2001 Ad

Sporting News, The, Jan 29, 2001 by Dave Kindred

The Super Bowl is Vince Lombardi. It's Tom Landry's fedora and Jimmy Johnson's hair. Its World Series divided by seven, multiplied by a thousand. The day after a Super Bowl, 7-Eleven stores sell five times their usual amount of antacids.

The Super Bowl is Garo Yepremian trying to throw the danged thing somewhere. It's Refrigerator Perry ker-lumphing in for a touch-down while Walter Payton watches, disconsolate. It's Jackie Smith on his rump in the end zone, the ball bouncing away. It's Joe Namath's guarantee and John Elway's smile. It's Mike Jones bringing down Kevin Dyson. It's Kurt Warner to Isaac Bruce, Joe Montana to Jerry Rice.

If Nero had the Super Bowl, he wouldn't have burned Rome, he'd have burned Al Davis.

Super Bowl 9 is a Bourbon Street topless dancer who flounces around the field in her working outfit until four policemen catch her, causing press-box punster Si Burick to say, "They took her away two abreast."

Super Bowl 35 is $325 a ticket, and it's Bubba the Ticket Scalper standing in a hotel lobby with gamblers, sportswriters and other social deviants. Wait. Bubba said if used his real name, he'd have to kill me.

So, my friend Jethro the Ticket Scalper will set up shop this week and will put his lips four inches from my ear and shout above the clatter, clamor and cacophony, "GOT ANY TICKETS?"

The Super Bowl is Doug Williams hearing a reporter ask, "How long have you been a black quarterback?" and then throwing four touchdown passes in the second quarter of a 42-10 victory. And wouldn't it be neat about Super Bowl 22 if somewhere in America there were little boys named Daunte Culpepper, Steve

McNair, Charlie Batch, Donovan McNabb, Shaun King, Akili Smith, Aaron Brooks, Kordell Stewart and Anthony Wright who saw what Doug Williams did?

It's the Steel Curtain, the Purple People Eaters and the Doomsday Defense. It's Ray Lewis paying $250,000 for obstructing justice and getting paid over $2.3 million to obstruct everything else.

It's John Hannah explaining Buddy Ryan's "46" defense: "They have four down linemen. They take their backers and put them in an underlook. They introduce the end over on the strong guard. Instead of having outside backers on the weak side, they put two backers outside the right end on the strong side and overshift the safety-only it's an outside backer-and they put the safety on the weak side. It's pretty simple, really."

The Super Bowl is played, the fearsome defender Richard Dent once said, "to see who's baddest." Good reason. For the real mason, we go to San Francisco sportswriter Ray Ratto, who says, "Parrr-TEEEE!"

It's a TV show. Eight of the 15 most-watched shows ever are Super Bowls. A Japanese TV reporter said to Joe Montana, "Tell me, why do they call you `Boomer'?" Asked what Italy's television viewers thought of the goings-on, broadcaster Rino Tomasi said, "We get Super Bowl, you get Sophia Loren. Good deal."

It's John Riggins in guerrilla camouflage explaining his longevity: "Formaldehyde." And his drinking: "The only drinking problem I have is when I hang by my knees from the ceiling."

It's Hollywood Henderson saying of Terry Bradshaw, "He's so dumb he couldn't spell `cat' if you spotted him the `c' and `a'." It's Bradshaw throwing four touchdown passes over Henderson's mouth.

The Super Bowl is Red Grange and Bronko Nagurski and Sammy Baugh and a thousand old-timers who gave up cartilage and ligaments long before anyone saw the belly-flopping/skeleton-rearranging brutality now practiced by the Ravens' Tony "That's Not a Spare Tire, That's FOUR Spare Tires" Siragusa.

We pay Tom Hanks $20 million to talk to a volleyball. We pay A-Rod $25 million a year to hit a baseball. We pay teachers peanuts to shape our children's futures. Silly, this America, but we are who we are. And if we'd rather hear John Madden on chop blocks than Ms. Thistle-bottom on the Inquisition, the late commissioner Pete Rozelle knew why:

"The Super Bowl, a few people say, is hype; it's overdone. But I think it's tremendous. I've often said that if the American public didn't have an entertaining, emotional outlet, we'd have trouble. We'd be a sick society. It's meant to be fun, and we think it is."

Some theorists see the Super Bowl as a high holy day of a national religion built on sports' rituals and bonding experiences. They cite Norman Vincent Peale's quote: "If Jesus were alive today, he would be at the Super Bowl." Which opinion moved the curmudgeon columnist Tom Callahan to say, "Wouldn't it be something if, on our arrival in heaven, God's wearing a rainbow wig?"

When the Super Bowl came to Tampa for the second time, 10 years ago, it served as a national pep rally. Because our armed forces were in the Persian Gulf, Tampa Stadium pulsated with a fevered display of nationalism: martial music, F-14 fighters roaring overhead, commander-in-chief George H.W. Bush's image 35 feet high on the Jumbotron as he read a message of support for troops under fire in a distant land. I wondered, "If we'd seen 80,000 Iraqis in a Baghdad soccer stadium cheering for war to the tune of martial music as they displayed their weapons under the gaze of a 35-foot high Saddam Hussein urging his troops to victory, what would we think of those people? Chances are, we'd think they were a bunch of lunatics."