any less historically significant. What’s changed is the quantity and speed of the information. It’s easier to adopt a blasé whatever attitude toward it all when I don’t have to patiently wait for someone like Walter at 10 p.m. to tell me the news. The news has become so unlimited and synchronized with my own heartbeats that I worry that I’ve become jaded. I could live through the most amazing episodes and hardly even notice them.

I don’t think Walter would have liked that. The CBS network logo was an eye. Walter believed in shrugging off self absorption and the temptations of a narrow slitted viewpoint in order to have our eyes wide open. He wanted us to be awake to what we are doing to this planet and each other, good and bad, and I thank him for that. - V.W.

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News-zilla and Running the Gantlet

Behold! The News-zilla Screen at Gate D28

I'm traveling this week in order to attend a conference at a major city in the American Midwest. That's how I found myself in a hub airport. It appears that since I was last in this place flat screens have moved to the next level. They have multiplied,consolidated, and they may be about to take over the world.

Propelled by the investment and sponsorship of Samsung, it's been decided at the airport in question that it would be ideal if multiple LCD screens are stacked together to form a giant wall-size rectangle of television which brings the innocent airport lounger and gate sitter 24/7 cable news.

Live from NYC...

Although the total effect is Orwellian-1984ish, I don't have any special problem with this video upgrade except that as long as I'm waiting for my flight it makes it hard for me to remain Van Winkled. I had to almost slap myself to keep my eyes from being drawn to the images in front of me on the wall.

Is the woman about to jump out a hotel window?

The temptation to subcumb to the News-zilla reached its peak when I saw a young man suddenly stop staring at his laptop and jerk his head and look up at the millions of dancing pixels. Had something happened on the screen? I didn't dare look, even though I wanted to.



That Isn't All...
People in transit read newspapers. They really do. They're almost always men. They spread the newspaper pages wide. The black and white headlines, and sometimes subheads, are easily readable from a few feet away at the gate and aboard the airplane.

Like a shy Victorian who can't stand an inadvertent glimpse of a lady's ankle, I had to advert my eyes from the Wall Street Journal and USA Today.

There are also big glaring posters slapped to flat surfaces all around me advertising new products and TV shows. Don't look! I told myself.

Thrilling Conclusion
I thought schlepping my carry-on bag and stripping down for the security check were chief arduous requirements of air travel in the 21st century. Now I've made things worse for myself. I have to run this gantlet to avoid the News-zilla and his minions.

But I would be dissembling if I didn't admit there's a fun side to escaping the media's attempts to reach out and touch me. It reminds me of being a child and hiding from my brothers when they wanted to get older brother to play with them. I hold my breath and they walk on past my secret hiding place, muttering in frustration. Where did he go?

And I'm quietly laughing to myself. Because I've won. At least for now. - V.W.

PS: A question arose about whether it's "gantlet" or "gauntlet." Although people pronounce it "gauntlet," the word spelled that way actually refers to a glove, as in "throw down the gauntlet". "Gantlet," per the AP Style Book,  is the proper spelling of an obstacle course designed to severely test a person.


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Black Out



Still Life With Flat Screen Unplugged, 2010

 
Last night our son made me feel good about being Van Winkled. He emerged at 6 p.m. from the Williams-Couric-Sawyer-Major Pharmaceutical Companies half-hour and slammed the door on the TV room.

"What a waste of time!"

Apparently not much happened on our planet yesterday. He also said the feature stories "sucked."

At that point I started trying to cheat. I asked, "So since I started this project nothing very momentous has occurred?"

"Well," he hesitated, knowing very well what I was up to. "Let's just say there's only been one thing. We would have definitely talked about it over dinner. Then that would have been it."

He clammed up. I started to obsess. What could this bit of news I missed have been? He reminded me. He's saving the info for me in a file on the desktop of my computer. He's labeled it "Daddy No-No". And guess what. Until Sept. 11, 2011, it will be password protected.

"It's a long password, Dad."

Let's see:  aa29ry8ab0? 

Or:   g2r2weqa129p?

Or could it be: 1whya4qw-don't0-you98a09[0just-0-give07up?


V.W.