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And how the beasts organize themselves to see the contemporary version! Preparations begin the day after a site has been chosen. The first step in 18 months of logistical work-up is the arrival in the blessed city (the Super Bowl pours $55 million to $70 million into the local economy) of Bill Granholm, a top aide to National Football League Commissioner Pete Rozelle. Granholm begins by cornering 15,000 hotel rooms. Before the game is over, he and the rest of the league staff will have seen to everything from towels and hot dogs to brackets for televisions in the press box to X-ray machines for diagnosing injuries, to coat hangers for clotheshorse athletes to an elaborate security system designed to ensure that nothing can possibly go wrong on Super Sunday.
Next come the advance guards of the television network that has paid $3.5 million into N.F.L. coffers for the privilege of broadcasting the big game—and collecting $250,000 per minute of commercial time. For Super Bowl XI (Will the institution be called Super Bowl LXXIII when it is as old as the World Series is now?), NBC will haul to Pasadena a massive force of personnel and about $5 million worth of equipment: 165 people, 14 of whom—headed by Curt Gowdy and Don Meredith—will appear on home screens; twenty-one cameras, 16 of them the full-size "hard" variety, three handheld, one in a helicopter and one in the Goodyear blimp; five slow-motion "discs" for replays, and a vidifont, a computer-like machine that can instantaneously cough up players' names and statistics. Add to that three miles of video cable, 3½ miles of audio cable, 65 microphones and 100 monitors, then plug everything into 15 giant trailer trucks and a specially built studio for the pre-game show, and the Super Bowl can be beamed to the addicted nation.
Just to make certain that there are no embarrassing slip-ups—28 minutes of silence is acceptable, perhaps even desirable, in a presidential debate, but the Super Bowl is serious business—NBC Executive Producer Scotty Connal a month ago called together the 87 members of his game crew for training sessions. (The remaining 78 will handle the pre-game show only.) By kickoff, they will work together as cohesively as the teams on the field, and maybe a lot more so. As a shining example, the television crew will have the sacrifice of CBS Sportscaster Jack Whitaker, who dieted the entire week before Super Bowl I. Said Whitaker in 1967: "This is serious stuff. I weighed 162 at the start of the season. I wanted to be down to 155 for this game."