Green: Snarling Al Davis coined Super Bowl as 'snow job'

San Francisco — Hurrah — the great snow job is ending and Peyton Manning and Cam Newton and their teammates are about to batter each other for the bragging rights — victory in Super Bowl 50.

The great snow job has been conducted mostly here in San Francisco, with its picturesque bridges and cable cars — and fearsome hills.

It was the late Al Davis, who referred to the Super Bowl as “a great snow job.” This was in 1968, before pro football accepted the term Super Bowl, and an obscure crewcut sports journalist from Detroit started the use of Roman numerals.

It was Al Davis, who conducted the first poolside interview at a Super Bowl. Not Joe Namath.

“I’m all for the merger,” fibbed Davis, the heart and soul of the American Football League as head of the Oakland Raiders. “But I still think we could licked the NFL.”

This was in the prelude to Super Bowl II in Miami’s Orange Bowl. As Davis pontificated you could hear the surf breaking in over the beach from the Atlantic Ocean.

“I’ve known Vince Lombardi since I was a kid in New York,” Davis said to a few of us. “He’s pretty smart. Who’s called us a junior league except Lombardi? Everybody else picked up on it. It wasn’t necessary.”

Davis was a nasty, cursing, insulting individual.

One time when I attempted to ask him a question he responded.

“Get the bleep out of here” he once told me. “Get out of my face.”

But he was street-smart clever, an arrogant fighter out of Brooklyn. He added rogues and renegades to his Raiders teams — athletes no other pro team would tolerate.

Rogues gallery

“We’re the halfway house of the NFL,” said the Pro Football Hall of Fame Gene Upshaw, who 15 played years with the Raiders.

Despite his pugnacious attitude, Davis remains a prime character in Super Bowl lore.

Pete Rozelle was suave as the NFL commissioner. Davis, briefly the AFL commissioner, during the two league’s infighting, was anti-suave.

Davis and Rozelle went through the post-merger years as bitter enemies.

After the Raiders won Super Bowl XV, Rozelle by protocol, handed Davis the Lombardi Trophy.

Standing nearby during the ceremony, you could sense the bittersweet atmosphere.  Rozelle made an effort to smile, but you could sense his emotions.

“I hired him because everybody hated his guts,” said Raiders boss owner Wayne Valley said of Davis at Super Bowl II.

Davis, always scheming, conceived the idea of stealing away the top NFL quarterbacks with richer contracts.

This was the straw that snapped the NFL into submission and a year later it was Joe Namath who forced the AFL toward full acceptance and equality.

Davis was a scoundrel — that’s a weak word for him — and he certainly was not a personal favorite. But when his name came up several years before his death for election to the Pro Football Hall, I favored him with my vote.

He was one of the thinkers who made pro football the appealing addictive sport that it is now. He was the guy who in meetings at Palm Springs developed the scheme for three NFL teams to join the AFL teams in forming the American Football Conference. After considerable hectoring between the sides, the Baltimore Colts, Pittsburgh Steelers and original Cleveland Browns accepted payments to switch over.

Even if, most of the time when he wasn’t telling you to get out of his face, Al Davis was a human snow job, himself.

Not so super

Back then — for those first two AFL-NFL championship games now included in history as Super Bowls I and II — the AFL was not ready for game competition.

I recall the first play of Super Bowl II between Davis’ Raiders and Lombardi’s dynastic Packers. Hewritt Dixon, a home-grown AFL star, tried to hit left guard for the Raiders. Ray Nitschke, fangs flashing as Lombardi’s middle linebacker, charged forward. There was an enormous collision. Dixon was bashed backwards and down.

And that to me, symbolized the two still-enemy leagues — and to me, determined the result right then. After one scrimmage play.

The sad part is, Nitschke was not voted the game’s most valuable player. Bart Starr, Lombardi’s robot quarterback, was a Super Bowl MVP for the second time.

Linebackers never get enough credit; quarterbacks get too much.

With young Newton leading the Panthers and grizzled Peyton Manning, in perhaps his last hurrah, leading the Broncos, the safest prediction is that a quarterback will dominate the MVP balloting. That is the usual pattern with quarterbacks receiving 27 MVP elections at the previous 49 Super Bowls.

Linebackers have been selected as MVPs in a mere three Super Bowls. Chuck Howley made it at Super Bowl V in a defeat for his Cowboys.

It’s too odd.

But this past week of the entire prelude to Super Bowl 50 has been odd.

The circus is in San Francisco — the nosiest, most audacious snow job of any Super Bowl. With the highest prices ever. It costs seven bucks to ride on San Francisco’s vintage cable cars.

And with the toughest logistics ever because the game itself is in Santa Clara — at Levi’s Stadium, 39 miles south of San Francisco.

But finally there will be a game — as soon as Lady Gaga finishes singing "The Star Spangled Banner."

Al Davis hit the bull’s-eye of the target when he tabbed 47 Super Bowls ago.

Snow job, indeed.

Jerry Green is a retired News sports writer.