Outside my hotel window I can see the Superdome, where inside at this very moment Michigan and Virginia Tech are playing in the Sugar Bowl.
I'm back in the newly-reopened and remodeled (the after-effects of Hurricane Katrina) Hyatt Regency, a place where I spent many weeks after Christmas waiting to cover Sugar Bowls and/or National Championship Games.
I'm not inside the game tonight, having turned down a ticket to the game. It is, after all, Michigan and Virginia Tech; it's not like its real football (and if you're from the South you know what I mean by that).
But it does bring back memories.
Particularly the Hyatt. I can't think of the Hyatt without thinking of that trip in 1992. From the moment we arrived, we kept hearing from off to the west of the Superdome (where the Hornet's arena is now) what we thought were fireworks going off, almost non-stop. Since it was approaching New Year's Eve, we didn't think anything of it.
However, later we found out what it was. My good friend and noted sportswriter Tommy Hicks was sitting in his room somewhere around the 16th floor of the Hyatt when he felt something sting his leg. He looked down and saw a bullet. He then looked at the outside wall of his room and saw a small hole. Yes - a bullet had come through the outside wall (not the window, the actual wall) and hit him in the leg.
Fortunately, it didn't hit hard enough to puncture the skin. But he was rattled. It's a long, very funny story - particularly when the hotel management asked Tommy not to tell his story to the media (this was the media hotel and it was full), to which Tommy replied, "You don't understand. I am the media; all my friends are in the media. They already know."
As I've said before, I've spent a lot of my life at bowl games, and there are some crazy stories.
Beatwriters - the guys assigned by their newspapers to the daily coverage of a team - used to arrive in the host city before the team so as to write about the team's arrival. That often meant spending a week in the bowl city location.
I've been to games in New Orleans, Atlanta, Nashville, Memphis, Orlando, Tampa, Jacksonville, Miami, Shreveport, Dallas, Phoenix, Los Angeles, El Paso, Fort Lauderdale - and so on. Most of those I've been to more than once.
The first Music City Bowl in Nashville was between Alabama and Virginia Tech and was played in Vanderbilt University's stadium (this was before the Titans' stadium was finished). It was the coldest I've ever been, so cold the ink in my pen froze, which was OK because it was too cold to write notes anyway. The interview room after the game was way too small, and the temperature change so great that cameramen had the lenses on their cameras fog up so bad they couldn't shoot decent post-game video. Shoot, there were guys' who wore glasses whose glasses fogged up so bad they couldn't see. And you could wipe them all you wanted and it didn't matter; everything just kept fogging up again.
We were in Tampa one year, and the team stayed in a hotel directly across the street from a strip club. Now in those days (and maybe it's still true), the strip clubs in Tampa were 'dry,' meaning they weren't allowed to serve alcohol. While this rule was designed to discourage attendance, I was told it also meant they could allow a younger age group into the club. And while they couldn't sell alcohol, patrons could bring their own alcohol in.
That's only relevant because I was standing in the parking lot of the team hotel with a former assistant coach when a certainly Alabama lineman came walking across the parking lot toward the strip club, carrying two cases of beer on his left shoulder. The coach stepped out from where we were talking to confront the player.
"Where you going?" he asked.
"Uh, out for a walk,'' said the player, who knew he'd been caught but was undoubtedly praying that this coach - who happened to be his position coach - was either stupid or incredibly merciful.
"What are you carrying there?" the coach asked.
"Uh, pizza, Coach,'' said the player. "Two boxes of pizzas."
Unfortunately the coach wasn't that stupid, and the player was sent home the next day.
Perhaps not surprisingly, that very same player was sent home from the next year's bowl game in a completely different city for a similar violation of rules. The guy was a starter, but I don't think he ever played in a bowl game in his career. I guess there was something about being out of town that he just couldn't handle.
Another oddity was talking to players from other conferences, particularly schools from the North. I remember Alabama was playing Michigan in the 1980s and I was doing a story on a Michigan player. He kept referring to the head coach as "Lloyd,"as in Lloyd Carr. I was surprised by this reference, but it turns out all the players referred to the head coach by his first name.
Later I found out it wasn't just Michigan. Notre Dame, Penn State - at almost every northern school I covered, the players referred to their head coach by his first name.
This was - and is - unheard of in the South. You'd never hear an Auburn player refer to Gene Chizik as "Gene'' or an Alabama player refer to Nick Saban as "Nick." I guess it's a cultural thing.
My favorite bowl trips were to El Paso and the Sun Bowl. It was a horrible/terrific trip; the joke was that El Paso wasn't the end of the world, but the end of the world was right across the border. Consider that if you flew from Birmingham to El Paso you usually had to change planes in Dallas, and it was disconcerting to know that when you arrived in Dallas you were still not halfway to El Paso.
