Beating the Ban

While a sellout throng of 80,010 cheered the Miami Dolphins to a 20-14 victory over the Cleveland Browns in Miami's Orange Bowl last week, hundreds of other fans were enjoying the game on color TV in the ten-story Marriott Motel just two miles from the stadium. The motel management had evaded the National Football League's TV blackout in cities where games are being played by erecting a high-sensitivity parabolic antenna that picked up the telecast of the Dolphin game from a TV station in Fort Myers, 149 miles away. Taking advantage of a special half-day (from 11 a.m. to 8 p.m.) rate of $24.95 for up to six TV viewers per room, the fans at the Marriott whooped it up. "We could tell when the game ended," says Assistant Manager Miquel Torres. "The whole place shook."

Among those in the Miami area who never got to see the Dolphins-Browns game at all was Richard Nixon, who was resting in his Key Biscayne retreat over the holiday weekend. Earlier in the week, the nation's No. 1 football fan had directed Attorney General Richard Kleindienst to ask N.F.L. Commissioner Pete Rozelle to lift the blackout on all playoff games that were sold out 48 hours in advance. Rozelle refused, explaining that easing of the TV ban could seriously reduce attendance at future games and might even turn pro football into a "studio show." Kleindienst countered by announcing that the Nixon Administration would urge the new Congress to re-examine the antitrust exemptions granted the N.F.L. in an effort to "seek legislation more in keeping with the public interest."

The public, meanwhile, seemed interested only in devising new and more fun-filled ways of beating the TV ban. Some 400 fans who were watching the Dolphin game at the Miami Playboy Club (which has a space-age antenna) were interrupted by a police raid that closed the club for not having a license to operate before 5 p.m. on Sundays. Undaunted, diehard "Dol-fans" found a long extension cord and hauled a TV set outside, where they sat under a spreading sea grape tree, munching Bunny Burgers and watching the game while the traffic whizzed by on Biscayne Boulevard. "I almost went out of my mind when the Dolphins got behind 14-13," said Bunny Mother Madeleine Kirkland, "and I'm not even a football fan."

Football freaks in three other playoff sites--Washington, D.C., Pittsburgh and San Francisco--hit the highways in search of blackout-free telecasts. Washington Redskin rooters packed 150 rooms at the Holiday Inn in Bethesda, Md. (40 miles from the stadium). The hotel, which is equipped with an extra-high antenna to pick up Baltimore stations, offered a gridiron buffet of lox, whitefish and onion rolls ($2.25) and a post-game open bar ($3). Fans at the Sheraton Motor Inn in Fredericksburg, Va., known for such victory celebrations as nude swim-ins, this time observed the Redskins' decisive 16-3 win over the Green Bay Packers with a nice orderly tumult. "When the Skins win," says Jim Graham, manager of the Fredericksburg Holiday Inn, "that's when we have trouble with the fans. By the end of a game they have gone through a bathtub of beer, and they start throwing toilet paper and hollering."

Hours before game time, Route 30 out of Pittsburgh was choked with the cars of Steeler fans heading west for oases in Ohio that were beyond the 75-mile radius of the blackout. When the Steelers squeezed by the Oakland Raiders 13-7 with a freak touchdown in the final five seconds, something akin to a seismic shock wave hit the Avalon Inn in Warren, Ohio. "One man got so excited," says Innkeeper Robert Grossman, "he rammed his hand through the glass coffee table in the bridal suite. Of course, it wasn't too good to put six men in the bridal suite in the first place but we had no other space left."

On the West Coast, followers of the San Francisco 49ers trekked to Reno and Lake Tahoe. Nev., where they could keep one eye on the TV tube and the other on the electric board flashing keno numbers. Other San Franciscans journeyed 185 miles to a hotel at the Fresno Airport. "Watch the 49ers on color TV," said the newspaper ads. "We pick you up at the airport, $15 a room, single or double. Enjoy the kind of food that would even make a referee smile. You'll have a ball." In Sunnyvale, Calif (40 miles south of San Francisco), the 700 boozing, betting, bellowing fans at the Bold Knight, a bar-restaurant with a $3,000 microwave antenna, were having the biggest ball of all until the Dallas Cowboys scored in the last minute to down the 49ers 30-28. Even so, there was comfort in commiserating with fellow fans. "At home," said one Bold Knight regular, "my old lady would be nagging me about something. Here, with people on all sides of me, I feel like I'm at the stadium."

That sense of togetherness-before-the-tube has, in fact, become a unique kind of American sports ritual that will not be easily dispelled even if the TV ban is lifted. Many fans actually prefer traveling to some instant-replay outpost to watch a game en masse. "I enjoy a game with a crowd," explains San Francisco Attorney Herb Kessler. "It's no fun telling the quarterback he should have called a different play when he can't hear you and nobody's around to disagree with you. Football is a community spectator sport. If I had to watch it alone. I might go skiing instead."

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.