Motorcycle police were closing freeway ramps and inconveniencing mid-morning traffic to escort media buses to various Super Bowl interview sites this week. Multicolored banners touting the game seem to hang from every light pole and you can’t swing a cat without striking a TV crew.
Thus this Roman numerals-bearing football game–XLI this year, the IXth time it has been in South Florida–seems a pretty big deal in the American tropics, a region that views itself as the world capital of chic coolness … or is it cool chicness.
Imagine, then, the anticipation in solid, meat-and-potatoes Midwest burgs–Chicago, say, or Indianapolis, where football is thought to be part of the fabric of life. How many times has Bears vs. Colts come up in conversation during the past week? Even if you canceled your newspaper subscription (shame on you), stayed off the Internet and avoided television and radio, you know something’s up.
That would be the Super Bowl, the childishly simple yet awe-inspiring title given professional football’s championship game. And your Bears are in it for only the second time in their storied history.
The opposing Colts made two trips during their comparably storied Baltimore years, but this is their first visit since they sneaked out of Charm City and shifted operations to Indianapolis in 1984.
The modest Hoosier State capital is a relative newcomer to big-time sports and never has won a major championship, unless you count, as most in a hoops-crazy state do, the three American Basketball Association titles the Indiana Pacers bagged in 1970, 1972 and 1973.
The Colts seem to have been threatening to win ever since their Tom Sawyer-like quarterback, Peyton Manning, arrived in Indy nine years ago. The conventional wisdom is that Manning, 31 next month, needs to prevail this week to “validate” his status as a true standout at football’s true glamor position.
The Bears, meanwhile, are trying to match the signature achievement of their swaggering 1985 forebears, although they’re aware they never will match the enduring, iconic stature the ’85 team earned in worshipful Chicago with a take-no-prisoners style that it couldn’t sustain.
Both teams, incidentally, are coached by African-American men, a Super Bowl first. And they’re good friends.
And if you don’t know all that, you really did cancel your newspaper subscription (for shame), stay off the Internet and avoid television and radio. Brad could leave Angelina for Rosie O’Donnell and either adopt or acknowledge Donald Trump as their love child and the fuss wouldn’t equal the two weeks of Super Bowl hype that should come to a merciful end with Sunday’s 5:25 p.m. kickoff.
“Lovie,” a questioner wondered at Friday’s final, final–and this time we mean it–final interrogation of Bears coach Lovie Smith. “Is there anything you haven’t been asked?”
Probably not.
It has become quite fashionable, if not necessary, to ridicule the buildup that precedes each Super Bowl. Critics declare that no single game, no matter how brilliantly played or tautly contested, can live up to two weeks of breathless, non-stop coverage any political candidate, movie-plugging actor or book-pushing author would die for.
“I played in Super Bowl XIII (for the Steelers), and I’m amazed at how big it has become,” Colts coach Tony Dungy said. “But that makes it fun.”
The players seemed to be enjoying themselves during the lengthy prelude, some taking breaks from the repetitive “Cover-2: threat or menace?” questions to interview each other via camcorder. Mimicking reporters, they carried on like college students on a spring-break trip, from which many of them are not that far removed come to think of it.
“Just because they’re on television doesn’t make them larger than life,” Smith said at one point.
Sports heroes occupy an exalted spot in American culture, largely because of how television magnifies what they do, and there’s no bigger television attraction than the Super Bowl. Dallas’ Michael Irvin (3-0) and Buffalo’s Thurman Thomas (0-4) went into the Pro Football Hall of Fame on Saturday. There’s little doubt the exposure from those seven combined Super Bowls ushered them ahead of some equally deserving candidates.
The normally bombastic Irvin was gracious and humble in acknowledging the honor, which was in keeping with how it has been in Miami. Super Bowl buildup and what it reveals serves to remind us there are human beings behind the stunning athletic achievements that captivate us.
Dungy’s son committed suicide last year, an emotional burden the proud, dignified coach will carry for the rest of his life. Reggie Wayne, the Colts’ Pro Bowl receiver, had a brother die in a car crash late this season.
All of Chicago is aware of Tank Johnson’s tribulations and Smith was as emotional as he ever gets when he spoke of how much his late father would have enjoyed this moment.
“God’s in control of our lives,” Smith said. “You can’t always understand what happens, but you deal with it, and you move on.”
Such sentiment probably was relegated to the deep recesses of his mind this week as Smith and his staff schemed up ways to discombobulate Peyton Manning.
The 75,000 fans who shelled out at least $600 per ticket and the kazillions watching on television who have turned Super Bowl Sunday into an unofficial national holiday . . . sure, they appreciate a good story, and a good man, but what they really want to see is the Bears knock the Colts’ hats off, or vice versa.
Football, after all, is a fast, violent game played by tough, hard men. At its highest level it requires a blend of skill, strength and courage beyond both the reach and the comprehension of a normal person.
That may be why we love it so, why the ’85 Bears remain the quintessential Chicago team. They embodied the way Chicagoans like to feel about themselves: Proud. Tough. Resourceful. Successful.
The ’06 Bears have yet to forge such a distinctive identity here in ’07. But they’re trying.
“Chicago is a football town, and I think we represent the city pretty well,” Smith said. “We’re a lunch-pail team. We work hard, we earn our money.
“But the ’85 Bears … they’re still talked about weekly, and rightly so. People tend to talk about your best team and that ’85 team is our best team. It might be time to give our fans something else to talk about.”
The Super Bowl is the ideal opportunity. Theoretically, at least, it’s the best against the best in the game we love best, and the presence of a marquee star such as Manning raises the stakes.
In a sense he was groomed for this; he’s the son of Archie Manning, an exemplary quarterback/competitor who never got a sniff of a title game in 15 NFL seasons. But if Peyton was born with a silver spoon in his mouth, he quickly discarded it lest it interfere with his throwing motion.
“Peyton raises your level of play,” teammate Dallas Clark said. “He’s such a competitor that he expects perfection. He’s not going to let you take a play off because he never would. You have to be as focused and prepared as he is.”
That’s because you never know if you’ll get another opportunity on the big stage . . .
Unless you’re wide receiver Ricky Proehl. Super Bowl XLI will be the fourth for the former Bear, and the final game of his NFL career. Proehl is 38 and his work ethic combined with his sense of self have seen him through 17 NFL seasons despite modest size and ability that often has been taken for granted.
Yet Proehl was Dungy’s personal choice to lend a hand when a series of injuries left the Colts short at wide receiver late in the regular season. And he was Dungy’s choice to speak to the team about the impact of a Super Bowl trip.
“I told them it never gets old–first one, fourth one, it’s very exciting,” Proehl said. “But make the most of it. You want to do everything you can to make it the game of your life.”
Because the world will be watching? It sure seems that way.
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dmcgrath@tribune.com
