A super national holiday

What’s the Super Bowl all about?

It began in 1967 as a simple football game between the champions of two leagues, but Super Bowl Sunday is now an unofficial national holiday—an orgy of hype and consumption rivaling Christmas and Thanksgiving for sheer, all-American excess. The 10 hours of TV begin in the afternoon with six hours of ritual pregame analysis and reverent tributes to the players and coaches, and culminate in the game’s quasi-gladiatorial display of courage, skill, and blood. Lulls in play are filled by Madison Avenue, which unveils the year’s most ambitious and clever advertisements. At halftime, as millions rush to the bathroom, stars like Michael Jackson, Smokey Robinson, and Gloria Estefan perform or lip-synch their hits amid the pyrotechnics of mid-game “extravaganzas.” One sportswriter has said that the Super Bowl “clears out our streets and fills our family rooms and pulls us together like moon walks and royal weddings have yet to do.”

How popular is it?

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About 130 million people—nearly half the American population—watch on TV. Indeed, nine of the 10 highest-rated television programs of all time have been Super Bowls. During the game, the nation’s streets fall quiet, movie theaters are empty, and long-distance calls drop by 50 percent. Fewer weddings take place during Super Bowl weekend than at any other time during the year. The host city becomes a giant, drunken bacchanalia for days. Tickets to the game have become prized corporate goodies; scalpers have been known to get $5,000 apiece for them. A lawyer once offered free legal advice for life to anyone who could find him two seats. According to one poll, 72 percent of young, single men said they would rather have an all-expenses paid trip to the Super Bowl than a date with a supermodel.

Was it always like this?

Hardly. Super Bowl I was a grudge match between the 47-year-old NFL and the relatively new American Football League. A third of the seats at the Los Angeles Coliseum went unsold, even though the top ticket price was only $12. The game, between the NFL’s Green Bay Packers and the AFL’s Kansas City Chiefs, wasn’t even called a “Super Bowl.” Chiefs owner Lamar Hunt coined that title after being inspired by his young daughter’s bouncy new Superball. But before long, encouraged by the hype conjured up by the football establishment and TV networks, Americans glommed on to the event as an excuse to throw a party in the dead of winter.

What’s with the Roman numerals?

They’re part of the hype, designed to impart an aura of Roman nobility and antiquity, as if theame were once played before emperors and toga-clad spectators in the Colosseum. In 1970, fans were still officially attending the NFL’s Fourth World Championship Game, but the next year their tickets were marked “Super Bowl V.”

Does everyone like the game?

Football purists tend to despise it. Before 1967, football championships were determined before rabid fans in the subzero chill of places like Green Bay, Wis.—a properly brutal setting for sorting out the men from the boys. But the Super Bowl is staged in a neutral city such as Miami or New Orleans, generally chosen for its warm weather and good-times atmosphere. The NFL requires that if the average January temperature of the host city is below 50 degrees, the stadium must be enclosed. Hence, there is generally a synthetic, AstroTurfed quality to the proceedings. The game is popularly known as the “Super Bore” or the “Stupor Bowl”; many of the four-hour-long games have been lopsided contests, decided in hour one. The average margin of victory is 16 points—more than two touchdowns.

So what do viewers do for entertainment?

Mostly they eat. Super Bowl Sunday is now the biggest at-home party event of the year. On game day, Americans swallow about 14,500 tons of chips, 2,000 tons each of popcorn and pretzels, 1,500 tons of nuts, and 4,000 tons of guacamole. They also devour more than a million Domino’s pizzas. The average viewer, says the disapproving Calorie Control Council, consumes 1,200 calories and 50 grams of fat in junk food alone, not counting the chili, lasagna, or sausage and peppers served as a main course. Americans buy 3.4 billion bottles of beer for game day—about 26 bottles for every viewer. Not coincidentally, on the day after, antacid sales rise 20 percent, and 6 percent of Americans call in sick to work. As a one-day food orgy, Super Bowl Sunday is topped only by Thanksgiving.

So the game is primarily about eating?

No. It’s also about gambling. Fans relieve the tedium by turning Super Bowl Sunday into the world’s biggest betting frenzy, wagering about $6 billion both legally and illegally. Much of the money goes to bizarre “proposition bets,” such as which team will win the coin toss and how many penalties will be called.

A word from our sponsors

The Super Bowl is usually the highest-rated TV program of the year, so it’s a mecca for advertisers. Last year, a mere 30 seconds of airtime cost a record $2.2 million. In that half minute, Madison Avenue tries to unveil mini-epics that the viewer will remember long after the game. The standard was set by the heart-tugging 1980 ad featuring Pittsburgh Steelers defensive tackle “Mean” Joe Greene giving a young fan his jersey in exchange for a Coca-Cola. In the Orwellian year of 1984, Apple established the modern ad benchmark by debuting its Macintosh computer with a $700,000 spot directed by Ridley Scott. A lone female athlete was depicted smashing Big Brother on a huge video screen before an audience of mindless automatons. E*Trade may have offered the most self-conscious entry of all by featuring a monkey dancing in a garage and concluding, “Well, we just wasted two million bucks. Now what are you going to do with your money?” For all the attention given them, only a few Super Bowl ads have any sort of staying power. Often, the companies don’t either. During Super Bowl XXXIV in 2000, 17 dot-coms offered commercials. The next year, the number of dot-com ads dwindled to three.