Fear and Loathing at Rolling Stone (51 page)

At this point I was seized by both arms and jerked backward, spilling my drink and interrupting the climax of my sermon. “You crazy bastard!” a voice screamed. “Look what you’ve done! The manager just called. Get back in the room and lock the fucking door! He’s going to bust us!”

It was the TV man from Pittsburgh, trying to drag me back from my pulpit. I slipped out of his grasp and returned to the balcony. “This is Super Sunday!” I screamed. “I want every one of you worthless bastards down in the lobby in ten minutes so we can praise God and sing the national anthem!”

At this point I noticed the TV man sprinting down the hall toward the elevators, and the sight of him running caused something to snap in my brain. “There he goes!” I shouted. “He’s headed for the lobby! Watch out! It’s Al Davis. He has a knife!”

I could see people moving on all the balconies now, and also down in the lobby. Then, just before I ducked back in my room, I saw one of the glass-walled elevators starting down, with a single figure inside it ... he was the most visible man in the building; a trapped and crazy animal descending slowly—in full view of everybody from the busboys in the ground-floor coffee shop to Jimmy the Greek on the balcony above me—to certain captivity by that ugly crowd at the bottom.

I watched for a moment, then hung the Do Not Disturb sign on my doorknob and double-locked the door. That elevator, I knew, would be empty when it got to the lobby. There were at least five floors, on the way down, where he could jump out and bang on a friendly door for safe refuge ... and the crowd in the lobby had not seen him clearly enough, through the tinted-glass wall of the elevator, to recognize him later on.

And there was not much time for vengeance, anyway, on the odd chance that anyone cared.

It had been a dull week, even by sportswriters’ standards, and now the day of the Big Game was finally on us. Just one more free breakfast, one more ride, and by nightfall the thing would be over.

The first media bus was scheduled to leave the hotel for the stadium at ten thirty, four hours before kickoff, so I figured that gave me some
time to relax and act human. I filled the bathtub with hot water, plugged the tape recorder with both speakers into a socket right next to the tub, and spent the next two hours in a steam-stupor, listening to Rosalie Sorrels and Doug Sahm, chewing idly on a small slice of Mr. Natural, and reading the
Cocaine Papers
of Sigmund Freud.

Around noon I went downstairs to the Imperial Ballroom to read the morning papers over the limp dregs of the NFL’s free breakfast, then I stopped at the free bar for a few Bloody Marys before wandering outside to catch the last bus for the stadium—the CBS special—complete with more Bloody Marys, screwdrivers, and a roving wagon-meister who seemed to have everything under control.

On the bus to the stadium, I made a few more bets on Miami. At that point I was picking up everything I could get, regardless of the points. It had been a long and jangled night, but the two things that needed to be done before game time—my sermon and my lead—were already done, and the rest of the day looked easy: just try to keep out of trouble and stay straight enough to collect on all my bets.

The consensus among the 1,600 or so sportswriters in town favored Miami by almost two to one ... but there are only a handful of sportswriters in this country with enough sense to pour piss out of their own boots, and by Saturday night there was an obvious drift among the few “smart” ones to Minnesota, with a seven-point cushion. Paul Zimmerman of the
New York Post
, author of
A Thinking Man’s Guide to Pro Football
and the sportswriting fraternity’s scaled-down answer to the
Washington Post
’s political guru David Broder, had organized his traditional pressroom betting pool—where any sportswriter who felt up to it could put $1 in the pot and predict the final score (in writing, on the pressroom bulletin board, for all the world to see) . . . and whoever came closest would pick up $1,000 or so dollars.

Or at least that was the theory. But in reality there were only about four hundred writers willing to risk a public prediction on the outcome of a game that—even to an amateur like me—was so obvious that I took every bet I could get against the Vikings, regardless of the spread. As late as 10:30 on Sunday morning, I was calling bookies on both coasts, doubling and tripling my bets with every point I could get from five to
seven—and by 2:35 on Sunday afternoon, five minutes after the kickoff, I knew I was home free.

Moments later, when the Dolphins drove the length of the field for another touchdown, I began collecting money. The final outcome was painfully clear less than halfway through the first quarter—and shortly after that,
Sport
magazine editor Dick Schaap reached over my shoulder in the press section and dropped two bills—a five and a twenty—in my lap.

I smiled back at him. “Jesus,” I said. “Are you giving up
already
? This game is far from over, my man. Your people are only twenty-one points down, and we still have a whole half to go.”

He shook his head sadly.

“You’re not counting on a second-half rally?” I asked, pocketing his money.

