He became a man the day of the greatest game he ever played. Everything he ever knew about common decency and morality he learned that day in December from Alan "The Horse" Ameche; and today in the Superbowl he would earn his wings. The crowd had assembled; a crowd of America's elite. Toyota salesmen from all around the country -- orientals and even those suspected of being orientals -- stacked on the thirty yard line watching him sweat and wipe caked blood from his face. The Gallo brothers -- Ernest and Julio -- party guys who had skinned a few Mexicans and forced them to carry them on their shoulders down to the pre-game tailgate parties at the Colosseum. The Pepsi and Coca Cola bottlers of America -- Coke adds life; It's the real thing -- bombarded by missiles; flying flaming matchbook covers. The waterheads from General Motors up in the top seats where they belong; getting the worst of the pollution. All sorts of weird motherfuckers were at the game.
Super Sunday
Moderator: Animal
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CaptQuint
- Biker's Biatch
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Super Sunday
Any damn fool can navigate the world sober. It takes a really good sailor to do it drunk
-
CaptQuint
- Biker's Biatch
- Posts: 30361
- Joined: Sun Jan 06, 2019 7:18 pm
Re: Super Sunday
Super Sunday was a foul gray day in Chicago. First there was snow, then freezing fog, and finally a long subzero night with icy winds off the lake and a wind-chill factor at midnight of 44 below . . . but none of the mattered to the natives: They ripped off their shirts and spit beer on women and ran wild in the streets like hyenas, to celebrate another great victory.
I had my own problems and most of them had to do with gambling. They were many and varied, but the nut of the matter had to do with the fact that I came awake on Sunday morning with the uneasy knowledge that I had taken New England and 13 points, which was beginning to feel uncircumcized. I had done it on the advice of Rev. Desmond Tutu, the Anglican bishop and Nobel Peace Price laureate from South Africa, who made a speech in Chicago Friday.
The problem with Tutu is his accent, or perhaps his feeling for emphasis. He had warned me, I thought, to stay away from the Bears, which disturbed my basic gambling instinct and ran counter to all my analysis. Until I spoke to Desmond I was taking the Bears and not worrying too much about points. . . .
It seemed clear that the Bears would score at will and make a mockery of the whole thing. They had shut down the best running games in the NFL, and their only loss of the season looked more like boredom or carelessness than a sign of any real weakness. My instinct was to give 20 points and not even bother to watch the game—
But when the bishop fixed me with his glittering little eyes and uttered the equivalent of "Nevermore, quoth the raven," I took it as a serious sign: Take the points.
But it made me nervous, and by midnight on Saturday my confidence was turning to wax. I raced for a while on the phones, and too many smart people snickered when I said I was switching my whole nut, on the word of some bishop from South Africa who had never even seen a football game.
It was my old friend Craig Vetter, in fact, who finally had to point out to me that there was nothing in what Desmond had said to me that could be taken as a warning to bet heavily against the Bears. It was mainly a moral admonition: Stay away from gambling—which had nothing to do with the point spread.
Had I gone mad, I wondered, to reverse a whole lifetime of sporting wisdom on the world of some mischievous quack? Vetter laughed all night at my queasiness, and by noon on Sunday I was grabbing everything I could get on the Bears and giving up 10. Here was a chance for a two-point "middle," time honored gamblers' trick to win coming and going, to collect on both ends. If the Bears won by 11 or 12, I would be home free—and that spread was not out of the question. I also picked up a huge piece of coverage on the chance of a shutout, at seven to one, plus a three-to-one side bet that Walter Payton wouldn't gain 100 yards . . . by the time the big countdown started on Sunday I was covered in many ways, and Desmond was somewhere over the Atlantic on a 1,300-mph Concorde, en route to Paris and Cape Town.
There was no shortage of good places to watch the game on TV, but the best one for my purposes was a 40-foot-high Diamond Vision in downtown Daley Plaza, where a huge and essentially goofy iron statue by Pablo Picasso looks down on the jabbering crowds who have been flocking in all week, from places like Cicero and Galesburg. They pressed in on the plaza like lemmings, despite the unholy cold and winds that swept in off the lake like some nightmare freeze-out of the Cremation of Sam McGee.
There is nothing quite like the cold that you feel on a bad winter day in Chicago. It is a genuinely frightening pain that is like being plunged into ice water, or feeling your skin on fire. . . . But pain meant nothing to these people; they tore off their clothes and raced around the plaza like slam dancers, totally ignoring the game. Later that night, I heard a radio news bulletin that said they were all transvestites, giddy drifters who lived off the land and sold industrial ether for a living and whipped their own dogs at night to relieve the terrible tensions that come with the life of a bull fruit. The game was over by halftime, with the Bears up by 23 to 3 and rapidly pulling away. About half the crowd was gone, by this time, and the ones who remained were drunk.
On our way through the plaza, we were joined by a man named Willis, who seemed vaguely familiar and claimed to be a friend of Mike Ditka. I sensed that he had a problem of some kind, which turned out to be true. . . . His wife, he explained, had left him unexpectedly and moved into a penthouse apartment on Lake Shore Drive with three Bears—two brutes from the special teams unit and one on the injured reserve list.
They had made her a sort of team mascot for most of the season, and then rudely kicked her out and banned her from the team hotel in New Orleans. . . . She didn't even make the trip, but took up with the rookie linebacker who was still on injured reserve and said he was going to marry her, once his status finally cleared up. "The slut is driving me crazy," said Willis. "Every time I see her she's staggering around in some meat rack on Division Street, wearing Kevin Butler's jersey. It's No. 6. She wears it like a dress; I see the rotten thing in my dreams."
