This was the year when the corporate cancer that afflicts all major sports almost succeeded in overwhelming the Super Bowl finally and for good. The National Football League title matchup was itself a sign of the problem, a game played between nomadic teams moved by fat-cat owners to take advantage of sweetheart deals. The Tennessee Titans, previously the Houston Oilers, had been moved by Bud Adams to a smaller market where greater profits were waiting, while the Saint Louis Rams, previously settled in Los Angeles, had been moved by Georgia Frontiere to exploit Saint Louis’s desperation after it lost the Cardinals to Phoenix. As if the game itself weren’t bad enough, it was televised by Disney’s ABC network, which flexed its corporate ties with ESPN in the pregame coverage, and the halftime show was turned over to Disney’s theatrical-production subsidiary, complete with Phil Collins performing a song from the just-about-to-be-released-on-video Disney movie Tarzan. All this, of course, was in addition to the usual mania surrounding the Super Bowl TV commercials, which always threaten to make the game a sideshow.
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It took perhaps the most thrilling fourth quarter in Super Bowl history to keep the corporate muscle at bay, and I’m not even sure the Rams’ 23-16 barn burner of a victory over the Titans did the trick. Look, I’m usually the first to insist that a sports fan has to come to terms with the modern-day environment–including the corporate environment–in order to fully appreciate today’s athletes. Escalating salaries and sponsorship deals are just part of that atmosphere. Yet the Super Bowl is perhaps the epitome of the larger problem; it’s a gargantuan event in which it no longer matters whether the game is good or not, the matchups intriguing or not. It’s going to be there as an excuse to sell beer and launch Internet firms whether one likes it or not, whether the game is minimized or not. The question becomes: If the game was a remarkably good one, what does that matter, what good does that do?
Once the game began, I found myself rooting for the Titans, though I’m not sure why. Certainly Bud Adams is no more lovable than Georgia Frontiere. Yet the Titans had a more athletic if less talented quarterback in Steve McNair, who’s a limber gazelle of a field leader, and a more basic approach to the game under their coach, former Bears assistant Jeff Fisher. On offense they mixed the run with the pass the old-fashioned way, and on defense they simply tried to keep the Rams within arm’s reach. The Rams, who ran some teams off the field this season with their speed-oriented passing attack, had more razzle-dazzle, to be sure. Though Warner came out looking a little nervous, Saint Louis coach Dick Vermeil and his offensive coordinator, Mike Martz, got him started with a game plan based on short, high-percentage passes, and by the end of the first half he was hitting his receivers as they dashed back and forth over the middle with the efficiency of a short-order cook dealing out meals to a staff of waiters. Warner hit 19 of 35 passes for 277 yards in the first half–a full day’s work for most quarterbacks. Yet he displayed rattled nerves here and there (on an atrocious shuffle pass that helped kill a Saint Louis drive, for instance), and the Rams’ holder was having trouble getting the ball down for kicker Jeff Wilkins. For all the yardage the Rams piled up in the first half, they had only a 9-0 lead to show for it. What natural fan of underdogs wouldn’t have been rooting for the Titans, who after all had avoided a first-round playoff upset with a cross-field lateral on a kickoff return to win the game in the final minute, and whose uniforms were so downscale that Chicago scribe Lester Munson said on The Sportswriters that they looked like a Public League team?
