Access

I should warn you that this post will contain some celebrity name-dropping. Please recall that I have been raised in the Midwest, a place where we steadfastly try to shrug our shoulders in the presence of celebrity (“Yeah, that’s Brad Pitt eating lunch over there, so what? You think he doesn’t get hungry too?”). As such, I am not typically a name-dropper, a celebrity-fawner, an autograph-beggar, or a photo-op-moocher. That said, I saw an awfully lot of famous people on Friday, enough to stretch the dropping of names into a regular carpet bombing. [For those of you who don’t follow sports, I apologize, as most of these people are sports figures. But hey, this is the Super Bowl, not the Oscars.]

Friday morning, we drove from our Livonian hotel down into the heart of Detroit. You may be aware that Detroit has a slightly un-stellar reputation as a major American city, thus making it a questionable choice to host a sporting event that subjects roughly seven gazillion tourists to that reputation. As it turns out, however, years of revitalization and weeks of frantic cleanup have made downtown Detroit a nice place walk around. I’m not saying you should plan for a Motor City Valentine’s trip or anything, but the downtown area is pretty nice. A few photos from around the town:

This is Detroit, so cars are sort of a focus. Add that fact to Cadillac’s sponsorship of the game, and there are concept cars littered about town, such as this sixteen-cylinder four door beast with 24-inch wheels and a thousand horsepower. Nifty:

Cars Theme + Wintry Weather Theme + Maybe Trying Too Hard =

Ethnic food note: Detroiters love their sausage:

Well, not all of the sketchy elements of downtown have been cleaned up. Probably this one was allowed to remain because of its unbelievable name:

I originally thought that the decay of the building had removed the “a” from “China,” but the yellow sign seems to confirm that this establishment was indeed called Chin Tiki.


We arrived at the Renaissance Center, the massive downtown convention center/office complex/hotel where all of the media aspects of the Super Bowl are housed, and it was there that we picked up possibly the most important element of the weekend: press credentials. Yes, the Von Maur pillow is extra cool, but credentials grant the thing that an outsider such as myself gets a big kick out of: access. Lots and lots of access.

There were very few doors that these fantastic plastic necklaces would not open, and while ESPN employee Jim went up to the temporary ESPN offices to do some actual work, Lou, Chad and I made the most of our access. We went directly to the press lounge and picked up some additional swag (a free pair of fleece mittens with hand warmers – apparently Detroit is aware of its un-Miaminess), and then proceeded down to the press-only radio and tv production area. The design of this area of the Renaissance Center creates the perfect division between those with and without access:

The open-air setup allows the unwashed and uncredentialed masses to peer down on the various productions going on below, cheer when prompted by a producer, and lavish uncomfortable praise on their sports heroes. For those of us in the privileged class, the view from the comfy leather chairs at ground level looked like this:

While Jim slaved away upstairs, we pretty much just hung out in the media area, strolling around to see who had shown up for an interview with NFL Network or Sirius Satellite Radio or Sports Psycho Bob on AM 1340 Tulsa. This was surprisingly entertaining, and yielded the following photos:


Pats QB Tom Brady and Notre Dame coach Charlie Weiss catch up on old times. Charlie looks like he has lost some weight.



Former Lions coach Steve Mariucci and NFL Network anchor Rich Eisen. I think maybe Rich noticed that we were taking a picture of him, as he is looking straight at the camera. Also, the Lions fans, who are no big fan of their former coach, hurled a few choice heckles his way, such as “Hey Steve, where’s your life partner Jeff Garcia?” Nice. Way to represent your city with dignity.



USC QB Matt Leinart being interviewed for a radio talk show and sporting a curiously “lazy-eyed psycho” expression. I think the interviewers are laughing just so that he doesn’t snap and kill them.



Talk radio host Jim Rome, who is such an amazing jerk that his jerkiness caused the image to blur.



Former 49ers QB and Superbowl MVP Steve Young chats with Mariucci, possibly trying to convert him to Mormonism.



This picture illustrates one of the funny things about athletes and their celebrity: you don’t always recognize the face, but you get the sneaky feeling that you should. So, from left to right we’ve got Ray Lewis, Mariucci, Mystery Athlete #1, Mystery Athlete #2, and former Super Bowl MVP Terrell Davis. Bonus prizes for anyone who can ID the two gentlemen in the middle.