He stared at me, saying nothing ... then he rolled his eyes up toward the soupy mist above the stadium where the Goodyear Blimp was hovering, almost invisible in the fog.

In the increasingly rigid tradition of Super Bowl games, this one was never in doubt. The Dolphins took the opening kickoff and stomped the Viking defense like they were a gang of sick junkies. The “Purple People Eaters”—Minnesota’s fabled “front four”—ate nothing but crow on that long afternoon in Houston. It was one of the dullest and most predictable football games I’ve ever had to sit through, on TV or anywhere else. My final score prediction in Zimmerman’s pool had been Miami, 27–10—3 points high, on both sides, from the final score of 24–7. It was not close enough, apparently, to win the sportswriters’ pool—but it was close enough to beat most of the bookies, wizards, and experts.

There is a definite, perverse kind of pleasure in beating the “smart money”—in sports, politics, or anything else—and the formula for doing it seems dangerously simple: take the highest odds you can get
against the conventional wisdom
—but never bet against your own instinct or the prevailing karma.

Moments after the game, standing in the sawdust-floored circus tent where the players were being led in, one by one, for mass interviews with the sporting press, I was approached by Larry Merchant, author of a recently published book called
The National Football Lottery
, a
shrewd layman’s analysis about how to beat the bookies by betting on pro football games. I was just finishing a long talk with Dolphins owner Joe Robbie about the relationship between national politics, pro football, and the cruel fate of our mutual friend George McGovern, when Merchant tapped me on the shoulder with one hand and handed me a $50 bill with the other. He said nothing at all. I had given him Minnesota with six and a half. The final spread was seventeen.

I smiled and stuck the bill in my wallet. Joe Robbie seemed not to notice. Gambling on the outcome of games is strictly verboten among owners, players, coaches, and all other employees of the National Football League, and being seen in public in the presence of an obvious gambling transaction makes these people very uncomfortable. The only thing worse than being seen with a known gambler is finding yourself in the white-light glare of a network TV camera in the company of an infamous drug abuser ... and here was the owner of the winning Super Bowl team, moments after accepting the Lombardi Trophy in front of three hundred cameras, talking with obvious enthusiasm—about the likelihood of President Nixon’s impeachment—to a person long-since identified by the NFL security watchdogs as both a gambler
and
a drug freak.

I half expected Robbie to jerk his coat over his head and sprint for the tent exit, but he never even blinked. He kept right on talking about the McGovern campaign, then shook my hand again and invited me out to the Dolphin victory party that night at the Marriott Motor Hotel. “Come on out and celebrate with us,” he said. “It should be a nice party.”

“Why not?” I said. Behind me I could hear George Kimball, bellowing in the throes of a long-delayed acid frenzy ... and as I turned to deal with Kimball I remembered that Joe Robbie was originally a politician—a candidate for Congress, among other things, on the left-wing Farmer-Labor ticket in Minnesota—and there was something about him that suggested a sense of politics or at least political sensitivity that you rarely encounter among men who own and run professional football teams. Both Robbie and his coach, Don Shula, seem far more relaxed and given to quick flashes of humor than the kind of militaristic, puritanical jocks and PR men you normally have to deal with on the business/power levels of the NFL. This was just as obvious—especially with Shula—
before
the game, as well as after it.

In stark contrast to Shula, Viking coach Bud Grant spent most of Super Week acting like a Marine Corps drill sergeant with a terminal case of the piles. Grant’s public behavior in Houston called up ominous memories of Redskin coach George Allen’s frantic pre-game bitching last year in Los Angeles.

The parallel was hard to miss, and it seemed almost certain—in both cases—that the attitudes of the coaches had to either reflect or powerfully influence the attitudes of the players ... and in high-pressure games between supposedly evenly matched teams, pre-game signs like confidence, humor, temper tantrums, and bulging eyeballs are not to be ignored when betting-time comes.

Or at least not by me ... although there is definitely another side to that coin, and it comes up just often enough to keep the game interesting. There is a factor known among players as “flakiness,” which translates roughly as a kind of “team personality,” characterized by moodiness and an almost manic-depressive unpredictability both on and off the field.

Miami is decidedly
not
a flakey team; they are consistent to the point of tedium. “We’re a money team,” says all-pro defensive back Jake Scott. “When something has to be done, we do it.” And the record is there to prove it: the Dolphins have won two straight Super Bowls and lost only two games in the past two years. One of these was a meaningless, late-season giveaway to Baltimore last season, when Shula was resting his regulars for the play-offs—and the other was a potentially ominous 12–7 loss, in the second game of this season, to the Oakland Raiders—known throughout the league as the flakiest team in pro football.

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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—