 Behind the Billion Dollar HypebyPete Croatto
The beauty of the Super Bowl is it takes one game to determine the champion of professional football, the one sport that is truly America’s game. It’s the perfect sporting event for the casual fan, cutting through the five- and seven-game series nonsense that can make pro baseball and basketball's postseason stretch like Tess of the d’Urbervilles. And like most grand American productions (e.g., the Oscars, beauty pageants), everything about the Super Bowl is sparkly and splashy and as subtle as a frying pan to the head. The storylines are bigger. A Saints victory, not improvements to New Orleans’ crumbling infrastructure, will save the battered city! The commercials are as anticipated as summer movie blockbusters, and both star Megan Fox. Even the pre-game shows are longer. This year, the NFL Network’s one started eight-and-a-half hours before kickoff. For those who wanted less inane chatter, ESPN’s only ran four hours. Oh yeah, and there was a game . . . But did you see The Who perform at halftime? Making the Super Bowl—the game and the surrounding pageantry—work involves countless separate parts. Allen St. John, a sports columnist with The Wall Street Journal, attempts to cover some of them in The Billion Dollar Game: Behind the Scenes of the Greatest Day in American Sport—Super Bowl Sunday. It’s not an epic book in heft and it doesn’t regurgitate the tough-guy mythology of pro football’s greatest day. St. John simply observes and reports, creating an insightful and impressive account of the unsung people who construct and handle the hype. It’s fitting that there is almost no description of the actual game, historic Super Bowl XLII, when the underdog New York Giants upset the previously undefeated New England Patriots. Instead, he details how the Phoenix area turned itself into a contender to host a Super Bowl, and how architect Peter Eisenman spent years planning the perfect stadium. What’s the prerequisite for booking a memorable halftime act? It's “the Hummability Factor,” which is explained to St. John by Charles Coplin of the National Football League. “They have to have a catalog that’s accessible and familiar and recognizable,” he says. “When songs like ‘Hey, Jude’ and ‘Purple Rain’ are played, the world sort of comes together for a moment and sings the song. And when you see 80,000 people in a stadium singing, it provides an energy that’s really unique.” For Fox Sports’ production team, we learn that half the battle is not getting sucked into the game's hype. “There's a tremendous amount of temptation in the Super Bowl,” reveals game director Artie Kempner. “It’s South Beach, and we're loaded with money. You've just got to be careful that you don’t misuse the money, or misuse that time, and make yourself look like a jackass on America's biggest stage. All games are important, but this game is way too important to be messing around.” Adds Joe Buck, the play-by-play man, “It’s so trite and almost stupid to say, but you have to realize that it’s just a game. You just get overwhelmed by the detail. And by the time the game starts it’s like, wait a minute.” St. John also looks at the process behind Anheuser-Busch choosing an ad for the Super Bowl, which reveals this nugget: the best commercials may not get played during the big game. After all, beer needs to be sold all year long. St. John also gives us an insider’s look into the painstaking detail—from securing liquor licenses to finding girls to choosing the perfect locale—that goes into creating Playboy’s much-ballyhooed Super Bowl party. By turning his attention to the overlooked aspects of the game, St. John reveals that people, not a machine fed with Big Macs and classic rock songs, put this thing together. St. John has given a face to the day’s glitz and glamour while finding a refreshing angle to a sporting contest that becomes less about the sport and more about the production with each passing year. Books mentioned in this column:
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