For the first two years, it was a football game. The first wasn’t called a Super Bowl at all. It was unimaginatively tagged the First World Championship, NFL vs. AFL, and it didn’t sell out. Not until the second year did Kansas City Chiefs owner Lamar Hunt, inspired by kids playing with a “Super Ball,” suggest the name.
When Joe Namath guaranteed victory the third year, it moved into the realm of show business. Namath conducted interviews in Miami casually sitting with a few writers around a pool.
Quickly, it escalated from exhibition to extravaganza. By the sixth one, President Nixon was suggesting plays. By the 10th, preacher Norman Vincent Peale said, “If Jesus were alive today, He would be at the Super Bowl.”
Inevitably, corporations recognized the development of the most original American holiday of all, the marriage of football with capitalism without the distractions of food and religion that fans endure on Thanksgiving, Christmas and New Year’s Day.
Commissioner Paul Tagliabue says it won’t become the Campbell’s Chunky Super Bowl, but the logos are getting closer. It’s the Doritos Super Bowl Halftime Extravaganza, and as soon as the games get as entertaining as the halftimes, maybe they will be for sale, too.
Joe Robbie Stadium will be dwarfed Sunday by 27 tents in “Corporate Village,” where 6,200 business people from companies such as General Electric, Ford, Seagrams, MCI and Nissan wine and dine. One tent is big enough to house a Ringling Brothers circus. Nissan flies its people to Tampa, where they board a cruise ship that docks in Miami for the kickoff.
Does the point spread really matter anymore?
The game’s two principal players, San Francisco’s Steve Young and San Diego’s Junior Seau, were named Players of the Year last week by Miller Lite and True Value Hardware, respectively.
The cost of one minute of advertising for each of the first three Super Bowls was $85,000. After Namath’s upset win, the price jumped to $200,000. The first “million-dollar minute” in TV advertising was during the Bears-Patriots game in Super Bowl XX. This year, despite the most lopsided point spread yet, a half minute goes for $1.2 million. The Doritos ad will feature deposed Democratic governors Mario Cuomo and Ann Richards.
Miss America, Heather Whitestone, who is deaf, will sign the national anthem sung by talk show host Kathie Lee Gifford. They will follow the pregame show, which features laser lights, an F-16 flyover and fireworks, unsponsored but also including power boats “from Hovercraft.”
Not only is the Super Bowl televised in 174 countries (only 150 live) from Benin to Tortola in 18 languages, it strives to relate (i.e., sell) to every segment of society. Crime drops and church collections rise on Super Bowl Sunday. How many other events do MTV and National Public Radio report in earnest, both confident of audience appeal? Once confronted by a reporter saying he was from the BBC, former 49er Bubba Paris replied: “The Baby Seals?”
It is inextricably linked to issues it tries to avoid. The awarding of next year’s game to Phoenix was delayed until Arizona recognized a Martin Luther King holiday. World crises revolve around stadiums. The New Orleans Superdome was draped in yellow ribbons during the Iran hostage affair. Tampa Stadium buzzed with security helicopters during the Persian Gulf war.
A riot coincided with the last trip to Miami in 1989, prompting ex-player and author Pete Gent to write: “The Super Bowl is an incredible metaphor, illustrating what America has become as the 21st Century draws near; a self-perpetuating, corrupt, infernal machine that has achieved social and financial welfare for the rich, while the middle class and the poor continue to feed it their money and their kids in the desperate hope and dangerous delusion that the American Dream is alive and well in the NFL.”
This week, a Russian journalist named Misha Knight distributed flyers at Super Bowl headquarters requesting “Give Peace a Hand” and “Save the World!”
Economic impact to South Florida is estimated between $160 million and $180 million, based on a crowd of 74,000 plus another 50,000 who won’t attend the game. There is plenty to do if the $200 game ticket is out of reach. The NFL Experience, featuring interactive games, costs only $12. The World’s Largest Super Bowl Party is also $12. The NFL Legends Bowl is $10. And Deion Sanders’ Super Prime Time Shootout (yes, he plays basketball, too) costs $15 to $20.
Using funds from its NFL Experience, the league is opening its third “Youth Education Town,” a high-tech recreation center in conjunction with United Way that Tagliabue calls “an attempt to do our part to improve the environment for young people in areas of need.”
Long beyond any boundaries of simple definition, whatever the Super Bowl has become was never envisioned.
“It’s a phenomenon and when that happens, you don’t know why,” former Cowboys President Tex Schramm once said. “All of a sudden it takes off, and you wonder what happened. People have asked me the same thing about our cheerleaders. I don’t know. They’ve all seen women before.”
This is America the Bountiful, a celebration of excess combining its most violent, most popular sport with Hollywood fantasy and corporate possibility. It is both welcome relief from the tedium of ordinary life and stark reminder of abundance most Americans never imagine.
“If the American public didn’t have an entertaining emotional outlet, we’d have trouble,” former Commissioner Pete Rozelle once said. “We feel it gives half the country a chance to think of something else other than our domestic troubles and our international troubles.”
The half that doesn’t watch usually knows about it.
