we are coming up to Super Sunday, when 70 million Americans will be watching the Super Bowl. Our cover story, written by Associate Editor B.J. Phillips, contrasts the opponents: the cool, efficient Cowboys and the upstart Broncos. One problem for Phillips was to figure out what lifts a team through all the playoffs and into the big bowl. "I finally concluded that Billy Clyde Puckett was onto something in Semi-Tough," she says. "He found out that everyone wants to win, but the champions are the guys

who hate losing most." The game will be held in New Orleans' Superdome, which Senior Writer Michael Demarest visited for his accompanying piece on the controversial indoor sports arena. For Demarest, going to Louisiana was a kind of homecoming: his family has lived in New Orleans for three centuries. sb Before writing his impressions of Micronesia for NATION, Hong Kong Correspondent David DeVoss made a 17,500-mile, 17-day odyssey through America's vast aqueous empire. He had first visited the Pacific during the early '70s while commuting to two brief tours in Viet Nam and remembered the islands as "a frontier where tedium and pleasure competed for men's souls." Those territories today, he found, are suddenly facing very modern social and economic problems.

In the course of his voyage, DeVoss surveyed the island of Ponape via a Boston whaler, helped fly a Grumman goose on an

air evacuation mission in the Marshall Islands, attended the wedding of a high chiefs daughter in Pago Pago, and talked about Somerset Maugham's legacy with former Samoan Governor H. Rex Lee as rain beat against the roof of the veranda. "Ego gratification and upward mobility, America's gifts to Micronesia, have changed the Pacific of Maugham and Robert Louis Stevenson," says DeVoss. "A $500,000 bridge is planned to link two outer Samoan islands I once swam between four years ago. Still, no change can dull the macaroon scent of drying copra or the taste of raw tuna."

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