Quiet Super Bowl Week now the norm
Posted: Friday, February 01, 2008 10:23 PM
The guys in the home office wanted me to check in today with a recap of all the craziness of Super Bowl Week. This was something we’d planned all week, and now here we are on deadline, and the realization is setting in that if there’s been craziness, I’ve missed it.
It could be being billeted in a hotel out by the airport, far from the madding crowd. Whatever loopiness is going on in the downtown hotel lobbies has had to get along without me. But I think it’s more a case of Super Bowl Week not being what it used to be.
There’s an air of banality that’s overtaken the greatest pre-event week in American sports. It’s like the NBA’s slam-dunk contest. After a while, you realize that no matter how spectacular a move is, you’ve seen it before. When Michael Jordan took off from the free-throw line and threw one down, it was something we’d never witnessed, something that made our jaws drop. Today, kids in high school can do it.
Our “controversy” of the week was Giants’ wide receiver Plaxico Burress letting slip that he thinks his team will win. That was on Tuesday, and for the next two days, he was more popular with reporters than a free buffet.
We were trying to make it Joe Namath or Mark Messier guaranteeing a win, and we failed miserably because it wasn’t anything of the sort. For one thing, Burress isn’t the guy who can deliver a win. For a “guarantee” to mean something, it has to come from the team’s main man. If Eli Manning had said it, then, yeah, it’s a story. But a wide receiver? Please.
For another, Burress wasn’t really issuing a guarantee; he was just expressing an opinion. But it was all we had, one tiny kernel of wheat thrown before a starving multitude. So we fought over it.
But there weren’t any players getting drunk and naked downtown or anywhere else. No one was sighted throwing money at strippers.
None of this should be surprising. The Super Bowl has become a deadly serious event for the athletes involved. As Michael Strahan, the Giants’ fun-loving defensive end, said, win the game and you can party like there’s no tomorrow. Why would he or anyone jeopardize that for a night on the town two days before the biggest game of their lives?
There was a day when the NFL wasn’t nearly as serious, when Joe Namath could hang out by a hotel swimming pool with a cocktail during Super Bowl week and shoot the breeze with a gang of writers. And there was another day when society in general had gone off the deep end and every excess was not only accepted but expected.
When Jim McMahon, the quarterback of the 1985 Bears went to the Super Bowl in New Orleans in January 1986, he was out all night on Bourbon Street. He mooned a helicopter trying to film the team’s practice. He wore headbands mocking then-NFL commissioner Pete Rozelle.
If McMahon were around today, he wouldn’t do any of that. If he did, he wouldn’t have made it to the game at all. There’s no tolerance for it, not on a team, not in the media, not with the fans, and, most important, not with the league office. Rozelle fined McMahon; commissioner Roger Goodell would suspend him.
The crazies aren’t the players anymore, but the people who once a year decide to report on a sporting event. But entertainment reporters dressing up like hooker brides or trying to tackle guys who outweigh them by 220 pounds aren’t stories, no matter how hard they try to be. This is a football game, after all, not karaoke night for MTV reporters.
I’ve no objection to what the week has become. I’ve had a fine time learning a little bit more about what makes people like Tom Coughlin, Bill Belichick, Tom Brady, Michael Strahan, Junior Seau and offensive linemen tick. It’s more fun and enlightening to make them human beings than to continue to present them as cartoon characters. It may not sell as many newspapers or generate as many web hits, but it’s more real.
