I’ve often wondered about the popular appeal of the Super Bowl.
What is it about this epic event on Sunday that will cause more
than 40 million households to gather in living rooms and bars
across America and witness a series of Budweiser Beer commercials
occasionally interrupted by a football game?
I’ve often wondered about the popular appeal of the Super Bowl. What is it about this epic event on Sunday that will cause more than 40 million households to gather in living rooms and bars across America and witness a series of Budweiser Beer commercials occasionally interrupted by a football game?
The answer, I believe, can be found in Homer. I refer, of course, to the writer Homer of ancient Greece and not to the nuclear reactor safety technician Homer Simpson of Springfield on the Fox Network.
“The Iliad” is Homer’s account of the Trojan War. It details the personality conflicts of warriors during the 10th year of this testosterone-induced clash to take back the beautiful cheerleader Helena. It’s a tale of larger-than-life figures such as Odysseus, Agamemnon, Paris and Ajax (who, for the record, never signed a million-dollar contract to hawk a certain brand of cleansing powder).
Think of these heroes in the same light as the grid-iron warriors of the world of football — except they didn’t have agents and managers making multi-million dollar deals for them to peddle Lay’s potato chips or Rightguard deodorant.
It’s the fourth quarter. The last seconds tick away. It looks bad for the Greeks. Quarterback Odysseus comes up with an innovative play. Build a big wooden horse and hide inside it.
The Trojans wake up to see no Greeks on the scrimmage line. What they see is the horse. Thinking the war is over, they pull it inside their fortified city and start to party hearty. The Greeks slip out of the horse. Their final slaughter begins.
The crowd goes wild. The Goodyear blimp flies overhead. Television viewers across the ancient world jump and holler at the final moments of the game. The Greeks celebrate their victory by dousing themselves with Gatorade.
One TV announcer shoves a microphone in Odysseus’s face and says, “You’ve just won the Trojan War. What are you gonna do now?” Odysseus smiles at the camera and says, “I’m going to Disneyland!”
Of course, his trip to Disneyland gets sidetracked much like the castaways of “Gilligan’s Island.” He and his fellow conquering hero’s version of a three-hour cruise gets blown off course by a sudden storm.
For years, they voyage around the Mediterranean having adventures with strange creatures who aren’t exactly Mickey, Minnie, Donald Duck and Goofy. This, of course, gives Homer plenty of material for his spin-off to “The Iliad,” a terrific tale called “The Odyssey.”
But back to the Super Bowl. How did we get to this point where we as a nation focus our attention on a single game? Blame it on soccer. That ancient sport evolved in the mid-19th century into the game of rugby when some innovative player in the English town of Rugby decided to pick up the ball and run with it rather than simply kick it around with his feet.
In 1876, a Yale student named Walter Camp put his own spin on rugby, changing the scoring system and inventing the line of scrimmage. The new version of the game was called football.
Just to make things kind of interesting, what we Americans call soccer is what Europeans refer to as “football.” This sordid little difference in vocabulary once resulted in my having a very bizarre conversation at a London pub.
It’s interesting how Europeans view football. They see an edited version on their television sets. All the boring bits of players walking around during time outs or grouped in huddles or slapping each other’s butts are taken out. It’s non-stop running around as play after play quickly follows each other. American football athletes on Europe’s edited version seem to have an astounding surplus of energy. If the players actually had this amount of superhuman stamina, they would irrefutably deserve their multi-million-dollar paychecks.
Speaking of salaries, the first professional football player was William “Pudge” Heffelinger. In 1892, he earned $500 for his efforts in a game for the Allegheny Athletic Association. At that moment, football became not just a joy of primal battle as one tribe fought another tribe. It became a job.
In the 1960s, professional football and television found true love. Football is not a cheap sport to play. All the equipment, the coaches, the player salaries and the training to create this gladiatorial
spectacle cost a lot of money. And so network TV became football’s sugar-daddy, providing lots of cash for the teams in exchange for marketing spots.
On Jan. 14, 1967, Super Bowl I was broadcast. A one-minute TV commercial on NBC cost 75,000. This Sunday, TV ad time will cost about $2.4 million for a 30-second spot.
And that’s how we got to Super Bowl Sunday as we now know it. The irony is, it almost never fails that Monday morning quarterbacks will talk more about the commercials they saw then the actual game itself. The Super Bowl ads every year are nothing more than pop culture fodder for chats around the office water cooler.
Which makes me suspect something about Super Bowl’s future evolution.
Years from now, I bet, Super Bowl organizers will ulimately decide to get rid of showing the actual game itself and just present a non-stop series of clever TV advertisements.
