Death and Taxes and Super Bowl

What I did in lieu of watching the big game... in seven movements...


1 - I'm At Home

I piddle around on Sunday afternoon. I look out the window and I'm glad to see that what was left of the snow and ice that trapped us inside the house for nearly three days last week is gone.

I try not to think about my friend.

When will the services for her be held? What is going to happen to her office down the hall from mine? What about the 120 students she would have taught this semester?

I'm almost certain I'm violating some unwritten rule of blogging.

Don't write about death.

Keep everything light and frothy. People mostly read these things to be amused. And it's Super Bowl Sunday.

I should act like a real American.

Americans don't want to cry. That's why we have "celebrations of life," not "funerals." We always look for the silver lining...or we just don't look. And we move on...

2 - I Go Shopping
At 5:25, as one team is kicking off to another in Dallas, Texas, I head to the grocery store. It is raining lightly. I look at the parking lot and I'm surprised. I'm not the only one who isn't at home watching the big game.

Attention, shoppers. It's 5:25 CST and there's
a Super Bowl on Aisle XLV...

The store isn't crowded, but it is far from empty. Of course, earlier in the day one can assume it was a madhouse of shoppers stocking up on treats for their Super Bowl parties.

I can see the evidence on key aisles [photo below].

As I am checking out, the young,  blue-eyed, red-headed clerk who has a tag that says "Hailey" asks me, "Why aren't you watching the Super Bowl?" I think, "Why are you asking me and not the 200 other people in this store?"

Before I can briefly tell her about the VWP, Hailey blurts out, "The Packers are ahead by two touchdowns."

"Actually, I'm avoiding all the news and the game as part of a year-long project I'm blogging about," I interject.

"Oh no! Then I wasn't supposed to say that." I can't tell if Hailey is apologetic or just amused. Maybe both.

"Don't worry. People say things that I can't help overhearing. Or they wear the jerseys. I'm not blind. I knew it was the Steelers vs. Green Bay. You just gave me one more thing to blog about."

I wonder how many people bought rice, corn and wheat Chex cereal
to make "Chex mix" for the big game? More than a few?

3 - I Work on My Taxes
Once the groceries are put away I begin the second part of my alternative to watching the Super Bowl.

The Van Winkle Tax Bowl.


At 7:25 CST as half-time nears, I'm loading
TurboTax and getting down to business...


I load TurboTax onto my computer which unexpectedly takes 20 minutes and then five more minutes for the program to search for and load on-line updates. But I'm not complaining.

Each year the simple Q & A format and the built-in calculators spare me the agony of puzzling over the tax forms and the impenetrable IRS instructions and then punching calculator buttons.

Without the tax software it would take me hours of work instead of 45 minutes. I would likely have some kind of breakdown and have to be hospitalized...

There it is again. I'm thinking about my friend. The last time I saw her was on Monday of Super Bowl Week. She was on pain meds and speaking softly. She was reconciled, imagining, as she put it, "Not waking up one morning," and "then I'll be in a better place." She spoke of all the people who kept coming by to express their love for her.

"You can have money in the bank or a job title," she said. "It isn't profound. Everyone knows. All that matters is love. I can't go to the bank and take dollars out, rub them on my forehead and feel love."

4 - I Look at the Numbers
Then I am done. Super Bowl XLV is likely gone into the record books. This year calculating our taxes took more time than in the past, partly because I wasted 15 minutes looking in the garage for an official DIV statement on a money market account in which we have a decent nest egg that earned a sum total of interest in 2010 of around 55 cents. Welcome to America post- financial collapse.

Still , there is the good news I hoped for: We don't owe the U.S. Government any money. Instead, we are going to get back a decent tax refund.

What I really want back is my friend.

5 - I Relive the Shock
My friend now has something in common with me. She doesn't know who won the Super Bowl either. You see, she passed away in hospice the day before the game. A few weeks ago she was like me. She stood at the photocopier and made copies of her syllabuses to hand out at the start of the new semester. New students, new names. She was ready to go!

Except she wasn't feeling well. She was in pain. Another professor took away her papers and told her to go home.

The next day they put her in the hospital for tests. Exploratory surgery would follow. Someone purchased a card and put it in the work room for everyone to sign. A cheerful card that would prove wildly inappropriate.



Someone got a get well card like this for us to sign...
After we heard the diagnosis we knew.
Such a card would never be sent.

