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With Super Bowl Sunday dead ahead, Stone talked about a lifelong love-hate relationship with the game, including his (not-so-glorious) playing days, the evils of TV timeouts and a Super Bowl bet he wishes he'd never made.

This season in the NFL was particularly brutal, on and off the field. We saw nine stars go down with serious injuries, a player pushed a referee to the ground, another was accused of murdering his pregnant girlfriend. Is this a vision of the future of the game?

I think this has been going on in the NFL all along. What's happened is the media fishbowl got too fast for them. I mean, also you might add that Cecil Collins for the Dolphins got in trouble, breaking and entering, but this has been going on for years in the NFL. When we researched [for "Any Given Sunday"] and found out about this stuff, [the NFL] got very sensitive about that issue, especially domestic abuse situations. But that is the nature of aggression. Aggression is required to play the game. Sometimes it leaks over into the rest of life -- not in everyone. Guys have been fighting with refs for years, players have fought each other. Now, if anything, it's become more civilized.

What are the two things that most irk you about the game these days?

Defensive [pass interference] calls. I think it's impossible to be a defensive back and guard against the pass. You can easily give away 40 or 50 yards for a nothing push, with just a glancing blow -- not anything that interferes with the pass receiver in any intentional way. They have been calling a lot of that over the season. I think it's appalling that you can get 40 or 50 yards on a call.

Yeah, that's what's different about the college game: You only get 15 yards.

It changes the game. That's one of the things that really annoys me. The second thing is commercial timeouts. The intrusion of commercials is bullshit. It's part of the whole commercialization of American culture. As Jim Brown was the first to point it out to me, how many times have you seen on TV a team march down the field and get to the 20 and they take a TV timeout? The whole stadium goes quiet, waiting for the television commercial to play out, stretching the game out. The team has lost its concentration, as well as its momentum. It's a shame. The game has changed.

Who was your team growing up?

Growing up in the '50s, I was a fan of the 49ers.

Where did you grow up?

New York.

So why were you a 49ers fan?

Don't ask me, it's just the Giants got so much attention. I always liked the other guys. They had that million-dollar backfield: Y.A. Tittle was the quarterback; Hugh Perry was the fullback; Hugh McElhanny was the broken-field runner; John Henry Johnson was second halfback -- he was also a pass catcher. He was a hell of player.

Did you ever play in school?

Sure, I played at Trinity. I was a left halfback. I was in the defensive backfield as well; we played both ways back then. It was really an hour game back then: back and forth. Now with all these TV commercials it's a three-hour game.

Where you any good?

Very good. But then I went from the Trinity school in the eighth grade, in the ninth grade to the Hill School in Pennsylvania. The coach there was a knucklehead who transferred me to fullback without ever giving me a tryout as a halfback. That happens to a lot of kids in sports, which is what I hate about coaches.

So at an early age the powers that be were out to get you.

Oh, yeah. They got me. They do that with a lot of kids. Bad coaching.com, it's everywhere.

Any great achievements on the field?

Not really, we mainly lost. We were not the world-shakers. We were a small team, but we were fast, and we had some talent.

What does the game do for you now that other sports don't?

I like that it's a team sport, that you have these 11 guys in the huddle all looking downfield together. It approximates the conditions of war, in a purely abstract sense of a team unified trying to gain land against another team. It has a very primeval feeling to it.

The uniforms, the helmets. I love the helmets. When I was a child they reminded me of the Greek helmets, of the Greek and Trojan wars. That's part of the thrill a young boy feels toward it. I remember putting on that helmet and feeling like a superhero as a kid.

When you were in Vietnam were you able to follow the game?

No, I pretty much lost track, the reports came in so sporadically. I missed the Namath-Unitas Super Bowl, which was too bad.

Do you have any great Super Bowl memories?

My best Super Bowl memories would have to be the Dolphins and the 49ers over time. I loved watching Miami. They were wonderful to watch, like the Niners in the '80s and the '90s. Whenever the Dolphins got the ball in those two seasons -- they had that one unbeaten season [1972], every time they got the ball the first series they scored -- they marched down the field like a machine. No one could figure out a way to stop them. They could pass, run inside, run outside. Don Shula was a genius, and he ran that team, I guess you could say, like a war machine.

So the Dolphins wiping out Minnesota in the early '70s, the 49ers beating Cincinnati with that catch [1989 Super Bowl]. I love them beating Denver, 55-10 [1990]; that was wonderful to watch. I love them beating the Chargers[1995]. And more recently, in terms of tension, the Packers being upset by Denver [1998] was exciting. I loved that game. That was the most exciting single Super Bowl I have seen in a long time.

Basically, like most people, I love the underdog thing -- that makes it happen for me.

Where were you for "The Catch" [49ers quarterback Joe Montana's last-minute touchdown pass to Dwight Clark to beat Dallas in the 1981 NFC Championship Game]?

I didn't see that. I was in Italy writing "Scarface."

Next page | Stone's days as a betting man