Try to imagine how John Facenda might have described the 1967 NFL championship game–better known as the Ice Bowl–had it been played in some sunny locale or on fake grass under a domed roof.
“The frozen tundra of Lambeau Field” are the immortal words that Facenda, late voice of NFL Films, used to describe the playing conditions that New Year’s Eve in Green Bay, where the temperature plunged to 13 degrees below zero.
Let’s pretend the Green Bay Packers and Dallas Cowboys had staged that game at enclosed Ford Field in Detroit, host site for this season’s Super Bowl. Hermetically sealed football isn’t conducive to poetic narrative or, for that matter, aesthetically pleasing competition.
“There’s no comparison,” says Steve Sabol, president of NFL Films. “One of the tenets of football, its essence, is triumphing over adversity. That can be your opponent, your shortcomings or it can be the weather.”
Some of the NFL’s most memorable moments have unfolded amid a wintry mix.
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Who can forget the 1982 “Snowplow Game” between Miami and New England in which a convict on work release used a tractor to clear a path to aid Patriots kicker John Smith, whose boot won the game 3-0?
Not much in sports is as enjoyable as watching winter-weather football, which provides for images like the coordinated breath of a panting offensive line or the hash marks slowly vanishing under a blanket of white. And what could be more entertaining than a scrum of 300-pounders flopping in the muck trying to grab a fumble?
But the NFL doesn’t want its players frolicking in the snow during the Super Bowl. Football cathedrals like Lambeau or Soldier Field need not apply.
“You want to play the game in the most ideal set of circumstances,” said San Diego Chargers President Jim Steeg, who oversaw the Super Bowl as an NFL executive before joining the team.
“The Super Bowl has never been rained on.”
And that’s too bad.
New Orleans has hosted the Super Bowl nine times. The big game has visited Miami eight times. Los Angeles and nearby Pasadena have combined to host it seven times.
And yet four of the top five U.S. media markets–Chicago, New York, Philadelphia and Boston, which all have open-air stadiums–have never hosted the biggest game.
Mike Pearl, senior vice president of Walt Disney Co.’s ABC Sports, says simply, “Snow means more viewers.”
“I’ve always believed in that famous quote from Karl Marx, something like: `Men make history, but not under conditions of their own choosing,”‘ Sabol said.
Close your eyes and imagine Facenda’s booming baritone uttering that.