She had Stage 3C ovarian cancer that had already spread throughout her abdomen. Because of a virus her heart was working at only 20%, and that meant they couldn't give her chemo or operate further. At that point she calmly accepted these facts and began preparing for the end.

It came little more than a week later.

And now begin the summations and orations. With words we try to hold onto a body and soul.

6 - I Grieve
She loved frogs and her office was decorated with them in every shape and form. Her students used to give her plastic frogs. She told them that f-r-o-g stood for "fully reliant on God."

She had a life-size cardboard cut-out of Spock from Star Trek standing in a corner of her office.

At home she loved her pug dog.

Even though she had strong competition from the wits and cut-ups and grown-up class clowns that populate English faculties she was, in my estimate, the funniest person around.

She audited two of my creative writing classes because she always was interested in learning. She was a darn good poet and story teller.

She wrote a story about a one-armed man who could roll cigarettes with one hand and who thought he saw a panther in a Texas alfalfa field. Years later, I still remember it.

She was middle-aged, but she sometimes dyed her hair magenta and wore jeweled glasses.

She was white, but every Sunday she attended an African-American church.

She grew up among rednecks, but from an early age she recognized racism for what it was. She spoke with horror of being in school the day Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. was assassinated. The class of white children broke into applause. She would spend the rest of her life speaking out against that kind of ignorance and evil.

She died at the beginning of Black History Month. That time always held significance for her.

She came to academic late in life after a career in business. That's why she only had an M.A. and her title was "instructor." This meant that effectively she never gained the same respect as the profs who had PhDs and terminal degrees. But she had other credentials that in my mind exceeded most of those our

résumés boasted about.

7 - And Some Day Comes Acceptance?
Another year's taxes are  now done. After 13 years of knowing her, my friend is dead. Life keeps subtracting from my accounts, but I think she would remind me to look at the other side of the picture. Every day something is added into my life.

I just have to pay attention and find out what it is. - V.W.

The outside of her office.

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4 Super Bowl Ads We'd Like to See

In 2005 Careerbuilder.com aired this uber realistic portrayal
of corporate life in America...Pass the bananas, please.

Today Super Bowl viewers around the world will be entertained by the commercials that debut during interludes in the game.

The best talent at top advertising agencies pull out all stops to startle, amaze, or just get a huge laugh. They have to.

The "spots" in the recent past have cost as much as $3 million for 30 seconds. Think about it. That's $100,000 for every tick of the clock.

Read this sentence.

That was $100,000 that just flew past your eyes.


Best Fantasy Ad Nominees
Because of the strictures and injunctions of the Van Winkle Project, I am not allowed to watch Super Bowl XLV. I won't have any idea what drama unfolds on the field, nor will I know which commercials people will be talking about around the mythical "water cooler" on Monday morning.

To compensate for this, I've made up some 30- and 60-second spots of my own. I figure if you can have "fantasy football," why not "fantasy football commercials"?

1 - APPLE COMPUTER - "Humility"
There's hardly an organization that's more successful than the dream team pairing of Steve Jobs and Apple. Before they even release a product and price it, the world is lining up and clamoring to buy it.

Apple also has the distinction of its 1984 Super Bowl "Big Brother" commercial.

"Big Brother" had cinema-quality production values, a then innovative use of veritable black and white, and an audacious, storyline that refused to directly tell viewers what the product was and that they needed to buy it.

For these reasons "Big Brother" is regarded by many ad pros as the greatest TV spot of all time. Apple swung the hammer at the IBM PC and they scored.

Apple knew all along. Apparel is a major consideration
when buying a computer.

Apple also gets high marks for a passive aggressive approach in its more recent Mac vs. PC ads. Call them arch, call them snarky, but to stand on the sidelines and just grin sadly in your hoody and jeans as you portray your competition as a lumpy, dumpy boob in khakis, this was brilliant.

And effective. Apple was so cool, that they could make arrogance and mockery look like socially acceptable behavior.

Surely Apple realizes that success brings with it a danger. The consumer could start to root for the underdog.

Apple with its dominant electronic-device triumvirate of iPod, iPhone, and iPad could start to resemble the Big Brother of its ad of 37 years ago. If so, it's hammer time...

I suggest that Apple run the following 30-second "Humility" ad during Super Bowl:

Meet the new Jobs...Not the same as the old Jobs...

Steve Jobs in trademark blue jeans and black turtleneck sitting on a stool on an empty stage with a blue curtain background. He speaks to an unseen audience.

