South Florida Sun-Sentinel (Sunday)
South Florida’s the site of memorable sights
Past Super Bowl weeks here difficult to forget, for better or worse
I was asked to give a proper welcome to arriving Super Bowl week visitors. So here it is:
Find a bail bondsman, pronto, before Antonio Brown corners the market on them.
Do you really want some fake smile from me offering a welcome — and is any common citizen really happy there’s even more traffic on I-95? — or some practical knowledge to survive the next week?
Keep your lawyer on speed dial too. Just in case.
For the next seven days, something will be lurking to ensnare even the most innocent, most moral and certainly the most religious of visitors. Or have you forgotten the Super Bowl moment of Atlanta safety Eugene Robinson being named the NFL’s Christian Man of the Year by morning and being arrested for soliciting a prostitute by sundown? I know what some readers are thinking: Why can’t you bask in the height of football accomplishment and weave a beat-theodds story? That’s part of the coming week, sure, but there’s an equal and opposite part of the week called “Tuesday night on South Beach.”
Experience tells us nothing ever goes as planned in our Super Bowl. The game’s
legacy in South Florida isn’t just, say, a New Orleans’ onside kick changing the big game so Drew Brees defeated Indianapolis’ Peyton Manning in 2010.
The larger legacy of that game was the rain. Some Indiana visitors are still drying off. It was a deluge straight off the pages of Leviticus to the point NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell proclaimed South Florida would never host another Super Bowl until an umbrella was put over the stadium.
Goodell wasn’t done either. The Dolphins were also held ransom by having to hold a “home” game in London to get this Super Bowl. It’s happening again during the 2020 season, which is dumb piled on unnecessary, though this seems the only way the home team can be involved in a Super Bowl.
Look, South Florida shouldn’t be extorted to host this game. It only belongs in cities that serve fresh snapper filet.
That guarantees the sun, the sea and a measure of sin for everyone to rub against. Some always rub too hard, as its history here tells.
In the 1975 Super Bowl, Dallas linebacker Thomas “Hollywood” Henderson ingested crack cocaine from a Vicks inhaler during the game. He got away with it until a changed life had him fess up.
Others weren’t so lucky. In the 1989 Super Bowl, Cincinnati running back Stanley Wilson had a relapse of cocaine the night before the game and was found passed out in the team’s Broward hotel.
That was the Super Bowl in which something as simple as going to a movie turned into something as complex as watching an Overtown riot that led to civic unrest, a policeman on trial, eight people being shot and the cancellation of a Miami Heat game.
“I went to see ‘Mississippi Burning’ and came out to see Miami burning,” Cincinnati defensive back Solomon Wilcots said.
Our world, we hope, is better from those dark days. It’s not so much civic threats that will rise from this Super Bowl as civic temptation.
The week is like one of those made-for-TV obstacles courses where someone survives rope swings, mud crawls, tire climbs and multiple trampoline jumps only to be knocked into the water by the padded oar.
Of course, every once in a while, an epic moment arrives. In 1989, it was Joe Montana, defining his cool legacy in the huddle before his game-winning drive.
“Hey, isn’t that John Candy?” he asked.
Indianapolis coach Tony Dungy became the first black coach to win a Super Bowl here in 2007, and San Francisco quarterback Steve Young saying to teammates after he finally won in 1995, “Someone take this monkey off my back, please!”
The Super Bowl moment that made the Super Bowl is ours too. In 1969, Joe Namath wore a fur coat in a Miami Springs hotel that no longer exists and accepted an award from the Miami Touchdown Club that’s no longer given.
“I’d like to personally thank all the single girls in New York for their contribution,” he said.
“Sit down!” a heckler shouted.
In the ensuing volley, Namath became emotional enough to “guarantee” his Jets of the American Football League would beat the heavyweight Baltimore Colts of the NFL.
We can only hope for history like that this Super Bowl week. But, just to be sure, double-check that your lawyer’s on speed dial.