The above represents the handful of photos that we actually took. There were a number of other opportunities that were lost because either a) the famous person walked by too fast or b) they were right there but our Midwestern sense of dignity prevented us from poking a camera right in their face. Celebrities encountered at close range but not photographed include Reggie Bush, Vince Young (very tall), Joe Montana (wearing a bizarre green hyper-paisley shirt), William “The Refrigerator” Perry (staggeringly huge), Rod Woodson, Tom Jackson, Mike Ditka, Shannon Sharpe and Barry Sanders. See? I told you there was going to be some completely shameless name-dropping.

There were also several non-celebrity moments of note, the first being this gentleman who was filming a football:

I have a new respect for cameramen, because this highly trained professional went on filming this football for a full four minutes without moving a muscle. The football, camera, and lighting never moved. Perhaps NFL Network is getting into postmodern avant-garde stationary video performance art. Mysteries abound.

And because this is football, there must be cheerleaders. Two representatives from the Arizona Cardinals squad were on hand to help promote the fact that Arizona will be hosting the 2008 Super Bowl. Chad was talked into posing for a photo with one of them, but I don’t think he enjoyed it at all:


After a while, we wandered upstairs to the ESPN offices to see how Jim was getting along with doing actual, real work. Sitting at the table next to him, dictating a column shortly to be posted on ESPN.com, was none other than Joe Theismann, the very same individual whose leg I predicted I would re-break in my previous post:

Well, sometimes fate shouts at you through the megaphone of apparent coincidence, and it is clear that destiny cannot be denied, so I promptly tackled him in his chair and started beating on him at the femur with his laptop. Also, possibly, I didn’t. It was, in any case, pretty humorous to sit and listen to a guy who will be the color commentator for Monday Night Football next year, who spent his entire life in and around the game of football, and who is supposed to be an expert on the subject, struggle to create any kind of coherent thought in his column. At one point, he had to ask for a Super Bowl roster to remind himself who was on Seattle’s defensive line. Joe: This is your job. You should know these things. This would be like a doctor checking the skeleton hanging in his office to remember how many elbows his patient is supposed to have.

On the other hand, we found out that Joe Theismann is a pretty nice guy. As Chad, Lou, and I were boarding the elevator to ride back down to the media area, Joe jumped on and participated happily and with what seemed like genuine interest in a conversation about the Detroit Lions. What he had to say didn’t make much sense, but he was extremely pleasant and not stand-offish in any way.

So he’s got that going for him.

There is definitely some overarching lesson here regarding the joys of access, but I haven’t settled on exactly what it is. On one hand, talking football in an elevator with Joe Theismann or seeing Tom Brady from six feet away isn’t really life altering. These people are important for relatively arbitrary reasons, and it is important to keep things in perspective, or else you quickly become the sort of person who TIVOs “Access Hollywood.”

On the other hand, there is some degree of undeniable electricity that revolves around celebrity. When Joe Montana walks by you in a hallway, your brain unavoidably goes “Hey, that was Joe Montana!” and that is empirically, categorically, cool. It just is. That’s why they’re celebrities. It’s cool to have access, flashing your credentials to get past the line of drooling fans and into the restricted area, it is cool spending a whole day in close proximity with famous sports persons of various import, and it is cool to watch a live tv program being filmed and consider calling a friend to say, “Hey, TIVO whatever’s on the NFL Network right now. I’m going to tackle Rich Eisen in about two minutes.” I’m having an absolute ball.

That’s it for me for now. Later on Friday evening we attended the ESPN party, which I’ll blather on about later. I probably won’t have time to post again until Monday, so enjoy the game. I am, for the record, rooting for the Steelers, because a) they have several likeable individuals (smilin’ Hines Ward, IU grad Antwan Randle-El, quintessential football coach and chin-model Bill Cowher, jolly Santa-esque Jerome Bettis) and because b) it will mean that the Colts have been eliminated by the future Super Bowl champs three years in a row. Yes, okay, fine, b) is a terrible reason, but the wounds are still fresh.