SJ: No one ever apologizes for success. Nobody. Least of all me. But Apple is a company that's all about surprises. We go where no one has ever before. Therefore, today, at a cost of $100,000 per second, I apologize to the World. With the seductive allure of a cocktail waitress we've sold way too many of our good looking toys.We've helped you waste time. We've made possible the family meal where Dad reads The New Republic on his iPad, Mom is listening to a Sarah Palin podcast on her iPod, and the kids are texting Justin Beiber on their iPhones.

[Pause as Jobs points to a Keynote slide with graphic that is projected on curtain behind him...]

SJ: Today I am announcing Apple's Special Buy-Back program. If you bought an Apple product of any kind in the past year, we'll buy it back at a 10% premium, no questions asked. Please help us at Apple to wallow in some humility. Tell us you don't love us unconditionally. Let us give you money to disown us. That way we'll both make history since no company has ever bought back its own products for no reason whatsoever.

[Pause as new graphic goes up and Jobs gestures toward it...]

SJ: And should you change your mind after the buy-back, we'll be announcing at some vague point in time, can't even hint at it, a new convergence product that is a game-changer and...

[Screen goes black.]

2 - BUDWEISER -  
"Let's Bring Back the Reign of Terror"
The Budweiser Clydesdales are an iconic representation of this global brewer of beer that harken back to the days when their product was not made in gigantic factories.

These beautiful horses pulling the beer to market or being allowed to frolic in the field, help beer drinkers feel warm and fuzzy about their latest frosted one. Wrapped in metaphorical sweaty horsehide, a Bud truly becomes a "bud."

The challenge with the Clydesdale spots is to keep thinking of things for the horses to do short of entering the Kentucky Derby. We've seen the horses play football with each other and go on sundry outings. What's left? Crank up the Way Back Machine, Sherman. It's time to travel to those "heady" days of the French Revolution...

The poor Clydesdales have been forced to pull a wagon load of prisoners to the guillotine. But wait! The lead horses look at each other, nod, and go for it! They defy their driver and veer down a side street in Paris.

 The driver whips the Clydes to no avail and then tumbles off the wagon as the horses knock over a large barrel of beer. The prisoners jump off the wagon and are untied by peasants. Everyone is standing knee-deep in beer and praising the horses and toasting la liberte with Buds.

 We end with a close-up Marie Antoinette who has come into the street and has her own mug of foamy delight.

 "Let them trink Budweiser," she says in a charming Austro-Hungarian accent tangled up with French. "And ray-mem-bair. Drink responsibly. Don't drink and drive or... you might looze ze head!"

3 - PEPSI - "Sugar, Sugar..."
In 2010 Pepsi received a logo makeover because its war against Coke never ends and it needs every edge it can get. Pepsi is capable of stumbling massively (e.g., setting Michael Jackson's hair on fire during a commercial shoot) as is Coke (New Coke), so there's a lot at stake in any new ad.

Taking a cue from our fantasy Apple ad, it might be good if Pepsi did something counterintuitive and, at the same time, trendy. They can run an ad positioning themselves as the leader in the world's effort to move toward sugar water cessation. And we're not talking about Diet Pepsi here.

No, what Pepsi should introduce is a new product that is the beverage equivalent of the Nicotine Patch. A way to wean people off their unnatural desire to have the water they drink always taste sweet.

It's not enough to offer bottled water, Pepsi needs to pioneer a way to help sugar addicts find their way back to the natural stuff.

Introducing Pip-si.

Yes, you buy this Pepsi variant drink in a different six-pack each week at the store. Each Pip-si set is designed to give you a gradually, slightly less sweet taste. In a year's time (after drinking vat-loads of this stuff, which equals mega $$$ for Pepsi), you'll finally discover that H20 tastes great...because that's what you're actually drinking by now. Cans of water that you paid $1.99 for.

4 -  GEICO INSURANCE - "The Resurrection"
A lizard is the mascot of a company that sells car insurance? Pure genius! Does it make sense? Only a little. Gecko sounds like Geico. Is it original? Not if you've seen the Budweiser lizard ads from the 1990s.

But does it work? You bet! Overnight, a boring insurance company had an identity. Reptiles are hip!

But after a while they're also a bit cold-blooded. How can we warm up the Geico gecko? The answer is to refresh the image and get people talking about the little guy again.

So here's what we do...

We turn him into roadkill.

