Super Bowl XVIII: Did you know . . .

In the locker room after the game, Al Davis approached guard Mickey Marvin, and the 6-foot-4, 270-pound player -- sobbing like a baby -- smothered him with a bearhug and whispered something in his ear.

“You know what he said to me?” Davis said later, smiling broadly. “Just dominate.”

Nose tackle Reggie Kinlaw, who was deemed “just average” in the pregame analysis by Pro Football Weekly, was considered the game’s most valuable player by some experts for his role in shutting down Washington’s vaunted running game.

Redskins Coach Joe Gibbs was as strait-laced as they come, but that didn’t mean he didn’t yell from time to time. Before the game, guard Mark May recalled one of the coach’s G-rated but fiery locker-room speeches. “It was in the Kansas City game, and we came into the locker room down, 12-0, at the half. Joe rarely raises his voice, but this time he really yelled at us. He let us have it. We call it his ‘Two-gosh-darn speech.’ ”

At one news conference, Redskins center Jeff Bostic told reporters: “I’d run over my mother in a game like this.” When informed of that quote, Raiders linebacker Matt Millen shrugged and said: “I’d run over his mother too.”

Barron Hilton, Connie Stevens, Phil Rizzuto and Fred MacMurray predicted a Raiders victory. (Wrote Times columnist Scott Ostler: “I watched ‘My Three Sons’ for years and never saw MacMurray hand out a single piece of bad advice.”) Picking the Redskins were Alan Shepard, Burt Reynolds and Dr. J.

After the victory, Coach Tom Flores got a congratulatory call from President Reagan, who joked: “Coach, my congratulations on your wonderful win. However, I think you’re giving us problems. Moscow just called and they think Marcus Allen is our secret weapon and they insist we dismantle him. If you turn him over to us, we’ll put him in our silos and we wouldn’t have to build and deploy MX missiles.”

Not everything went the Raiders’ way that night. After the game, their bus got lost for more than an hour going from their hotel to a party for family, friends and fans. Said Flores: “I think the driver went by our hotel three times. Matt Millen was about to get sick. . . . It’s a good thing we found it; Matt was about to tear the window off.”

Flores got about two hours’ sleep before meeting with the media on the morning following the game. “I’ve had a fun night and a long night,” he told reporters, “as I guess you can tell by my eyes.” Wrote The Times’ Rick Reilly: “They were bloodshot, of course, but after that night, Flores could have shown up in a strapless gown and a lampshade and the world would have understood.”

The Raiders’ Mike Davis advised the Redskins before the game not to try to wage any psychological warfare. He said the Seattle Seahawks tried that before the AFC championship game. “There’s no question they were playing a game of psychology,” Davis said of the Seahawks. “But they forgot all the Raiders flunked psychology.”

Times columnist Jim Murray called Allen’s long touchdown run “a thing of beauty,” but “as ad lib as boardinghouse stew and was not drawn on any blackboard anywhere.”

-- Sam Farmer