TOM MOFFATT & RON JACOBS GREATEST LISTENERS

Elvis and Fan: Hawaiian Village, 1957

This is the case for me, Ron Jacobs, and my oldest friend in radio, Tom Moffatt, as being as cool as any rock’n’roll deejays in the annals of American broadcasting. You know, back when the top jock was the king of the kids living with excitement of Top 40 fast and furiously being born. I produced the original History of Rock & Roll for KHJ and the RKO stations consulted by Bill Drake and Chenault in 1969. It begins with John Lennon stating: It all started with Elvis.

Tom and I were kings of radio on the rock when EP sailed into Hawaii. Our station, KHVH (which stood for Kaiser Hawaiian Village Hotel) broadcast an Elvis music marathon continuously from our breathtaking penthouse studios atop Waikiki’s tallest building for the three days in November 1957. While Elvis and Colonel sailed into range they listened, we later discovered, to us all the way.

The shocking and awesome upshot of that—and our staging of the First Elvis Impersonator (a title also claimed by Punahou’s Bobby Shane of the Kingston Trio who was singing like EP right after he hit it big, but our fake King was deejay Donn Tyler, who was dressed and made up professionally to look like the boy from Tupelo in one of the most infamous stunts pulled in Fifties radio). Only over time has it gained notoriety, word spreading of the crazy thing across the global network of Elvis fans.

Why is he considered THE greatest? Because he left behind the most loyal fans of any artist and his wondrous vocal talent can be recognized by an appreciative ear at any time and in any place.

Anyway, we all became friends. One of the members of “The Memphis Mafia,” the entourage that accompanied Elvis to paradise Hawaiian style was George Klein, one of the top deejays in Memphis, at WHBQ. It was a hot radio market. Sam Phillips (not the man of the same name who brought Elvis fame on Sun Records, but the man, along with Wink Martindale and a few others made it the bigtime). Plus Elvis lived and recorded there. The local stations broke his early hits. But George Klein and Elvis Presley went further back, to their days at Humes High School where George was class president and Elvis was the most exotic kid in school, to say the least.

Colonel was blown away by our all-Elvis hit parade beamed to their radios on the S. S. Lurline from our beachside studios in blue Hawaii, to what became known as “Elvis’ second home.” So was Elvis himself when he joined us on the lanai and, puffing on his cigar, told Elvis what “Mr. Jacobs” and “Mr. Moffatt” had just pulled off: riding “him” around in my 1957 Ford Skyliner retractable hardtop, touring Oahu, a place that was second to none in the worship of his fans, their loyalty expressed Hawaiian style.

Colonel suggested that Tom and I each emcee the next day’s concerts at Honolulu Stadium. I was twenty and that was the biggest moment of my life. And it began a lifelong friendship with my mentor: Before launching anything, uh, out of the ordinary I always stop and ask myself, “What would Colonel do?” I mean more profound lessons than Tom Parker 101, like: “You can always draw a crowd with elephants or midgets.”

Tom and I were as emotionally close to Elvis and Colonel as any deejays. We had aloha on our side. At Colonel’s memorial service in Las Vegas we, along with George Klein, attended a small private gathering hosted by Mrs. Loanne Parker before the actual services, at which George, Tom and I were honorary pallbearers.

(And to silence those who know absolutely nothing but gossip, not the facts, about Elvis and Colonel and the enduring mutual respect between the two great men: know that among the select group invited to pay their respects to the Great Snowman were Priscilla Presley and the management team of Graceland and all the Elvis Presley enterprises.)

Tom Moffatt and I first worked together in 1955 at KGU Radio as staff announcers at the Territory’s NBC affiliate. My proudest moment was interviewing Natalie Wood for the network’s prestigious Monitor program. Four years later I was the program director and morning deejay and Moffatt was the nighttime king of radio and hosting every rock and roll concert that hit town. We started a record label and proceed Hawaii’s first rock records in 1959. We were the newest and most exotic state. Word slowly spread that KPOI radio was not only tops in the ratings, but was doing some wild shit never heard before on the air.

Tom took Hawaii and I took off for California. Since that time Moffat has become “The Showman of The Pacific” (not surprisingly the title of his autobiography, written with Jerry Hopkins). He has produced concerts featuring every star in the rock’n’roll universe—and beyond, everyone from Sinatra to the Bolshoi Ballet.

When I had established myself in Hollywood with Boss Radio, we leveraged that into a concert company, which evolved into the corporation, Watermark, that created, produced and distributed American Top 40 with Casey Kasem, the CRUISIN’ albums series (featuring the greatest jocks of all time, such as Robert W. Morgan, B. Mitchell Reed, Hunter Hancock, Dick Biondi, Dr. Don Rose, Russ “Weird Beard” Knight, Jack Carney, Arnie “Woo Woo” Ginsberg, Pat O’Day, Johnny Holiday and others, all of whom I was privileged to work with as the producer-director of the series.