But that's not all. After a Mustang convertible rips past and the reptile is made to resemble a  green piece of Wrigley's gum in the first 10 seconds of the spot, we pay homage to a classic film.

E.T.

The Geico lizard is resurrected by a cute, kindly little girl who reaches down and...touches him. Presto! He reaquires three dimensions and comes back to life!

She carries him home lovingly cupped in the palm of her hand.

And as for the jerk in the Mustang who ran him over? He has a lapsed policy with another insurance company. He's sued and the last we see he's being led away manacled to a home behind razor wire while our lizard hero puts his hands on his slim hips and flicks his tongue. Which, of course, is how lizards laugh their little behinds off...

- V.W.

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The Best Super Bowl Halftime Show (That Never Was)

It's not fair to be too hard on the halftime entertainment at the Super Bowl. You must consider how far this activity had to come in forty-five years to arrive at the present moment.

In 1967 at Super Bowl I the crowd and TV viewers "thrilled" to the trumpet sounds of Al Hirt and the marching bands of two colleges.

Al Hirt was so "big" they brought him back (with Carol Channing)
for SB VI in '72. Love that Goodyear blimp about to bomb his head...

This pattern of featuring marching bands along with an artist whose LPs resided beside your aged aunt's and uncle's record player next to key albums by the Mormon Tabernacle Choir and Nelson Riddle persisted for years.

This was the other, older side of America. As far as it was concerned rock 'n' roll had never been invented.

The Super Bowl show was stuck back in the Big Band Era (Woody Herman, Ella Fitzgerald) or Broadway or tourist schmaltz (Pete Fountain, Carol Channing).

We can only be thankful we were somehow spared Andy Williams and Pat Boone.

When in 1988 at Super Bowl XXII rock 'n' roll finally arrived it came in the form of (hold your breath) Chubby Checkers. The Super Bowl's entertainment was literally almost 30 years behind the times.

The Up With People Era
When the Super Bowl folks finally realized, "You know we need to have something to pull in the younger generation," they just didn't get it. They brought out Up With People. They thought "Well, this group of clean-cut kids with major orthodontic smiles are young and they'll appeal to Grandma and Grandpa, too."

That was the problem.

Up With People (whom I'm sure are lovely and very "up" people) had its genesis as a singing group that recruited youth from around the country and then the globe. They sang in, no surprise, an upbeat fashion.about those great themes of the sixties: love, peace, and togetherness, but they did it minus the sex, drugs and rock 'n' roll.

The very name of the group was a reaction to the sixties' youth movement that chanted "Down with the establishment!" "Down with whitey!"

These kids asked us to think UP!

They would first appear at the 1976 Super Bowl X and make three more appearances.

I'm sorry to say, UWP was the musical offspring of Al Hirt and Carol Channing. If any person under 30 was watching the Super Bowl by 1980 the song that came to mind as halftime approached again was "Won't Get Fooled Again" by The Who. This song was already a rock 'n' roll relic, but it startlingly conveyed what was wrong with the Super Bowl musical fare.

Halftime show? Are you kidding? It's always the same drivel!

A Change is Gonna Come
In 1990 it seemed the NFL finally awoke from their cultural coma. They must have said, "The masses are restless. They're fixing snacks during halftime and not watching the show and the commercials. We need an injection of youth and acts that are actually still on the charts, not on the easy listening radio station."

You want youth, the NFL was going to give you youth: The New Kids on the Block. Now that's young!

Yeh. So was the Partridge Family.

But the next year it was Gloria Estefan. Hey, Gloria is on the charts! And she's from Miami and the Super Bowl that year was in...the Minneapolis Metrodome. Well, I never said it made complete sense.

Then came Super Bowl XXVII in the Rose Bowl. Michael Jackson. True it was 1993 and Thriller and Bad were distant memories, but MJ always was tabloid fresh as befits a global celebrity. And since at the Super Bowl the quality of the actual music at halftime show will always be handicapped by the need to set up quickly in the middle of a stadium, it helped that Michael could dance. Like no one else. May he rest in peace. There will never be another one like him.

The one and only.

Evolution Super Bowl Style
By now the Super Bowl powers that be had the memo in hand. They had to feature either current charting popular acts or classic rockers. The music should be loud, energetic and gaudily presented.

So they brought on country music stars. Then they visited the other side of the pop charts and gave us Aeorosmith, Stevie Wonder, Sting, Boyz II Men, various Motown stars, and Phil Collins.

In 2002 they brought on the rock band best suited for a 9/11 tribute: U2.

