David Lee’s fortunes changed at halftime. As the two teams filed off the field and entered the tunnels leading to the lockers, a muscular Orange Bowl security guard pulled the young halfback aside and asked to speak with him privately. The guard informed David Lee that there was an emergency phone call from his parents in Bedford-Stuy, and escorted him to a stale-smelling broom closet below the stands in the southwest corner of the stadium. Once inside the room, which had no telephone, the security guard locked the door and said:
“Do you know who I am?”
“No, sir,” David Lee replied politely, as even mediocre Notre Dame athletes were taught to do.
“I’m Viceroy Wilson.” And Wilson it was, not at all dead.
“Naw!” Lee grinned. “C’mon, man!” He studied the security guard’s furrowed face and saw in it something familiar, even famous. “Shit, it’s really you!” Lee said. “I can’t believe it—the Viceroy Wilson. Man, how come you wound up with a shitty job like this?”
The young man had obviously not been reading anything but the sports pages in Miami.
“Having a rough time tonight?” Wilson asked.
“You got that right,” David Lee said. “Those honky farmboys are built like garbage trucks.”
“Field looks pretty slippery, too. Hard to make your cuts.”
“Damn right. Hey, what about my momma and daddy?”
“Oh, I lied about that. Lemme see your helmet, bro.”
Lee handed it to him. “Fits you pretty good.”
“Yeah,” Viceroy Wilson said, squeezing it down over his ears. “Lemme buy it from you.”
“Sheeiiit!” David Lee laughed. “You really sumthin.”
“I’m serious, man.” Viceroy Wilson pulled out a wad of cash. “A thousand bucks,” he said, “For the whole uniform, ‘cept for the cleats. I got my own fuckin’ cleats.”
The money was Skip Wiley’s idea; Viceroy was just as amenable to punching the young man’s lights out and stripping him clean.
David Lee fondled the crisp new bills and peered at the visage inside the gold Notre Dame helmet. He wondered if the Carrera sunglasses were some kind of gag.
“Is it a deal or not?” Wilson asked.
“Look, the coach is gonna freak. How about after the game?”
“This is after the game. Believe me, son, the game is over.” Viceroy Wilson nonchalantly handed the college halfback another one thousand dollars.
“Two grand for a football uniform!”
“That’s right, bro.”
“You want the jock strap, too?”
“Fuck no!”
When he finally made it back to the Notre Dame locker room, David Lee stood naked except for his spikes and athletic supporter. After apologizing for interrupting the team prayer, he soberly told the coach he had been robbed and molested by a gang of crazed Mariel refugees, and asked if he could sit out the rest of the game.
The Orange Bowl Football Classic is as famous for its prodigal halftime production as for its superior brand of collegiate football. The halftime show is unfailingly more extravagant and fanciful than the Orange Bowl parade of the previous evening because the Halftime Celebration Committee adopts its own theme, hires its own professional director, recruits its own fresh-faced talent, and performs for its own television crew. The effect is that of a wearisome Vegas floor show played out across ten acres of Prescription Athletic Turf by four hundred professional “young people” who all look like they just got scholarships at Brigham Young. In recent years the TV people realized that lip-synching by the New Christy Minstrels and clog-dancing by giant stuffed mice in tuxedos were not enough to prevent millions of football viewers from going to the toilet and missing all the important car commercials, so the halftime producers introduced fireworks and even lasers into the Orange Bowl show. This proved to be a big hit and new-car sales went up accordingly. Each year more and more spectacular effects were worked into the script, and themes were modernized with the 18-to-34-year-old consumer in mind (though a few minor Disney characters were tossed in for the children). In the minds of the Orange Bowl organizers, the ideal halftime production was conceptually “hip,” visually thrilling, morally inoffensive, and unremittingly middle-class.
The emcee of the Orange Bowl halftime show was a television personality named John Davidson, selected chiefly because of his dimples, which could be seen from as far away as the stadium’s upper deck. Standing in an ice-blue spotlight on the fifty-yard line, John Davidson opened the festivities with a tepid medley of famous show tunes. Soon he was enveloped by a throng of prancing, dancing, capering, miming, rain-soaked Broadway characters in full costume: be-whiskered cats, Yiddish fiddlers, gorgeous chorus girls, two Little Orphan Annies, three Elephant Men, a Hamlet, a King of Siam, and even a tap-dancing Willy Loman. The theme of the twenty-two-minute extravaganza was “The World’s a Stage,” an ambitious sequel to previous Orange Bowl halftime galas such as “The World’s a Song,” “The World’s a Parade,” and more recently, “The World’s a Great Big Planet.”