Watermark also established Charlatan Productions, the first company to produce, on film, what later would be known as “music videos” on MTV, featuring artists ranging from Jimi Hendrix to Aretha Franklin and shot by Allen Daviau, who went on to film the first hits of one of the groupies who hung around our office catty-corner from Pink’s Hot Dogs, Steven Spielberg. Daviau was behind the lens for E.T., The Color Purple, and major motion pictures by other director’s that earned him five Oscar nominations and acclaim as one of the top all time director’s of cinematography.

Another noted director, Cameron Crowe, was a groupie of the most under-rated of all the stations with which I have been associated with over the years, in San Diego. “It was the city where I first met Ron Jacobs, the pop-culture visionary and genius behind my favorite local radio station, KGB,” wrote Cameron about 1972, when the station was named FM Station Of The Year by Billboard magazine.

Three years earlier Watermark produced the event that spawned Woodstock, The Miami Pop Festival. It inspired Michael Lang to try it in New York, where it was staffed by many who learned how to do it in Florida the week before Joe Namath’s Jets won the stunning Super Bowl III a few miles away from our show at Gulfstream Park. More than thirty acts performed in Miami, from the Grateful Dead to Marvin Gaye, Steppenwolf to Chuck Berry and like that for three days on two stages managed by legendary Chip Monck.

Okay, RJ, why the sudden ego burst about you and Moffatt as deejays? Much of the above propaganda involves you guys doing amazing things with all the biggest names. Other jocks can pop bigger resumes. But …

Only Tom and I can claim that we were the #1 deejays when two hometown boys from two schools two miles apart on Nehoa Street listened to us spinnin’ the hits along with virtually all the teens on the island. One kid was from the elite private institution, Punahou, where he graduated in 1979 when yours truly was the man with the music in the final cusp of AM superiority. The other attended the plebeian public Roosevelt High School, at the opposite end of the academic rainbow the arched from Manoa to Makiki. He was Peter Hernandez, 2002, who heard all the roots of rock on Uncle Tom’s Cabin (still on the air on Saturdays after all these years), where the hits Moffatt debuted are now the classic oldies of rock.

So watching these guys on TV today, while sorting through years of my stuff that reflects faded and forgotten memories, both of our former listeners appeared on the tube bigtime. Punahou’s Barry Obama speaking of matters that will change the course of history, and his fellow keiki o ka ‘aina (child of the land), now known as Bruno Mars, lit up the Grammys with his dazzling tour d’ force of movement and music.

But let’s not forget the females. A Radford High School girl who worked as a secretary at KGU to begin her career also first tasted rock on the radio when Tom Moffatt and I were the local hero Poi Boys bringing home the hits to Halawa Civilian Housing, where Bette Midler was born and raised.

Those were three of our homegrown listeners. There’s many a deejay who was heard by millions of more listeners than Tom and I. But who else can claim Barack, Bruno and Bette getting their youthful daily injections of America’s heartbeat, the musical pulse of the past half century listening to our shows?

What got me thinking about this was watching the Grammy Awards tonight—all the musical connections, legends, generations … the days when radio made hits and hits made radio, concert halls and studio walls. And thinking back to 1962 when some kids drove up to KMAK in Fresno to play for the publicity of it on the roof of our funky station on McKinley Avenue and here they appear tonight on the tube, after all those years: The Beach Boys.

I used to be impressed and measure radio fame by the size of ratings. Tonight I flashed on whose ears heard Tom and first turn them on to good ol’ rock and roll. Hey, we had Jack Lord and Tom Selleck playing us in their dressing rooms…like Elvis Presley did in his cabin forty-five years ago. And sometimes even the stuff between the records was also way cool.

Now I ponder who is reading, not hearing, what I have to say. In 1956 before Bill Haley rocked the world, I played Dean Martin’s “Memories Are Made Of This” what seemed a million times. Anyone who finds this interesting and drops an email on me. I’ll send the first few who do an unused ticket to Whitney Houston’s magnificent, sold out 1997 concert in Aloha Stadium.

Now I’m off to read “I-Wanna-Be-A-Deejay” Ken Levine’s traditional review of the Grammy Awards and check this year’s spiel for its cynicism ratio. After all you don’t write TV shows like M*A*S*H and Cheers and Frazier by being serious.

FIRST LOOK: NEW NFL BOOK

DON AND TODD HEWITT

I am using this blog in a new way at least for me. It will comprise a book that my collaborator, Todd Hewitt, and I have been undertaking for the past year: NFL LOCKER ROOM CONFESSIONS. We have over 92,000 words and quirky graphics to go with the text. This is coming directly from myMac in Kaneohe, Oahu, Hawaii while composing this on the slick software of Scrivener—a fun word to spell—directly to the antiquated Blogger program that I got stuck with when I finally gave in to blogging and so all of my stuff is in their archives and getting to even my present work is such a pain in the ass this is fundamental guerilla publishing. And why not now?

ARE YOU SUFFERING FROM

S P S B S ???