Bono, the Irishman who is an American patriot.
You've gotta love it...especially at such a preeminently American event.

Can you say HUGE? This is the kind of thing people would tune in to see.

In 2004 the halftime show discovered one other thing. The performance should not be sexy. Justin Timberlake gave the tug that was watched and talked about around the world. That oh so convenient "wardrobe malfunction."

At the moment the nethermost point of Janet Jackson's 38-year-old, pierced mammary gland touched the humid Houston night air some portion of America was scandalized. The rest was "tit-i-lated" but to no avail. An FCC fine followed. Everyone except nursing babies would forthwith be protected from visual collisions with female breasts. So this sort of thing wasn't going to happen again.

Like a bandage dressing the flesh wound, Paul McCartney arrived the next year. Legend! Former Beatle! Superstar solo artist! It was milk and cookies pop (during the most glib moments) and, come to think of it, closer to Up With People than some of us Beatle worshippers might feel comfortable admitting.

There's a shadow hanging over Sir Paul...
but he still believes in yesterday.

But Paul made it safe to watch the Super Bowl halftime show again. Bring on the Stones, Prince, Bruce, Tom Petty and...

Who Are They?
Last year I decided to watch the halftime show out of a sort grim respect for a rock band that once was the most iconoclastic and innovative that ever burned up a stage or smashed a drum kit. The Who.

Before: The greatest rock performers of all time...

Of course, when only two of the four original members are left, I think truth in advertising means they ought to add another character to their name...The Who?

After (40 years): 1/2 a Who and Who Cares?

The constantly changing lights on stage were the best part IMHO. The music was loud, but the band, like all others before it, opted for a medley of hits.

In the interest of total candor I must say that I strongly dislike medleys of hits. I've heard the song being played multiple times, perhaps hundreds (that's why it's a "hit"), and now the band deigns to play a short snippet and then segue into the snippet of another hit and another.

Medleys? Ugh. I feel like I'm listening to a machine that's slicing and dicing music. It's just an exercise.

Sure, within its medley The Who(?) played about two minutes and 15 seconds of "Won't Get Fooled Again," my favorite song back in my bell bottom jeans day. But that means 5 minutes of the greatest rock 'n' sturm and drang ever penned was lopped off. Won't get fooled again,  indeed. Which leads me to propose a constructive alternative.

Four Halftime Shows We'd Like to See

1. A man or a woman on a stage with just an acoustic guitar. Twenty minutes, 3 soul-stirring songs. Your nominations for this person are now being accepted.
2.  A band that plays an extended version of a familiar hit song for 10 minutes, then has the nerve to send the lead singer to mic to announce, "This is a new one we just wrote. We want to play it for the first time." 
3. Ice skaters. Why not? If we can send men to the moon and back, we can create a large rink quickly mid-field (and do a better job than the Teflon one they set up in front of Gloria Estefan in '92). And ice skating always looks good on TV.
4.  Up With People. Did I just say that? Yes! Why not bring back the original performers, now graying boomers in the their golden years. Because, you know what, after all we've been through with this show, maybe they won't seem that bad. And I just bet some of them can make some fancy moves with their aluminum walkers and canes.



The Up With People Super Bowl Challenge:
"Let's get UP! tonight!"



- V.W.

The Worst Super Bowl Ever

This is how the world looks outside my front door today.
The temperature is 9 degrees Fahrenheit. The wind is blowing, creating an effective "wind chill" temperature of -10 F.

Closures for all schools and universities have been announced for the second day in a row. This is unprecedented in these Sun Belt parts.

None of this has anything to do with the Super Bowl V, the 1971 contest between the Baltimore Colts and the Dallas Cowboys, my nominee for "worst Super Bowl game ever played."

Please, Don't Call It "Super"
The funny thing that occurs to me about Super Bowl V is how little I remember of the details surrounding the game and yet how sure I am of my distaste for it.  I felt halfway in that this was the most boring "big game" I'd ever tried to sit through.



Mercifully, the winning kick by the Colts in the final seconds
ends this numb-fest.

Super Bowl V  was a threshhold experience for me. Football would start to change on that day. For example, the Dallas coach Tom Landry preferred to play at quarterback a fellow named Craig Morton over young former Navy, Heisman Trophy winner Roger Staubach. Though Staubach was destined to be a future Hall of Famer, at that point Morton would obediently call the plays that the coach sent in and Staubach sometimes didn't.

