Jerry Izenberg has covered every Super Bowl since the first in 1967, when the game was known as the AFL/NFL Championship Game.
Friday, Jan. 30, 2015 | 5:30 p.m.
Asking Jerry Izenberg for his favorite Super Bowl memory is like asking a parent to name his favorite child — if that parent has 49 children.
Izenberg owns Super Bowl memories that stretch back forever, to the very first game, when the game was called the AFL/NFL Championship Game, was broadcast simultaneously on two networks (CBS and NBC) and couldn’t fill the Los Angeles Coliseum.
Izenberg, at age 84 and today a resident of Henderson, has covered every Super Bowl and will be in the box Sunday at University of Phoenix Stadium for Super Bowl XLIX watching the New England Patriots and Seattle Seahawks.
“It’s heating up,” Izenberg said Wednesday during a phone conversation from Phoenix. “By tomorrow, it’ll be filling and pretty crazy here.”
Izenberg’s title now is sports columnist emeritus for the Newark Star-Ledger, for whom he has spent his entire career as a sports journalist beginning in 1951. Izenberg has won the Associated Press Sports Editors Red Smith Award, is a member of the National Sportscasters and Sportswriters Hall of Fame and is the author of a dozen books. The latest: “Rozelle: A Biography,” centered on the life and career of the great NFL commissioner and architect, Pete Rozelle, was released in October.
Izenberg is among just three print journalists to have worked every Super Bowl, the others being Jerry Green of the Detroit News and Dave Klein, also long of the Star-Ledger and founder of the e-Giants newsletter.
In Izenberg’s retelling, covering the Super Bowl in its infancy was not necessarily an epic experience. Access to players, coaches, even the NFL’s top official, was a simple process.
Example: Two days before first Super Bowl, Izenberg needed to interview Rozelle.
Izenberg ran into Jim Kensil, the NFL official Rozelle often referred to as “my offensive and defensive coordinator,” which is to say Kensil lorded over Rozelle’s schedule.
“Where’s your guy?” Izenberg asked. Kensil had been fielding requests for interviews with the NFL’s chief executive, so he said, “Tell you what, tomorrow at 10 a.m., we’ll go to Pete’s suite and have an informal press conference.”
A total of 14 reporters covering the Green Bay Packers-Kansas City Chiefs game filed into Rozelle’s room.
“Now, it’s a couple thousand in a ballroom,” Izenberg says, “It’s bigger than a presidential press conference and a lot less relevant.”
Topics discussed that morning included how the AFL and NFL were to coexist and how a prospective merger would play out, and if the championship game between the two leagues might one day be as big as the World Series. Where the game would be played was examined, as the first championship matchup was sprawled out, with the journalists headquartered in Anaheim, the game in Los Angeles and the heavily favored Packers staying in Santa Barbara.
“Vince Lombardi wanted to train in Palo Alto,” Izenberg says. “Pete was on the phone with him, ‘Do you know where Palo Alto is!?’ And Lombardi says, ‘Yes! That’s why I want to go there!’ ”
The commissioner overruled the coaching legend. The Packers’ team hotel faced the ocean, was shrouded in palm trees and offered a big pool in the middle of a courtyard. With Izenberg arriving for a pre-game interview, Lombardi shouted from the courtyard in a voice that could be heard throughout the resort, “This is too relaxed! I’d better not catch any of you guys in this pool!”
Izenberg asked the Packers’ legendary offensive lineman Jerry Kramer how he planned to prepare for the Chiefs, a team that was a mystery from another league.
“We’re going to win anyway,” Kramer told Izenberg, “because we’ve got the best coach in the world.”
Lombardi, and the Packers, were under enormous pressure to dominate the Chiefs, representing the upstart AFL. The influential owner of the Giants, Wellington Mara, who along with Rozelle envisioned the championship game, told Lombardi: “Vince, I know no other man who would lead us in to this game. You must win this game.”
As it evolved, the Super Bowl was often a great story but infrequently a great game.
“The first five, six Super Bowls were not very good,” Izenberg remembers. “The owners put a lot of pressure on the coaches, and the result was their teams didn’t play to win. They played not to lose, they would get ahead and become conservative, and that doesn’t make for great football.”
Nerves were evident from everyone prior to that inaugural game — for which tickets were priced at $10. Izenberg called the room of Chiefs linebacker E.J. Holub, nicknamed “The Beast,” for an interview over breakfast.
“Really, I set this up with him over the phone, and you couldn’t get near the players today like this,” Izenberg says. “E.J., The Beast, he’s sitting across the table from me, and he puts his palms out. They’re all sweaty. I said, ‘Why are you so sweaty? You’re nervous?’ ”
Oh, yeah. The Beast was uniquely pressured.
“If we win this game, we get $15,000 a man,” Holub said, “and my wife has already spent that money.”
The Packers, of course, won the game 35-10. Holub was out $15K, but that story, in the hands of a man who has seen it all, is priceless.
Follow John Katsilometes on Twitter at Twitter.com/JohnnyKats. Also, follow “Kats With the Dish” at Twitter.com/KatsWiththeDish.
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