And Now There Will Be A Fourth

Posted Jan 26, 2009 by Tom McEwen

Updated Jan 26, 2009 at 06:11 PM

Tampa cashes in the winning football lottery ticket for a fourth Super Bowl Sunday when Art Rooney and Family’s Pittsburgh Steelers and Bill Bidwell’s Arizona Cardinals are the featured stars in the Super Bowl XLIII.

With just about a perfect place for it—the most functional Raymond James Stadium on the perfect field of grass grown just for these precious few sports hours.

The payoffs will be record despite our lousy economic times. Ticket prices are so inflated, the advertising and marketing sources so high, and the NFL Experience next door, which the then-Super Bowl’s version of P.T. Barnum, Jim Steeg, started here in 1981.

This is another magical achievement of the NFL.

The two blocked streets are double fenced, a football and fun island where the Buccaneers played with a 0-4 finish, resulting in the dismissal of Coach Jon Gruden by the Buc-owning Malcolm Glazer Family a few days ago.

Reid Sigmon, executive director of the fourth Super Bowl here, says all’s fine. No surprises have arisen, no emergencies. His primary concern, as it is for all involved, is the weather, and yet, you can only worry about that so much. Gosh, if it had only been scheduled this Sunday past.

Oh, yes, the next three Super Bowl locales are taken, but look for Paul Catoe and his hustlers to be after a fifth immediately, if this one in front of us comes off as expected, swimmingly. 

Now Buc fans who years ago survived an 0-26 start in the older Big Sombrero Stadium, as announcer Chris Berman identified that original Bucko home, north abit where they park cars now, have a choice of who to support in this Steelers-Cardinal game ahead. Both of the owning families of the Steelers and Cardinals supported the Buc drive to win the franchise in 1981, then in winning each of the past three Tampa-staged Super Bowls and this one just ahead.

Dan Rooney also was chairman of the expansion committee that chose Tampa in 1981 in Detroit. Not much fun for me. Frugality forced me to room up there with Bid Chairman Leonard Levy, who can outsnore and can outsmoke anybody you and I know, and, I guess, outwork about anybody on behalf of Tampa that I know.

  The previous Super Bowls were beautifully presented, and received, the rain on the weekend of the first in 1984, stopped to make room for sunshine and a perfect day for the game Raiders of Coach Tom Flores to slam Joe Theisman’s Redskins 38-9.  The most recent on 2001, was also a rout, 34-7, by Baltimore over the New York Giants, with quarterback Trent Dilfer playing the hero that he was so seldom when he was a Buccaneer on that same field.

A specialt memory of that game for me was when a well-dressed young man came up to me in the pressbox during the game with a full media credential on his chest and said he was a phony. He wanted me to know he’d faked his credential by talking his way into the media authenticating area, made photographs, then made his badge.  He worked for Pitney Bose, he said. He also said all they wanted to do was to do it. Our photographer took a picture of him and his badge and wrote a little story for The Tribune to go with it the next day.  Never heard from him again.

The only truly hard-fought game came when the Bowl didn’t need it. Oh, the Giants beat Buffalo 20-19 when New York’s Scott Norwood missed a makeable field goal on the game’s last play. But, this was the Jan. 27, 1991 game played just as Desert Storm began in the Mideast. It was surely, the most tense game and circumstances of games played at Raymond James, ever, indeed, in Tampa. With the USA government encouraging the game to be played, well, Commissioner Pete Rozelle, ordered it played, but with little fanfare.

The pre-game parties were cancelled. Security was at an all-time high. All were body-searched.  I wondered how Buffalo and Giant fans would react, not considered the NFL’s most patient. The stood quietly throughout and had a whale of a time.

The great vocalist Whitney Houston lip-synced the National Anthem, with the Tampa Symphony accompaniment in the end zone so dramatically as to draw tears and allow her to later successfully market the single.

Co-writer Joey Johnston went with me before the game up through and atop the pressbox to see and hear the great event. Police and troops were up on top of the stadium with their M-1 siper rifles, down on one knee at the ready. Black Hawks were around the stadium. Fly-overs were banned that nervous night. Everything was at the ready for everything, for either a single or mass disturbance. I had ridden to the game with Mayor Sandy Freedman, just in case.

Don’t know if Whitney Houston has been so beautifully received before or since.  Probably not. Everyone was so reverent. Many sung along. From where we overlooked and listened to that tense time, well, patriotism flourished, as it had been all week.

The USA Army Drum and Bugle Corps performed at an NFL Hall of Fame dinner that Art Pepin and his Budweiser, and George Steinbrenner and his Yankees had sponsored at old Curtis Hixon Hall. GMS got the drum corps to perform. I emceed that one, too, with Don Shula and Tom Landry and GMS participants, which was televised live. Bob Hope headlined the entertainment, and both Al Hirt and Lionel Hampton played with their orchestras.

After Super Bowl XXV, Tribune Executive Sports Editor Richard Lord and I went to the parking lot to leave in our cars. He left first. I somehow managed to close the trunk with my keys in the trunk and the motor running.  Wife Linda had to come to my rescue. 

I later heard that Richard Lord gave out of gas on the Gandy Bridge and bummed a ride to a gas station from a St. Petersburg Times delivery man.