The Super Bowl is the Academy Awards presentation of American sport - overblown, over-hyped, and vastly overrated. Like the Academy Awards, everyone knows this, and everyone watches anyway. For the last five years, the National Football League (NFL) has had slumping TV ratings in the regular season. The Super Bowl, for reasons too lengthy to explain, is almost always a boring, one-sided debacle. And yet still, it remains the icon of American sport, if not American culture: gaudy, decadent, and big. Real big . . .
Of the 10 most watched TV programmes in US history, nine have been Super Bowls - all with more than 125 million viewers, in the States alone. Some eight million pounds of guacamole are prepared on Super Bowl Sunday, to be consumed with 29 million pounds of crisps. This year, the cost of a 30-second ad was $2.2 million. A single ticket cost $325, and scalpers were charging $5,000. Casinos offered over 350 kinds of bets - which team would have the most penalties, incomplete passes . . . drug arrests afterwards . . . you name it, it was there. The Super Bowl TV ratings usually hover around 45 (sets tuned in out of 100 available), a perennial best in TV Land. And even that seems incredibly low. While out one night before the game, I asked a group of friends if any of them knew anyone who wouldn't be watching the Super Bowl. Not one of us could think of a single person, grannies included. It's a wonder they don't move the big day to Monday and make it a National Holiday.
America's obsession with the Super Bowl is, by design, not limited to football fans. People talk during the game but pipe down at commercial breaks, as all the major advertisers parade their most creative endeavours. Men and women who normally couldn't care less are drawn into the game. Everyone - from fashion models to librarians - has an opinion about who will win, and why. It's due to the hype. A full two weeks pass from the semi-final championships to the Super Bowl. In that time, an army of media descends upon the Super Bowl site. (More than 3,200 reporters were in Tampa last week.) Small wonder in the days leading up to the game it's impossible to pick up a newspaper or turn in on a TV news programme without hearing about the big bowl. They don't send those news hounds down there for a free vacation. Not with their bar bills.
Pete Rozelle, the deceased former commissioner of the NFL, invented the term Super Bowl and is generally credited - or blamed - as the architect of this PR machine. Rozelle had a vision of football becoming the most popular sport in America and the Super Bowl as its annual coronation. Before the Super Bowl, there were NFL Championships. An upstart American Football League was formed in the early 1960s and someone got the bright idea that the champions of these two leagues should play each other. Eventually, the two leagues merged but kept the Super Bowl concept.
The cost of a reserved seat at the first game, in 1967, was $10; a 30second ad cost $42,000. (This, truly, is a growth industry.) Things didn't really get going until three years later, when Joe Nameth, a handsome playboy quarterback with the AFL New York Jets, brazenly predicted a victory in their Super Bowl. Nameth had a way of generating headlines. He had long hair and a Fu Manchu moustache. Feelings about him ran strong. Men hated him, kids loved him, women adored him. He drank like a fish and wrote a book called I can't wait till tomorrow (Because I get better looking every day). Shockingly, he backed up his prediction, pulling off a miraculous upset, and "Super Bowl Party" has been in the national lexicon ever since. (New commercials became a mainstay of the Super Bowl after 1983, when Apple ran, for the first and only time, it's famous "1984" commercial, which portrayed the company as a liberator against Big Brother - obviously IBM. Many analysts believe this "highly successful" commercial cost Apple the corporate market forever.) Along the way, football replaced baseball as the US national pastime. And for very good reason - it offers athleticism, speed, and the spectacle of 350-pound monsters trying to rip each other's heads off. And, best of all, it isn't baseball. This year, Super Bowl 36 (er, I mean Super Bowl XXXVI - the Super Bowl is far too important for conventional numerals) was at first regarded as a lacklustre match-up. Neither the Baltimore Ravens nor the New York Giants were much respected around the league. It was predicted to be a defensive struggle with limited appeal. Prime Super Bowl games are flashy, pass-oriented offenses that can light up the scoreboard like a pinball machine. The network had trouble selling advertising time, partially because last year's windfall of dot.com companies had all but dried up. (Though the $2.2 million price tag might have had something to do with it.)
Not that the event was without its story lines. New York's quarterback, Kerry Collins, was forthright about his alcoholism and his chequered past. The two head coaches were best friends. And then there was Ray Lewis, Ravens middle linebacker and Defensive Player of the Year, who was arrested for double murder after last year's Super Bowl. Lewis eventually plea-bargained for a lesser charge (Obstruction of Justice) and continued playing football. A murderer was never convicted, though Lewis's mates had the victims' blood on their clothing, and the clothing Lewis wore that evening disappeared. Despite all this, Lewis was far from contrite - both he and his team-mates struck out at the media, as if no one had a right to bring the subject up. Sadly, the media obliged. After all, these were not mere mortals - they weren't even politicians or movie stars - they were professional football players, far above scrutiny.
Besides, there were plenty of other things to talk about - there was something in this Super Bowl for everyone, even teenage girls. 'N Sync and Britney Spears were performing in the half-time extravaganza (and heck, they're hardly ever on TV . . .) The Backstreet Boys and Sting would make an appearance before half-time, as would Ray Charles, perhaps for all those grannies out there. For the sports fans, there was Eye Vision, a panoramic digital viewing system with 34 cameras. There were all those new commercials. There was even a football game, which had mysteriously grown from a bad match-up to the event of the century, guaranteed to be a fiercely fought battle between the best and the baddest of the league. Oh my goodness!
The drums beat loudest in New York, whose native Giants were returning to the big event after a 10-year hiatus. Once again, everyone was caught up in the excitement. This was truly going to be a big event, not like Super Bowls of the past. I hosted a Super Bowl party in my New York apartment. In the moments leading up to the kick-off, you could feel the nervous energy in the room. Five minutes after kick-off, that energy was gone. It was immediately apparent that the game would be a dud, and we'd been duped again. The Giants were obviously over-matched, though both teams played badly. The commercials were boring and stupid, like they always are. The half-time show was utterly hellish. As one reporter put it: " . . .the theme was the same as all of the ones in the past . . . `America, the Most Embarrassing Country in the World'." Suffice it to say that there is a very good reason why Britney Spears, Aerosmith and 'N Sync don't normally perform together. Trust me.
Even Eye Vision was a bust, the images generated from the camera looked like a computer game. I'm told that the final score was 34-7 to the Ravens, and Ray Lewis, yes him, was named most valuable player - though I can't vouch for it, as I was washing dishes the entire final quarter.
Apparently not everyone was duped. According to Nielsen Media Research, the TV ratings were down 7 per cent from last year, at a 40.4 rating.
The next day, the citizens of Gotham were quiet and sheepish, uttering, "Wait till next year".
Ah, right! Next year. I'm dreaming about it already. The Giants will be back; maybe they'll even face the Ravens. Eye Vision will have 120 cameras! Korn, Backstreet Boys, and Wayne Newton will perform at halftime . . . Next year , we'll have a great Super Bowl. I can't wait.