Is It Really Only a Game?

By Tom Callahan

With each passing Roman numeral, more people join the feast

In most respects, Detroit was just like Miami or New Orleans or Pasadena, only more so than ever. The National Football League heaved laboriously for two weeks to bring forth its Super Bowl, and Nielsen counted 105 million people paying attention.

The game, which is hardly ever super, was fine. San Francisco, Bill Walsh, Joe Montana, Hacksaw Reynolds, Ray Wersching, Forrest Gregg, Pete Johnson and Cincinnati got where they were going all right, as Toyota, among other sponsors, provided the transportation at $345,000 per half-minute spot on CBS. None of the commercials mentioned that Toyotas and other foreign cars stopped at traffic lights in Pontiac, Mich., are getting bumped angrily from behind by the drivers of American-made vehicles.

Bringing the Super Bowl to such an economically depressed area, a quid pro quo involving automotive commercials, distressed the sportswriters and irritated the purists, who go on insisting that the championship of professional football belongs in one or the other of the contending towns, no matter how chilly Cincinnati can get in late January. The Cincinnati climate is a recurring controversy in sports. Remember, Baseball Commissioner Bowie Kuhn shivered without his topcoat through a World Series game there several years ago. Neither baseball nor football is a winter sport, of course, but schedule makers don't know that.

People with warm memories of cold games either have forgotten that the football championship used to come around in the month of December, or they have missed the news that the Super Bowl is now absolutely everyone's home game. The television ratings are conclusive. Four of the nine most watched TV shows of all time are Super Bowls, including last week's. Only Roots, Gone With the Wind and Who Shot J.R.? can hold their own in this league. Clearly, observing the feast of football has become a national, cultural and conversational imperative, if not a religious holiday.

"If Jesus were alive today," says Norman Vincent Peale, "he would be at the Super Bowl." Sacred imagery is almost irresistible since the ceremony is scheduled on the sabbath and near the beginning of the year, an epiphany, a manifestation of something certainly, maybe everything slightly. A San Francisco clergyman speaks of a "secular celebration" of the masses, but the property-seizing principle of football would make a fine analogy for a Communist too. Almost everything applies at the Super Bowl, except "it's only a game."

As a phrase to settle one down, "it's only a game" only works if it is not your game. In annual attempts to bring the Super Bowl into saner, more seemly perspective, the problem is that with each passing Roman numeral it becomes the game of more and more people.

At XVI, Bill Walsh referred to it as "our true national pastime." The 49ers' brainy coach, who thinks of more things than just squib kicks, went on then to say that losing the Super Bowl, all the same, ought not require anyone to skulk around forever in the wretched manner of the Minnesota Vikings, who have appeared in four Super Bowls and have lost four. ("It's only a game" also goes if you win the game.)

So in 16 years, from Lombardi to Walsh, the Super Bowl has shifted from winning is the only thing to losing isn't everything, from the hazy glare that first year of Los Angeles and empty seats in the Coliseum to the honest grime of Pontiac and artificial springtime in the Silverdome, from a football game to a ritual fascination that envelops millions not attracted to the sport in the slightest. Even N.F.L. Commissioner Pete Rozelle (who arrived in Detroit with pneumonia, thereby avoiding the embarrassment of catching cold there) has taken to referring to the "event," not the game.

Unlike the event, its equally famous "hype" is actually getting smaller. Time was, the N.F.L. needed to hire vacant airports and race tracks for staging the Super Bowl parties, small, intimate gatherings of some 5,000 guests. Longstanding records for paganism were broken in 1974 in Houston, where the party took up the whole floor of the Astrodome. Fatted calves were literally sacrificed on spits as their live parents milled sad-eyed among the congregation. This year, invitations were limited to an exclusive 2,800 for a soiree on the indoor tennis courts of an ordinary country club, and Peter Duchin played piano.

What this means socially and politically is unclear, but interpreters no doubt will be along shortly. Political significance would have been found in Super Bowls even if Presidents were not in the habit of recommending flanker-reverse plays beforehand and rushing to the telephone afterward ("Hello .. . Mr. President?"). And sociologists have always had a field day.

In 1967, the year I, the country was said to be in need of an ultimate battlefield other than Viet Nam. Given the already richly militaristic language of football--bombs, blitzes and such--crewcut values supposedly were seeking a war with clear-cut results. As a national figure of authority, Coach Vince Lombardi was right up there with Walter Cronkite. Lombardi's Green Bay Packers (except Paul Hornung and Max McGee) upheld tradition. The half-time shows were full of fifes and drums, stars and stripes, reconstructions of battle scenes and fighter jets streaming information.

But the sentiments of the country began to swing, so the anti-Establishment sent Joe Namath into the game; a flock of doves were set free. Later the Vikings were not just football players, they were examples of the folly of forcing men to learn by rote any more; the Kansas City Chiefs represented new technology; the Dallas Cowboys brought the computer age.

By now, it is much too simple to say that the San Francisco 49ers are a real nice team, and the Cincinnati Bengals have a pretty good one too, and Walsh is a sharp coach, and Joe Montana is a nifty quarterback, and it is only a game. --By Tom Callahan

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