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How to Cover the Super Bowl and Why

By Roy Clark

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		Join a live chat about Super Bowl coverage on Tuesday, Jan. 27 at 2 p.m. EST with Roy Peter Clark and Dave Kindred, Buddy Martin, Jemele Hill. Scroll to the chat window below and set a reminder for Jan. 27 at 2 p.m. then come back and join the conversation. Poynter Sports Summit April 22-24, 2009 Apply by March 9 Join some of the most noted sports journalists in America, from ESPN, Sports Illustrated, The New York Times and many places.

My friend Tom French loves Springsteen but hates the Super Bowl. This poses something of a moral dilemma for the Pulitzer Prize winning feature writer. Should he simply ignore the game in Tampa next Sunday and watch the halftime mini-concert? It turns out that Tom is no playa hater. He just hates the game.

But why? "The Super Bowl is the celebration of empty excess," he told me, "a celebration of consumerism. It's the least interesting of the big sporting events. It's a celebration of hype. Those two weeks leading up to the game are designed to whip up the hype. The Super Bowl is not about the players. It's an empty exercise in some of the worst of our instincts."

But, Tom, what about the great victory of the Tampa Bay Buccaneers over the nasty Oakland Raiders in 2003? What about Joe Namath's guarantee of victory in Super Bowl III? What about Lynn Swann's swan-dive of a catch? What about Tony Dungy becoming the first African-American coach to win the Big One? What about the New York Giants upsetting the 18-0 New England Patriots when Eli Manning escaped a swarm of defenders and threw a bomb that a receiver caught on top of his helmet? What about all those cool commercials? What about Janet Jackson's wardrobe malfunction, the flash seen round the world?

OK, team, I've just given you two decent story ideas you can write without traveling to Tampa to cover the game itself. You can find someone who hates the Super Bowl and explore that antagonism. You can find someone who has seen all the Super Bowls and extract their fondest or quirkiest memories.

Love it or hate it, the Super Bowl has huge cultural importance if for no other reason than its ability to attract a mass audience. The current wisdom dictates that the crowd is fragmenting, not amassing. Such atomizing makes big moments even BIGGER, as we've seen recently with both the events surrounding the Inauguration and the new season of "American Idol." One is serious, the other merely entertaining. Both tapped into, or helped create, huge communities of interest.

The impact of that audience can be seen not only in the price of advertisements, but also in the ridiculous response to the lightning quick exposure of Janet Jackson's left breast. It happened so fast that it took visits to the Internet and freeze frames to check it out. But because the game has the ability to magnify everything, that silly moment brought down upon the American media a wave of government repression so out of proportion to the "crime" that it made Gitmo look like Chuck E. Cheese.

The key to writing a good Super Bowl story when you're not at the Super Bowl is to look for the off-beat. Go against the grain. Zig when they zag. Or, in language taught to me by Jim Dwyer of The New York Times: "The bigger, the smaller." That's the approach Dwyer took to coverage of 9/11: writing about the big event through the significance of small and almost sacred objects left behind.

My favorite off-beat sports story was written by Tom Archdeacon for the late, great Miami News. On the very day, in the very city, where the Miami Dolphins played for a title, Archdeacon decided to cover a very different type of championship game:

That story appeared on December 24, 1981, and reflected the culture of a spunky afternoon newspaper always looking for a different angle on a big event.

Back then Archdeacon told me, "To be truthful I get bored with the mainstream of sports. I'm not interested in statistics ... But I'm fascinated by some of these little backwaters. A lot of people think I'm stretching a point here, but I'm just fascinated by these people and I think their stories are a lot more interesting. They inform a little bit, in their own way, and they also entertain. I think there is room for them in the paper. These people really pour their souls out to you. When I get around the Miami Dolphins it's just not the same. At least half the time, I've got what they'll say down to a formula, and I don't really like it."

Archdeacon was talking, of course, about the canned quotes from pro athletes and coaches: "I'm so proud of these guys ... There is no quit in them ... Guys just stepped up and made plays." As opposed to this quote from Charles (Bunky) Clark, the Bucktown team owner:

"Bucktown football is guys you see every day. It's street versus street, seeing who's the best, but usin' the football field instead of battlin' and fightin'. It means something to the people here and usually it's free."

Somewhere in your town on Super Bowl Sunday there will be a small amateur team fighting for a championship -- maybe it's old folks pitching horseshoes, or pixie girls doing handsprings. But they are there. The bigger, the smaller.

Who knows, you may run into one of those powerful moments when the smaller becomes the bigger. In my copy of Poynter's St. Pete Times recently there were two sports stories that became national in their interest, although they began as local stories somewhere else.

In Dallas, Texas, the Covenant School defeated Dallas Academy in girls basketball by the score of 100-0. The blowout would be interesting enough. But then officials from the winning school apologized for the score and sought a forfeit against themselves: "It is shameful and an embarrassment that this happened," said the head of the school as reported by the AP, "a victory without honor is a great loss."

Then there was the story about the indictment of a Kentucky high school football coach in the death of a 15-year-old player during a hot practice. Every high school football coach in America may be sweating the nightmare of being arrested for the death of a player brought on by tough workout regimes.

The lessons drawn from your distant coverage of the Super Bowl are lessons that can apply to any story you may cover on any beat. When struggling for an angle, remember this: "the bigger, the smaller; the smaller, the bigger."

You can join a live chat about the Super Bowl on Tuesday, Jan. 27 at 2 p.m. EST with Roy Peter Clark and Dave Kindred, Buddy Martin, Jemele Hill, three high-level sports journalists. Just enter your e-mail address below to set a reminder for Jan. 27 at 2 p.m.

Full post as published by Writing Tools on January 25, 2009 (boomark / email).