By Bob Markus

I have more than a passing interest in Sunday's Super Bowl, which has not always been the case. Although I covered 10 Super bowls as a writer for the Chicago Tribune, my interest in the game dwindled to the point where, for several years, I would take my wife to a movie and dinner on Super Bowl Sunday, taking advantage of near-empty movie houses and no-reservations-needed restaurants. One year we saw "Titanic," which I found to be as tedious as the majority of Super Bowls. Another year we saw "Babe," which starred a whole pig, not just the pigskin. But this year is different and on Sunday I intend to be planted in front of my TV set along with most of the rest of America, watching the Pittsburgh Steelers play the Chicago-St.Louis-Arizona Cardinals.

In any ordinary year, I'd probably be rooting for the Steelers, a team I covered extensively in its heyday. I was there for Franco Harris's "immaculate reception," although I can't say in all honesty that I actually saw the play. I remember that the game had been rather dull up to that point, with the Oakland Raiders leading 7-6 and Pittsburgh facing a fourth and long in the final minute. I had stationed myself at the press box door, preparing for a dash to the elevator down to the locker room level. As soon as I saw Raiders' defensive back Jack Tatum swat down Terry Bradshaw's desperation heave, I bolted out the door. Already waiting for the elevator were Steelers' owner Art Rooney and his son, Dan. I was about to commiserate with them when I heard a roar from the crowd. I popped back into the press box just in time to see Harris reach the 5-yard line on his way to the winning touchdown. I had no idea how he'd gotten there. Most of the rest of the knwon world, of course, knew that Tatum had broken up the pass with a trademark viciousness that knocked the ball into Harris's hands. Thank God for instant replay.

After the Steelers won their first Super bowl, I covered their training camp the next summer as they prepared to kick off the exhibiton season with the College All-Star game, an annual event sponsored by my newspaper. When you spend two weeks with a team, sleeping in the same dorm, eating in the same cafeteria, standing on the sidelines at every practice and conducting lengthy interviews with most of the stars, you get to know them fairly well and they get to know you a little bit. At least, when you show up in a crowded postgame locker room down the road a year or two they'll remember your face, if not your name.

I remember once, a few years later, covering a Steelers' Monday night game in Houston and standing outside the dugout entrance to the Steelers' locker, when Bradshaw spotted me as he was leaving the field and said, with a big smile, "Sam Blair, how the hell are you!" Sam Blair was a writer for one of the Texas papers who was about six inches taller than me and resembled me about as much as a wombat resembles a water buffalo. But the point is that Bradshaw knew that he knew me, even if he didn't know exactly who I was.

My favorite player from that team was Rocky Bleier, whom I got to know pretty well. I remember one conversation we had on the subject of fear. Bleier had been wounded in Vietnam, an exploding grenade having injured a foot so severely that he missed an entire season rehabbing it. Bleier said that there was a fear factor in football almost as strong as he'd experienced in Vietnam. It was the fear of failure, he told me, a fear so pervasive that at times a player will welcome an injury that allows him to rationalize that he is not responsible for his poor play, while at the same time fearing the injury will cost him his job. But if Bleier was my favorite Steeler player, my favorite Steeler was Art Rooney, who loved good cigars, good horses, and good stories. The Steelers' owner always made you feel that he was interested in what you had to say, even if what you had to say was not of the slightest interest. He was, there's no other way to say it, a nice man.

Still, with all that pulling me toward the Steelers in Sunday's game, my heart tugs me the other way. I grew up a Cardinals' fan in a city and a time where that was not fashionable. The gulf between Cardinals and Bears fans was just as wide then as the gulf between White Sox and Cubs fans is today, with perhaps a little less animosity. The Cardinals were less despised than ignored by Bears fans. In truth, I liked both teams, but I saw far more Cardinals games, thanks to my father's job. He was an internal revenue agent and, as such, often was assigned to sporting events, presumably to make certain that taxes were being collected and reported on every ticket sold. He would always get a couple of general admission passes to the Cardinals' games in Comiskey Park and I saw several games in 1947, the year the Cardinals won their only championship. The seats were not the best, often in the upper grandstand in left field, where the overhang of the top deck obscured the first 10 to 15 yards. Once, for a Bears' game--this must have been in Wrigley Field--we had standing room tickets and stood along the sidelines.

