Super Bowl. It is the Great American Time Out, a three-hour pause on a Sunday afternoon in January that is—as sheer, unadorned spectacle—an interval unique. For 70 million Americans, life compresses to the diagonally measured size of a cathode ray tube. Work goes undone, play ceases too; telephones stop ringing, crime disappears, romance is delayed and, in all the land, there is just one traffic jam worthy of the title—on highways leading to the Super Bowl site. If it is not literally McLuhan's global village, the Super Bowl certainly is the national town, and all the inhabitants have gone to watch a game on the community screen.
The scale of the Super Bowl happening is staggering. It has commanded the largest audience ever for a single sporting event televised in the U.S. The number should grow even larger when the Oakland Raiders and Minnesota Vikings contend for the Super Bowl title this weekend in Los Angeles. One of every three Americans—male and female, newborn to nonagenarian—will see at least some of the game; just nine nations in the world have a total population larger than the Super Bowl's TV audience. Only the World Cup soccer final, a few heavyweight championship fights, and the Olympics attract a bigger one-day sports audience. All are events of worldwide interest, steeped in tradition. The Super Bowl spectacle pivots around a grand, but parochial American passion. It was born a mere decade ago, the child of technology, a unique combination of slick and schlock with no history at all save a profound connection to a taproot of the human psyche.
To play—to compete in or look on the struggle—is an instinct that stems from an early branch of man's evolutionary tree. Playing games not only sharpens the hunting and fighting skills of animals but also, as Jane Goodall found in her studies of the great primates, serves to organize the beasts. In all ages, the human race has used sports to order its social house in virtually every particular of life. English knights jousted for the hand of a lady; Philippine villagers set the boundaries of paddyfields in wrestling matches; Greek city-states staked local pride ("We're No. 1 in the Peloponnesus!") on the laurel-leaf total at Olympia. Wherever and whenever the match, a crowd gathered to be entertained. So the evolution of Super Bowl Sunday was just a matter of time and technology, awaiting the installation of millions of television sets. Indeed, there are remarkable similarities between the first prehistoric foot race—undoubtedly enhanced by those who grunted their favorites on—and the game this corning Sunday.