His hands were unsteady and his eyes were like unripe tomatoes. "I have a feeling that she's about to do something desperate," he said. "I need some advice. What would you do in a situation like this?"
I jammed my hands deep in the pockets of my thin Palm Beach dinner jacket, shuddering from the cold and The Fear. His tale was too much to deal with, and I was late for dinner with Vetter at the Pump Room.
Willis asked again for advice, and I could see that he needed an answer. "Call my friend Bishop Tutu," I told him. "He's always been a great help to me."
January 27, 1986
Hunter Thompson
I had my own problems and most of them had to do with gambling. They were many and varied, but the nut of the matter had to do with the fact that I came awake on Sunday morning with the uneasy knowledge that I had taken New England and 13 points, which was beginning to feel uncircumcized. I had done it on the advice of Rev. Desmond Tutu, the Anglican bishop and Nobel Peace Price laureate from South Africa, who made a speech in Chicago Friday.
The problem with Tutu is his accent, or perhaps his feeling for emphasis. He had warned me, I thought, to stay away from the Bears, which disturbed my basic gambling instinct and ran counter to all my analysis. Until I spoke to Desmond I was taking the Bears and not worrying too much about points. . . .
It seemed clear that the Bears would score at will and make a mockery of the whole thing. They had shut down the best running games in the NFL, and their only loss of the season looked more like boredom or carelessness than a sign of any real weakness. My instinct was to give 20 points and not even bother to watch the game—
But when the bishop fixed me with his glittering little eyes and uttered the equivalent of "Nevermore, quoth the raven," I took it as a serious sign: Take the points.
But it made me nervous, and by midnight on Saturday my confidence was turning to wax. I raced for a while on the phones, and too many smart people snickered when I said I was switching my whole nut, on the word of some bishop from South Africa who had never even seen a football game.
It was my old friend Craig Vetter, in fact, who finally had to point out to me that there was nothing in what Desmond had said to me that could be taken as a warning to bet heavily against the Bears. It was mainly a moral admonition: Stay away from gambling—which had nothing to do with the point spread.
Had I gone mad, I wondered, to reverse a whole lifetime of sporting wisdom on the world of some mischievous quack? Vetter laughed all night at my queasiness, and by noon on Sunday I was grabbing everything I could get on the Bears and giving up 10. Here was a chance for a two-point "middle," time honored gamblers' trick to win coming and going, to collect on both ends. If the Bears won by 11 or 12, I would be home free—and that spread was not out of the question. I also picked up a huge piece of coverage on the chance of a shutout, at seven to one, plus a three-to-one side bet that Walter Payton wouldn't gain 100 yards . . . by the time the big countdown started on Sunday I was covered in many ways, and Desmond was somewhere over the Atlantic on a 1,300-mph Concorde, en route to Paris and Cape Town.
There was no shortage of good places to watch the game on TV, but the best one for my purposes was a 40-foot-high Diamond Vision in downtown Daley Plaza, where a huge and essentially goofy iron statue by Pablo Picasso looks down on the jabbering crowds who have been flocking in all week, from places like Cicero and Galesburg. They pressed in on the plaza like lemmings, despite the unholy cold and winds that swept in off the lake like some nightmare freeze-out of the Cremation of Sam McGee.
There is nothing quite like the cold that you feel on a bad winter day in Chicago. It is a genuinely frightening pain that is like being plunged into ice water, or feeling your skin on fire. . . . But pain meant nothing to these people; they tore off their clothes and raced around the plaza like slam dancers, totally ignoring the game. Later that night, I heard a radio news bulletin that said they were all transvestites, giddy drifters who lived off the land and sold industrial ether for a living and whipped their own dogs at night to relieve the terrible tensions that come with the life of a bull fruit. The game was over by halftime, with the Bears up by 23 to 3 and rapidly pulling away. About half the crowd was gone, by this time, and the ones who remained were drunk.
On our way through the plaza, we were joined by a man named Willis, who seemed vaguely familiar and claimed to be a friend of Mike Ditka. I sensed that he had a problem of some kind, which turned out to be true. . . . His wife, he explained, had left him unexpectedly and moved into a penthouse apartment on Lake Shore Drive with three Bears—two brutes from the special teams unit and one on the injured reserve list.
They had made her a sort of team mascot for most of the season, and then rudely kicked her out and banned her from the team hotel in New Orleans. . . . She didn't even make the trip, but took up with the rookie linebacker who was still on injured reserve and said he was going to marry her, once his status finally cleared up. "The slut is driving me crazy," said Willis. "Every time I see her she's staggering around in some meat rack on Division Street, wearing Kevin Butler's jersey. It's No. 6. She wears it like a dress; I see the rotten thing in my dreams."
His hands were unsteady and his eyes were like unripe tomatoes. "I have a feeling that she's about to do something desperate," he said. "I need some advice. What would you do in a situation like this?"
I jammed my hands deep in the pockets of my thin Palm Beach dinner jacket, shuddering from the cold and The Fear. His tale was too much to deal with, and I was late for dinner with Vetter at the Pump Room.
Willis asked again for advice, and I could see that he needed an answer. "Call my friend Bishop Tutu," I told him. "He's always been a great help to me."
January 27, 1986
Hunter Thompson
Any damn fool can navigate the world sober. It takes a really good sailor to do it drunk