This is the time of year when America renews its relationship with Roman numerals, conjuring up a long-ago elementary school lesson that we endured for reasons that remained elusive. Perhaps curriculum planners back then thought that the Roman Empire would come back into fashion someday, and hey, I can't discount that possibility.
Anyway, on this Sunday, we will have Super Bowl 59, which, if you're scoring at home, is Romanized with a LIX. The Super Bowl didn't start out with numerals, by the way. It wasn't until Super Bowl 5 — V, that's an easy one — that the idea was advanced to give naming rights to worthies such as Marcus Aurelius and Julius Caesar.
Super Bowl Sunday is now tantamount to a federal holiday, comparable to Thanksgiving in its gluttony (every place you see turkey replace it with wings, chili dip, and the word 'fried') and St. Patrick's Day in its alcoholic consumption (every place you see the words 'green beer,' replace it with... I don't know, anything). And Super Bowl LIX is a special one in the Lehigh Valley, obviously, since our Eagles are playing. I'll get back to that.
I covered five Super Bowls over my career in sports journalism, though the word 'covered' is offered tentatively. You don't cover Super Bowls as much as you endure them. My first one was in 1980 when the Eagles got clobbered by the Oakland Raiders. Years later, I ran into Ron Jaworski, the Eagles quarterback back then, at a Wawa in South Jersey — you can't have more of a seminal Eagles experience than running into 'Jaws' at a Wawa — and told him I covered the game for the defunct Philadelphia Bulletin. He smiled... kind of. It was not a happy memory.
People invariably think it's cool to have covered a Super Bowl and I suppose in some ways it is, but it's actually a journalistic nightmare. Too many writers competing for too few stories.
Now, the Super Bowl wasn't always so super. There were only a dozen journalists at the first Super Bowl in 1967 between Green Bay and Kansas City. The halftime show was trumpeter Al Hurt, a couple of college bands, 10,000 balloons and, for some reason, 300 pigeons. The networks that broadcast the game, CBS and NBC, even taped over the game, and it wasn't until years later that the league scraped together a full video tape from various other sources.
By the time I covered my first one, that 1980 Eagles/Raiders, the game had become, for want of a better word, bloated. When I walked into a Super Bowl party in the late 1980s (the last one I covered) there were acrobats swinging from trapezes over the lavish buffet. Never had the Roman number seemed so apt; it suggested Rome right before the fall.
By the way, I brought my father along to that game, at which time he was promptly pickpocketed. We dutifully reported it to the police, who kinda laughed in our faces. They were dealing with 400 other pickpocket incidents.
I've missed the Super Bowl on several occasions, choosing to travel for work on Super Bowl Sunday because most of America stays home to watch the game. I was on a flight to LA on one Super Bowl Sunday when the flight attendants invited everyone up to first class because the plane was so empty.
But I'm obviously invested this year with the Eagles in the big one, and I'm honest enough to admit that I didn't think they'd make it this far. But now that they have, I'm all in. Their opponent, the Kansas City Chiefs, has officially reached the annoying stage. I have nothing against their quarterback, Patrick Mahomes, or their coach, Andy Reid, or their tight end Travis Kelce, or Kelce's girlfriend, a singer you may have heard of. But taken collectively, it's just too much. The Chiefs are going for their third straight Super Bowl — enough already. I like the Eagles, so pass the wings.