Coach Landry, like all future NFL coaches, wanted to call all the plays.

Can't play football without the ear goggles...

Yes, we were moving toward the era of the Motorola headset, the technicalization of the game of professional football. As coachng staff and trainers proliferated, it felt like the players had walked onto a cruise ship with an enormous uniformed staff who watched over them and scheduled their every movement.


It would become unimaginable that on the NFL game-day cruise that a player might try to think for himself. Instead, he had become like a piece on a chess board. It was all so complicated that you now had separate coaches for the offense and the defense who called the plays when each unit was on the field. You still had the head coach, but I'm not sure what he did...

The wonders of technology. You could now buy a football field
and have it delivered...just like a rug.

Super Bowl V was also the first Super Bowl played on plastic grass, euphemistically called "artifical turf." Another switch in atmosphere and ethos: "This game is made possible by the 3M Corporation."

The game was becoming less a contest than an entertainment in which the goal was to eliminate risk and tweak every imaginable movement in a massive choreography that might even include injecting drugs into players to enhance what they did on the field. It didn't matter that this meant adopting what could seem at times an arrid, technical style of play. You did what you had to do because the money invested in this production had become enormous and you had better win so you could keep on selling tickets to the show.

Sure I would find future football highlights, some of them occurring in Super Bowls even, but overall nothing would match the days of fiery, principaled coaches like Vince Lombardi and the players making about the same annual salary as a lawyer instead of the gross national product of some small republic.

Stinking Up the Orange Bowl
Super Bowl V, variously called "The Blunder Bowl," "The Stupor Bowl" or the "The Blooper Bowl," stands out as an example of how even with the best laid plans and high expectations by players and coaches you can still flop.

I only vaguely (and uncertainly) remember that I watched the game at a high school friend's house in Anchorage Alaska. It was in the basement where they had a color TV.

Color didn't improve what was taking place on the field in Miami. The Colts and Cowboys would combine to lose the ball to the other side 11 times, 7 of these turnovers by the Colts, an appalling record. The Cowboys' own ugliness came in the form of 10 penalities, another record.

Chuck Howley, the MVP who didn't wanna be...

What this meant practically speaking was that it was like watching two people take turns trying to drive a car with a manual and neither of them could manage the shifting. They'd lurch forward, then go backwards. Then they'd stall the engine all together. Then the other one would try.

It was the only time the Most Valuable Player award was a matter of massive head scratching. Everyone who took part in the game, as we'd bluntly put it today, sucked. So the award was given to a player on the losing team, the Cowboys' Chuck Howley who intercepted two of the opposition's passes.

Howley, God bless him, refused the award.

I Bench Myself
That Super Bowl was a game changer (pun intended) for me vis a vis my football watching habits. Thereafter, I would enjoy the NFL regular season and perhaps some of the playoffs, but the Super Bowl seemed to me less than worthy of my attention.

This placed me outside the mainstream culture which responded to the increasing hype surrounding each Super Bowl as if it had to be the best and most compelling football played. The viewership in America and around the world, with a few annual blips, kept going up.

In the meantime, I'd circle that Sunday on the calendar, then to go to the grocery store while everyone was inside their houses having their cocktail meatballs, beer, popcorn and watching the game. The grocery store was empty. The checkout clerks looked like the last people left on board the Titanic. Working on Super Bowl Sunday was the last thing they wanted to do.

A Crack in My Super Bowl Boycott
In the early eighties I married my wife who was an executive in advertising. Of course, she was into ads. We began taping the Super Bowl and fast forwarding it later to get to the TV spots. Here was a whole new way to appreciate the event!

Also, our son came along and I thought I ought to give him a chance at seeing what the Super Bowl was about. He could then make up his own mind.

The year I decided to initiate him (2003) happened to feature the Oakland Raiders playing the Tampa Bay Buccaneers. The Pirate Bowl. How cool is that, son?

You like the logo, you'll love the team!
So the theory goes...

I decided to root for the Raiders. I've always liked their black and silver uniforms and that football pirate on their helmet.

So we went shopping for Raiders' wear the day before the game. Problem. Nobody in this part of the country cares about either coast. There was nothing for sale except for Dallas Cowboy regalia. Talk about irrelevant.

No problem. We'll make some snacks and wear non-logoed black T-shirts and sit down and watch the game, father and son.

