It’s definitely a Quiche-22 situation, this impending Super Bowl XXIX co-starring the San Francisco 49ers and San Diego Chargers.
No matter which team prevails Sunday evening, the state of California will become even more infatuated with itself than did New York during Superiority Complex XXV, though the Giants who beat Buffalo’s Bills actually play out of New Jersey.
That’s how fleeting fame can be. Only four years after the East Coast invented football, the West Coast now claims a patent on mecca status. San Francisco is where everybody wants to go to live, San Diego is where everybody wants to go to die, and never mind that in between, the Rams depart Los Angeles to find a place where somebody wants to buy tickets to a game.
Still, if Sunday’s tiff is a no-win proposition for us hicks from the nation’s midsection, business booms onward within the NFL, a league that works and plays.
At his annual season’s farewell address Friday, commissioner Paul Tagliabue cited a litany of facts and figures confirming the NFL’s fiscal fitness. While President Clinton bids to apply the Heimlich maneuver to Bud Selig and baseball, Tagliabue’s toughest dilemma involves how many pesos to charge for an expansion franchise in Mexico and when.
True, Tagliabue did have to fend off the usual allegations about ragged officiating. But here again, the NFL makes do. A couple months ago, supervisors admitted that Jerry Markbreit’s crew botched three calls that affected the course of a really crucial fray, Tampa Bay at Seattle.
Yet, Skokie’s own Markbreit gets Sunday’s assignment on merit, proving he is not only human, but an excellent referee. And he is not Chicago’s only representative in Miami. Jerry “The Gate Crasher” Berliant is also here and so ubiquitous at Super Bowl functions that NFL security has this theory about the existence of Berliant brothers, identical quintuplets.
Jerry has a way with words, mostly his, and by pure chance during hotel lobby patrol Friday, he came upon Markbreit. Berliant, in good throat and as ever anxious for a friend, initiated a conversation with Markbreit. Problem is, zebras must remain sealed off from the zoo for propriety’s sake. The moral to the story is this: Markbreit can still run at his age.
Michael McCaskey, yet another Chicago emissary, witnessed Markbreit’s fly pattern and smiled. The Bears’ owner then volunteered that he might draft a proposal to seed playoff teams, so as to restore competitive balance to Super Bowls. The idea of abandoning conferences for the post-season “has been floating around for a while,” according to McCaskey.
Tagliabue, however, seems unruffled by the prospect of an 11th straight NFC triumph. These things go in cycles, he said, and he has a point. What’s more significant is the ability of a San Diego team to succeed at something besides yachting.
In baseball, with apologies to the 1984 Cubs, the small-market Padres can’t beat a rug. They stage fire sales of players, a disgrace. But in football, same population, the Chargers manage to cope.
“It’s the system,” Tagliabue gushes, meaning revenue sharing and a salary cap.
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That doesn’t preclude ingenious ways around payroll limits by the 49ers, whom Tagliabue also praises for running a good shop. Just so long as they don’t risk a fine for being “too creative,” an accusation this typist-clerk studiously avoids.
It’s only the facts here, and we can report that coach Bobby Ross, dangerous with two weeks to prepare, has his Chargers so anxious that they’re removing pads earlier than usual at practice. Better instead to hurt the 49ers, if they can be caught.
Not likely. Make it 40-14 for San Francisco in another nolo contendere.
Which reminds us that Judge Lance Ito says jurors at the O.J. Simpson trial may watch the Super Bowl on TV. But haven’t they suffered enough already?