A game worth waiting for
Posted: Tuesday, February 05, 2008 1:49 PM
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London, England
By Jim Maceda, NBC News Correspondent
One word of caution: I may be a foreign correspondent, but at heart, I’m a fifth generation New Yorker who grew up eating box scores for breakfast.
If you say "hero of 1969," I still think of Joe Namath, who led the New York Jets to their Super Bowl championship, before Neil Armstrong.
Unfortunately, frustratingly, my relationship with the greatest show on earth – American football and best of all, the Super Bowl – has always been at a distance.
From scratchy shortwave to satellite TV
In the ‘70s, as a cub journalist based in Paris, the Super Bowl was, well, forgedaboudit (before someone had coined the term). In those medieval days, I could find Yankees games on my crackling short-wave radio, but never the Super Bowl.
It didn’t get much better in the ‘80s. As I moved from Paris to the Middle East to London to South East Asia, reporting on the news of the day, I was always trying to watch the ever-elusive football game without much luck.
Toward the end of that decade, however, things began to change. We did a news spot on ‘Refrigerator’ Perry and his Chicago Bears who came to London to play an exhibition game at Wembley Stadium. That turned out to be the spark that ignited the slow burn of British interest in American football – a pastime that had been seen as rather confusing, annoying (with all those time-outs) and less-than-macho by the die-hard fans of blood-soaked, pad-less rugby.
The ‘90s brought me to Moscow and Frankfurt. Work meant covering the anti-Gorbachev coup, the fall of the Soviet Union, and the wars in Yugoslavia. But now you could actually go somewhere, push a button and watch the game – the next day.
The NFL Europe League was thriving by then, an international source of fresh NFL talent, and a couple of forward-looking sports bars in Frankfurt figured out how to spike profits by pumping in the occasional football game, especially the Super Bowl.
These events drew a strange mix of young, shaven-headed Germans, NFL Europe back-up players, wannabe cheerleaders, and dozens of American expatriates – who would pay dearly for their wicked hangovers and lack of sleep at the workplace the next morning.
Eventually, by the time I left Frankfurt in 1999, these Super Bowl parties were "live," meaning I finally got to watch the game in real time. That is if I wasn’t in Iraq or the West Bank. But there was still a catch: pre-game coverage, Frankfurt time, began at 8 p.m., as did the prerequisite BBQ-ing and beer drinking. The kickoff was never before midnight or 1 a.m. The action – and all those expensive American commercials – would go on all night. In fact, I can admit now that I slept through most of Super Bowl XXX in 1996 when the Dallas Cowboys defeated the Pittsburgh Steelers and Super Bowl XXXII when the Denver Broncos defeated the Green Bay Packers.
Watching from Baghdad and Kandahar
During the 2,000s, with the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, those of us who were covering the conflicts were still chasing the game.
By then, the NFL Game of the Week had become standard fare on British TV Channel 5. It was packaged by two British anchors who talked about the game much better than I ever could – but again, it aired at an ungodly 1:30 a.m. on Mondays. American football was regularly drawing tens of thousands of fans at Wembley Stadium for pre-season games. And during the 2007 fall season, Wembley hosted the first regular NFL game to be played outside of North America when the New York Giants beat the Miami Dolphins.
American troops got caught up in the international dimension of trying to catch the game along with the journalists covering the wars. I managed to watch some of Super Bowl XXXVI in 2002 with a company of Marines in Kandahar, Afghanistan. It was freezing, the satellite signal was down more than up, but it was the start of a new tradition.
Two winters later, in Baghdad, I looked on as the world saw TV images of a handful of U.S. soldiers with whom we were embedded cheering on the players of Super Bowl XXXVIII, as the New England Patriots beat the Carolina Panthers, from inside a massive, mostly empty tent. That time, there was a lot of patriotism, but not a lot of enthusiasm for the actual game. Some soldiers laughed then when I asked if they would still be fighting five Super Bowls later.
Worth the wait
But Sunday night was truly super. I finally caught up with my bowl. No more weak, choppy, TV signals or unstable Internet video streams. No more desert dust or mortar rounds to compete with.
I watched ALL of Super Bowl XLII from the comfort of my London living room on my HD wide-screen LCD, at room temperature, with immediate family, take-out pizza and bottles of Newcastle Ale. And on top of all of that, my New York Giants did the unthinkable, and won.
The perfect Super Bowl was worth the four decade wait, even if it still kept me up all night.
Jim Maceda is an NBC News Foreign Correspondent who is currently based in London.
