Sometimes events become so emblematic of a culture that we don't notice because we are so thoroughly steeped in it. That's how it is with the Super Bowl and the college bowl games. They've become such a regular part of our lives that we no longer consider what they say about us.
The Super Bowl started out pretty small. It was short on hype and fanfare. The first one was played in 1967, between the Green Bay Packers and the Kansas City Chiefs. There wasn't even a sellout crowd; about 40,000 seats were empty in the Los Angeles Coliseum that day.
Still, two networks paid $1 million each for rights to broadcast the game, and the take was about $750,000 in ticket fees. That's small potatoes. Back then it was the richest team sports event in American history.
Times have changed, and so have we. The Super Bowl has ended up as a kind of national Rorschach test for our culture.
Today, about 130 million Americans will watch the game between the Giants and the Ravens. But now the game itself isn't much more than a backdrop for the ads.
The real blitz is the marketing blitz. As Monster.com CEO Jeff Taylor says, on Super Bowl Sunday, the "advertising is the program."
The sheer dollar amounts are staggering. A single 30-second ad costs millions to produce and about $2.2 million to air during the game.
Some companies will spend a fortune. Anheuser-Busch bought eight ads during the game; Pepsi bought six. CBS will pocket $150 million from ad fees, with another $50 million going to network affiliates.
The marketing has gone so far that parts of the Super Bowl have been sold off and renamed: there's the Charles Schwab Corp. pre-kickoff hype, an E-Trade halftime show and the Pontiac postgame cooldown.
The game will feature so many ads that even advertisers are complaining. "The Super Bowl advertising bonanza has gotten very crowded and cluttered," said Coca-Cola spokeswoman Susan McDermott.
And, of course, it will be played in a corporate-named arena: the Raymond James Stadium in Tampa, Fla. Raymond James Financial Services Inc. bought the right to name the stadium for $55 million.
Pro sports is awash in money. Funny thing is, for all the money, the game itself is no better. No more drama than Super Bowl III, when Joe Namath promised a victory for the New York Jets and carried off the upset over the Baltimore Colts, 16-7.
Many would say the game is worse. It's played by squads of overpaid athletes, bulked up to inhuman proportions, playing a game planned like a corporate marketing campaign but without spontaneity and joy.
Much of this is true for college bowl games, too. They used to be truly amateur events, all about the meaning of sport. But it's all commercialized now. So we sit through games called the Micronpc.com Bowl, FedEx Orange Bowl, Chick-fil-A Peach Bowl, and my own favorite, the Poulan Weed Eater Bowl.
Money and advertising have swallowed college sports whole.
Last week, the Knight Commission, a group of college presidents that is trying to reform college athletics, took testimony about this from Sonny Vaccaro, executive director of sports for Adidas USA.
Vaccaro said that the decline in college sports began 24 years ago when a tiny start-up firm called Nike Inc. struck a deal with college coaches for their teams to wear Nike sneakers.
"The biggest sin you ever made was taking our money," Vaccaro told the college presidents, "because you sold your souls."
"We have met the enemy and it is us," responded Wake Forest President Thomas K. Hearn Jr., at the hearing. "But confessing sin is not going to do us much good unless we take steps to redeem ourselves, and it's the steps we are trying to figure out."
As perhaps we all should.
Plenty of fans are bitter because money, ads and hype are draining the fun out of sports. Even worse, what we get for the money is the further degradation of culture, while lousy commercial values are reinforced in our kids.
The commercial takeover of the Super Bowl is emblematic of a culture in which everything is for sale, and every waking moment is an occasion for an ad. Not much is done for its own sake anymore.
The notion of virtue has a quaint ring to it, and motivation or measures are usually expressed in dollar terms.
What to do about it? Well, if we all resolved not to buy anything advertised on the Super Bowl, that would be a start. If we put the TV into the closet and did something else, that would be even better.
Gary Ruskin is the director of Commercial Alert, which opposes the excesses of commercialism, advertising and marketing. His email address is gary@essential.org.
© 2001 Star-Telegram, Fort Worth, Texas
###