Within minutes of  the kickoff there was a problem. The Raiders put on their own Blooper Bowl. The awesome passing game we expected from Raider QB Rick Gannon never materialized. Every time the ball was snapped to him, it seemed like Tampa Bay poured through and sacked him or harassed him into throwing interceptions (5 in all).

The Raiders had no chance. Final score: Tampa Bay 48, Oakland 21. Son now hates football.

Conclusion: A Bowl of My Own
The fact that I'm Van Winkled and this means I can't watch Super Bowl XLV this year isn't exactly breaking my heart.

But I'll wish for the commercials, which are often clever and lavish.

And I will regret not seeing moments like some offered us in recent years: the Titans' last play lurch that fell one yard short of winning the game in 2000, David Tyree's "helmet catch" that put the Giants in a position to upset the Patriots at the very end of Super Bowl XLIV, the "Aint's" showing last year that they had what it took to keep coming back until they had the Vince Lombardi Trophy in hand.

Still, looking a few days down the road, I'm totally all right with not seeing the game. I'm planning to sit down and spend a couple of hours with the Tax Bowl. Yes, I'm going to use the Super Bowl time slot to perform the annual ritual of striding onto the gridded lines and boxes of Form 1040A. It's a challenge. As everyone knows, Uncle Sam has a tough defense and he doesn't like for you to score. - V.W.

The Best Super Bowl Ever

I lived in Alaska with my family in those days in a semi-Rip Van Winkled state. None of us had any choice about it. Our delayed access to the news was a fact of life.

Deep into the sixth decade of the 20th Century, Alaskans still had no live TV.

This was a problem! As a teenager hoping to have some kind of life, I already wasn't exactly thrilled when my father's oil company offered him the chance to drag all of us to the Last Frontier. I began 7th grade in Anchorage, Alaska that winter, walking to school in the dark, sometimes in near zero temperatures.

The isolation was annoying, too. With no live TV (because nobody was going to build broadcast towers all the way from Washington state to the far north) you couldn't watch sporting events on weekends. My parents graciously tossed me a bone.

They got me a subscription to Sports Illustrated.

Here's the cover of the first issue I ever received.

I read SI from cover to cover. I didn't even know it, but there were some of the greatest journalists ever writing for the mag in those days. No wonder I lapped up the colorful writing of Tex Maule and Dan Jenkins. These guys could wield a line of prose like nobody's business, even if it was in service of describing big sweaty guys performing an athletic feat or a man in a sweater swinging a golf club.

So I didn't see the football games, football being my main sporting interest, but I read about them. This was a whole different level of involvement. A great game like the 1966 UCLA vs. USC match-up in which Heisman contenders quarterback Gary Beeban and halfback O.J. Simpson created the expected fireworks and then some became, upon reading it, a great short story.

But still...I would have much rather seen the gridiron heroics on TV.

What's the Score?

Before there were iPods...

My Alaskan isolation became pertinent on Super Bowl Sunday January 12, 1969. As I saw it, I had no choice but to secret in my pocket a transistor radio the size of a pack of cigarettes and take it to church.

This was the only way I would know how the game was going as the NFL's Baltimore Colts took on the AFL's New York Jets in the third Super Bowl ever.

Timing was the other problem. In those days the Super Bowl was not about an all-day build-up to the big event in the evening. Kick-off was at 3:05 EST.

In Alaska this meant the first Colt-Jet collision occurred at 10:05 a.m. as I was sitting in Sunday School class at church.

For the next two hours I kept my counsel, the radio burning a hole in my pocket. I couldn't turn it on, even if I used the ear plug. People would see what I was doing. But I just knew the Colts had to be killing the Jets. I wanted to know how bad.

To put it in biblical terms, I was like a Philistine waiting for Goliath to bring back to camp the tiny head of David. In this case the head belonged to a loud mouth guy named Joe Namath.

Earlier in the week, Namath, the Jets young quarterback, said his team would defeat the 11-1 Colts. The Colts were being called the greatest team of all-time. They had allowed a total of 7 touchdowns all season. Their offense was just as potent. The seemingly clueless Namath compounded his sin of hubris by adding to his prediction these words: "I guarantee it."

This guy "guarantees" a win? Over the Colts?
What has he been smoking?

A Tale of Two Leagues
Many people who will tune into the Super Bowl this Sunday weren't even born when the first Super Bowl was played. It might be worth remembering that originally the game was originally marketed as a sort of grudge match, albeit one in which the grudge was being played out to make substantial sums of money via TV broadcast.

