This Sunday just gone a weird thing happened. About 6pm, the streets all around the city (and probably all around the US) went disturbingly quiet. Football mad fans (that is American football, not soccer) around the nation all converged on their respective couches, or the couches of their friend who has the biggest flat screen TV. And they sat there until approx 10:30pm, with only minor interruptions to go to the fridge to acquire more beverages, to the bathroom to rid themselves of those beverages, or to the front door to let in either their mates who had come to stare at their flat screen TV or to give the delivery guy some cash in exchange for some eagerly awaited pizzas.
The person with the biggest flat screen TV that I know around here also happens to be my neighbor, so shortly after 6pm I bundled up (it's still deep in winter here) for the 15 second walk from my back door to his, popcorn and Coke in hand.
To set the scene, this is pretty much the biggest and most eagerly anticipated sporting event of the year in the US. Cowboy's stadium in Dallas, Texas was the venue - a stadium that holds over 100,000 spectators and cost $1.2 billion to build (that's $1.56 billion NZD). However, Dallas has had bizarre weather over week leading up to Superbowl Sunday, and had struggled to cope with it.
It's interesting here in Louisville to see the reaction to snow. Louisville is approx halfway between the north and south borders of the US, and so doesn't see anywhere near the amount of snow that the northern states get. It is also in the Ohio valley, which somehow seems to limit the amount of snow we receive. Therefore, when we do get a good dumping of snow, schools close, people don't go to work (or at least go into work late) and everything limps along a bit slower. It does seem a little unusual to us NZ'ers observing, even though we're not used to snow on our roads at all. You see, every main road around the city is sprinkled with a salt-like chemical as soon as the snow starts falling, so by 7:30am when everyone's going to work, all the main roads are completely free of snow and are fine to drive on. Even so, things seem to close pretty easily as heavy snow is still reasonably rare (although the last two winters have been exceptions to that). Our Canadian friends here reckon that if they closed schools and businesses back in Canada like they do here, the whole country would be shut down for about 5 months of the year.
Anyhow, it seems that the guys way down south there in Dallas don't see much snow - far less than Louisvillites, and when they do see a few flakes of snow, they all freak out, buy up a bunch of milk and bread from anywhere they can find it, close the entire city, and hunker down in their homes until all the weird white sky dust disappears. Of course the organisers of the event had planned for bad weather. They had planned for two of the biggest weather incidents that could affect the lead up to the game - a snow storm or an ice storm. They just hadn't planned for them both to hit within days of each other. Mayhem ensued and the major metropolis of Dallas didn't know what to do with itself for a couple of days. There were airport closures (just what people around the country with $4000 Superbowl tickets in their airline luggage want), rolling power outages, roads frozen over for days... everything.
In spite of all this, the show went ahead, and we were all able to sit in the warmth of our (or our friends) lounge and watch the game. And it was a pretty interesting game. I haven't watched all that many American football games since coming here, but am getting to know basically how the game flows and a few of the intricacies of the game. All in all it was a good game, with the Greenbay Packers stretching out to an early lead and the Pittsburgh Steelers fighting back to get within 3 points, only to have the Packers hit them hard in the final quarter to round out the game. It was mildly exciting, but perhaps you have to get a bit more wound up in the tradition, the build up and the culture of the game to experience the full effect. I had an enjoyable evening with my neighbor, had the experience of a football Superbowl event and watched a pretty good game of American football. But was it worth a $1.2 billion stadium, $4000 tickets for not a great view of the game, and endless news bulletins about the theoretical chances of getting snow in Dallas? I'm not entirely sure. I'm picking that the game at Eden park on Oct 23 will far eclipse it. Interestingly though, I haven't met any Americans that agree with me on that point yet...
Ps. Sonia came over and watched a few minutes of the game. Her biggest excitements of the game were 1) Finding out that that Michael Douglas was still alive. She thought he died a while back, but he was sitting watching the game with Catherine in the stands in seats probaby worth a lot more than $4000; and 2) that Camerin Diaz is dating Alex Rodriguez - she saw them in the crowd sitting together. It's great to get a woman's perspective on a football game...
