This Game Can Really Get on Everyone’s Nerves--Until Sunday

We are the media and we are on our way to San Diego for Super Bowl XYZ.

Don’t bother meeting us at the airport. Our plane, the Enola Gay, will drop us somewhere over Sea World. Who says it never rains on California?

Don’t send taxis. We will sneak into town, like any self-respecting guerrilla commandos.

You’ve heard of the Three Amigos? We are the 2,387 Amigos, or whatever the latest count is.

Our mission? Bring the Super Bowl to life for the readers on the home front. That’s our cover, anyway. The players and coaches will set you straight. To them, our mission is simple: Search and destroy.

So far, in finding and destroying, we’re 0 for XXI.

Each of us is armed with a toothbrush, press pass and, as Mark Twain said: “A pen warmed up in hell.�

Mine is a 39-cent model (Louisville Libeler) that leaks like a cheap rowboat, spreading fear in its wake of muddled metaphors.

Don’t try to pick us out in a crowd. We are the crowd. The National Football League Big Brother Program keeps us herded together in hotels and assembly rooms, for the protection of the players in particular and society in general.

Still, we are sneaky. In the old days, we were easy to spot. We wore cheap, rumpled suits and frumpy fedoras with “Press� cards in the hatband. We’ve gone undercover. Now we often wear clean clothing, some of it purchased within the current decade. Our socks match. We jog and play tennis and eat with utensils, all for deception and camouflage, of course.

Don’t be fooled by the recreational props. We are coming to work. To probe, dig, pry. To blow the lid off this annual debacle, to tell the real story, the story “60 Minutes� and Ted Koppel wouldn’t touch with a 10-foot boom mike.

Why? Because if we admitted we were here in hopes of overhearing a couple of good Dexter Manley quotes and milking them for a week’s worth of front-page stories, we would grow despondent and jump off hotel roofs.

We are armed for destruction. We have sophisticated weaponry. At press headquarters, in a back room, we keep a large apparatus that twists quotes out of context. It looks something like a taffy-pulling machine. We also have a word-garbler, to assist us in misquoting players who have nothing to say, and a detonation chamber for taking trivial issues and blowing them out of proportion.

We are the enemy. The coaches and players know this.

Mike Ditka sarcastically offered to let us call the first Bear play of each quarter. A brilliant idea, but too little, too late.

The entire week before the NFC playoff game, Redskin Coach Joe Gibbs had a gag order on his players. At the sight of a reporter, Redskins fled like frightened deer, crashing through the woods. Cornered, they sweated bullets and pleaded the Fifth.

It worked. Thanks to Operation Ziplip, Viking receiver Darrin Nelson dropped that would-be touchdown pass.

We are, as baseball pitcher Bob Ojeda said, “The media maggots.� That’s not quite the swashbuckling Woodward-Bernstein image we favor, or even Slap Maxwell, but it’s colorful, and we can appreciate a well-turned phrase as well as a well-turned stomach.

The Super Bowl players and coaches, whose collective IQ would approach genius level, are good sports. They realize we have a job to do. They just wish that, this week, we could do it in some other city.

We are carriers of the dread poxes, hoopla and hype, which we will spread like typhoid throughout the free world this week.

To the league and the teams, we are like plutonium or asbestos--prolonged exposure can result in death, or worse. Avoid us like the plague? We are the plague. Lock the doors? We’ll come through the woodwork. Wisely, the league allows us complete and free access to the players. For one hour each day.

Do not try to buy an egg in San Diego this week. Pete Rozelle bought every egg within 100 miles and had them scrambled into Mt. Cholesterol, to be served at our daily breakfast, while we wait for our shot at the players. A well-fed predator, the reasoning goes, is less likely to attack.

It makes no difference. Once allowed in the interview hall, we are piranhas in savage packs. We would prefer intimate one-on-one encounters with the gladiators, but there is a numbers problem. The solution would be to limit the press-credential allocation to 45, or to expand each team’s roster to 2,000.

We conduct in-depth interviews . . . 10-deep around each star, the rear guard hoping a favorable wind will waft quotes within earshot.

We quickly identify the talkers, the colorful quotesmiths, then close in for the kill. One Dexter Manley or Howie Long is worth 100 superstar cliche-slingers.

We silently pray that Dexter does not get laryngitis, and that John Elway does.

We write our stories, turning C-minus college non-grads into profound philosophers, converting borderline linebackers into brazen kamikazes. Then we come back the next day and listen politely while the glorified player, who has been drinking all night, playing Pac-Man, reading comic books and writing a Super Bowl diary for his hometown newspaper for more money than we’re getting, refers to us as a distraction.

Since about last Monday, we have been getting on the players’ nerves. And vice versa. Together, united, players and maggots, we get down on our knees and pray for the only thing that can save us all--a football game.