By Zachary Horner, Chatham News + Record Staff
For Governors Club resident Jim Steeg, the Super Bowl holds a lifetime of memories, relationships and stories that connect to football and sports.
Jim Steeg served as the NFL’s senior vice president of special events for 26 years — meaning he was the guy that ran the show at 26 Super Bowls — from 1979 to 2005. He now lives in Governors Club in northeast Chatham County.
“Even if you don’t care about it, you’re affected by it,” says Steeg, who worked as the National Football League’s senior vice president of special events from 1979-2005. “If you decide, ‘Screw it, I’m going to go play golf,’ the guy you wanna play golf with says, ‘No, I’ve got to get home for the game.’ It has an impact on everybody, and I don’t think we do anything else that has that.”
If Steeg was still the man in charge of making sure the Super Bowl went off smoothly, he’d be there right now — in fact, he would have been in Miami weeks ago.
“The Saturday of the divisional round would be the day I’d go to the site,” he said. “You get in and you move into your offices and you set up and you watch the games on Sunday. Then the four teams that are left all come in that next week, and you give them a day-long tour of their hotels and their practice sites and hook them up with the phone company — which probably doesn’t need to happen anymore — the guys providing cars and buses and things like that. So you go through this whole litany of things with them this week so they can go back. They’ve got to have everything in the bag the minute after they win. “
One of his favorite stories — and after a quarter century of producing the Super Bowl, he has an endless supply — relates directly to this set-up. In 1991, the heavily-favored San Francisco 49ers, led by future Hall-of-Famers Joe Montana and Jerry Rice, considered themselves a lock for the Super Bowl, so much so that team personnel installed a vast network of computers and phones in the team hotel to prepare, even before they had won the NFC Championship. But in the final seconds of that game, New York Giants kicker Matt Bahr hit his fifth field goal of the day to give the G-Men a 15-13 victory.
“The woman who is working for the Giants, her thrill at that point in time was walking through going, ‘Rip it out, rip it out, rip it out,’” Steeg said. “I actually think the 49ers spent more money on that Super Bowl than the Giants did in their offices.”
It was Steeg’s responsibility over his 26 Super Bowls to see a constantly-growing staff in setting up meeting rooms, arranging food, controlling the hoard of media which descends on the site, picking the halftime and National Anthem performers, getting security in place, all the way down to making sure the coin gets to the field for the opening toss. One year, he said, he left the coin in his hotel room and a staffer rushed back to get it just in time for kickoff.
Steeg was also responsible or partly responsible for several innovations that are used around the sports world now. He was in the Los Angeles Dodgers’ stadium for a game one year and heard the booming voice of Vin Scully in the men’s bathroom. He thought it was speakers put in the facilities, but it was just a bunch of men listening to Scully on their handheld radios. Now you can go to sports games around the country and hear commentary while using the restroom.
Putting a logo on the net behind the field goalposts? Laminated media credentials? Broadcasting the NFL Draft on television? He was part of all that.
Steeg’s stories could fill a book, but two stand out.
In 2002, he helped the NFL create the first Super Bowl after the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. The league moved the game back a week, negotiating a deal with the National Automobile Dealers Association, which had booked the Superdome in New Orleans. Janet Jackson — we’ll get to her again in a minute — dropped out of performing halftime, so the league booked U2 to do halftime and Mariah Carey for the National Anthem. Paul McCartney’s brother-in-law called about a month before kickoff to say the former Beatle also wanted to perform.
Steeg also had to help coordinate heightened security at the event, working with the Secret Service to institute a new credential process and new field barriers.
“There’s a lot of things we changed that we did then that all of a sudden everybody else did,” he said. “We literally invented stuff. There were a lot of things that happened.”
He said that he felt it was vital that Super Bowl — the 36th edition, in which the New England Patriots beat the St. Louis Rams for Tom Brady’s first championship — go well.
“In my opinion, and I’m prejudiced, it might have been the most important event in the history of sports because at that time,” he said. “Nobody was getting on airplanes and nobody was going to events. We were all afraid that somebody was going to hijack an airplane or somebody was going to blow up a stadium. We thought we were the major topic. If that had failed, I think that got the country back on airplanes, that and the (Winter) Olympics (in Salt Lake City) two weeks later.”
Two years later, at Super Bowl XXXVIII between the Patriots and the Carolina Panthers, came the Janet Jackson incident. The story has been told ad nauseam by now, but basically this is what happened: Jackson led the star-studded halftime show. During the final song, a duet with Justin Timberlake of the latter’s “Rock My Body,” the former NSYNC member ripped a piece of clothing from Jackson’s breast, exposing it.
It was not the first controversial incident of the night. Singer Kid Rock had been wearing an American-flag poncho. During his performance, Rock took the poncho off and threw it into the crowd. Then-Commissioner Paul Tagilabue was berated in his suite, Steeg says, by the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.
Steeg said he was sitting with former NFL head of officiating Mike Pereira and did not initially see the Jackson incident.
“I’m orchestrating getting everybody off and getting the teams back on, giving them notice when to come back,” Steeg said. “And (Pereira) said, ‘Did you see that?’ And I said, ‘What? No.’ He’s got Tivo there for officiating, and he said, ‘Let me show you.’ Backed it up and,” Steeg imitated a sigh.
There are lots of other stories Steeg could tell and has told — the Giants leaving the trophy in their locker room after the 1991 Super Bowl; Steeg standing next to Giants stars Lawrence Taylor and Carl Banks as they said some unprintable things about National Anthem singer Whitney Houston, who performed that same year; and getting Diana Ross to sing the National Anthem in Detroit in 1982.
Jim Steeg was part of overseeing everything at the NFL’s key events, including the Super Bowl, the Pro Bowl and the NFL Draft, from securing a National Anthem singer to making sure the coin for the pregame coin toss was ready to go.
That last one, he said, was his favorite event.
“That was the first one I saw from the very beginning of the award all the way through executing the game,” he said. “It was when I was starting to feel like I could dictate things. I was no longer a 29-year-old kid reporting to other people. I remember walking into (then-commissioner Pete) Rozelle’s office and saying there’s only one person who could do the anthem in Detroit. It’s gotta be Diana Ross. He laughs at me and says, ‘Go ahead kid, try to do that.’ Called her up, went and saw here and she did it.”
Ross began by encouraging the crowd to sing it along with her “with authority.” In the broadcast, you can hear the audience sing along as she slowly turned around to take it in. The Joe Montana-led San Francisco 49ers defeated the Cincinnati Bengals 26-21 that year.
But he’s not gone to the Super Bowl since his final one in 2005, in which the Patriots defeated the Philadelphia Eagles in Jacksonville. Steeg said he learned from his old boss, Rozelle.
“When he quit as commissioner, he believed that he should never go back,” he said. “Literally when he came to New York, we would go out to lunch with him. He would never go into the office, because it’s now Tagliabue’s office, it’s not his office. The only time we got him to come to the Super Bowl was when we got him to toss the coin for the 25th anniversary, but he never came back to the Super Bowl. I believe that too. It’s on somebody else’s watch now.”
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TheChatham News + Record is Chatham County’s source for local news and journalism. The Chatham News, established in 1924, and the Chatham Record, founded in 1878, have come together to better serve the Chatham community as the Chatham News + Record. Covering news, business, sports and more, the News + Record is working to strengthen community ties through compelling coverage of life in Chatham County.
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