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Sporting News, The, Feb 5, 1996 by Paul Attner

Are you saying this was just another no Super Bowl week, filled with pseudo-news stories and bombastic boasts?

Well, everything seemed about the same until a Phoenix group decided to award two free tickets to anyone performing the most outlandish stunt. You know it brought out some crazies when the guy mondback rattler didn't win. The tickets instead went to a man who covered himself with peanut butter and jumped into a long trough full of cow manure. Somehow it seems it would've been easier if he had found a scalper willing to unload a couple of tickets.

And how much would that have cost his hank account?

By game time, $2,000 a seat wasn't an outlandish asking price.

But isn't the commissioner concerned about this ticket outrage?

Of course, the league says it hates scalpers. But the NFL helps create this atmosphere of greed with its own ticket pricing. For this game, it decided, for the first time, to split up Sun Devil Stadium into three price ranges, from $200 to $350. Considering all tickets last year were $175, that is a healthy jump.

But Commissioner Paul Tagliabue also spent part of his annual Super Bowl news conference defending Permanent Seat Licenses, the dreaded PSLS, which teams now ask fans in many cities to purchase before they can buy a season ticket. Taghabue maintains that PSLS allow clubs to build stadiums without asking for public funding. But they certainly eliminate blue-collar season-ticket holders.

Doesn't Tagliabue have some major franchise-movement problems to cope with?

Does Jerry Jones carry on? Tagliabue is like that guy protecting the dike who has to keep plugging leaks wherever he looks. He is starting to run out of fingers. In the course of his news conference, he said he didn't think there would be expansion the rest of the 90s and didn't want any other existing franchises to leave their current homes, yet he said the league was working on a plan to satisfy both Cleveland and Baltimore. If you don't have expansion or franchise transfers, it might prove exceedingly difficult to make sure those cities have teams in the near future.

Enough of this league talk. Is it true Deion Sanders was coaching a basketball tea days before the Super Bowl?

And you don't think this is a new era of athletes? By Friday night, you would think the players would be focusing on Sunday. But not Prime Time. He sponsored his own basketball game and followed that with a party, which he stiffed because he couldn't miss curfew. Forget the fact that the party had been promoted for weeks. Betcha Nitschke did the same running around under Lombardi, right? Talking about the past, that's another change in Super Bowl week. Players, both former and present, are everywhere now at this event, which is surrounded more and more with sideshows of the rich and famous. Early in the week, Jim Kelly and Brett Favre were among the prominent stars to host their own private parties, open to a few hundred or so of their closest friends. And everywhere you turned, there was another old-timer strolling around, signing autographs and basking in the spotlight again. But Terry Bradshaw boycotted the event, a carryover from an ongoing feud with the Steelers, who retired him before he wanted to leave.

Hate to stop you, but let's get back to Deion. Why is he feuding with Mike Ditka?

Because his momma listens to pregame shows. She heard Ditka's frequent criticism of Sanders and passed it on to her son. "I do what my momma says," claims the Prime man. And momma says he shouldn't give an interview to a critic. So he turned down NBC's request to talk to Ditka, who says he doesn't like Sanders' style -- on or off the field. They would be a great pair to sit together at a future dinner party.

Maybe they should have squared off in the wrestling ring, with the Steelers' Kevin Greene as ref?

Talk about craziness. Greene left Phoenix on Tuesday, flew to Las Vegas and participated in the wrestling show with Hulk Hogan and Randy (Macho Man) Savage. He traded taunts with one of Hogan's opponents, Ric Flair, and then helped the Hulkster toss some wrestlers from the ring. Even if the whole thing was staged, wouldn't it have been something if Greene hurt himself in the ring?

Now that you mentioned rings, Charles Haley of the Cowboys now has five Super Bowl rings. Do you think he shows them off a lot?

Haley is a boisterous, demonstrative man, but when it comes to those rings, he takes a far more subtle course. He keeps them in a safe-deposit box. He says he never wears them -- never even looks at them. Something about how they represent the past and he wants to focus on getting better.

Any chance the Cardinals will actually play in a Super Bowl, instead of hosting the game?

A two-word answer: Bill Bidwill. Bidwill called in all his league IOUs to get the game to Arizona, and you would have thought he'd have taken advantage of the week for all its public relations worth. Instead, the reclusive owner hardly was seen around town. Strange. And he still is trying to hire a coach and general manager to replace Buddy Ryan, who did both jobs badly before getting fired after the season. Bidwill could have made a big splash by at least introducing the general manager this week in front of the national media, but that would have made too much public relations sense.