Word: superealism
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...bars, especially those that feature oversize screens, Super Sunday is boom time. In a restaurant/discotheque hard by the u.C.L.A. campus, students have their choice of three seven-foot screens on three separate floors. In no-longer-teetotaling-on-the-Sabbath Atlanta, bar owners plan to discount drinks, hoping to lure patrons away from their home TV sets...
...principal social outlet for Super Bowl mania is getting together with friends to party, or at least munch, and watch the game. Some gatherings are formalized affairs, involving early invitations, official N.F.L. team bunting and other decorations purchased far in advance. Supermarkets in Knoxville, Tenn., report mountains of potato chips carted away in the days before the game; fast-food franchises put on extra help to handle the halftime hamburger crush...
Still, the matter of lodge membership rankles. Always there is the implication that without it, a man of his talent is unfinished, his gifts somehow flawed. Says Tarkenton: "Of course it bothers me not to have played for a Super Bowl champion. But a failure? Lord no. I have played with and against the best players in football since 1961 and I have to believe I belong with the best quarterbacks ever. I don't give a damn about artistry or how much velocity my pass develops or how many tight ends I can knock through a brick wall...
...comes Super Bowl XI, eleven in the Vulgate, and the distinctions between sports and show business approach invisibility. The networks underwrite both on the same artistic basis. How do they draw? What is the cost per 1,000 to the advertisers? Athletes and actors are interchangeable on commercials. O.J. Simpson earns $1 million for telling us what car to rent; Rex Harrison earns $ 1 million for telling us what car to buy. Our old preoccupation with what Clark Gable was paid at Metro has been replaced by speculation on Francis Tarkenton's net worth. Most significant, where the athlete...
That is something one might consider while watching Super Night II and Super Bowl XI. Sports stars are young, sometimes heady with fame and often terrified lest it vanish. Jimmy Connors won half a dozen tennis classics invented by his agent. But after we came to know Connors well on television, he was no longer much of a hero. He and his agent then split. The trend toward the athlete as superhero may work for a few, but carried too far it will selfdestruct. The stars themselves, not Louis B. Mayer, killed the star system in Hollywood...