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Friday, February 3, 2006
Press hits bottom in Corporateville
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Furman Bisher
Detroit — Bear with me. Detroit again.
The Major League All-Star game was no more than a hiccup during the baseball season. Here today, gone tomorrow. This time the Motor City was ready, lit up like 10 zillion Christmas trees, mainly because all the big-time auto corporations are in this thing together. Super Bowl 40, all for one and one for all. The NFL Lions are owned by the Ford family, who built the playroom where the game is played. The media center is in the General Motors Global Headquarters, which is wrapped around the Marriott Hotel where we stay, and the official car of the game is Cadillac.
Not only that, but chairman of the whole works is Roger Penske, who has an empire of racing machines and wheels for rent. And get this, he doesn’t even live here. Penske came from Shaker Heights, Ohio. He’s into this production to the point he has been seen driving about town supervising garbage pickups. He’ll do anything for you, short of changing your oil.
I’ll have to guess that the most read item in the Detroit Free Press Friday morning was the weather forecast. Snow was in it, and Penske, when asked what he feared most, said, “A snow dump on Saturday,” such as happened on that Sunday in 1982, when the game was last in the neighborhood.
All has gone well up to now, to the point that the visiting press has been scraping bottom, and reached it the other day. Now, the two biggest celebrities in Detroit right now are Jerome Bettis, a native, known as “The Bus,” and his mama, Gladys. They have even done a television soup commercial to be shown sometime Sunday. So, when Jerramy Stevens, Seattle tight end and a placid fellow, said it would be a sad day when Bettis has to leave town without the trophy, Joey Porter, Steelers linebacker, snarled out in rebuttal, and snarling is something he does well.
The hungering press leaped all over it, like a bird on a June bug. “Word War XL” was the headline in the Free Press. Something at last to raise the hackles on the neck, they hoped. Frankly, it was little ado about nothing, and right now, the huntsmen are on the prowl again.
So bland has it been that some interviews turned into an inspection of faith. Seattle’s Mike Holmgren, when asked how a coach balances this game of violence with his Christianity, said, “People do look at it as a contradiction at times, think you can’t be a devout Christian and coach or play, but that couldn’t be further from the truth.”
Mack Strong is the Seahawks fullback from Georgia, and playing in the Northwest for 13 years, may as well have been on another planet until he was rediscovered in the Super Bowl. He has a strong religious base, and spoke of it as it relates to football. “I just look at it as an opportunity to glorify God. I feel like God has given me the talent and blessed me with the ability to play a long time and do the best with what He has given me.”
He and his wife have settled firmly in the nearby town of Kirkland, and created a family foundation there. Columbus has seen the last of him, except for visitation.
Just another little sidelight here, with an area touch. In 1972, Georgia Tech recruited a receiver named Steve Raible. After a good, solid career at Tech, Raible was drafted in the second round by Seattle. As one might suspect, he drifted off the Southern radar, but he played six seasons as a Seahawk, caught 68 passes for 1,017 yards, then broke into sports broadcasting, and to end the suspense, he became the news anchor at station KIRO-TV but still does play-by-play of Seahawks games. And will Sunday from Ford Field. Just thought you’d like to know what had become of Steve Raible.
Friday was more of the same. Both coaches performed. Holmgren was more entertaining than Pittsburgh’s Bill Cowher. The commissioner, Paul Tagliabue, did his state of the union act, but unlike the president, he invites questions. He didn’t get the one I wanted to ask, that Atlanta was turned down as a Super Bowl site on account of “unpredictable weather,” so how on earth did it wind up in Detroit again? Had it slipped his mind that there’s a roof in Atlanta, and it snows in Detroit?
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Emotional Starr pays homage to Lombardi
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Terence Moore
Detroit - They were all there, an impressive collection of former Super Bowl most valuable players, sitting around various parts of a ballroom of the Marriott Renaissance Center on Friday and telling stories. The most riveting ones came from Bart Starr, but what else is new? He always has the definitive subject.
Vince Lombardi. Not Pete Rozelle, the famous commissioner who married professional football with television forever. Not Red Grange, the Galloping Ghost, or Johnny Unitas, the ultimate competitor, or Jim Brown, the greatest running back, or Joe Montana, Mr. Comeback, or any of those other names that conjure up visions of excellence between goal posts.
What Starr preferred to mention often and dramatically before a captive audience gathered around his still finely tuned 72-year-old body was Lombardi, Lombardi, Lombardi. How appropriate, especially since the NFL championship game will take place on Sunday within this notoriously rough city that was a member of Lombardi’s Black & Blue division. Not only that, the Pittsburgh Steelers and the Seattle Seahawks will play in the 40th edition of this game that featured the Green Bay Packers of Starr and Lombardi winning the first two editions. Plus, the trophy is named after the late coach who still sends his old quarterback to tears.
This time, Starr was in mid-sentence when his eyes became a river. His story for the moment involved the summer of 1969, when Lombardi ran the Washington Redskins after retiring from the Packers, and when Lombardi visited Starr and his wife, Cherry, in Green Bay. “He said, ‘I’m really happy for the two of you. This is a beautiful home,” recalled Starr, now a Birmingham resident, pausing to collect himself. “(Cherry) said, ‘We owe all of this to you.’ He actually walked over to her and gave her a great, big hug. Then he gave me a big hug, and he walked right out the door. We always wondered if he, at that time, knew that he had the cancer.”
In a stunner to many, Lombardi died by the end of the next year, but his memory still lives. No, it still dominates professional football through the eternal magic of the Frozen Tundra of Lambeau Field, through the sights and sounds of NFL Films — mostly, through Paul Hornung, Forrest Gregg, Fuzzy Thurston and all of Lombardi’s others boys who also love to tell the stories. It’s just that none among those Packers of lore can do so with the zeal or the credentials of Starr.
At the end of his 16 years with the Packers, he was a Hall of Famer after five NFL championships (including those two Super Bowls in which he was the MVP after both of them), four trips to the Pro Bowl and a league MVP award. At the beginning of all of that, he was the struggling quarterback and punter from the University of Alabama who the pitiful Packers made the 200th selection of the 1956 draft.
Two years later, Starr was starting for a Packers team that won just once in 12 games. Then along came that voice for the ages before the 1959 season. That was back when the Packers management had the audacity to give its head coaching and general manager jobs to some offensive assistant coach from the New York Giants, but he had that voice. He also had that message on his first day with his new team, and the nearly verbatim memory of it all caused Starr’s river to flow more. With face glowing, Starr said of Lombardi’s speech, “He quickly turned to us, and he said, ‘Gentlemen, we’re going to relentlessly chase perfection knowing full well that we will not catch it, because perfection is unattainable.’ He said, ‘But we are going to relentlessly chase it, because, in the process, we will catch excellence.’ “
Then Starr paused, because he remembered how Lombardi paused back then before the late coach said, “I’m not remotely interested in being good.”
Between chuckles over that story and a slew of others involving those opening Super Bowl victories for the Packers, the evolution of the NFL through the years and more Lombardi, the old quarterback snatched a handkerchief from his back pocket. He needed something to dry up that river, but it didn’t work.
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