In those days the NFL, which had been around for decades, thought they ought to have a lock on lucrative TV contracts in large market cities as well as the high esteem of the American sporting population. But beginning in the early 1960s they were challenged by a new league: The American Football League.

The AFL had "cool" helmets and uniforms...

The AFL set up teams in unexpected places like Kansas City and Denver and Buffalo. They played literally by a different set of rules: for example, a slightly larger football with stripes on it and the option of a two-point conversion. They brought excitement and innovation to a game that had grown stodgy and they carried it, like missionaries, into new venues.

Generally the sports establishment dissed the AFL as a league composed of NFL cast-offs and college talent not good enough to be drafted by the elite league. This was not actually true. The AFL was acquiring talented players the NFL had given up on as well as first round choices and players from all-black colleges that no one had bothered to recruit before.

And the AFL was spoiling for a fight. They had a TV contract with ABC and loyal fans. The NFL, well, they just wanted to crush these guys before they started stealing all their talent and carving up a significant slice of the football pie.

While this was going on, I found a book at the library that told the story of how the AFL survived through pluck and luck, The $400,000 Quarterback: Or the League That Came In From the Cold (1965).

As a kid I loved the true life tale book told. The AFL was the underdog, David to Commissioner Pete Rozelle's NFL Goliath. But the day the AFL announced they were signing a scruffy quarterback from Pennsylvania who had played for Alabama and giving him the unheard of sum of $400,000 that changed. The AFL was on it's way to what the NFL dreaded. National notice and legitimacy.

That's when everybody began speaking of  "parity." The AFL was coming into its own; however, many people assumed it might take years for the new league to ever achieve this golden parity in quality of players and execution. Then, and only then, would the best AFL team be able to beat the best team in the NFL.

In the meantime, the only way to find out where things stood at this point was to bring the two best teams together from each league and let them fight it out. The Super Bowl was born.

NFL Commissioner Pete Rozelle was smiling: My league can whip your league!
No parity here. The AFL is a bunch of wannabe's!

As predicted, there was to be no parity for the AFL. In the first two Super Bowls the Green Bay Packers breezed to victories over the Kansas City Chiefs and Oakland Raiders.

Which brought us to Super Bowl III. It promised more of the same. I liked underdogs, but this was ridiculous. Why even tune in? The Jets, a so-so but scrappy team that was lucky to have won the AFL championship, would be crushed by the Colts. We were talking total road kill. The Colts were favored by 18. Most people thought the spread ought to be doubled.

I imagined that in 60 minutes against such a juggernaut of a defense as the Colts fielded, the Jets would be lucky to score a field goal.

Church is Over!
I hurried out the front of the building. My dad wasn't a sports fan; he didn't really care what I was doing. One of my brothers, though, was tuned to my urgency. On the steps of the church building which were covered with deicing salt we bent over the radio's tiny speaker.

Out in front of us Anchorage, Alaska looked normal for January: the downtown "parkstrip" was buried in snow, the streets were a glaze of ice, the temperature stood frigidly in the low twenties. Our breath twisted in front of us.

I couldn't believe what I was hearing. Even the announcer sounded befuddled. I listened again. Surely he had inverted the team names. We were into the second half of the game and the Jets were ahead.

We had been singing hymns, listening to a sermon, taking communion from little cups and the world had inverted. We had on our hands one of the most astounding upsets in the history of team sports. It was historic.

I couldn't see it. I could only listen and imagine...how thousands of miles away
things were unraveling for the Colts.

That same year men would land on the moon, but the American Football League had already landed. It had come down hard on Planet Parity. The NFL had already decided it had no choice. If you can't beat 'em, join 'em. The fascinating competition between two styles and ethos of football, the old guys vs. the new ones, was at an end.

The following year the merger of leagues would be realized. Everything would become the NFL with teams ensconced in  two conferences, AFC and NFC. New teams would be added (New Orleans and Cincinnati) and there would be the jarring "realignment" of some of the NFL's most deeply traditional teams, the Steelers and Browns and, yes, the Colts!, as they moved to the AFC.

After that the Super Bowl would never be the same as far as I was concerned. The pigskin sibling rivarlry element would be lost. No more Cain vs. Abel. The Super Bowl would become just a glorified NFL championship game, and the AFL would be mostly forgotten.

But I wouldn't forget the lesson that happened while I was in church, the one that played out on the green grass plains of the Orange Bowl in Miami, Florida as I listened in on a tinny speaker:

- V.W.


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