I'm old enough to remember when the centerpiece of Super Bowl Sunday was a championship football game. But in the two-week runup to last Sunday's Super Bowl in Detroit, football sometimes seemed like an afterthought as the marketing folks bombarded us with multiple distractions that had nothing to do with the Big Game.
Even though I realize that a TV audience of 90 million viewers is a huge incentive to marketers and advertisers, I wish the networks would pay more attention to the game itself and not interrupt so often with irrelevant nonsense, including idiotic ads for beer, cars and big trucks. Of course those ads tell us something about the target audience - young, beer-drinking males and old guys pretending to be teenagers. I love it when Budweiser advises us to "drink responsibly" while showing a bunch of screaming drunks on the screen.
When the first Super Bowl was played 40 years ago, they managed to play the game without turning the stadium into a rock concert venue. Last Sunday, however, it was difficult to tell whether the star of the show was supposed to be Steelers' running back Jerome "The Bus" Bettis, a popular Detroit native, or venerable Rolling Stones rocker Mick Jagger, who's almost as old as I am. Imagine! What I didn't understand was why the halftime show featured the Stones instead of Detroit Motown legends like Diana Ross and Aretha Franklin. Yes, Aretha belted out the Star Spangled Banner before the game, but that's the last we saw of her.
Media coverage of the Super Bowl paid almost as much attention to competing TV ads as to the game itself. Viewers were urged to vote for their favorite ads as if those were at least as important as what was transpiring down there on the playing field. I mean, those giant robots were cute in a grotesque sort of way, but they couldn't hold a candle to The Bus or the Steelers' multi-talented Player of the Game, wide receiver Hines Ward. Meanwhile, it was a long afternoon for my hometown (I grew up in Seattle) Seahawks, who simply didn't play well enough to win. Although my Seattle friends and relatives are still whining about the officiating, the Hawks made too many stupid mistakes at critical moments during a game that lasted forever because of the aforementioned wall-to-wall advertising blitz.
As for the advertisers, I guess when they're paying $2.5 million for a 30-second spot - more than $80,000 per second - they want to get their money's worth. Some of them did and some of them didn't, but in the end, who cares? Not me, that's for sure.
I thought AOL sports columnist Jim Armstrong summed up the whole thing pretty well when he wrote that the Super Bowl is "must-see TV" because of all the extra added attractions like the traditional Lingerie Bowl at halftime, which I missed by dozing off during the Stones concert. The Lingerie Bowl, Armstrong noted, featured "scantily-clad babes blocking and tackling in their undies" in a game between the Los Angeles Temptation and the New York Lovelies. No one knows who won, but that's beside the point.
Sports Illustrated's Rick Reilly injected more humor into the proceedings by predicting that Seattle would lose because it's 1) too damn nice, 2) too damn geeky - Microsoft geek Paul Allen owns the Seahawks - and 3) it's too damn wet up there. I know all about that because I lived through the year-round Seattle Rain Festival during a semi-idyllic but damp childhood. Now my daughter and twin grandsons are "enjoying" the Rain Festival; it goes with the territory.
Another S.I. columnist, Steve Rushin, injected a serious note into the proceedings by pointing out that "it's hard to feign shock at Super Bowl malarkey ... when a player can get an award for 'high moral character' and solicit a prostitute on the same night" (which actually happened a couple of years ago). And not only that, "choreographed halftime nudity is somberly attributed to a 'wardrobe malfunction.'" Enough already!
And now that Super Bowl 40 is history, we're already deep into NBC's over-hyped Winter Olympics extravaganza with Katie herself reporting from "Torino" (Turin, that is, for my English-speaking readers). And after the Turin Olympics, we'll face college basketball's annual "March Madness" playoffs followed by the seemingly endless NBA (National Basketball Association) championships. So bring on the talking frogs! We sports nuts are ready for some basketball. Go Wolfpack!
CARPETBAGGERS - Former President Jimmy Carter and his 58-year-old son, Jack, were in town last Monday to announce Jack's candidacy for the U.S. Senate from Nevada, of all places. Carter will challenge incumbent Republican Sen. John Ensign. How these Georgia carpetbaggers think they can win here is beyond me. Stay tuned.
REVOLVING DOOR - Gov. Guinn's former chief of staff, Mike Hillerby, just went to work for mega-lobbyist Harvey Whittemore. But are we surprised? No, because the political revolving door is alive and well in Nevada. Ho hum, business as usual.
n Guy W. Farmer, a semi-retired journalist and lifelong sports fan, resides in Carson City.