Super Bowl XLIX

Super Bowl XLIX

 

Super Bowl Sunday 2015 fast approaches and the New England Patriots will soon be facing the reigning world champion Seattle Seahawks, in a quest to wrest the Vince Lombardi Trophy from the grasp of its current owners. Despite all of the back and forth about deflated footballs and the like, my guess is that Seattle will retain their title. Granted, I personally have no stake in this particular matchup…I’ll care about the big game, itself, when Baltimore returns to it… ‘til then, it’s just another football game, as far as I am concerned.

Having thus opined about this year’s Super Bowl, I continue to marvel at the spectacle the Super Bowl has become, of late. For anyone who knows me, that should be no surprise…after all, I am older than all of the players, and most all of the coaches who will be participating in this year’s contest, and even eight years older than the game, itself. I do have memories of what came to be known as the Super Bowl, from its very beginning when it was known as the AFL-NFL Championship Game.

In the first such contest, the NFL’s Green Bay Packers faced off against the AFL’s Kansas City Chiefs at the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum, which was only two-thirds filled at kickoff- amazing, considering that the tickets to that game were $ 6.00 (that’s six bucks, folks), not to mention the fact that it was the only Super Bowl to be simultaneously broadcast by two networks, CBS and NBC. The halftime show consisted of a traditional college football bands from the University of Arizona and Grambling State University, along with jazz trumpeter Al Hirt. There were no special commercials aired for the Super Bowl back then…just the normal ads one might see for any run-of-the-mill football game, mostly for beer and cigarettes…yes, cigarettes. Miller High Life (“The Champagne of Beers”) squared off against the Marlboro Man (“Filter, Flavor, Pack or Box”) for viewer interest during the minutes between football plays.

Two years later, in what was to be the first so-called Super Bowl, a husky ten-year-old in suburban Richmond, Virginia was crying his eyes out when the Joe Namath-led New York Jets pulled off the greatest upset in the annals of sports and defeated the heavily-favored, Earl Morrall-led, Baltimore Colts. Coached by Don Shula, who stubbornly refused to play all-time-great Johnny Unitas until the fourth quarter, when the Colts were down 16-0, it was to become second darkest day in that young lad’s life as a football fan. Given more time, Unitas would easily have beaten the Jets, but it was not to be on that particular Sunday afternoon.

Two years later, that same husky ten-year old (now twelve) became the happiest kid in America, when Jim O’Brien kicked a field goal with five seconds remaining, to lift the Baltimore Colts over the Dallas Cowboys in Super Bowl V, which was the first time the newly minted AFC squared off against the newly-minted NFC, following the great merger of 1970. It was ironic that the first NFL team to lose a Super Bowl would become the first AFC team to win a Super Bowl, but that was the irony that was the Baltimore Colts. The darkest day in his life as a football fan, would follow thirteen years later when, on March 29, 1984, the Robert Irsay-owned Baltimore Colts snuck out of town in the middle of the night and thus became forever, in the mind of this fan, the Indiana-no-place Counterfeit-Colts.

In the decades that followed, the Super Bowl became a bacchanalia of excess, with “nip-slips”, “wardrobe malfunctions”, and even a platform for the sitting President, to take advantage of vast viewerships and drone on and on about something that has long since been forgotten. The pre-game show, which had been fifteen minutes, back in the day, now comprises five hours, yet the game itself is no better now than it was back then, and actually worse given all of the rules changes that have summarily ruined what was a great game in the 1960s.

That statement even holds true when the Baltimore Ravens won their pair of Super Bowls in 2001 and 2013…but, alas, I digress…

It’s Super Bowl Sunday, after all and the time for talking about it will end, soon enough…that is, until next year…Go Ravens !!!

-Drew Nickell, 20 January 2015

© 2015, by Drew Nickell, all rights reserved