SUCKING POST SUPER BOWL SYNDROME

If so, you are invited to follow along as I transfer to the Ron Jacobs Blog, Bra BREAKING TEXT bypassing any publishing precedents I’ve ever pushed. So here we go:

WhoDaGuy & Hewitt Do It

Ron Jacobs is the author of the 2009 best-selling nonfiction book in the Fiftieth State: Obamaland: Who Is Barack Obama?, the co-creator of American Top Forty in 1970; the Sixties radio rockumentaries The History of Rock & Roll and The Elvis Presley Story as well as producing records and concerts from the Hollywood Bowl to the Waikiki Shell. A legendary deejay and TV host in his native Hawaii since the 1950s, Jacobs began his broadcast career engineering high school football games and serving as backup trackside announcer at the Roller Derby when it visited Honolulu. He has won various awards for his work as a broadcaster and writer. This is fourth book—but the first one to roll like this baby!

This is also coming as a absolute surprise to his longtime faithful friend and editor since the last century, Carol Williams, who is no way responsible for the spelling, grammar, fumphs, typos broken out here without any advance warning to her of the authors’ impulsive and eager craving to kick this off.

Todd Hewitt worked in the equipment department of the then-Los Angeles Rams starting at the age of eleven in Orange County California where he was born. He started on the University of California Riverside team that won the 1979 College World Series. His father, Don Hewitt, played for the PCL Oakland Oaks, coached by Leo Durocher but injuries knocked him out of the game and back home to Fresno, California where he began coaching high school baseball and football. Moving to Los Angeles, his prep teams caught the eye of the University of Southern California. The Trojans hired him as the head football equipment manager in 1965. Playing in the same LA Coliseum as the glam Rams of Hollywood, in just two years the pro team lured Don Hewitt from USC to the NFL where he began his career as head equipment manager of the storied Los Angeles Rams, the first US professional major league sports franchise established in Southern California in 1946.

The team moved to Anaheim in 1994 and Todd Hewitt succeeded his dad in 1986, supervised the move to St. Louis in 1995 and was with the franchise through the end of the 2010 season, ending the Hewitt Era that kept things cool in the Rams locker room for forty-three seasons. Todd joined the Univeristy of California at Berkeley in 2011 as head equipment manager of all sports. He promises to finish this book by the time I post what we have done so far on this exclusive first draft, fumbles and all.

Old School off-field hi-jinks =

good methadone for NFL Junkies.

NOTICE

THIS IS COPYRIGHTED MATERIAL AND MAY NOT BE COPIED, PUBLISHED, FORWARED OR OTHERWISE TRANSFERRED WITHOUT THE ADVANCE WRITTEN CONSENT OF THE COPYRIGHT OWNERS.

© 2012 by Ron Jacobs & Todd Hewitt.

PLEASE NOTE THAT THIS IS A RUFF COPY OF PORTIONS OF A MANUSCRIPT. SECTIONS IN THIS EXCERPT MIGHT NOT APPEAR IN THIS SEQUENCE IN THE FINAL COPY OR AT ALL. PLEASE PARDON TYPOS, SPELLING ERRORS, ETC. ANY RESEMBLANCE TO ANYONE LIVING OR DEAD IS WHAT IT IS.

ALL PUBLISHING AND MEDIA RIGHTS TO THIS PROJECT AVAILABLE TO THE RIGHT PLAYERS. FOR MORE INFO PLEASE CONTACT RON JACOBS AT RJ@HAWAII.RR.COM.

NFL Locker Room Confessions

By Todd Hewitt & Ron Jacobs

“The Equipment Department is a very important aspect of an NFL franchise. Players spend so much time in and around the equipment and locker room personnel it is critical to have the right people there. Believe me: Todd Hewitt and his staff were and are the right people. The hours these guys put in are way beyond a normal workday. I never heard Todd complain! He has great integrity, so you can always trust that he will do what is right for all the right reasons. If I ever return to coaching, I would ask Todd to come with me. Head Coach Dick Vermeil, 2011.

PREFACE

Ten years ago Todd Hewitt and I first joked about doing a book detailing his time with the Rams of the National Football League. Anything seemed possible then. The Rams had just competed the greatest run in the team’s history, one of the most sensational in the annals of the National Football League. It climaxed with the St. Louis Rams winning Super Bowl XXXIV on the first Sunday of 2000.

That kickoff of the twenty-first century marked my forty-fifth year of following the team that was a major part of Todd’s life since he was old enough to pick up inflated “pigskin.” He had every reason to live and inhale pro football. From the start Todd’s living room away from home was the locker room of one of the NFL’s most famous franchises, the Los Angeles Rams.

The senior Hewitt’s career was cut short by injury and he returned home to Southern California where he coached high school football, a job that included handling team equipment and just about everything else.

Tall, blonde haired, blue-eyed Todd was born and raised in Southern California. His father was a former athlete, coach and meticulous equipment manager of the USC Trojans and the LA Rams, Don Hewitt. Born and schooled in Fresno, California, after serving in the Navy during World War II, Don played baseball for the Oakland Oaks of the Pacific Coast League, coached by Casey Stengel. Don’s roommate was another future New York Yankees great, the inflammable Billy Martin.

Don’s first son, Todd, played sports throughout high school and started on the Cal State Fullerton baseball team, capping his own athletic career when the squad won the 1984 College World Series. Todd had no illusions about “going to the next level” in pro sports; he longed to follow in his father’s cleats, working the locker room, where there are no secrets. Behind doors closed to the public repose naked truths about the players and coaches whose profession is pro football: the most popular sport in America.

