Super Bowl LII Diary, Day 2: Sadness Amongst the Gladness
Joe Oberle
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On Monday night at the Xcel Energy Center, Super Bowl Opening Night took place. Both teams finally made it to town and they had their first media availability. It’s now a media event that is open to the public, and it left me with as many questions as there were asked of the players (well, not quite that many).
The public paid for this event–$32 dollars, actually. And the only Vikings there I saw were Randall McDaniel and John Randle. Certainly, this event would have been better had the Vikings won the NFC title game (it was not sold out). But plenty of Minnesotans showed up to boo any mention of the Philadelphia Eagles—which they did.
But I am still wondering who wants to watch media members ask questions of the New England Patriots and Eagles players and coaches, and I guess I got my answers: Eagles and Patriots fans, and (mostly) the Vikings fans who couldn’t get rid of their tickets.
This event was never like this in the olden days—back in 1992, when the Super Bowl was last in town. The media horde was let out on the Metrodome floor and the players were spread around the stadium (the main ones seated on risers) and the rest up in the Metrodome seats. (You can find more about that event in part one of this SB Diary.)
This year, Tom Brady, Bill Belichick, Dann Amendola and a few others were on risers while the remainder of the roster wandered around among the media on the raised floor of the X, which was a much smaller space than last time. You couldn’t swing a cat or microphone without hitting a camera unit, and it was kind of a mess. A person could have used a little blocking to get around, but the offensive linemen were more interested in answering questions than blocking—well a little more, anyway.
And for the Minnesota media not doing his homework, you had to find a player’s number on his jacket to know who you were talking to (guilty as charged). I didn’t recognize a lot of the players that I was bumping into.
It was easier to pick out the assembled national media who were in attendance—I walked in next to SI’s Peter King, I saw ESPN’s John Clayton and wondered if he had cut his hair since that commercial, Ian Rappaport, whose is not as tall as I thought, and I even gave my seat in the media dining room to Sal Paolantonio. There was also some dude who apparently goes by the name of Smoov (not sure of the spelling) who was interviewing people while lying on the floor. “Smoov move” with all those people with cameras and tripods walking around.
This is the annual media blast even where questions such as “If you were a tree, which tree would you be,” and other such silly-arse stuff. I wanted to ask Brady how many utters there are on a southern Minnesota cow, but I couldn’t get close enough. Besides, I didn’t know the answer myself, and that violates the first rule of question asking—at least in a court of law: don’t ever ask a question you don’t know the answer to.
This is also time for the players to rev up the cliché machine, since bulletin board material is the last thing you want to serve up the week of the game. Dion Lewis, who had 36 carries in two seasons with the Eagles, was asked all kinds of questions about getting back at the team who drafted him but where it didn’t work out. “Do you have anything to prove, Dion?”
“No, not really,” Lewis said. “I just want to help my teammates and do the best I can and make plays and hopefully we can go out on Sunday and win the Super Bowl.”
He could just as well as had he come right out and said “I’m only here so I don’t get fined.” That actually would have been better.
I watched Bill Belichick squirm though his hour in the fishbowl. BREAKING NEWS: the man clearly does not like this part of his job. But about the best thing I heard came from Brandon Bolden, a native of Baton Rouge, Louisiana, who said “I’m freezing my butt off,” to the question of how he has found the weather so far.
I did run into a couple members of the Vikings media and public relations staff—executive director Bob Hagen and directory Tom West—two great guys who were getting plenty of condolences from some of the local media. It had to be tough duty to be in attendance at this event without their team, which had come so close. I can’t imagine how nuts it would have been in there had that been the case.
Instead, I saw Eagles tight end Zach Ertz’s wife Julie, a World Cup Champion soccer player, being interviewed by someone in a dog mask. I wonder if he asked her, “if you were a tree, what kind of . . . .”
But I didn’t stick around to find out. There was a break between the appearances of the two teams where the first one clears out (kind of a like the bride not seeing the groom before the wedding, but in this case, we will go with the bride not seeing the bridesmaid)—and I bailed. I didn’t have the stomach to see all the giddy Eagles players twisting their nose out of joint when having to answer all these “difficult and tedious” questions. Too soon; just too soon.