But once in El Paso, the people there went out of their way to make sure you had a good time. No bowl committee came close to taking care of media the way the Sun Bowl people did. They had a hospitality room (food, drink, and sometimes even a live band) that was open 24/7. If you wanted to go somewhere, they had someone not just willing to take you, but insisting on taking you.
It was in El Paso that I bought my first pair of cowboy boots. The bowl took the two participating teams to the Tony Lama factory and the players and coaches all got boots. I was standing in the hospitality room with Donnie Webb, who worked for Anniston then but is now in Syracuse, and casually mentioned I'd like to get some boots. Donnie said he'd go with me if I wanted to go, and suddenly this hostess said, "Come on, I"m driving. We'll go to the Tony Lama factory outlet is, where they sell 'seconds'." And just like that we were gone (and both of us bought a pair of boots; in my case, the first of many).
You could say almost anything - "I'd like to go to a Chinese laundry" - and some member of the hospitality committee was there saying, "I know where one is. Let's go, I've got a car."
The other thing about El Paso is the weather could change faster than any place I've seen. One year, we arrived at the game that morning and it was warm and sunny. I think I had a light jacket. But by halftime, it was snowing - and the field was getting covered. It was the fastest drop in temperature I've ever seen. I remember we all left the press box to go to the souvenir stands and buy Sun Bowl sweat shirts. It was like nothing I'd ever experienced.
We were in Tampa once for a bowl game when the Alabama basketball team happened to be playing in the Red Lobster Classic up the road in Orlando. So we all trucked up to Orlando for two days and one night in the middle of the week for basketball.
Orlando was also famous for a row of strip clubs with names like "Thee Doll House." This was in the days when the company would give you 'advance money,' meaning all the money you'd need for the week - for hotels, meals, travel, etc. - in cash rather than you charging everything on your own credit card and then having to wait to be reimbursed. Often guys would go on the road with several thousand dollars in their pocket.
So that night, I'm sitting on press row at tip-off of the Alabama game and we're all wondering where this one sportswriter was. He showed up right before the end of the game, looking like he hadn't slept or eaten anything in 24 hours. But he did look like he'd had plenty to drink.
Turns out, he'd spent the night at what we used to call the "redneck ballet,'' where he'd met this one particular "ballerina."
"She was really a nice girl,'' he told us. "She started giving me two dances for the price of one. She was sweet."
She also got all of his money. All of it. His week's worth of advance money.
Fortunately he'd paid his hotel in advance, but he had no money for meals, for gas, for anything extra for the rest of the week.
Of course we pitched in and loaned him money. Even if we never got it back, we got so much mileage out of that story (and many others like it) that it was worth it.
And he wasn't the only sportswriter who had been known to spend all his expense money the first night in a new town.
This has gone on way too long, but two quick stories.
Another guy I know wore cowboy boots, too, and he often drank a bit too much. One night he passed out in the hospitality room, and we filled one of his boots with beer. He woke up, and we told someone had urinated in his boot!
He was disgusted. Even when we told him later we were kidding, that it was 'just' beer, he wouldn't believe it.
It was snowing the next day as he walked out of the hotel in his socks to the nearest shoe store, which happened to be just about a block away. He walked in and delivered one of the greatest opening lines ever: "Sir, you're about to make the easiest sale you've ever made in your life!"
The second story?
Another hungover sportswriter who showed up just as the game he was assigned to cover was ending. He was desperate, and somehow managed to convince a guy from another part of the state to let him copy his story (this was in the days before the internet, so it wasn't likely anyone would see both stories).
As the hangover raged and the sportswriter typed off the other guys' work, he looked at me with the saddest eyes and said, "To think that this late in my career I've been reduced to copying crap like this."
Speaking of good lines - one more story (and any sportswriter has a million of them). We're at a dinner the night before a big game. A buddy of mine was a heavy drinker, to say the least. We'd travel together sometimes, and I remember he'd get in the passenger seat, pull out a bottle of Jack Daniels, unscrew the top, and throw it out the window with the farewell, "We won't be needing this anymore!"
Anyway, we're at this bowl-sponsored dinner the night before the big game. This guy is already drunk when they serve the steak. He decides he can't eat the steak, but doesn't want to give it up, so he slips it into the side pocket of his sport coat.
The next day he's at the stadium, wearing the only sport coat he brought with him. Completely serious, he asks, "What's this big stain around my side pocket?"
We tell him the story - which he doesn't remember - and he looks inside the pocket and, sure enough, there's a steak in there.
His reaction?
"Thank God they weren't serving soup!"
Ah, if only all of us Southern sportswriters could write as well as we could talk.
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