Through the chain of circumstance that make life interesting, surprising and full of excitement, since we became close in the 1990s I have been privileged to share some of Todd Hewitt’s off-the-record anecdotes. These are stories that this assiduously tight- lipped team player kept to himself, telling no none other than, perhaps, his wife, Kathy.

Again and again I am amused by the offense taken by press and public when an NFL player makes the news, usually on a deplorable negative note about DUI, domestic abuse altercations or some other bizarre incident, most usually involving breaking the law, using alcohol, drugs or guns and in some instances, death itself. Ex-Rams equipment manager Todd Hewitt witnessed just about everything that we fans know nothing about from watching from our couch, a fancy suite high above the action or up in the cheap seats. Todd knows between-the lines, untold stories, from goal line to headline, tales never told before.

For Todd it was Fifties through Nineties Hollywood, living and cruisin’ through the decades within the Orange County, luscious, sunny Southern California, from the mountains to the sea, where athletes blazed in coliseums and the America’s most beautiful people were to be found. Then the team, and Todd moved to St. Louis in 1995. It would prove to be the scene of his highest highs and lowest lows.

Todd hung with the jocks, enjoying a bachelor existence most guys dream of until one night Rams All-Pro guard, hulking Dennis Harrah, carried a sweet young lass through a rowdy Anaheim sports bar and dumped her into Todd’s lap as he sat in a back booth surrounded by Rams players. They all thought it was hilarious and ordered up more beer. Todd never let go of Kathy, his former cheerleader high school sweetheart, who he married on March 9, 1985.

For anyone interested in fun in the sun there was no better place to be than SoCal, including me, away from my home in Hawaii. At 27 I held down a job that just about everyone in my profession wanted: Program Director of KHJ Radio, Los Angeles. Built in 1922, this pioneer station was older than the Rams, itself an enterprise begun in 1937. As my deranged obsession with this team deepened over the years it overwhelmed my mind in a way that resembled an addiction to drugs, sex or rock’n’roll. Unfortunately there is no RA, Rams Anonymous, with a Twelve Step programs to kill the deadly compulsion to follow the fortunes of this horn-helmeted junta of pro footballers.

My collection of Rams remnants includes scores of items Todd has sent me over the years, always out of friendship, postage paid. What kind of stuff? An autographed game-worn pair of Marshall Faulk’s personalized custom golden cleats. Kurt Warner material of every manner (all Sharpie signed with a Bible notation, chapter and verse). And if Mike Martz asks, tell him I have his Redskins offensive playbook from 1998. If just a few of the millionaire player signatures were on checks made out to me ...

Rather, insults about the team and my evangelistic dedication to it were hurled back at me, making fun of me, my obsession and, of course, the Rams themselves. By the time my daughter, Miki’ala, learned to howl with bad intentions her first manic mantra every time I mentioned the team was, “Rams suck, Rams suck!”

For over five decades I’ve sucked up minutiae about this football team. Whenever I exclaimed aloud about my discoveries, such as the fact that I was fourteen days old on the day the Cleveland Rams scored their first touchdown, all my wives, co-workers, non-football fanatics and Forty-Niners fans repressed the urge to smack me in the mouth.

I endured eight seasons as a season ticket holder for every Rams games played in the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum. As noted on the Rams official web site I have never missed watching a game that this team has played since the annual Los Angeles Times Charity game in the summer of 1965 just a few weeks before the Watts Riots.

Football has fascinated me from the beginning when I knew I could never do it as well as the guys on the playgrounds and in school. I also did not fancy being hit. My dad took me to the 1944 Annual Shrine East-West All-Star Game played in Kezar Stadium, located in San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park where we lived across the street during the middle of World War II. The game ended in a 6-6 tie, dooming me to crave more action, seek resolution and pray for victory for our team.

Football is bigger here in Hawaii than everything else combined, including all the water sports. I attended Punahou School, once somewhat famous in intellectual and athletic circles for scholars and scat backs and now right up there, being the school attended by Barack Obama, Class of 1979. But what I knew and wrote of the man was second-hand knowledge no matter the scores of interviews and claimed veracity of the folks with whom I talked or corresponded.

I’ve been rapping with Todd Hewitt on the phone pretty much continuously for the past ourteen years. How this came about, and my thousands of miles traveling the country’s highways, flying around to cities that I would never entered other than to cash in the winning lottery ticket, and tuned to every communications device invented by man so that I could follow every play, all the action on the field on which the Rams were playing, is an entirely other story, mine, not Todd’s. Such a memoir might be called “A Fan’s Notes” (1968) had not that title been used by “brilliant one-book writer” Fredrick Exley during his prolonged stay in a New York mental institution contemplating his fascination about football star Frank Gifford of USC and the New York Giants.

Although I live in Kaneohe, right down the road from a state mental institution, and have worn official Rams workout shorts of three different sizes on all but 10 days since 1997 and caused many ridiculous scenes in various NFL stadia, I have avoided incarceration based on my beyond-religious devotion to this football team.

