My Friends,

 

After reading Barry Rozner’s great piece in today’s Daily Herald about The Last Time, I thought I’d put my own spin on it.

Back in 1986 I was just starting out in my current floundering career. I was living in Brooklyn and dating a great girl who also happened to be a Patriots fan. I didn't have a lot of money back then, but I did have one thing.

Credit cards.

And so I flew back to Chicago for both playoff games and sat in section 15 with my late father, enjoying the ride. Then came the Super Bowl and the first of many lottery shutouts, and the mad scramble for the whole package began.

It started shortly after the NFC Championship, when a friend of my cousin who had scored through the Bears offered him game tickets at double face. My dad snapped those up, and he and my sister made plans to drive down to New Orleans for the game. My friend Ray lived in Chicago and also was dead set on going, but you couldn't find a flight into New Orleans, or Baton Rouge for that matter, from anywhere, not even any of the NYC area airports. So we arranged to drive from Houston. Actually, I flew from Newark into Dallas and Ray from ORD into DFW, and we met up there and took the same flight from Dallas to Houston.

But we still needed another pair of tickets so all four of us could get in to see the game.

The plane to Houston was where all 60 Patriot fans were, and as we boarded I announced to anybody who would listen something along the lines of "I need two tickets, and if anybody wants to sell me theirs, make a little money and save yourself the embarrassment of seeing your team get destroyed tomorrow, I would greatly appreciate it." The plane laughed, but I found no takers.

We got to Houston, rented a Lincoln Town Car from Budget ($49.95 a day!) and eventually made it to New Orleans.

Our first stop was the Bears hotel, which was the Hyatt, or Hilton, or some other place beginning with an "H." We saw a mass of Bears fans there and decided the demand was too high in that spot, so we headed over to the French Quarter.

I felt like a carnival barker the entire weekend, constantly saying, "need two!" wherever I walked. But I kept in mind the last thing my girlfriend had told me before I left New York: "talk to the bell captains at every hotel you pass. They've got a line on everything." And I did, but still no luck. So after way too many hurricanes and beers, Ray poured me into the Town Car and we headed off to our accommodations.

They were actually quite nice and very comfortable - former slaves quarters on a plantation my dad had arranged. The only problem is that they were 45 minutes outside the city. Somehow Ray managed to find the place, before the days of MapQuest and GPS, and we settled in for a few hours sleep.

The next morning came way too bright and early, and I think that was the first time I saw my dad and sis that weekend. Ray and I struggled to our feet, showered, fortified, and the four of us took two cars into the French Quarter for breakfast. On the way we parked the car and spent a few minutes talking to scalpers outside the Superdome without much luck. When we went back to retrieve the car we discovered we had locked the keys inside. Fortunately, a local had a Slim Jim, and Ray spent about 30 seconds destroying the lock in the process of opening the door. But we got in, and made it a point to remember not to leave the keys inside again.

We ate at the Coffee Pot on Saint Peter St. just down the block from Pat O'Brien's and Preservation Hall. The Creole food there is excellent, but they have their own pace, and Ray and I were getting edgy sitting in the courtyard sun nursing hangovers with work finding game tickets still left to be done.

We finished up and made arrangements to meet up with dad and sis in the lobby of the Bears’ hotel at 3pm, and Ray and I again set off to hawk for tickets. Along the way I recall meeting up with a couple guys who said Michael McCaskey was selling game tickets at face to season ticket holders in the lobby of the Bears hotel. We had no way of knowing whether this was true or urban legend, but the guys seemed sincere and it was worth a shot, so we stored that info for later in the day.

It was early afternoon. Game time was coming up fast and we still needed two. We paid a visit to the Royal Sonesta and spoke with the Bell Captain there, but no luck. And then I made the stupidest decision of the day. A guy approached us with a pair in the lower deck for $200 each. He showed us the tickets. THE TICKETS! But with that nugget about McCaskey in the back of my mind, I thought we'd do better at the Bears' hotel. I looked at Ray, and thinking back, I think he wanted to buy them. I know now we should have, but I passed, and we headed back to the Bears’ hotel. What a colossal mistake.

It was devastating. Once again the place was packed with Bears fans looking for a seat, but we didn't see any sellers and there was no McCaskey to be found. It was around 3 and I ran into my sister, who was looking for me to hand over the second ticket to sit with my dad. I refused it and told her Ray and I would come up with something. She was apprehensive, but headed off. Without cell phones, there was no way for all of us to work the crowd and scour, so the upshot was she was going with dad and Ray and I still needed seats.

We hightailed it back to the French Quarter, but not before discovering that this time the car hiker had locked the keys inside. We came up with another Slim Jim and Ray set to mangling the other door lock. I'll never forget the look of deranged glee Ray had on his face as he busted that lock open and worked us into the car. I still don't know why we were driving back and forth to these places.

