Meet the Man Charged With Keeping the Super Bowl Safe
If Mickey Sulick does his job Sunday night, this is the last you'll ever hear from him.
For all the chatter over the past two weeks about Champ Bailey's long road to the Super Bow l - the Denver Broncos cornerback, a future Hall of Famer, made his NFL debut during the second Clinton administration - there is another man who's waited far longer, and whose particular job allows for an even smaller margin of error.
Sulick is a security manager at MetLife Stadium, where the Broncos and Seattle Seahawks will play the game of their lives, a job he's done at MetLife and Giants Stadium before, for more than half of his own life. And like Bailey, or anyone who plays his fraught position, all Sulick wants for himself on Sunday is to stay out of the headlines.
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To that end, Sulick's been logging "15-, 16-, 17-hour days," working with, by his estimate, new colleagues from the State Police, Secret Service and FBI. The stadium has been locked down since early Monday.
And that's got him feeling confident.
"[MetLife Stadium] will be the safest place in New Jersey on game day," he told ABC News today.
Wearing a mustache that would make the whole of Brooklyn blush, Sulick, the retired fire chief of Elmwood Park, N.J., patrols the sideline behind the home team's bench. That means he'll be just steps from Bailey and his Denver teammates, the designated "host" team for Sunday's game.
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When the job is done, Sulick will make the same 15-minute drive, from the Meadowlands complex to his hometown, he's been making for more three decades.
As for all those folks ringing him up, asking for some help finding tickets for the first-ever NY/NJ-based Super Bowl, the veteran security man has a veteran trick.
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"I get many, many phone calls from friends and people who think they're friends, that I haven't heard from for many years," he said, "and to be polite I say, I'll see what I could do, I'll put your name on the list.
"Then I take that phone number and I throw it in the round file."