True family affair
CABOT — Attending every Super Bowl has been a thrill ride for Tom Henschel.
The people he’s been able to bring along has been the most rewarding part of the journey for the 80-year-old Cabot resident.
Henschel will continue to join Maine resident Don Crisman and Lansing (Mich.) resident Gregory Eaton as the only people to be in the stands for every Super Bowl when he enters SoFi Stadium in Los Angeles on Sunday.
The trio are on the NFL’s VIP list and buy their tickets that way. The league seats them together and makes two game tickets available for purchase by each. Henschel said he paid $5,000 total for two tickets to the Bengals-Rams showdown.
“I may be attending this game alone, though,” he said. “A man who graduated high school with my sister years ago lives in the Los Angeles area and we’re going to hook up this weekend.
“I’ve offered him the other ticket at face value, but I’m not sure he’s going to opt in. If not, I’ll probably just scalp the ticket.”
Regardless, Henschel will be there to extend his streak. Crisman has said this will be his last Super Bowl.
“Don isn’t in the best of health and he’s gonna give it up,” Henschel said. “Greg’s a real nice guy, but may not have been to the first two or three Super Bowls when the games weren’t called that. He doesn’t have any evidence to show he was at those early ones.”
That may soon leave Henschel as the lone Super survivor — something he’d be proud of. But it’s not his proudest aspect of this Super Streak.
“It’s the family members I’ve been able to include along the way,” Henschel said. “I’ve taken my father to five games, my mother to two. My brother Jim went to 30 games with me. My brother David’s gone to two, my sisters Janet, DeeDee and Janee one each.
“My wife’s gone to 13 games with me. We have no children, but I’ve taken all five of my nephews and my two nieces to games. I’ve got plenty of Super Bowl memories with all of them.”
A graduate of Har-Brack High School in Natrona Heights, Henschel left the Pittsburgh area in 1965 and worked as a gate agent for an airport in Chicago. He frequented a bar called “Some Other Place” some evenings, got to talking and landed himself a part-time job as a bartender there at night.
He met some Chicago Bear football players there and received tickets to the first Super Bowl — known then as the NFL-AFL Championship Game — between Green Bay and Kansas City in 1967.
“Flight attendants came into that bar quite a bit and football players came in to meet them,” Henschel said, laughing. “I’m an outgoing guy. I talk to everybody. They found out I could fly for nothing and I wound up being handed those tickets.”
Henschel received tickets to five of the first six Super Bowl games that way, mainly from then-Bears quarterback Jack Concannon. The exception was Super Bowl III, the year Jose Namath and the Jets upset the Baltimore Colts.
“That was in Miami,” Henschel recalled. “We flew down there and I paid 12 bucks for a ticket. The (Super Bowl) game just wasn’t that big a deal back then.”
Henschel found a way to get tickets to the big game every tyear since before getting on the VIP list for the past 32 Super Bowls. He worked in Miami for a few years, had Dolphins season tickets, and befriended Dolphin owner Joe Robbie’s secretary.
“She got me Super Bowl tickets maybe four times,” Henschel said.
He and his brother Jim attended all of their Super Bowl games together wearing Steeler jerseys, whether Pittsburgh was playing in the game or not.
“Other fans would question why we had those jerseys on, telling us the Steelers weren’t playing that day,” Henschel said. “We used to say: ‘Do we need to give you folks a history lesson?’ They would quiet down after that.”
Henschel said he never liked sitting in the corner of the end zone for the Super Bowl, where some of his seats would be, until he was sitting in the same corner where Santonio Holmes caught the game-winning pass from Ben Roethlisberger in the 43rd Super Bowl.
“That’s a vision I’ll never forget,” he said.
He described New Orleans, which along with Miami has hosted the most Super Bowl games, as “a city everyone should visit at least once in their lives. The French Quarter is amazing.”
His prediction for Super Bowl LVI?
“I’m going with the Bengals, 31-27,” Henschel said. “Cincinnati’s never won one and I’m really hoping they get this one. I know that field goal kicker (Evan McPherson) is going to make at least one field goal.”
