The Last One

Having attended every Super Bowl since the beginning, sports writer Jerry Green, 93, has seen heroics, disasters, blow-outs and nail biters. But he still hasn’t seen a single half-time show

- STEVE FRIESS

LITTLE ENDURES VERY LONG IN Super Bowl history. Dynastic teams come and go. Stadiums and commissioners, too. Even Tom Brady, it turns out, could not last forever. But on February 13, as he has on every single Super Bowl Sunday, 93-year-old Jerry Green expects to don a collared shirt and dungarees, loop his credentials lanyard around his neck and head to “the office.”

This time, that will be SoFi Stadium in Inglewood, California, where he’ll watch the L.A. Rams take on the Cincinnati Bengals and then tap out some observations for The Detroit News. In doing so, Green will extend an unbreakable streak: He’ll become the only newspaper reporter of the 338 credentialed journalists to document Super Bowl I in 1967 who will have attended and covered all 56 of them. “I’m the last one,” he says with a grin. “How about that?”

This one—fittingly with the hot local angle of formerly long-suffering Detroit Lions quarterback Matthew Stafford competing in his first year with the Rams—might also be Green’s finale. He’s had to use a wheelchair at the games for the past few years and can’t physically chase stories the way he did in 1969 when he raced to a hotel pool in Fort Lauderdale to be one of a half-dozen reporters present for an iconic impromptu press conference with a shirtless Joe Namath. Also, Green is charmed by the poetry in stopping at 56; in 1941, New York Yankee legend Joe DiMaggio, Green’s childhood idol, hit safely in 56 consecutive games, “another unbeatable record. That might be enough.”