The Rams, as all NFL teams, have millions of fans. But other than family members, I doubt few, including journalists, have heard more many locker room stories as have I, 99% of them told me by Todd Hewitt in his “Aw, shucks,” down home, underplayed way. For a decade I was a close friend with All-Pro tight end Russ Francis, from his rookie year, with the New England Patriots to his days with the San Francisco Forty- Niners, where he finished his career. Russ won a Super Bowl ring; he played in 167 games, a respectable total.

In his career, Todd Hewitt worked in an incredible 738 consecutive National Football League games, never missing one, even on that Sunday when one of his four kids was born in LA, in he was on the road in New Orleans.

To put that into perspective, the all time position player is Hall Of Famer Jerry Rice, who played in 303 games. That's less than half the game checks Todd Hewitt received. Of course Rice's were loaded with lots more zeroes in the money column. But no player's career ended in a more sudden and shocking way than what happened to Todd following the final game of the 2010 NFL season, something that has left Todd's many friends and fans throughout the league still scratching their heads and sends me into a rage when I think about it.

The oxymoronic subtitle of “A Fan’s Notes” is “A Fictional Memoir.” One thing I can tell you is that Todd Hewitt’s story is 100% true with the referees looking the other way on only a few bizarre, hilarious or surrealistic occasions in his life and career. And this story would not be complete without his co-star, a woman every actress would want to play in the HBO special, Mrs. Kathy Hewitt, who has inspired not only Todd, but yours truly, to do this thing in a winning way.

Hopefully what follows will also satisfy the perverse curiosity of those few who are interested in the dimensions of NFL players' unmentionables and lots of other stuff you don't read about in Sports Illustrated, hear on sports talk radio or see on ESPN. NFL locker rooms are not posted KEEP OUT without good reason. Todd Hewitt tells the naked truth. Meanwhile, Kathy insists that the book should be called, “How I Hooked My Way Into The NFL,” and told from her special point of view.

If it doesn't matter who wins or loses, then why do they keep score?

Vince Lombardi

To be continued with stories of wild men doing crazy things.

PRO BOWL FOR MEDIA DUMMIES

Don Ho

(Born in Honolulu before “Pearl Harbor,” broadcaster and author Ron Jacobs began his sportscasting career as the backup trackside announcer when Roller Derby came to Honolulu in the 1950s. While in Hollywood he co-created American Top 40 in 1970. He has written extensively about traditional and popular contemporary Hawaiian culture. Jacobs' OBAMALAND: Who Is Barack Obama? is the #1 best-selling nonfiction book in Hawaii since its publication in 2009.)

Please pass this on to anyone you know at ESPN or the sports people at the other networks: It’s HO-no-lulu … got it?

Let’s begin with the most onerous transgression committed by the off-Islander TV and radio announcers: They often blunder into the mispronunciation of the name of the Aloha’s State’s capital city: Honolulu. Al Michaels gets it right since he kicked off his broadcast career right here in Hawaii. Boomer Berman gets it right because he always does with most things besides having frequently flown to and from Hawaii to qualify as an Honorary Kama’aina (old timer.)

It is not pronounced: HUH-nah-lula. To anyone who knows the Hawaiian language or merely just how to pronounce the name of my hometown saying it that way aloud is excruciating to the “local” ear or anyone who knows the correct way to say this word, which literally means “protected bay.” Anyone who let’s loose with “Huhnahlula” is thereafter known as not akamai (hip) to the place and everything about it. There even might be a spillover of doubt as to the mispronouncer’s credibility when it comes to other “details.”

It would be easy here to cite examples of how the names of pro and college athletes from Hawaii and the rest of the South Pacific have their names butchered up by some sportscasters who have never been west of LA. Worse even is when they just quit trying and “cleverly” assign a Polynesian player a convenient nickname. At this they are not particularly creative. When the NFL’s St. Louis Rams drafted tight end Michael Patrick Hoomanawanui of Illinois in the fifth round announcers threw in the towel during the preseason games that revealed that Hoomanawanui was a keeper. He was re-labeled: “Illinois Mike.” And thus was he known by the play-by-play callers unable to tackle “hoh’-oh-ma-NAH-wah-noo-ee” for fear of what we say in Hawaii street Pidgin English: “Make ass.”

There is one sure fire way to remember how to pronounce the name of this town: Think of its most famous son (other than the current President of the United States.) Who else but: DON HO.

Can you say “Don Ho”? Great! You are on your way to nailing it like a native. Take my dear friend’s first name—I knew and interviewed Don Ho over a period of forty years—and add: “No” and “Lulu.” HO-no-lulu.

A small thing you might think. Until you think about the last time someone blew the pronunciation of your hometown or whatever. But unless you’re from a major city the chances of the town’s name popping up in the news are slim. But hey, this is Honolulu, baby. You know, the place where the crew from HAWAII 5-0 patrols the scene, keeping it safe for all who arrive here, whether or not they can pronounce correctly the HNL designation on their baggage tags.

The Pro Bowl is played in Aloha Stadium. The word “aloha” indeed can mean both hello and goodbye but in connection with this venue it may as well translate into: White Elephant Rusting By The Sea. Actually to say that in Hawaiian you must pronounce it: He 'elepani ke'oke'o e ki'o kukaehao ana ma ka pili kai.

