A Super Sunday

Is there anything more universal in this country than Superbowl Sunday? It’s a day where everybody is doing the same thing, where degenerate gamblers and girls who love seven-layer bean dip can unite for a common cause. It’s also the only day of the year where an entire city can sell out of Tostitos, as happened in Hoboken on Sunday. That itself is kind of cool, if not wildly inconvenient.

My Super Sunday started off just as every other since I was eight years old. I wake up just south of 9 a.m. and make a bee-line towards my couch to ESPN2, where they run a marathon of those classic 30-minute Superbowl recap shows by NFL films. This year I woke up at about 8:45 or so (after a night of heavy drinking no less) tuning in just in time to see a coked up LT dragging down John Elway in the second quarter of Superbowl XXI.

For those unfamiliar with the Superbowl recaps, you’re seriously missing out. You won’t find a better combination of timelessness and datedness on celluloid. Each show opens with a blast of programmed synthesizer against a picture montage of famous Superbowl heroes transposed next to the Vince Lombardi trophy. The images are of the Superbowl greats – beginning with Lombardi and ending with Montana (who was the Numero Uno Hombre when many of these films were produced).

The intro then gives way to a beaming Steve Sabol, who is nothing short of an icon in my book. The NFL Films president and son of company founder Ed Sabol, Sabol wears stupendous multi-colored sweaters while dolling out a brisk and effective intro and outro of each game.

The game footage itself is tremendous, featuring intimate camera work and miked up sideline insights from everyone from Bart Starr to Terry Bradshaw to Troy Aikman. The slow motion replays that define the series are classic– a practice that would later become an industry standard. The play-by-play dialogue is laughably endearing, where a gruff voiceover professional spouts ridiculous line like, “While Boomer Esiason looked as cold as a Cincinnati winter, Joe Montana and the 49ers were creating a heat wave.” And then there’s the music, which serves as the backdrop for everything. Contemporary to the time of production, Superbowls from the ‘60s feature big band flair, while many of the ‘70s Cowboys and Steelers classics possess an acute disco inflection. By the time the ‘80s roll around, creepy synth and random guitar squeals rule the day, the perfect soundtrack for The Fridge, Phil Simms and Doug Williams.

It's my own personal 12-hour pre-game show...and I don't even have to listen to Chris Collinsworth telling me how he's right and I'm wrong. It's perfect.

Some quick points from Sunday:

-- Paul McCartney is really old: Listen, I love the Beatles. And while I’ll always be more of a Lennon guy than a McCartney guy, you won’t ever catch me legitimately bashing Macca. The guy is a legend. But hiring a 65-year-old with dyed brown hair to play on the world’s biggest stage just smacked of banality, an insult to everyone involved. Sitting in my living room with some friends on Sunday, my roommate Dude Love (a tepid music fan who once ventured in a music quiz that Ringo Starr played saxophone for the Beatles) commented that this was “the worst halftime show he’d ever seen.” The sad thing is, there were probably 30 million other people across the country saying the same thing. Wrong place, wrong time for McCartney and a gutless choice by the NFL. And yes, this upsets me.

-- Boring ass commercials: Another byproduct of the Janet Jackson fiasco, commercials took a decidedly “cute” turn for Superbowl XXXIX. I can’t even think of one spot that legitimately stood out to me as funny. Certainly nothing that made me want to buy something…which is what I think commercials are supposed to do. I think.

And while we’re on the topic of commercials, did anybody see Buddy from “Just One Of The Guys” in that new Circuit City spot? Oh man, 2005 may have already hit its high point. How Buddy (real name Billy Jacoby) has been forced into doing pride-swallowing electronic store commercials to pay the rent of his seedy east L.A. apartment (okay, this is how I picture it) is beyond me. I mean…HE WAS BUDDY! “All balls itch! It’s a fact!”

--Terrell Owens shuts them up: His nine catch, 120-yard performance served as a big ole FU to the white sports media that ripped him all week for being selfish to his team for trying to play. If Andy Reid hadn't read the Herman Edwards Clock-Management handbook before the game, Owens may have been the MVP. After the game, Owens correctly asserted that Brett Favre would have been treated as a saint had he done the same thing. He wasn’t out of line…and this is coming from me, a former white sportswriter. There seems to be a double standard at play here, possibly a guilt by association situation brought on by the Randy Moss/Ray Lewis/Jamal Lewis generation of NFL stars. For a guy without any drug busts, assault charges or offensive hip hop records, he sure seems to get a bad rap. And no, I don’t defend him solely because he was on my fantasy team this year.

Okay, mostly, but not solely.

-- The Patriots are really, really good: The first post-Yankees dynasty has officially arrived. People seem to miss the reasons why this team is so good, reasons that I’ve seen up close as they’ve handed the Jets their lunch for the better part of the decade. This is a team with an assassin for a quarterback, a strong core of solid role players on both sides of the ball and, perhaps most importantly, one of the greatest combinations of coaches ever assembled on one staff. It may be a different formula than your daddy’s dynasties, but it’s just as effective. In the salary cap era, maybe even more so.