It was hard to tell when Super Bowl Weekend officially began. Was it Friday night when Dan Rather was seen in Los Angeles anchoring the “CBS Evening News?” Or was it Friday night when MTV ran its Super Bowl edition of “Top 20 Countdown?”
The next evening, TNT offered up a superficial-and superfluous-“Super Bowl Saturday Night,” a supposed sports/variety show with two sparse numbers by Garth Brooks (who perhaps was saving himself for the national anthem the next day) and one dull Dennis Miller comedy bit.
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And then came Super Sunday.
NBC jumped the gun by leading off its “NBA Showtime” with a five-minute Super Bowl report, possibly trying to snag a few viewers away from ESPN’s “NFL GameDay.” But Dan Patrick’s piece on the Ken Norton family split, Tom Jackson’s talk with Hall of Famer-turned-L.A. activist Jim Brown and Greg Garber’s report on the emotional and health hazards faced by ex-NFLers elevated “GameDay” above the 4,000 other previews, with their same old player profiles and season highlights.
By contrast, NBC’s “Super Bowl Live” pregame show, given a new look with freshened-up graphics, was an odd mix of features (the best-Gayle Gardner on ex-Cowboy Jackie Smith) and entertainment (more Bill Clinton’s style than Downtown Julie Brown’s).
And, as usual, it was too long (the first 80 minutes were pure fluff), too self-serving (a tape of Bills coach Marv Levy turning down a Will McDonough on-air-interview request was especially unnecessary) and too many commercials (weren’t those “Honda Moments” special?).
NBC executive producer Terry O’Neil even turned what could have been a newsworthy moment into a bit of schlock. When halftime performer Michael Jackson barred network cameras from his preconcert preparations (substituting instead a taped rehearsal bit), O’Neil used a live interview with injured Jets defensive lineman Dennis Byrd and his wife, Angela. But that led directly to a Fleetwood Mac performance, with Christine McVie dedicating “Say You Love Me” to Dennis and Angela Byrd.
Hokey, you say? Not as hokey as the O.J. Simpson-Mike Ditka showdown, via a computer game, John Madden Football ’93. “If I ever coach again, I won’t have a kicker,” said Ditka after losing 14-13. All of which led to a plug by host Bob Costas for a two-way cable outfit called Interactive Network that was testing a computer game in San Francisco.
The game telecast finally began after 2 1/2 hours of hype. And it took 20 minutes before the first round of the advertising wars began-for Pepsi’s “Right Now” campaign for its new colorless soft drink and the Michael Jordan-Larry Bird campaign for McDonald’s. Jordan’s latest Nike “Hare Jordan” spot premiered an hour later. Jordan, like Ditka in his Lay’s Potato Chip ads, has a personality made for these droll kinds of commercials.
Play-by-play man Dick Enberg waited until after 5:30 p.m. to utter his first “Oh, my” after the Bills’ Steve Tasker blocked Mike Saxon’s punt attempt. Eight minutes later, the Bills took a 7-0 lead and the cliche-ridden Bud Bowl V began. Producer John Faratzis, coming out of the commercial break, had a tape ready of a blocked punt leading to the AFC’s last Super Bowl win. Faratzis, whose crew was on its game all night, did it again later with a goal-line stand from the 1982 Super Bowl.
After a slew of Bills turnovers at the end of the first half, analyst Bob Trumpy started to show his frustration at a game getting out of hand. “Isn’t this a recurring theme for the Bills in the Super Bowl?” asked Trumpy rhetorically.
Halftime came almost as a relief. Then the Lay’s commercials-and Michael Jackson-took over. Jackson was the unfunny one.
Visually stunning but barely audible, Jackson’s 10-minute “concert” was a brief medley of a few of his hits leading into his sentimental “Heal the World” campaign.
By the time the third quarter began, the king of pop was history, as were the Bills, leaving only TV critics watching the telecast, something Enberg knew going in.
“Our job is to prepare for a bad game,” he said. “You measure the quality of the broadcasting team with what they do with the bad game, not with what they do with the good game.”
No matter how much Enberg and Trumpy tried to keep up interest-pointing out how Frank Reich was beyond the line of scrimmage on his TD toss and laughing about Leon Lett’s TD-denying fumble-they couldn’t mask a bad game. When NBC wrapped up its coverage Sunday night, there were a few-mostly visual (who will forget Emmitt Smith messing up Jimmy Johnson’s hair?)-memorable moments. Which irritated O’Neil, who, echoing recent complaints from other network production bosses, would have preferred audio moments, too.
“The NFL limits the access we have,” O’Neil said. “There’s certain things you’d like to do with audio on the field, there’s technology to do it and yet the league restricts that. You’d like to eavesdrop on the benches, you’d like to hear play calls. But the coaches are protective of what happens on the field. There’s a lot of chaos down there, and I’m not sure they want it all revealed.”
At least, the Bills were spared that embarrassment Sunday night.
– Random thoughts: Yes, that was ex-Bulls broadcaster Jim Durham doing Saturday’s ESPN Cincinnati-De Paul telecast, his second for the cable network. “We use (Durham) to fill in whenever we need him,” said an ESPN spokesman. . . .Transmission problems caused WGBO-Ch. 66 to miss the first 20 minutes of Saturday night’s Raycom telecast of the Indiana-Northwestern game. . . .Nice touch: CBS producer Bob Dekas dedicating a moment of silence to the memory of Chris Street at the start of Sunday’s Michigan-Iowa telecast. . . .Only in figure skating could you have an analyst (NBC’s Sandra Bezic) discuss a competitor (Kristi Yamaguchi in Friday night’s World Professional Championships) “gaining more sensuality.”