Stories indexed with the term ‘Super Bowl’

It’s been five days since the Super Bowl, just enough time to give us a little perspective on the whole thing. Was it a football game? A concert? A competition for the Clio Award? Or some bizarrely American combination of all three?

Let’s start with the least important: The football game. You might have caught bits of it, squeezed between the ads and the show. How could you tell when the game was on? Those were the people who ran really fast, and wore clothes.

For the Super Bowl’s first 30 years, most of the games were boring blowouts. I suspect even the players can’t recall the scores of those snoozers.

But the ads and the halftime shows were hard to forget, and often featured a member of the Jackson family having his hair ignited or her wardrobe mysteriously malfunction.

But lately, it’s been the other way around. Ten of the past 16 games have been barn burners – and the rest of the stuff is putting us to sleep. [Full Story]

Forty-five years ago, the Super Bowl … wasn’t even the Super Bowl. They called it the NFL-AFL Championship Game, until one of the founders renamed it after watching his grandson play with a “High Bouncing Ball” – a super ball. Super ball – Super Bowl. Get it? And thus, an artificial event was born.

Tickets were just fifteen bucks for that first game – and they barely sold half of those, leaving some 40,000 empty seats in the Los Angeles Coliseum.

A 30-second ad cost only $42,000 – and they weren’t any different than the ads they showed the previous weekend. The half-time show featured three college marching bands – including one you might have seen from the University of Michigan.

Over the next couple decades, of course, the event became a veritable national holiday. Tickets now sell for thousands of dollars, and ads for millions. The game attracts more than 100 million viewers in the U.S. alone. [Full Story]

Editor’s note: Chronicle sports columnist John U. Bacon is on hiatus writing a book about University of Michigan football coach Rich Rodriguez’s three seasons coaching the Wolverines. As Super Bowl Sunday approaches – a game between the Green Bay Packers and the Pittsburgh Steelers – we are pleased to offer a guest column from Ann Arbor resident Zach London. This piece appeared originally in the February edition of London’s monthly newsletter The Hard Taco Digest. Each month, the digest includes a link to an original song composed and recorded by London, and he has committed to this monthly musical project until he is dead.

Nicholas Dodman is an animal psychologist who wrote a book entitled, “The Dog Who Loved Too Much.” I haven’t read it, but the first chapter was described to me as follows: The author has a patient, a dog, who loves her owner too much. When the owner leaves the house each morning, she becomes so worried that he won’t return that she loses control of her bladder.

She paces around the house peeing on everything. When he finally comes home at 5 p.m., she is so overjoyed to see him that she throws up. The joy is so pervasive that she vomits constantly until he leaves again the next morning, at which point the bladder problem kicks in again.

That is how I feel about the Green Bay Packers.

It is a special kind of staggering love that only emotionally disturbed dogs and true sports devotees can experience. We soar, we suffer, and we soar again, and all of it is unhealthy. [Full Story]

It’s hard to think of too many endeavors that receive more overblown attention than do sports. And within sports, nothing’s more overblown than the Super Bowl.

This time around, we’re getting endless stories about President Obama picking the New Orleans Saints – because … that matters? – a preview of the ads scheduled to run during the game, and several hundred articles analyzing the recuperation of Dwight Freeney’s sprained right ankle, and how that might affect national security. Or some such.

But in the midst of this morass are two stories worth telling. [Full Story]