COMMENTARY : We Saw Stars, They Were Us

Certainly you remember Super Bowl Media Day, the day on which Dexter Manley was once asked, “If you were a tree, what kind of tree would you be?” and the day on which Doug Williams was asked, “How long have you been a black quarterback?” Hey, you might think we’re here to ask big lugs about two-deep zones and defending the counter-trey, but it’s way beyond that now. Who has time to talk X’s and O’s when you can see Michael Jackson and Downtown Julie Brown?

Let’s cut right to the day’s highlight: a police escort for the media to go from the hotel to Dodger Stadium, site of Media Day. I’m dead serious here. Imagine you’re a commuter in Southern California, and you’ve spent the usual 90 minutes on the freeway to go two exits. You look up Tuesday morning and see every entrance ramp blocked by cops on motorcycles. We’re talking LAPD, CHiPS; everybody this side of Elliott Ness was on media detail.

This is the same city that couldn’t get a single cop to the corner of Normandie and Florence last April. On the return trip, the Harbor Freeway, only the busiest highway in the free world, was virtually shut down for blocks.

The before and after were a gas too. Downtown Julie Brown has become to the Super Bowl what Chris Schenkel was to bowling.

She caught Jimmy Johnson totally by surprise. Sneaked up behind him. “Coach Johnson, I’m doing a piece on fashion.” Johnson turned, and got an up-close and personal view of leather, lace and, uh, cleavage. “Whoooooa! Talk about fashion!” Johnson bellowed, eyes bulging so wide you’d have thought he’d just seen Marv Levy’s gameplan. “Honey, who are you ?”

“I’m Downtown Julie Brown, wubba, wubba, wubba,” she said.

Johnson, like most NFL coaches, had absolutely no clue. “Coach, you know, the lady from MTV,” a writer said, forgetting she’s now moved on to one of those mindless evening tabloid shows.

“I haven’t seen it,” Johnson said. “But I’m gonna start watching it now.”

Downtown asked the stammering Johnson if he was nervous. “I can handle these clowns,” he said, meaning people like me. “But you?”

The day was off to a rollicking start, and we hadn’t even gotten to the Michael Jackson news conference. Nothing could prepare you for this unless you’d been studying alien life forms. More than 1,000 people packed a ballroom to see the “King of Pop,” as he likes to be called nowadays, talk about how happy he is to be the halftime entertainment.

There seems to be an inverse correlation between the number of records Jackson sells and the number or words he speaks in public. Back a few years ago when he was the pop icon, he was Garbo. Now that urban music has passed him by and he’s about half as popular as Ice-T, Jackson’s everywhere.

Don’t get me wrong, I think Michael Jackson is the greatest entertainer of our time. I go way back with him, back to when he was still black and his nose looked like mine. He’s in this halftime thing with Lays, but the sponsor ought to be Clorox.

An L.A. sportscaster, Fred Roggin, decided that since we’d all be asking ridiculous questions, he might as well make them really ridiculous, so he brought the home edition of “Jeopardy.” Roggin found a guy who was wearing No. 85 with no name on his jersey. It turned out he was Pat Evans, position unknown, thought to be on the practice squad.

Roggin fired away. “During a fox hunt, the whippers-in keep these together.”

Evans yawned and said, “What are the hounds?”

Huh?

Roggin fired again: “No well-dressed matador would be seen in the ring without this, his traje de luces.”

Evans flashed this “you’d-have-to-be-an-idiot-not-to-know-that” look and said smugly, “What is his suit of lights?”

Couldn’t stump him.

Media Day usually breaks down along these lines: the stars who each have 300 reporters around them, the go-to guys who can explain even the most complex football strategies, and the nobodies, guys who nobody wants to interview. Bills guard John Davis thought he was going to be a nobody, but when we saw nobody interviewing him, so many of us rushed over to ask how it felt to be a nobody that pretty soon Davis was holding court. Not expecting this sudden interest, Davis, whose bald head and bushy mustache make him look like a Russian czar, had brought a book called “Bankruptcy 1995: The Coming Collapse of America and How to Stop It.”

“I think about 75 percent of the guys (on his team) dread Media Day,” he said, “but they figure, ‘Let’s just get it over. Don’t be rude and answer every question politely.”

Davis continued talking, but we were distracted by a sudden burst of song coming from the third deck of Dodger Stadium. There’d been a Lite Beer commercial shoot in the Bob Uecker seats and one of the extras decided that she’d use this audience of 500 media people to audition. So she sang, a cappella, “I Will Always Love You.” Only in L.A. She was really good, actually. One more voice from the third balcony bellowed to Bills linebacker Darryl Talley, “Hey, Talley, don’t let me down, I gotta lot of money on you Sunday.”

Davis laughed. The sun glistened off his dome. Someone asked him to finish the sentence, “Media Day is as much fun as ... “ Davis thought, he laughed. “As much fun,” he said, “as washing my hair.”