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Out of Left Field |
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More Than $8 Million |
By STAN ISAACS
of TheColumnists.com
At the TV Hearthside, Jan. 26
The cliché was
that Oakland Raider owner Al Davis laughed all the way to the
bank when he held up the Tampa Bay Buccaneers for $8 million
and two first and second round draft picks last year in order
to allow Jon Gruden to leave Oakland and become the coach of
the Bucs.
It is not unlikely that Davis, whose mantra of passion is “win
baby,” is choking on his bank book and those draft picks
now because Gruden and his Bucs whipped Oakland, 48-21, Sunday
and deprived Davis of the fourth Super Bowl he craved.
Davis is a football genius. He has been a coach, general manager,
president of the American Football League when it challenged
the then-entrenched National Football League and the major presence
of the Raiders when he took over as coach and general manger
in 1963. He was a creative maverick who helped bring about the
peace between the NFL and AFL that led to the creation of the
Super Bowl in 1967. But he has also been a negative force who
moved his team out of Oakland to Los Angeles, then took it back
to Oakland, while suing the league contending he still owned
rights to the Los Angeles market. He became in effect the equivalent
of Walter O’Malley, who spirited a successful Dodgers baseball
franchise out of Brooklyn to the riches handed him by Los Angeles.
The ABC telecast of the game showed picture upon picture of Gruden,
a Robert Redford look-alike. Fair enough, but with each successful
Tampa play that moved the Bucs closer to victory, there should
have been some shots of Davis, sitting in the darker recesses
of the stadium the natives call the Q. Only in the hours-and-hours-long
pre-game show were viewers given a brief shot of Davis.
The game turned out to be satisfactory for many viewers because
it was a victory for the lesser of two evils. Tampa’s loudmouths,
Warren Saap and Keyshawn Johnson, are a tad less offensive than
Davis and Bill Romanowski, the Oakland linebacker with a mouth
and a reputation as a dirty player that is not unwarranted.
If the telecast didn’t show enough of Davis, the cameras
were Saaphappy with the Bucs’ defensive orator. Saap seemingly
never stopped gesturing and talking but it seemed a little much
to put the cameras on him after the first two touchdowns by the
Tampa offense. Keyshawn Johnson was relatively subdued for him,
though he managed as ever to station himself near Gruden when
he was on the sidelines, knowing that the cameras frequently
went to the coach.
* * *
Tampa allowed an early field goal by Oakland, but dominated the
game after that. So much so that it looked for awhile early in
the fourth period that the only suspense left in the evening
was to determine if the magicians Penn & Teller’s prediction
in the pre-game show would stand up. The prestidigitators, in
Times Square in New York, picked the final score and put their
prediction in a pickle jar from the Carnegie Delicatessen which
was watched over by Marines.
After the game, the cameras went back to Times Square in the
snow where the pickle jar was opened up and voila, Penn &
Teller had called the exact score. Call it a pickle tickle (and
wince).
* * *
The pre-game show was all commercials and all promotional spots
all the time. The game got in the way of the halftime show which
was one more example of Oscar Wilde’s line, “Nothing
succeeds like excess.”
* * *
Tampa dominated so much into the middle of the third quarter
that Jerry Rice, the greatest pass catcher of all time, not only
didn’t catch a pass, it seemed as if quarterback Rich Gannon
couldn’t get the ball to him. When Rice started catching
passes in the middle of the third quarter, Oakland’s offense
began to jell a bit, and it helped the Raiders score two touchdowns
in the fourth quarter that breathed some competitive life in
the game for a while.
* * *
There were five Raiders out for the pre-game coin toss. They
called heads and it came up tails for the Bucs. This reminded
me of the time the NFL honored the deceased immortal coach Vince
Lombardi by having his wife, Marie, do the coin toss. When she
was asked, “What do you think your husband would say about
this?” she said, “He’d say, ‘get the hell
off the field.’"
* * *
Of all the pre-game promos, I liked best the one for the ABC
show “The Practice” that lampooned the offensive beer
spot that has scantily-clad women mud wrestling. This one had
men wrestling in the mud while stripped to the waist and the
female members of the cast saying, “Men are dumb.”
* * *
This was not Gannon’s day, but I liked his comment that
he was a hard-working guy from Philadelphia, a blue collar town.
He said, “You can take the boy out of Philly, but you can’t
take Philly out of the boy.”
Marvelous Mike, a pal of mine who is a passioniato of the Philadelphia
Eagles, was so disgusted by the Eagles’ inferior play in
losing to the Bucs in the NFL championship game a week earlier
that he said he was off football and wouldn’t watch the
Super Bowl. The way Tampa beat Oakland, it became obvious that
it was the Bucs superior play and not the Eagles inadequacy that
day.
* * *
Tampa Bay won, baby. Tampa Bay won.
© 2003 by Stan Isaacs. The Stan Isaacs caricature is ©2001
by Jim Hummel.
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