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The Ice House cometh
Posted: Friday January 28, 2000 09:39 PM
Each afternoon during the hype-heavy days leading up to Super Bowl XXXIV, SI's David Fleming will do his best to cut through the S.B.'s B.S. and offer his take on the goings-on. This is Flem's fifth file. ATLANTA -- O.K., so you guys want to know what it's like to be at the Super Bowl? Well, here, see if this gives you an idea. Thursday night I was working (seriously) around 10:30 p.m. when there was a knock on my hotel-room door. My first thought -- or fear, perhaps -- was that it was halftime show director Gary Paben and his gang of happy-groin puppets, who had come to pummel me for ripping their work. "Good evening, Mr. Fleming," said a voice on the other side of the door. "Miller Brewing Company has a complimentary Super Bowl gift for you." You have never seen a door swing open so fast.
With the door open, the roar from the Hyatt lobby could be heard 19 floors up. I leaned over the railing to take a gander at what is Super Bowl Ugliness Ground Zero: the lobby of the media hotel. In the lobby you have hundreds of hangers-on looking for tickets, and standing around with cameras at the ready should someone really famous and distinguished (like Stuart Scott) walk by pretending to take a call on his cell phone. Then there are the guys looking for tickets. One of them has asked me 14 times if I got any. So far, two in the end zone are going for $2,500. (Or at least that's what the guy promised me when I told him at noon that I'd meet him outside in 15 minutes with the tickets, and no matter how cold it was to wait for me because I'd show.) The lobby is full of fashion victims, too. One scalper is wearing what looks to be an all-leather, All-Madden Football Team jacket that is six sizes too big for him. You could hide Orlando Pace in there. This morning I nearly choked on my blueberry muffin heading through the lobby to the Jeff Fisher press conference, when I was subjected to a very large guy from ESPN wearing biker shorts and badly in need of a towel or a jacket to wrap around his naked waist. The lobby is where SI's Peter King stole a good portion of my pizza at lunch when I wasn't looking. The lobby is where I conducted an in-depth 15-minute interview with NFL commissioner Paul Tagliabue, only to realize later it was just a cardboard cutout. In the lobby you can pay $6 for warm beer or $85 for a $10 sweatshirt. The sweatshirt is the better buy, particularly with the Beer Fairy around. Downstairs from the lobby, all the sports-radio folk do their shows. The Breezeway of Banality, I call it. The most popular guest this morning? Joe Theismann? Boomer? Elway? Nope. One producer tells me it was a porn star who went from show to show. She was a big hit. Imagine that? A porn star, popular with the sports-radio demographic. Hard to believe. To top it all, in the lobby today I saw a guy standing by the elevators with his dog. Moments later a couple of TV producers began interviewing the mutt about his reasons for taking the Titans and the points. As we speak, the Beer Fairy is delivering free suds to Rover's room. Sports Illustrated staff writer David Fleming explores the sometimes weird and wacky side of sports every Thursday. Click here to send an e-mail to Flem, or address it yourself: flemfile@aol.com. The opinions expressed here are solely those of the writer.
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