Aloha Stadium was conceived to be one of the first multi-sport venues, the kind where grandstands could be moved about to fit either a football or baseball configuration within its oval structure. Someone sold the reigning bureaucrats on the idea of, like, “floating sections” of seats that could be moved about from season to season.

To the best of my knowledge they never moved all that much after the Hawaii Islander baseball team left town. The all-metal structure opened in 1975, replacing venerable Honolulu Stadium, the old “Termite Palace” in Moilili in town, which had been the major outdoor arena since the Territorial Twenties. The old wooden structure wore down over half a century but it did not suffer from what has afflicted Aloha Stadium since day one: Rust. Park a car next to the Pacific Ocean for thirty-five years then have a look at what remains.

Of course Aloha Stadium is not a ’75 Chevy parked at Sandy Beach. So over the decades it has been as massive metallic political football, so to speak. But it all boils down to the place is still there and perpetually under repair with no viable alternative in sight. There have been studies, proposals, legislative boogies and all manner of suggestions but the place remains the only big game place in town.

Compared to the worst NFL stadium, whichever that may be, Aloha Stadium is bush-league and downright shoddy in just about every category except for Beautiful Weather in January. (The same can be said of Miami, but when the NFL shifted the Pro Bowl there last year it lacked the aloha and allure of the Fiftieth State so The Great Meaningless Filler Game is once again being played out in Halawa, within a few hundred yards of Pearl Harbor itself, with its metal-munching ocean saltwater. However the United States Navy keeps things shipshape unlike the rusting stadium that looks out at the USS Arizona Memorial next to the docked USS Missouri. Fortunately these historic landmarks have been preserved. As well they should be. They are not only perpetual reminders of the infamous December 7, 1941, sneak attack on the naval base but they are also the state’s number one tourist attraction. Officially the 2011 Pro Bowl generated $28 million in visitor spending and $3 million in state tax revenue.

These days the game is staged during the interregnum week between the conference championship playoff games and Super Bowl. This manufactured “all star” game, which originated in 1938 way before the AFL-NFL merger in 1970 but bounced around the country in eleven different stadia in search of fans who would fill the seats for this most exhibition of all NFL games. By 1979 someone figured out that high-paid pro football stars would compete in a meaningless game if it could be played in “paradise” and they could bring along their families and/or entourages while paying for the spree with their game check. Players on the winning squad take home nearly as much as Mitt Romney makes in a day: $45,000 per player to the victors and $22,500 each for the losers.

The rap has always been, “The teams mess around for three quarters and then play to win at the end so they can earn the victor’s share to help pay their wives and girlfriend’s shopping sprees.” A winner’s game check can evaporate at Waikiki’s “Luxury Row” on Kalakaua Avenue, a Rodeo Drive West, featuring stores like Tiffany & Co., Gucci, Yves Saint Laurent and so on.

Meanwhile the game itself is always video-garnished with the same mai tai, waterfalls and hula girl images of Hawaii that are great for those who serve the “visitor industry” but bear less resemblance to reality than the polyglamorous picture postcards peddled at souvenir counters and tourist traps.

The stadium in which the Pro Bowl is played is located “about twenty minutes from Waikiki,” but that really applies only to emergency vehicles with flashing lights and screaming sirens. In that days when UH football was hot and all 50,000 seats were sold a game could cause traffic jams for miles in all directions, all aiming for parking lots too small to hold maximum crowds.

Nonetheless, islanders who have never seen an NFL game in person regularly show up for this faux battle, which is usually a high-scoring, no defensive game just a few notches above flag football. And for those who do go and have a ball—good for them.

In a display of how meaningless this game is NFL players will be allowed to tweet during the Pro Bowl. Sort of. Before you get too excited, realize players will not be using their own personal devices. Rather, they will be using designated kiosks on the sidelines. If people do indeed “roll over in their graves” Vince Lombardi must be spinning faster than a Ferrari engine at maximum r.p.m.

Most of us football fans who live here in Hawaii watch the Pro Bowl game on TV, if at all. And we understand that nothing much is at stake but that’s cool; good for the guys whose plays merited their selection to these elite squads. I just hope that those in the broadcast media, the same people who have mastered the pronunciation of such Super Bowl players’ names as the New York Giants stars Amukamara, Kiwanuka and Umenyiora learn how to say “Honolulu” correctly. Before they focus the following week on Super Bowl XLVI played at that stadium in Indian Apple Us.

FILLING SPACE ON TIME

After decades of meeting deadlines for broadcast and print it is nice to throw off such commitments and write these things called “blogs.” The online Webster definition of such things is: “a Web site that contains an online personal journal with reflections, comments, and often hyperlinks provided by the writer.”

For those not keeping track (or giving a damn) the origin of the term "weblog" was coined by one Jorn Barger in December 1997. Wow—that was all of fifteen years ago. The shorter version, "blog," was coined by Peter Merholz, who, in 1999, broke the word weblog into the phrase "we blog" in the sidebar of his weblog. Let’s ask Google, “How many blogs are there on the Internet?”

