A Legendary Journalist Laments That the Super Bowl Has Sold Out

Would a former commissioner of the National Football League, the late Pete Rozelle, be thrilled that his beloved Super Bowl is at Las Vegas this year, or is he instead rolling over in his grave? A veteran sports journalist and author, Jerry Izenberg, votes for the latter.Mr. Izenberg, 93, is a longtime New Jersey sports columnist. He went to the first 53 Super Bowls, just one of two men to do so. He counts the late Rozelle as a personal friend. Mixing the league with sports gambling is something Rozelle wanted to avoid at all costs, Mr. Izenberg said, and he probably wouldn’t be happy that the Super Bowl has gone from a sporting event to a high-priced spectacle at Sin City. The Big Game, in other words, has sold out.“What businesses are really going to make the money: high-end restaurants; every casino and every casino hotel,” Mr. Izenberg told the Sun. “They’re going to make the money. The last time I went to a Super Bowl was five years ago. Now I wouldn’t care if they played it in my backyard — maybe I would care if they didn’t pay rent.”The Kansas City Chiefs of the American Football Conference face the San Francisco 49ers of the National Football Conference on Sunday at Allegiant Stadium for the championship. The Chiefs, led by quarterback savant Patrick Mahomes, won the title last year. Mr. Izenberg covered the Super Bowl between 1967 and 2019 and said he watched it go from a game, albeit a special one, to a spectacle that has lost its roots. He isn’t going to attend Super Bowl LVIII even though he lives about 30 minutes from where it’s going to be played. The Super Bowl, especially at Las Vegas, is now a weekend get-away for the rich and the corporate, Mr. Izenberg says. He laments that it has squeezed out the hardcore football fans — and journalists — who helped make the game what it is.“The best city to have it is Miami,” Mr. Izenberg said. “There’s hotels and meals for every pocketbook. It’s all spread out so there’s no shortage of stuff.”Mr. Izenberg recalls the day when the Big Game was a rich opportunity for in-depth journalism about the players, the coaches, and the league to who could wear the wildest outfits and ask the stupidest questions on media day, now called Super Bowl Opening Night.“I’m interviewing Dexter Manley of the Washington Redskins, who graduated college without being able to read,” Mr. Izenberg said. “I’m sitting in the stands talking with him and he’s telling me this great story. Here comes Julie ‘Downtown’ Brown with a hairdresser and her this and that. She walks right past me and puts her hands on his thigh and says, ‘Can I speak to you for a moment?’ Like he was going to say, ‘No.’ Then came the person asking, ‘If you were a tree what tree would you be?’ That’s when I really got mad at the Super Bowl.”Mr. Izenberg is a walking encyclopedia of the NFL and is especially proud of his book “Rozelle,” published in 2014. The biography of the legendary commissioner is a trip through the early years of the NFL, especially the time just before and after the merger between the American Football League and the National Football League, which ultimately led to the creation of the Super Bowl.Mr. Izenberg relates Rozelle’s relentless need to protect the integrity of the game by suspending star players Paul Hornung and Alex Karras for their ties to gambling. The book also goes behind the scenes on the decision to play games the Sunday after the Friday assassination of President Kennedy and Rozelle’s frequent battles with a legendary Raiders owner, Al Davis.“We fought. We argued, and we laughed,” Mr. Izenberg said of his relationship with Rozelle, who died in 1996.Mr. Izenberg also is a font of knowledge on such esoterica as why New Orleans was awarded a Super Bowl before it got a franchise and the time AFL scouts held college prospects “prisoners” in a hotel before the merger to keep them from being signed by the NFL. “Babysitters” is what those de facto guards were called, Mr. Izenberg explains. “How do you hold a guy who is 6-10 and 240 pounds prisoner? That’s ridiculous. Every time a guy wanted to leave they would throw him another broad or another set of car keys, and that was it — they stayed.”Even Rozelle probably couldn’t have imagined what the Super Bowl has become, with suites going from $20 million and individual tickets priced as high as $18,000 on the secondary market. That’s a long way from Super Bowl I, where a ticket cost $12.Mr. Izenberg, whose book on baseball great Larry Doby, who integrated the American league, will be published in March, grins and recalls having lunch with Kansas City center E.J. Holub two days before Super Bowl I. “This game is critical,” Holub told Mr. Izenberg, who thought the player was talking about the chance for the AFL champs to prove they were just as good as the NFL champion Green Bay Packers. “That’s got nothing to do with it,” Mr. Holub said. “If we win our share is $15,000.”“That would be tip money today,” Mr. Izenberg says.

A Legendary Journalist Laments That the Super Bowl Has Sold Out

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