All that did was enliven the Giants with the sort of nothing-to-lose bravura makes football teams loose and mean. At least, the long odds affected me that way. The long odds were one of the reasons I’d made the mad trans-desert dash to Phoenix, working every angle I could for media credentials and tickets and over-priced hotel rooms.
As a result of my desperation to see the Giants win after fifty years of devotion, the most vexing question facing me last weekend turned out not to be whether or not the Giants would win the Super Bowl. The larger issue at hand for me was whether or not to run down Larry David and Frank Luntz with my Prius.
They were standing outside the Ritz-Carlton in Scottsdale a couple days prior to the Super Bowl when I happened to pull up. My HarperCollins editor had scored some tickets from Fox, courtesy of our big NewsCorp daddy.
All I was doing, in fact, was turning my car around in the hotel driveway because I’d entered the wrong way. I was in a hurry. I was thinking U-turn, I warrant, and not homicide. But for a second David and Luntz were lined up and I could see them suddenly squinting through the windshield at me.
Their puzzled faces invoked the same question in my own mind. A terrible shame to take out someone as funny as Larry David. But what if I nailed Luntz in the bargain? Yeah, maybe Luntz isn’t Lee Atwater, but he’s basically a Republican partisan who spends his days thinking of every way possible to make my life miserable. He’s a small version of Bill Belichick.
Just as David’s and Luntz’s jaws began their rapid – very rapid – descent while my car surged toward them, I hit the brakes and stopped. At least ten inches short of them. I parked the car. I got out and asked Larry David to autograph my book. He was big about it.
The Ritz-Carlton security staff didn’t seem to appreciate my enthusiasm. There was, I guess you could say, some loose kind of a time limit put on my presence on the grounds.
But that’s what the Super Bowl does to you. It demands a radical re-examination of all you’ve considered yourself to be. And all the values that comprise who you are—what you hold dear and what makes you.
Last week, in Phoenix, I nearly did something that could have landed me behind bars for the rest of my days. But it wouldn’t have been all bad. I would have been breaking rocks, at least, with a smile on my face, knowing that the Giants had beaten the Patriots.
Roger Director is the author of “I Dream in Blue: Life, Death, and the New York Giants” from HarperCollins.
