NFL Football: A History of America's New National Pastime

12 Super Sunday

12 Super Sunday Excess is a relative term. Many would agree that you know it when you see it. Even at a glance, it is clear that excess defines the Super Bowl. Mary Riddell, The Observer’s superb columnist, once noted that sports heroes reflect and amplify “the fixations” of their society. It is who they are and what they do. It is also what sports cultures do. Both offer a distorted or exaggerated version of social reality and social values, and this happens whether one sees positive or negative images emanating from sport.1 For even the most casual observer of contemporary American culture, it is apparent that Super Sunday has grown exponentially and has become a bloated monster. Over the past four decades, Super Sunday illustrates the ability of a sporting event to offer a distorted and exaggerated version of social reality and social values. The Super Bowl has done so on a grand, glorious, and obscene scale. Becoming Super When exactly the Super Bowl reached larger-than-life proportions is difficult to pinpoint, but certainly it achieved that standard by the end of the 1970s. At Super Bowl XV in 1981 the New York Times headline proclaimed that seventy thousand fans made “New Orleans Throb with Super Bowl Mania.” Gerald Eskenazi’s account described a “gridlock” of people in the French Quarter, and an influx of “tens of millions” of dollars into the New Orleans economy.2 The extravagances of the fans and everyone associated with the game had achieved extraordinary proportions. By 1980 only the vocabulary created by Thorstein Veblen was capable of fully capturing the Super Bowl scene. Veblen’s The Theory of the Leisure Class Crepeau_text.indd 191 7/1/14 11:29 AM T h e N e w N F L 192 coined those wonderful phrases “conspicuous consumption,” “conspicuous leisure,” and “conspicuous waste” to describe the habits of the rich in latenineteenth -century America. Along with “predatory barbarism,” “pecuniary emulation,” “vicarious consumption,” and “conspicuous waste,” Veblen’s colorful vocabulary is ideally suited for describing this distinctive American midwinter holiday. The difference is that the habits of the rich in the late nineteenth century have trickled down the social order to those riding the wave of corporate wealth and consumption in the second half of the twentieth century. As a consequence the Super Bowl has become an ideal television production, an event so totally devoted to consumption that the television commercials have become a centerpiece of its appeal. One quantifiable indicator of the growth of excess was the skyrocketing price of commercial television time. At the first Super Bowl in 1967, before it was known by that name, a thirty-second commercial on CBS sold for $37,500 ($245,000 in current dollars). By the early ’80s the price for thirty seconds reached $400,000 ($956,000), and by the end of the decade it was a whopping $800,000 ($1.41 million). Thirty seconds of advertising reached the $1 million ($1.43 million) mark in 1995, climbing to $2.1 million ($2.66 million) in 2000. In 2007 the price tag was $2.6 million ($2.8 million) and by 2010 it reached $3 million for a thirty-second spot.3 This, and so much more, is on display on Super Sunday and during the excesses of Super Bowl week. The levels of conspicuous consumption and conspicuous waste reach new and dizzying heights with each succeeding Super Bowl. Three aspects of Super Sunday offer a sense of the scale of the game: the technical presentation, the creation of a festival atmosphere, and the development of a massive midwinter bacchanalia indulged in by a considerable portion of the nation. Beyond the event itself, its real significance is revealed in the way in which the nation has come to measure and compare the festivities , and delight in its apparently limitless growth. In the second year of the Super Bowl, while paying a $2.5 million rights fee, CBS used twelve cameras, including one in the Goodyear Blimp, along with four video machines for isolated replays and highlights, including stopaction and slow motion in color. This was up from the two-camera coverage that both networks used at the first game.4 In 1989 NBC deployed twentythree cameras and twelve replay machines, while NFL Films used fourteen photographers and twenty-six miles of film. Two years later in Tampa, ABC utilized twenty-two cameras operating around the stadium, on the ground, Crepeau_text.indd 192 7...