All The Eyeballs

On Super Bowl Sunday, 100 million Americans will watch the NFL and Madison Avenue play for all the marbles. In his new book, Allen St. John explains why.

"This is not a business book per se," says St. John, "but there's a lot to learn about how these guys go about their business. Because whether it's TV, merchandising, security, advertising, or halftime logistics, they're all the best at what they do."
Photo by Jennifer May.

Never mind that Super Bowl XLIII will be played in Tampa. At press time, with their teams surging, Giants and Jets fans were dreaming of a Jersey version of the Subway Series. They weren’t the only ones interested. A week before Thanksgiving, tickets to the February 1 Super Bowl were being offered online for prices ranging from $2,410 to $7,273. Why so high? As Montclair author Allen St. John explains in his new book, The Billion Dollar Game: Behind the Scenes of the Greatest Day in American Sport (Doubleday, $24.95), “The Super Bowl has become part of modern American culture, perhaps our largest and most significant secular holiday.”

St. John, who grew up in Bayonne and earned a bachelor’s degree in English from the University of Chicago, wrote the By The Numbers sports column for the Wall Street Journal and has co-authored two best-selling books with sports radio host Chris “Mad Dog” Russo. One of St. John’s heroes is the baseball statistician and writer Bill James—“a remarkable thinker and contrarian who said, ‘Hey, just because somebody says it’s true doesn’t mean it really is.’ While this book is not heavily dependent on number crunching, the idea is still to take this event that people think they know a lot about and get inside it and find out what really happens.”

How did you figure the billion dollars of the title?

The number is actually very conservative. Let’s use last year’s Giants-Patriots game as an example. An Arizona State University study put the economic impact of Super Bowl XLII on the Phoenix area at a record $500.6 million. On top of that, all the tickets in the stadium had a total face value of about $60 million. But the street value—what people actually paid or what the tickets would be worth on the open market—was estimated to be $511 million. I’m leaving aside the $422 million it cost to build the stadium, which was undertaken only because of the promise of hosting a Super Bowl.

Then you have the estimated $712.5 million Fox paid the NFL for broadcast rights to the 2007-2008 season, including the Super Bowl. The value of the commercials Fox broadcast during the game was approximately $162 million. Bridgestone’s sponsorship of Tom Petty’s halftime show cost more than $12 million. NFL Licensing sold $140 million worth of Super Bowl-related clothing and branded merchandise.
Finally, there was the legal betting handle in Las Vegas of $92.1 million. Some estimates of illegal betting on the game approach $1 billion. Because the point spread was large and the Giants pulled an incredible upset, bookmakers actually lost $2.6 million—the first time that happened since 1995, when the San Francisco 49ers blew out the San Diego Chargers. So, in sum, we could have called it The 2.5 Billion Dollar Game, but it doesn’t exactly roll off the tongue.

What does security cost?

I don’t know if anybody knows the total, and even if they did, they aren’t telling. Super Bowl security is right up there with the presidential inauguration. There is no higher level of security. It exceeds the World Series, it exceeds everything. If you’re at the game, you see the magneto-meters, the bomb-sniffing dogs, the security people, the National Guard. What you don’t see are the fighter planes on alert at the air base twenty miles away. You don’t see the Black Hawk helicopters hovering somewhere out of sight. You don’t see the snipers on surrounding buildings.

When the Super Bowl was in Detroit in 2006, you could see a bit of it, because the stadium is on the Detroit River and there was a warship docked right there. The people doing security for the inauguration will be doing security for the Super Bowl—FBI, ATF, even the Secret Service, depending on who’s attending.

Bruce Springsteen is doing the halftime show this year. How did halftimes get to be such a big deal?

The turning point was 1992. Until then it was what are called tonnage shows—huge marching bands, 88 white grand pianos on the field, Up With People, Carol Channing, things like that. Things conceived as entertainment for the people in the stadium.

In 1992 there was no Fox Sports. They were just starting things like The Simpsons and Married With Children and In Living Color. So while Gloria Estefan and figure skaters Dorothy Hamill and Brian Boitano were performing on the real halftime show, Fox put on an In Living Color skit called “Men On Football” with Blaine (Damon Wayans ) and Antoine (David Alan Grier) as flamboyantly gay football fans.
[Flashback: “I was so disappointed when I found out that those numbers on the back, they were just for identification,” says Antoine. Blaine responds, “Oh I know what you mean. The smallest one I saw was eleven. And then I saw one that said 78—child, I almost fainted!”

[Later Blaine asks Antoine his favorite play. “Well, to be truthful,” Antoine says, “for me nothing beats that exquisite moment of tension right before the play begin, as the muscular sweaty football men get down on that line of scrimmage. There they is, eyeball to eyeball. They breath is comin’ out like steam from a big bull. I just got three words to describe it—dee-lish-us!”

[Finally Antoine hikes a tiny toy football to Blaine, who runs in circles with it, then throws it down in disgust. “Wait a minute, wait a minute,” Blaine protests petulantly. “Where’s the mens that’s supposed to be chasing me? I don’t like this game!”]

That episode of In Living Color drew about 28.6 million viewers away from the Super Bowl. It was really guerrilla counterprogramming. The NFL realized the threat, and the next year they had Michael Jackson at halftime. He was maybe not what he was in 1983, but he was still top-level entertainment and none of the scandal had broken. From that point on, the NFL decided they needed to make halftime the biggest and best popular music show possible.

How did the commercials get to be as big a deal as the game?

It was a slow evolution, but one of the defining moments was the 1984 Apple commercial for the new Macintosh. It was directed by Ridley Scott in a style similar to his 1982 cult hit, Blade Runner. It showed this punked-up female athlete hurling an Olympic-style hammer at a giant screen on which a Big Brother character was haranguing people. The screen explodes and the announcer says, “On January 24, Apple will introduce Macintosh. And you’ll see why 1984 won’t be like 1984.”

That commercial—which hadn’t tested well and Apple was nervous about—became the biggest coup in ad history. Apple sold $4.6 million Macs in the first six hours it went on sale. News channels aired the spot over and over. It was such a hit that the next year Apple tried to go back to the well and hired Ridley’s brother, Tony, to direct a spot for Apple Office.

That one was called “Lemmings.” It was filmed on the same soundstage as Star Wars. It showed blindfolded business executives walking off a cliff. At the end, one man stops just short of the abyss and peels off his blindfold. The announcer says, “On January 23, Apple Computer will announce the Macintosh Office. You can look into it—or you can go on with business as usual.” People hated the commercial because it seemed to make fun of Apple’s potential customers. The product had its own problems, but the commercial was a disaster.

What’s the real story of Janet Jackson’s “wardrobe malfunction” at halftime of the 2004 Super Bowl?

From what I can tell, the truth lies between Justin Timberlake and Janet Jackson. But Jim Steeg, the guy who had been running the Super Bowl for the NFL for, like, 35 years, ended up leaving after the wardrobe malfunction. And he was not even running the halftime show. But after that happened, he was out. Granted, he had a soft landing. He is now the president of the San Diego Chargers.

How many Super Bowl parties are held each year?

The estimate is 7.5 million. Last year, 36 percent of Americans polled said they would be attending a Super Bowl party. The average party is said to have about eighteen people. Last year, more than 1.5 million large-screen TVs were purchased in the week before the game. It’s said that 8 million pounds of guacamole are consumed on Super Bowl Sunday. It has become America’s second largest stuff-your-face day, behind only Thanksgiving. That may help explain why there’s a 20 percent boost in antacid sales the day after the game.

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