(Returns to keyboard after ninety-minute ‘net search for this statistic. Data is either outdated or wildly conflicting. If you know the answer please let me know. But from reading many reports and studies just now it is safe to assume that someone somewhere is blogging about something. Who those people are and what they blog about has been probed by intensive studies. And to me these cross-tabbed data dumps based on who-knows-what-kind-of-sample? or questionable methodology add up to nothing but confusion. Let’s just say that more people are blogging by the minute. But unlike library books that can be discarded, the blogosphere apparently can handle an unlimited mass of this stuff and of all society’s major problems, over-blogging ain’t one of them, like burned out dead space hardware dropping from orbit into your swimming pool or Yankee Stadium.)

My admiration is limitless for those pioneering and persistent bloggers who crank out a new posting each and every day. Interesting. Most all the studies I checked reveal that the majority of these folks do so without pay or any kind of monetary compensation. Once upon a time a “diary” was a closely held book (some came with locks and keys); a place to stash private thoughts and feelings. But with the advent of all this electronic connectivity these once solitary thoughts have become public domain in the most literal sense.

Blogs are like a mega-amped Speakers' Corner, which is located at the north-east corner of London’s Hyde Park. Outdoor public rants, debate and discussion are allowed. Speakers there may rattle on about any subject, as long as the police consider their speeches within lawful boundaries. Years ago, when I visited the spot many of the ravers accompanied their pleas and tirades with hand-made placards announcing the Main Point of the oration, which was usually something about the world coming to end in the immediate future.

Putting aside commercial blogs, which are merely the newest forms of advertising, PR, bulletin boards, etc., sponsored by business entities of all types. People who track this stuff say commercial blogs comprise about 50% of what is spamming out of monitors globally. The other half are posted by individuals who blog about virtually every subject known to (and yet to be discovered by) mankind.

I started this blog after urging the Scribe For All Seasons, Ken Levine, to offer his clever unscheduled emails to friends. Ken, who I think was born typing, had already made his rep as a screenwriter and beyond. He was a “Hollywood hyphenate” back when most folks thought the term referred to some form of sexual deviation. Meanwhile Ken was expanding into sports broadcasting. (In a Walter Mitty universe Ken Levine would be deliriously happy to be legendary sportscaster Vince Scully or a rockin’ Boss deejay like the inimitable Robert W. Morgan.

He quickly transitioned from sitting in the Dodger Stadium bleachers doing play-by-play games—into a small cassette tape recorder. This is how he honed yet another talent. And one of those cassettes landed him a job in a Major League Baseball radio booth. Since the team was located in Baltimore, about 2300 miles away from his home in West LA, Ken’s “travelogue” reports expanded beyond his dispatches about family vacations, usually spent in Hawaii and described in his well-honed style of observations punctuated with punch lines. I’m certain that I wasn’t the only one urging him to present his hilarious highlights in the form of the then-still new form of a blog. What matters is that he officially became an online scribe in November 2005. His first entry contained commentary on everything but key elements of home plumbing (and further examination might indeed find concealed, covert, coded messages about the kitchen sink itself given Ken’s facile use of multiple entendre and his consistently cool POV.) Basically a humorist by trade, Ken sums it up in this question from one of his recent posts: “Who needs to write satire when stuff like this actually occurs?”

But even as impressive as the content of his entries—named one of the “Best 25 Blogs of 2011” by TIME Magazine—it is Ken Levine’s ’ that continues to impress. Doing it daily for more than six “Internet Years” is a long time. The blogs tar were started and since abandoned in that period number in the mega-digits. Shit, unless and until the Internet crashes all these time pellets of trivia will be, like, out there…subject to recall at any moment. This will result in a rainbow of consequences. Folks whose electronic epigrams like Ken Levine’s are a true body of work deserve all the space required on the digital shelf or whatever the metaphor is for The Cloud, quickly replacing the trusty old library. Gone are Borders and Barnes & Noble and cheers for the “small independent booksellers” like the kind often featured on CSPAN’s “Booknotes”—which is my personal method of filling the TV void created at the end of the football season. Nothing beats the NFL for us junkies locked and loaded into it but “Booknotes” dwells in the nonfiction world and is methadone for pro football addicts on when post-Super Bowl Cold Turkey sets in. And it can be watched with one’s eyes closed, know what I mean?

Of course such programming deals with “serious” writers who may have or still blog but that is not at the top of their resume. Blogs are still somewhat the back alley of “literature.” But then again punctual pasquinades like those of Ken Levine and countless others may be “books in the making before our very eyes.”

Jack Kerouac’s monumental “one roll” approach to his masterwork “One The Road” was a Blog-A-Thon in its own way. In 1951 Jack Kerouac took a continuous 120-foot roll of paper, threaded it into his manual typewriter and began to write his masterpiece, which he did, fueled by whatever version of the legend one believes and punched the thing out. Or, how about what in my opinion is the most amazing chapter on sports ever written, “Ice,” from David Maraniss’ classic, “When Pride Still Mattered”—a/k/a “The Lombardi book” that spawned the Broadway play— was written by him, fueled on coffee, in a day and night marathon. If you not read the book, then dig up a copy of this fantastic work. It is also a great way to fill those non-football hours looming up on us.

