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By Christopher Witflee
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Recognition of overdriven Super Bowl hype came pretty early, in the run-up to Super Bowl VI, when reporters asked Dallas Cowboys running back Duane Thomas about playing in the "ultimate game." Said Thomas, "If it's the ultimate game, then why are they playing it again next year?"
By the accounts of the ancients, the ultimate game had already been played decades before, that 1958 NFL championship contest ending with an overtime touchdown run by the Baltimore Colts' Alan Ameche. The nationally televised thriller drove water cooler discussion with an intensity that had been unknown to the NFL, which hadn't been a match for college football, let alone Major League Baseball, in its popular appeal.
The NFL became a full-blown popular culture centerpiece in the early 1970s, with the debut of ABC's Monday Night Football, cannily packaged as pro sports and prime time entertainment. Between Ameche's run and the emergence of Howard Cosell, the NFL grew in the direction set by Pete Rozelle, the former Los Angeles Rams publicity director who had become commissioner as a compromise candidate.
Rozelle brought to the NFL a quality that isn't often welcomed in athletics: A big vision that would, to use a loaded word, nationalize the NFL. His predecessor, Bert Bell, had already instituted the common draft. Rozelle's genius consisted in packaging the NFL as a network television commodity and splitting the revenues evenly among the owners.
Then, Rozelle worked with Lamar Hunt, a big hitter in the upstart AFL, to bring about a merger that ended with the NFL in 25 markets. The merger preserved enough of the AFL's identity to build on the short history of the Super Bowl, which, in the early days, was a glorified exhibition.
Since the end of the late Rozelle's tenure, the NFL hasn't backed off an inch from his ideal of competitive parity, which might not ensure that every team would finish 8-8 but would certainly put a braking mechanism on dynasties and persistently deadbeat franchises. Another Rozelle innovation was to set the schedules so the strongest teams would play each other and the weakest teams played each other, reducing the chance of back-to-back losing seasons. The latest wrinkle is the salary cap, which makes it impossible for any team to dramatically outspend any other for player talent.
The sources for Rozelle's vision of parity aren't hard to imagine. The only comparable paradigm for professional sports had been the model for Major League Baseball, where few franchises won in the 1950s and attendance stagnated in the majority of markets. In those days, no NFL franchise was so strong that it could resist strengthening the entire league.
The preceding history isn't merely an academic exercise, but a crucial framework for understanding the state of American spectator sports in the first days of the 21st Century. If, like most Americans, you saw Super Bowl XXXIV, then you know what that framework has created.
On Jan. 30, the two Super Bowl teams were largely unknown. The teams that had been the usual recent contenders were falling by the wayside, unable to maneuver around the salary cap indefinitely. The peculiar excitement only the NFL can create had spread to Nashville and St. Louis, two cities that had stolen their teams from larger markets.
The St. Louis Rams walked off the field at Atlanta's Georgia Dome with the Vince Lombardi Trophy and, just as significant, a banner for most every other football fan in America -- the realistic hope that his or her team can win it all next year.
To view the Rams' exciting 23-16 win over the Tennessee Titans is to understand, once more, how the NFL has gone three decades strong as the most popular athletic enterprise in the United States. Because of the framework set by Rozelle, every fan of every team knows that not only can his team win but that any competent organization ought to win now and then.
As a bonus, this Super Bowl was the most dramatic and exciting professional sports championship of at least the last 10 years. Some folks might point to the 1991 World Series between the Minnesota Twins and Atlanta Braves, but that contest was close only because neither team could steer clear of mistakes and put away the other team.
This Super Bowl had all the predicted elements. The strengths of each team were on full display. The high-flying Rams moved up and down the field, but the tough-minded Titans kept turning them back. The Rams cashed only 16 points off 42 points worth of opportunities before the Titans came back with their running attack to tie it, 16-16, with barely more than two minutes remaining.
The game rested on three extraordinary plays. With just more than two minutes left to break the tie, Rams quarterback Kurt Warner, the man the scouts forgot, dropped back and looked for Isaac Bruce on a go route. As he threw down the right sideline, Warner took a hit on his right side from Tennessee defensive end Jevon Kearse.
Warner underthrew his pass to Bruce, who was matched stride for stride by Tennessee defensive back Denard Walker. Bruce turned to look for the pass and slowed up to make the catch as Walker ran past him. From that moment, Bruce ran untouched as he completed the 73-yard touchdown play.
The Titans hadn't been known for spontaneous offense and appeared to be overmatched, needing 88 yards to score the tying touchdown with 1:51 and one time out remaining. But the Titans went at it gamely.
Facing third and long with 20 seconds remaining, quarterback Steve McNair evaded the rush, ran out of a sack and completed a pass to Kevin Dyson at the St. Louis 10. Six seconds remained. In one final play, McNair found Dyson at the 5. Dyson stepped toward the end zone, but Rams linebacker Mike Jones wrapped him up and, as Dyson stretched his ball hand toward the goal line, time expired.
Almost by acclamation, this goes down as the greatest Super Bowl finish ever. But the real beauty of this game flowed not from its own drama, but from the bigger message told simply by the fact it was contested between St. Louis and Tennessee. Every fan in every NFL city, except one, can anticipate the happy possibilities for the 2000 season.
All that said, the biggest sports story of January might not have been the Super Bowl. Earlier in the month, Bud Selig, the commissioner of Major League Baseball, won from the sport's owners "sweeping powers" that would enable him to fine clubs up to $2 million for infractions while authorizing that all clubs share their Internet revenues. Selig already had effectively consolidated the American and National leagues under his command.
If Selig has been particularly good on one point as commissioner, it is his insistence that every fan of every Major League Baseball club should have hope at the beginning of spring training. It remains to be seen if he can make it happen. A declaration of sweeping powers does not constitute sweeping powers -- they become reality only through practice, and there stands to remain plenty of political constraints against the commissioner's drive for parity.
But if the owners of the wealthiest Major League clubs need an object lesson for why their clubs are better off if every team is healthy, the example came on Jan. 30 at Super Bowl XXXIV -- the outcome of Pete Rozelle's model.
SPORTS is sports, in this space every week. Contact Bill at CityBeat, 23 E. Seventh St., #617, Cincinnati, OH 45202, or e-mail him at letters@citybeat.com
