With all due respect to Isaiah (J.R.) Rider — the NBA’s all-time arrest leader who solidified his first-ballot Sports Crime Hall of Fame status last week with a decisive post-retirement kidnapping bust — there really is no news in sports this week that doesn’t involve the Super Bowl.
The days leading up to kickoff have a reputation for being fraught with terrible temptations for the highly arrestable athletes of the NFL, but major criminal transgressions by game participants are actually fairly rare. (After the game is another story — more on that in a moment). The only problem is, the stakes are so high in the Bowl that any player who risks team karma with a high-profile pre-game arrest is instantly branded with the Mark of Buckner for all eternity, making these busts some of the most famous in the history of sports crime.
Oddly enough, none of the top three Super Bowl transgressions resulted in actual arrests. The inaugural scandal was the notorious Len Dawson gambling flap of Super Bowl IV, in which NBC reported five days before the game that the Chiefs quarterback would be called to testify in a federal gambling probe. Although virtually no new information other than this leaked out prior to the game, the national sporting media ran and ran with the story, so much so that the Chiefs, in a gesture that has since become legend in sports journalism, ordered five pounds of shrimp rémoulade for the hacks staking out the team hotel. How did the story end? Dawson was never charged with any crime, and the Chiefs pasted the first of what would be many demoralizing big-game whippings on the Minnesota Vikings, winning 23-7. Dawson was the MVP of the game.
The next big Super Bowl scandal didn’t arrive until almost two decades later, when Cincinnati Bengals running back Stanley Wilson proved the time-worn maxim: there’s no such thing as “a little cocaine.” Wilson broke curfew before Super Bowl XXIII, then returned to his room and went to sleep with what looked like the remains of a powdered doughnut caked on his face. Team officials broke into his room, found him passed out in a Tony Montana–like mound of prime shake, and left him there. Wilson eventually left the room via a fire escape and never played another game in pro football.
Former Oakland Raider Barret Robbins was another big-game no-show, failing to appear for a walk-through the day before Super Bowl XXXVII. Robbins had spent the previous days testing the integrity of the US-Mexico border as he stumbled between Baja and San Diego in a waking alcoholic coma, contemplating suicide. Robbins, who suffered from severe bipolar disorder, spent the day of the game in a hospital and would eventually be arrested for a series of bizarre crimes; he was finally shot by Florida police who caught him breaking into a Miami office building.
