Too much of a good thing, and we just can't get our fill

The Baltimore Sun

It's become the King Kong of cultural extravaganzas, bigger than Mardi Gras, bigger than the Kentucky Derby and Daytona 500, bigger than all the cheering drunks shoehorned into Times Square on New Year's Eve - bigger even than American Idol.

It's a day to worship at the altar of the big-screen TV, to swill beer and scarf pizza, to listen to inhuman amounts of X's and O's blather on the pre-game show, the game broadcast, the halftime report and the post-game wrap-up show.

It's a day to wince as another aging pop singer is trotted out for halftime entertainment, a day to critique the new commercials, a day to howl at the gods if you go down in flames in the office pool.

Oh, sure, they play a little football at some point too.

What we're talking about is the Super Bowl, and as the Chicago Bears and Indianapolis Colts ready themselves for next Sunday's Super Bowl XLI in Miami, one thing is clear: There's no spectacle on earth quite like it.

"It's the great holiday of consumption," said Mark Dyreson, an associate professor of kinesiology and history at Penn State, who has written about the Super Bowl for the Encyclopedia of American Holidays and National Days . "We don't play football. We watch. We consume."

In fact, watching the Super Bowl is one of the few things we still do collectively as a society.

Dyreson and other researchers have, of course, broken down the stats:

More than 200 million of us attend some sort of Super Bowl gathering.

Over 141 million viewers in the U.S. watched last year's game, as did an audience of 1 billion in 230 countries worldwide.

Four of the 10 most-watched TV shows in history are Super Bowls.

A 30-second commercial airing during the game costs $2.6 million.

Over 40 percent of the viewing audience is female. More women watch the Super Bowl than any other TV event, including the Academy Awards.

What else? More money is bet on the Super Bowl than any other sporting event.

More takeout pizza is sold during the Super Bowl than at any other time of the year. Only New Year's Eve rivals it for the sale of beer and booze.

Clearly, the country is obsessed with the big game and revels in all its excess.

Churches and youth sports leagues rework their schedules around it. Traffic on some highways is nearly nonexistent after the kickoff. Anecdotal evidence suggests that even drug dealers chill when the Super Bowl rolls around.

"It's truly an American festival," said Michael D. Bernacchi, marketing professor at the University of Detroit-Mercy, who has studied and written about the Super Bowl for years.

Then again, the glitzy Super Bowl of today would hardly be recognized by those who played and attended the first one back in 1967.

That Super Bowl pitted the vaunted Green Bay Packers of legendary coach Vince Lombardi against the upstart Kansas City Chiefs.

Tickets for the game averaged 12 bucks. There were 40,000 empty seats at Memorial Coliseum in Los Angeles, even though the game was blacked out on local TV.

Terrified no one would come, the lords of pro football had even given away thousands of tickets.

It wasn't even called the Super Bowl back then. Instead, it was burdened by the single most boring name ever given to a sporting event: the American Football League-National Football League World Championship Game.

(Not until Super Bowl III, when New York Jets quarterback Joe Namath famously guaranteed a victory over the Baltimore Colts, was it actually called the Super Bowl. The name was conjured by Kansas City owner Lamar Hunt, who had watched his daughter play with one of her favorite toys, a Super Ball.)

By today's standards, the halftime show was a snooze: Marching bands from the University of Michigan and University of Arizona entertained. (Carol Channing, at Super Bowl IV, was the first big-name halftime performer.)

No breasts flashed scandalously from leather jackets, no wrinkled British rock stars pranced across a stage illuminated by a giant red tongue.

There were no fog machines, no laser-light shows, no Paris Hilton sightings, no sideline interviews with Donald Trump and his lacquered helmet of hair.

Even the commercials -- a 60-second spot cost less than $100,000 - were tame: no video game characters cooling off with Cokes, no wisecracking lions in spots for Taco Bell's new Carne Asada Steak Grilled Taquitos, as there will be during this year's broadcast.

Compared to the spectacle that is today's game - Billy Joel will sing the national anthem, Prince rocks the house at halftime - it was meat-and-potatoes football, which suited gruff, no-nonsense Lombardi just fine.

"If he had his way," said Bernacchi, "he would have had [the] game played in a vacuum and reported it two weeks later. No fuss, no media, just football."

In fact, one of the stars of the game, Packers substitute wide receiver Max McGee, was so impressed with the Super Bowl's importance that he went out on the town the night before and got hammered.

Secure in the knowledge that he wouldn't be playing anyway, he staggered back to his hotel room about 7:30 in the morning and arrived at the game brutally hung over.

Naturally, starting wide-out Boyd Dowler promptly went down with an injury.

In came McGee, with a pounding headache that was off the charts in its ferocity, who went on to catch seven passes for 138 yards and two touchdowns as the Packers romped, 35-10.

If he played today, McGee would probably walk off the field and ink a multi-million-dollar endorsement deal with Excedrin.

This would be fully in keeping with the standards of Super Bowl XLI, where just about every part of the game is for sale: the Pepsi Super Bowl XLI Halftime Show, the Super Bowl MVP Presented by Cadillac, the Diet Pepsi Rookie of the Year award, the FedEx Air and Ground NFL Player of the Year award, and the Motorola Coach of the Year award.

"We often complain of commercialism of the holidays, such as Christmas and Easter," says Dyreson. " ... But if one thinks of the Super Bowl, it was created by the modern TV industry and the NFL for commercial purposes.

"It's all about commercialism."

And commercials.

Lots and lots of commercials, some funny, some incredibly stupid and sophomoric, some with breathtaking special effects.

Studies show that some 15 percent of the Super Bowl audience tunes in just for the commercials, many of which are dissected endlessly around the office water cooler the next day.

"There is no other event in the history of TV where people [tune in] to watch the damn commercials!" said Bernacchi. "Any other time ... we do everything we can to run by the commercials.

"For the Super Bowl, if you're going to take a potty break, you do it during the game!"

Bernacchi says the landmark 1984 Apple commercial introducing Macintosh computers began the viewing public's fascination with daring, innovative Super Bowl commercials.

That one featured a shapely young woman running through an Orwellian-like hall of dispirited "workers" in drab uniforms before throwing a sledgehammer at a screen and shattering the image of Big Brother - a not-so-subtle reference to computer giant IBM.

The words "You'll see why 1984 won't be like 1984" then scrolled dramatically onto the screen.

To many, it was the perfect commercial for the hip, stylized new Super Bowl.

"It put the commercial world on notice: If you're going to show up at the Super Bowl ... you better show up with something folks are going to talk about the next day," said Bernacchi.

Commercials have become so ingrained with the Super Bowl that CBS will air "Super Bowl's Greatest Commercials Top 40 Countdown" for the second year in a row, asking viewers to vote online for their favorite spots.

(The "perennial favorite," according to the network, was the classic 1980 Coke commercial starring Pittsburgh Steelers Hall of Fame defensive lineman "Mean" Joe Greene, shown throwing his sweaty jersey at an adoring young fan and then guzzling a cold one.)

The point is, every single element of the Super Bowl - the weeklong media frenzy that leads up to it, the pre- and post-game shows, the game itself, the commercials, the halftime show - is about consumption and entertainment.

And as a society, we'll take it all in gleefully.

"If people don't watch the Super Bowl," said Dyreson, "they're not part of the American culture."

kevin.cowherd@baltsun.com

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