There’s one main thing you need to know about this latest Super
Bowl: the State of the Union quarterback won, heroically. Advantage
George W. Bush. Tom Brady, shortly after front-running John Kerry
had claimed Brady’s New England Patriots team as his own, had
avoided the Democrat’s blitz by attending the SOTU address as the
president’s guest. Duly inspired, he went on to new greatness. Just
don’t expect ESPN or the sports pages to delve too deeply into this
central feature of last night’s game, which deservedly is going
down as the greatest Super Bowl ever, give or take 10 others.
Which doesn’t mean it wasn’t the greatest, assuming you did
other things while the ads were on. If not for Drudge, I wouldn’t
have known what Janet Jackson was up to. Perhaps she was reaching
out to her better known brother. The one fine thing about CBS’s
coverage of the game — apparently Jackson had inspired a few
imitators just before the second-half kickoff — is that it
pretends nothing untoward is going on if it isn’t game-related. One
can assume real fans watch the game, while fair-weather fans prefer
everything but the game. We remain a badly divided country
nonpolitically as well.
Reid
Collins has done heroic work capturing the brazen decadence of
the advertising and halftime show. My son had pointed out the ads
warning children not to smoke or drink or do drugs or a lick of
work around the house. So why was there a Pepsi ad glorifying the
young Jimi Hendrix, purchasing a Pepsi and guitar instead of a Coke
and an accordion? Maybe if he’d chosen the latter he wouldn’t have
died an early death from drugs and habits those earlier ads found
objectionable.
It’s come to the point that the only cleancut action is on the
field during the game (give or take a mean chop to the ribs of the
celebrating Carolina QB from a Patriot after the former had thrown
another touchdown pass). One had to feel sorry for the players
having to play the second half in air cancerously polluted by the
halftime show. Surely the hazy picture on my TV screen couldn’t be
blamed on Panasonic.
And notice all the slipping players from both teams did at the
most inopportune times. That’s what games on the latest confection
that passes for an artificial surface are likely to produce. Wonder
why there was so much scoring in a game that was a defensive
standstill for its first 26 minutes? No doubt because by then both
defenses were wiped out by the increasing heat of a game played
indoors.
It didn’t have to be that way. The Houston stadium has a
retractable roof. The weather outside was fine and a lot cooler
that the sauna-like conditions that built up inside. But the
geniuses who run things for the NFL and CBS were reportedly afraid
of a possible thunder storm (in February?). So let the players die
rather than play in conditions football is supposed to be played
in.
All these distractions notwithstanding, the play of both teams
was stupendous. I’m serious. For a time it appeared special teams
play would clinch it for Carolina. New England had missed two easy
field goals, punted anemically, and botched a squib kick. But then
just when it mattered most, Carolina’s kicker hooked a kickoff out
of bounds, giving Brady all the extra yards he’d need to win in the
final seconds.
Carolina didn’t deserve to lose, which is what makes Brady’s
achievement that much more memorable. When late in the game his
team fell behind for the first time in months, instead of folding
as 99.9 percent of players would have in these circumstances he
found a way to produce a go-ahead touchdown — and a two-point
conversion the other team twice failed at. After Carolina amazingly
came back to tie the score, he did it all over again.
It’s early, but this is one they’ll be talking about forever.
That, and Y.A. Tittle’s appearance at the pre-game coin flip.
