All Over (Includin’ the Shoutin’): a few thoughts on Super Bowl XLV

Well, I just heard that 111 million 0r, rather CXI million - viewers watched Sunday’s Super Bowl.

My husband and I were among them, more or less. (I’ll get to that less part later.)

First, I will say that I am happy with a Green Bay Packer victory. I’ve always like The Pack, and I like the fact that a) they’re the only game in town out there; b) the team is owned by their fans; and c) they play their home games under some of the most miserable weather conditions known to footballkind. Plus my friend Sean, despite having grown up in NJ, and living in NY, is a huge Packers fan. He told me yesterday morning that he is retiring his tattered old Packers jammies and getting some new Super Bowl victory gear.

In truth, I have always sort of liked the Pittsburgh Steelers, too. With the Packers – as in meat packers – the Steelers were named during a time when blue collar guys went to factories and produced things. Like meat. And steel. The Steelers also play cold-weather, hard-nosed football and, while they’re not owned by the citizens of Pittsburgh, they’ve been owned for generations by the Rooney family, which seem like a decent enough lot. Less so Steeler’s quarterback, Ben Roethlisberger, who has been involved in a couple of sexual assault cases. Nothing that’s ever made it to court, mind you – these unseemly incidents do have a way of disappearing – but enough to make me not want to root for Big Ben, indicative as they are of the entitled, macho, piggish side of athletics.

Anyway, I watched The Game. More or less. And had been planning on doing a post on the ads, as I’d done the last couple of years on my now more or less defunct marketing blog, Opinionated Marketers. (Old blogs don’t die, and they don’t fade away, either. I really need to do something end-game-ish about that puppy.)

But, as it turned out, I missed most of the ads.  As it happened, while The Game was on, I was too distracted thumbing through the Lands End catalog, making a quick supper, and getting some laundry done to pay all that much attention to the ads. The ones I did notice were not particularly memorable, other than the ones I found offensive (Dorito’s guy sucking chip crumbs off of his pants; Pepsi Max woman hurling the can at her boyfriend’s head). There were some technically nifty car ads, but, in truth, I can’t really recall which one was for Mercedes and which one was for CarMax. Which would be a problem for marketers spending $3M for 30 seconds on the ad space (plus whatever they spent on creative and production) if I were their target demographic. Which, of course, I’m not.

My sister Kath having sent me a link to some ad previews, I did find the ones from Audi that featured Luxury Prison pretty amusing – both the prison break one with the Kenny G music, and the “Startled Smart”teaser ad – a take off on Scared Straight, in which Richy Rich kids are warned about what could happen if they keep doing stuff like wearing four polo shirts at once.

I’m not quite sure what marketers want out of these big Super Bowl spends – Clios? Going viral?  - but, in the case of the Audi ads, at least it looks like they had fun making them.

Anyway, since I didn’t actually see all that many of them, I guess I can’t say I just watch Super Bowl for the ads.

I don’t watch it for the renditions of the national anthem, either.

In fact, I was not in the room when Christina Aguilera warbled away. But I was in ear shot and the lyric flub -  “what so proudly we watched at the twilight’s last gleaming” (or reaming, as some thought she’d come out with)  - didn’t bother me near as much as all the embroidery that Christina, like so many other artistes, seemed compelled to do to make The Star Spangled Banner her very own personal anthem. Note to next superstar called on to open the next Super Bowl: Why don’t you just sing the freakin’ thing like you did in grammar school when you may not have understood the words, but you probably knew them. No showing off; just belt it out without all sorts of frippery. Bet when that tune was better known as a British drinking song there weren’t all kinds of extraneous riffs added.

And how’s this for a novel approach: why not ask everyone in the audience to sing along with you. Hey, it’s our national anthem, too.

So if I missed Ms. Aguilera’s (mis)take of the national anthem, I did get TV-side in time to watch and hear Michael Douglas intone something about Super Bowl being more than just a football game.

How so, Michael?

Basically, it’s just a bunch of highly determined, athletic men playing a rough and tumble, highly physical, sometimes brain damaging (to those playing, and not, fortunately to us watching – at least I don’t think so) sport, for which they get paid (some of them a lot) and we get entertained. Yes, you can wrap the whole thing up in all kinds of  patriotic trappings and militaristic overlay, but at the end of the evening, it’s a game.  (And, yes, it is one that I enjoy watching.)

As for the “it brings us together”, well, sure, it brought 111 million “together” and gave them enough ammunition for a week’s worth of office small talk and bet-settling. But as far as I can tell, that’s about 200 million people short of bringing the entire U.S. us together. And 200 million is a lot of folks, which means that everyone who elected not to watch Super Bowl was not necessarily comatose and/or anti-American.

I’m not sure what most of the 200 million non-watchers were doing. But I can tell you what a couple of the partial watchers (which makes us partial non-watchers) were up to at some point.

During the half-time show, which Jim and I were not particularly enjoying (even though, unlike my husband, I had actually heard of and like the Black Eyed Peas), we flipped over to ESPN, which was rerunning a film they’d done on the 2004 American League Championship Series in which the Boston Red Sox shook off the curse and beat the NY Yankees after being down 3-0.

Despite the fact that we knew the outcome. Despite the fact that we’d already seen the show. Despite the fact  that my husband is not a particularly enthusiastic baseball fan, we stayed put and watched the film in its entirety, exhilarated and, yes, a bit misty-eyed when our boys won.

Perhaps we would not have been quick to channel cruise if another set of our boys – the Patriots – were in the Super Bowl this year. But that wasn’t the case, so we ended up missing most of the third quarter before we rejoined our fellow 111 million citizens of football fandom.

Meanwhile, pitchers and catchers report next week to spring training.

Yippee!

But while I’m still, more or less, on the subject of the Super Bowl, what is with the use of the Roman numerals? Is it supposed to confer on this event some greater meaning, that it’s really not, as Michael Douglas informed us,  just a football game? Do they even teach how to read Roman numerals in school anymore? Anyway, it’s just one more of the overblown, pompous aspects of professional football that I’m not wild about. (No surprise that, until the Patriots got good, I hadn’t watched pro football since the days when New Englanders rooted for the NY Giants.)  Pink Slip to the NFL: get rid of the ridiculous Roman numerals, already.

And did I mention that pitchers and catchers report next week?