The Cardinals in those years featured The Dream Backfield, originally comprising quarterback Paul Christman, fullbck Pat Harder, who also was the place kicker, and halfbacks Charley Trippi and Marshall Goldberg. But in that championship season, Elmer Angsman, already a local fan favorite after playing at Notre Dame, replaced Goldberg and starred, along with Trippi, in the 28-21 victory over Philadelphia in the title game. Angsman gained 159 yards in only 10 carries, including a 70-yard touchdown sprint and Trippi scored on a 44-yard run and 75 yard punt return. I later got to know Christman, who became a very good TV analyst.

The Cardinals seemed destined to repeat as champions in 1948, when they went 11-1 in the regular season, their only loss coming against the Bears in the second game. But the team suffered a tragic loss when offensive tackle Stan Mauldin collapsed and died after an opening game victory over Philadelphia, and the championship game was played in a raging blizzard, the Eagles slogging to a 7-0 victory.

The Cardinals were owned by Charles Bidwill, who suffered through a 29-game losing streak during World War II before rising to the top. But as quickly as they rose to glory, the Cardinals returned to mediocrity and beyond. After Bidwill's death, his widow, Violet, inherited the team. She later married a St. Louis businessman, Walter Wolfner, and in 1960 the team was moved to St.Louis. In 1962, Vi died and left the team to her two sons, Bill and Stormy (Charles II). The reading of the will touched off an exceedingly nasty law suit filed by Wolfner, who revealed that the two sons were adopted, a fact of which the two boys were unaware, even though they were as opposite in appearance as Arnold Schwarzenegger aand Danny DeVito in the movie "Twins." Bill was round in face and body, while Stormy was scarecrow thin and long-faced, with a beard covering an unsubstantial chin. The boys also inherited Sportsman's Park Race Track and, in 1972, divided the properties, Bill getting the Cardinals, and Stormy the race track.

I've never met Bill Bidwill and I only know Stormy to say "hello" to, but I renewed acquaintance with the Cardinals as a team after their move to St. Louis. Despite their repeated failures to make the playoffs, the Cardinals were a pretty decent team under Don Coryell. I got to know quarterback Jim Hart, having interviewed him when he was a rookie free agent out of Southern Illinois. Players tend to remember guys who talk to them on the way up and Hart always was my go-to guy in the Cardinals' dressing room.

Another connection I had to the Cardinals was Joe Pollack, who was my sports editor on the Columbia Missourian while I was studying journalism at the University of Missouri. My senior year I covered the football team for The Missourian and Joe and I travelled together in his car to most of the away games. By the time I started covering Cardinals' games, Joe was the publicity director. I always called him the Woody Hayes of p.r. men because, like the Ohio State coaching icon, he would go coatless, with a short-sleeved shirt, in the coldest weather. One unfortunate result of this habit was that when Busch stadium was built to house the baseball and footbll Cardinals it was built without windows in the press box. I spent many a bitter cold December day in that open air press box trying to make my freezing fingers hit the right keys on my type writer. Once, I beat the system by watching the game on TV in my room at the Marriott and walking across the street to the Stadium for the postgame locker room.

After their move to Arizona in 1988 I lost much of my interest in the Cardinals. I knew Denny Green from his days of coaching Northwestern and the Minnesota Vikings and I did watch in fascination his infamous meltdown after the Cardinals blew a big lead to the offensively punchless Bears. But they seemed a long way away from the Cardinals I once knew and admired.

Even when they made the playoffs this year despite a late season collapse, the Cardinals did not much excite me. I knew that Kurt Warner was looking a lot like the quarterback who won two MVPs and one Super Bowl for the St. Louis Rams and I knew he had quality receivers to throw to. But I didn't think that was enough to take a team to the Super Bowl, much less win it. Now I'm not so sure. I'm going to root for the Cardinals on Sunday and I'll even go out on a limb and pick them to win it, despite the Steelers obvious edge on defense. Call it: Cardinals 21; Steelers 17.