Now it was getting late. Kickoff was at 5:20, and it was around 3:45 when we got back to the Vieux Carré. Earlier in the day Jerry, the bell captain at the Monteleone Hotel on Royal Street, had told us he might have some tickets later on, so we walked over there to see if anything had turned up. We found Jerry, who said he still didn't have anything, but that they were close. Ray went into the lobby bar and bought a couple Heinekens (I remember the green bottle) and said as he handed me one, "I didn't come all the way down here to watch this game in a bar."

So we made the decision. Show him the money. We pooled our cash, four crisp C-notes and a pair of fifties, and I walked over to Jerry and told him again we needed tickets. Only this time, I flashed the bills.

Jerry said, "I'll be right back."

Jerry was gone what seemed like an eternity but what must have been only a minute or two, and when he returned he waved us into a corridor off the main lobby where he presented two tickets in section 154, row 30. Not being able to shake the trader mentality, I asked him if we could have them for $400. But Jerry begged poverty, saying he had to make something, too, and so Ray and I forked over the half G and jumped up and down like two little kids on Christmas morning. It was 4:10 pm, seventy minutes before kickoff, and we were IN!

Coming to our senses, we hoofed the twenty minutes or so back to the Superdome and left the now unlocked Town Car garaged in the French Quarter. It saw no further damage.

 

I remember almost everything of what happened after the game, as I was what passed for a designated driver that day. I left Ray to celebrate on Bourbon Street while I met up with my dad and sis for dinner at Pere Antoine, a small corner bistro on Royal Street, and then retrieved Ray in front of a Houlihan's or Bennigan's after. It was wall-to-wall Bears fans, with the only Patriot colors to be found on the souvenir displays, by themselves, as all the Bears stuff was sold out.

Sometime way after midnight we wandered into a bar named Fritzl's, lured by the Bears helmet hanging from the shingle and the sounds of the traditional Bears fight song, the Super Bowl Shuffle, and the version of the fight song played by Ben Arden and his Big Bear Band on an endless loop. There, rows of drunken Bears fans stood on the stage can-can style and danced to the Shuffle. It was mostly white guys with no rhythm. What a sight!

We made our way back down Bourbon Street toward Canal, where the Town Car was parked, and stopped in a dark, seedy place called the Port Orleans Bourbon for a superfluous nightcap. As we were wading through the crowd near the door a cheer went up behind us. Ray turned around to find himself face to face with Bill Murray. "Carl!" he exclaimed by way of introduction, and then he noticed the big guy standing behind him.

It was Dan Hampton, of the freshly minted World Champion Chicago Bears.

Ray reached out and shook Hampton’s gnarly hand, and off the celebrities went in search of beverages, much like us.

We finished the beer we didn't need, found the unlocked (lockless?) Town Car and made our way back to our quarters. It was late, but we had to get up early to make the drive to Houston for our flight.

Another rough morning followed, made all the more difficult by our late start and the fact we hadn't eaten anything. But my boss in New York had a chauffeur, Joe, and he had slipped me the boss's state of the art Passport radar detector, so we put the hammer down and made up enough time to eat one of the best burgers I've ever consumed at a truck stop in Texas along the way. We met a couple guys from NFL Films there and talked with them a bit, then resumed our bolt toward Houston.

It was close, and as we neared the airport it dawned on us that we needed to gas up the rental. "Find me a garden hose and this thing'll come chuggin' in," Ray said, but we did the right thing and found a proper filling station, dumped the car, and headed to the gate with our boarding passes and our carry-ons.

And who do we find prowling the ticket counter flying standby? None other than Ed O'Bradovich.

We said hello, and Ed grunted. Ed wasn't very talkative that day, probably owing to the fact that he stood a chance of being left behind and our showing up twenty minutes before takeoff reduced his chances of boarding. But they found a place for him, and while we found the way to our seats it was almost comical looking at the back of the plane and seeing big Ed O wedged into an aisle chair in the last row of the plane. Then again, I guess an aisle seat in the back is the appropriate place for an "end," don't you think?

The flight home was uneventful, save for the 400-pound guy Ray and I had to share our row with. Thank God for movable arm rests. Ray and I said so long in Chicago, and I headed back to Newark where my '77 Camaro awaited in the long-term parking lot.

I went straight to my girlfriend's place in Brooklyn Heights, who was much more gracious in defeat than I ever could have been. She got up and went to work the next morning, but I took the day off, slept late, and awoke to find out the Challenger had blown up on take-off.

Back to reality, I guess.

Let’s just hope everybody gets home safely next week.

 

LBF

1/30/2007