OK, would you settle for Ann Marlowe? Former Buffalo Bills head coach Marv Levy, a four-time Super Bowl loser AFC Champion and winner of 140 regular season games, is about to unveil his fiction debut, ‘Between The Lies’, a tome that tells the tale of a rigged Super Bowl. As you might expect, Levy takes pains to tell the Chicago Sun-Times’ Rick Telander he has (almost) no personal experience with that sort of fraud.
The novel won’t be out for a month, and by that time Levy will have assured questioners a thousand times that none of the Super Bowls he coached in was rigged, juiced, undermined, stolen or swiped in any way. He’s pretty sure about that.
‘‘It’s exaggerated,’’ he insists, looking for all the world like that lawyer or history professor he probably was meant to be. ‘‘I never have suspected or sensed a whiff of cheating in any of our Super Bowls,’’ he says.
Even when Scott Norwood’s 47-yard field-goal try sailed wide right as time expired in Super Bowl XXV? Maybe there was a wireless chip or a lead weight on the ball. Or a mouse inside.
‘‘No,’’ Levy says. ‘‘I knew people would ask questions. But it’s not about refs rigging the game. It’s about, well, what if teams have secret wires in opponents’ locker rooms? What if they listened in to other teams’ signals? What if they did illicit filming?’’
Nah, that never would happen. Would it, Bill Belichick?
In the book, for which he graciously provided me his own written synopsis, I notice lots of very amusing names, such as filthy-rich team owner Cedric B. Medill, equipment manager ‘‘Malaprop Joe’’ Skoronski and quarterback Q.T. ‘‘Cutie’’ Pye. There is also an opposing quarterback named, ahem, Kelly James.
‘‘Yep, there’s a little of Jim Kelly in there,’’ Levy admits. ‘‘But it’s, remember, fiction. But the Kelly in the book is a strong leader, determined, and a great locker room presence, like Jim was.’’
No experience with rigging a Super Bowl. Wonder what Scott Norwood thinks of this?
I liked this book better when it was a movie called Buffalo 66.