It's How You Play It

NOSTALGIA TRIPPING: On a crisp, mid-December afternoon in San Diego, when LaDanian Tomlinson found a well-earned place in the NFL record books, and the Chargers made a substantial down payment on a trip to Super Bowl XLI in Miami, my thoughts revisited two long-ago Chargers road trips to Miami.

The first was in 1982, after four college buddies bought the last tickets on a radio promo junket to the AFC semifinal game with the Miami Dophins in the rickety old Orange Bowl. That ticket won me entrance to the most-exciting NFL game ever playedoa battle in 90-plus temperatures that the Chargers finally won, in overtime, amid blood, sweat and several stretcher rides to the locker room for exhausted and dehydrated Chargers players.

The second came in 1995, when the Chargers and I returned to Miami for Super Bowl XXIX versus the San Francisco 49ers. For Chargers fans, at least, that went down in the books as one of the least-exciting NFL games ever. But then, getting there was more than half the fun.

I wrote my last newspaper columns for The San Diego Union-Tribune on assignment from Miami before quitting the paper to become editor of San Diego Magazine. Those columns, and ones that preceded them during the weeks leading up to the big game, chronicled the adventures of a deliriously happy populace dedicated to reveling in the moment. We'll surely do it again this year, but here's what it was like in San Diego in January 1995:

At a Family Health Centers luncheon in Barrio Logan, the mariachis played from their usual lively repertoire. But for the first time, the cheery crowd suddenly turned on them with boos. The emcee later apologized to the musicians, explaining, "It wasn't your performance. It was your choice of tunes. This isn't a good time to be playing 'I Left My Heart in San Francisco.'"

The SD Zoo's Jeff Jouett and his Bay Area fiancee made a life-changing bet on the Chargers-49ers Super Bowl. If the Chargers won, she'd move here; if the Niners won, he'd move there. San Francisco, he soon discovered, wasn't such a bad place to live.

Las Vegas pre-season odds in 1994 were 140-1 against the Chargers getting to the Super Bowl. John Lentz laid down $20 on San Diego that summer. The week before Super Bowl XXIX, he flew to Vegas to pick up his $2,800 winnings.

Police had become accustomed to reports of stolen Raiders jackets. A gang thing. But by Super Bowl week, the Chargers had arrived. Police logged the first theft of a Chargers jacket, valued at $60, swiped from a ninth-grader at Southwest Junior High.

After the Chargers clinched the AFC championship and were Bowl-bound, a University City divorcee phoned me. When she and her husband split 15 years earlier, she said, he got custody of their Chargers season tickets. He still had them. And when he phoned her that day to share the news he'd just won the lottery for a pair of tickets to the big game in Miami, she had the last word. "If I'd known then the Chargers were going to the Super Bowl," she quipped, "I could have made the marriage last another 15 years."

When I agreed to go column-to-column in a Super Bowl match of wits with San Francisco Chronicle city columnist Rob Morse (to be printed in both the Union-Tribune and Chronicle), my newsroom colleagues said they were betting on me. "Of course," said one U-T reporter, "we're taking the 19 points."

Long before he ascended to his lofty corporate perch in the insurance industry, Juan Vargas was a simple San Diego councilman and Chargers fan. No corporate jet for him; no invitation to Chargers owner Alex Spanosi box. He and then-aide Ralph Inzunza picked up two Super Bowl tickets at the $200 face value, rented a car and drove the 6,000-mile round trip to Miami. Their accommodations? "The car," said Vargas, "has reclining seats."

Arriving two days before the game, San Diegans Don and Penny Ables stepped off their flight at Fort Lauderdale carrying a pair of outsized foam Chargers lightning bolts - and twin stickers on their carry-on luggage proclaiming, "We're Spending Our Kids' Inheritance." Quite likely. To get there, she took time off work, without pay. Don took vacation. They paid $1,700 each for airfare and hotel room. Hired a babysitter for five days ($200). Paid $800 apiece for two game tickets. And, for mad money, took a $1,000 advance on their Visa card (at 21 percent interest). Any second thoughts, I asked them after the game. "Best money we ever threw away," Don beamed.

For Fort Lauderdale color, I found, you couldn't beat the Bermuda Triangle nightclub, where police presence was intentionally conspicuous. Teenagers were cruising the boulevard in "chopped" trucks with underbellies lit in neon pink and purple. "The light," one local told me, "is so when they run over someone, they can view their road kill."

The Chargers weren't exactly road kill in Super Bowl XXIX, but it wasn't a pretty sight, either. Still, San Diegans tend to take such setbacks in stride. The day after the big loss, the marquee at La Jolla Country Club read, "GO PADRES!"

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