So throw a random “something”-blog into your browser and play Internet roulette. And if this happens to pop up do let me know. Even if by the old school way: a note in a bottle that will someday wash up here on Oahu’s North Shore.

I have thus fulfilled my ulterior motive in putting this down in approaching 1300 words. That is to get rid of the last damn NFL-related blog. It was time-specific and I gotta get something up by kickoff Sunday or I will be awash in guilt and even more jealous of Ken Levine and all the others like him who pound out good stuff with the consistency of the changing of the Royal Guard at Buckingham Palace in London.

Speaking of which, to add an incorrigible blab of limited interest: In a precedent-setting move the St. Louis Rams of the National Football League have just announced that they will be playing one game per year—for the next three seasons—in London’s Wembley Stadium. It is superior in every way to the team’s home dome, one of the oldest and dilapidated in pro football. If only you could drive there from St. Louis. Not THAT would be some kind of tunnel.

NEW ORLEANS NIGHTMARE

If "something happens" to Drew Brees this is who takes over.

After all this is the biggest NFL weekend traditionally and this year's matchups are as good as it gets. And as usual most all the "experts" are not about to stick their necks out. Even though they are "my" team's biggest rival I must pull for the NFC Western Conference champion San Francisco 49ers.

And let's not beat around the bush: the team who can take out the opposing quarterback usually has an instant advantage. I have nothing as Mr. Brees as a person and he is one hell of a ballplayer. But now he must be a matador in the mud playing against a strong defensive unit in a town praying for a return to the Frisco teams heyday.

So this is a little note that I can always erase if I am dead wrong: Across the line from the Saints QB will be Isaac Sopoaga, former defensive star at the University of Hawaii, and a full wrecking crew.

Would I bet against the Saints? Immaterial since I don't gamble. So let's be real: I've attended hundreds of NFL games in person. People holler, "Kill the quarterback!" They don't say, "Have a nice day." At least I hope so tomorrow in the city by the bay.

PS - Congratulations to the St. Louis pro football franchise for doing something sane for the first time in many a season.

CAMERON CROWE 40 YEARS LATER

It seems that every jag off of a certain demographic wants to be some aspect of Cameron Crowe, whose talent erupted in sync with the rhythms of the times and the trends in technology.

Had he been born in Ancient Rome, young Cameron would have been chasing around Caesar’s gardens using his wit and love of the arts to ingratiate him with those who created it, and from whom he could get a breathless, exclusive interview.

Once I was a Wunderkind. Unless one has been through the barrage of expectations that increase with success at an early age, it is difficult to understand the yin-yang attached to being really famous in a world when once “almost well-known” was more than enough.

Forty years ago, Cameron walked into my office at KGB Radio-San Diego accompanied by two other hippies with chips on their shoulders. This long-haired barefoot trio showed up at the radio station to tell us what “the people” wanted — make that, needed — on and from the radio. I represented the corporate rats that stood in their way. At least that was my POV sitting there at the programming helm of the most messed-up radio station I’d ever signed up with in a town that everyone envied for its surf, sea and sun. All of this was manini kine stuff to me, born as I was in Waikiki where the real watermen of the Pacific dwell in the swells, and so many other sights and scenes are unknown in what was then billing itself as “America’s Finest City.”

To me San Diego was the anal sphincter of California in many ways. But one of my treasured memories is of watching the shifty-eyed kid who seemed to know more than he should about life and music for a high-school kid emerging from his nerd cocoon. Cameron hung around and our mutual passions bridged the age gap. I was 35-years-old and at the top of my professional heap: rock’n’roll radio. Cameron was a 15-year-old kid who wanted to snuggle up to Led Zeppelin albums until he could meet the group live and in person and live to tell the world the rest of the story.

In Pidgin English — the street slang of my hometown of Honolulu — Cameron would be called the “Sly Mongoose” type. His intellect and curiosity expanded like a sumo belly, overflowing with torrents of words that made you wonder: Is this kid writing that stuff? Mozart and cats like that have always confounded their elders but those were unwired days. Cameron plugged into and played back his way so far and so fast that the only way I could describe it as an observer would require my lapsing into sports writing clichés.

Many of the wannabe moviemakers now unleashed and unrestrained online write about an artist’s work as if they know or knew the person directly and they hold the key to revelations held within the world as seen through film.

I need not waste one word on those straining their brains to match words and wits, syntax and insight with a master such as Cameron, whose life is multi-faceted in ways that those who “analyze” his films cannot grasp.

To paraphrase the old Rough Rider himself — Theodore Roosevelt in his famous “Man in the Arena” pronouncement: those who don’t jump in and DO IT can go sit back and fuck themselves.”

While making movies and not measuring his mark in the intervals between doing so, Cameron whizzed through more life changes than a cartoon super hero. As Joe South once wrote and Elvis echoed: “Walk a Mile in My Shoes.”

Making movies is like fighting a war and those involved should be cheered for getting out of there alive. When the paying customers emerge from the theater with a smile or a tear it makes it all worth it. Here's a shove your way Cameron: Congratulations and check back sometime during the next forty years