Time to bowl over America

The League will be hoping the 2002 Super Bowl can restore an image dented by crowd trouble in Cleveland, Ohio, last month when a decision went against the city's team, the Browns, during their match with the Jacksonville Jaguars.

The teams and officials had to leave the field as a hail of beer bottles, later counted in their thousands, rained down on to the pitch. The players eventually came back on to finish the game.

The only man anyone wanted to talk to or about at last year's Super Bowl was Ray Lewis, of the Baltimore Ravens, an outstanding player who went on to be the game's MVP in a win over the New York Giants in Tampa, Florida.

A year earlier he was alleged to have been involved in a fatal stabbing incident after a Super Bowl party in Atlanta, Georgia. He was arrested, along with two other men, and tried for double homicide.

Lewis pleaded guilty to obstructing justice but he and the two other men were acquitted of murder.

The run-up to the 1999 Super Bowl was going nicely with Eugene Robinson of the Atlanta Falcons picking up an award for being a model Christian citizen. Then he spoiled it all on the night before the game when he was picked up in downtown Miami and charged with soliciting a prostitute.

The woman turned out to be an under-cover policewoman and he'd just offered her $40 (£28) for oral sex.

Here in New Orleans, they still remember Chicago Bears quarterback Jim McMahon for more of the wrong reasons.

In 1986, with the Bears getting ready to face the Patriots in the Super Bowl, McMahon allegedly dismissed the men and women of the city they call 'The Big Easy' as "sluts and nuts" on a radio show, while he was out partying into the early hours. He denied he actually said it, but the good people of New Orleans were outraged and there was a bomb threat at the Bears' hotel.

To make it worse, McMahon then "mooned" at a helicopter full of media people who had hired it to fly over the Bears training ground a few days before the Super Bowl.

That same year, Patriots player Irving Fryar's wife allegedly stabbed him in the arm during a domestic row the week before the Super Bowl.

However, there is room for the lighthearted headline grabber. In the first Super Bowl, in Los Angeles in 1967, folklore has it that Green Bay Packers backup player Max McGee was up all night drinking on the eve of the game.

He wasn't expecting to play, but due to an injury to a team-mate, head coach Vince Lombardi sent him on. He scored two touchdowns in a Packers win.