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Through its sophisticated and expensive techniques, television has forged a football game into the nation's single largest shared experience (except for electing a President or watching American astronauts walk on the moon). The Super Bowl has made other contributions to the culture too, footnotes not to be lost. In 1967, The Game was responsible for the release of 4,000 pigeons in flight over the crowd, an exercise that produced history's most massive precision drill: the simultaneous holding of souvenir programs over 63,036 heads. Other wonders: a 30-foot statue of a Green Bay Packer snorting smoke from three-foot-wide flared nostrils; a hot-air balloon that, too cold to climb out of the stadium, drifted into the stands and was torn apart by fans. The N.F.L. went superpatriotic in 1972, when it staged a flyover by Air Force jets, having arranged for a plane to peel off into the "missing man" formation while P.O.W. families looked on. There have been theatrics spectacular, displays dismal. This year it is all up to Walt Disney Productions, which will assure us that "It's a Small World" and a happy one.
But always there have been the multitudes ready for the opening kickoff. They include Americans in Europe who jet into Frankfurt to watch the game in German hotels that pirate the American Forces Network's signal. In Korea, 40,000 troops worry less about Panmunjom Truce Session CCCLXXXIII than the 5:30 a.m. live color broadcast of the Super Bowl.
Back home, Super Bowl mania takes even stranger forms. Boston Political Journalist Richard Gaines will be one of the few on the telephone during the game. (Long-distance calls dropped 50% in Pittsburgh last year while the Steelers beat the Dallas Cowboys.) Gaines watches the contest alone, but exchanges opinions via phone with a select coterie of fellow Super Bowl junkies. Says Gaines: "I always know exactly what plays will make the phone ring and who will be on the line." His Super Bowl record: all three hours on long distance.