BY DC CUEVA
As we embark on the next decade of DCBLOG, in our new generation we are broadening our focus to covering more of the other big passions of this blogger beyond our traditional focus on all things Inside MTV Reality. That includes our frequent posts on the sports world, which we plan to put into overdrive during this year's Summer Olympics and other events taking place this year... and that includes this following post that's been years in the making -- and fitting enough for what this blogger is going through as a Bay Area kid is looking forward to what's to come in around six hours from now.
Soon enough it will be the biggest sports event in the United States, as all of us are counting down the final hours to kickoff of Super Bowl LVIII. There, a dream matchup and a rematch four years in the making will go down when the Chiefs and 49ers will clash once again, this time in this blogger's happy place of Las Vegas. The first time they met came four years ago in Super Bowl LIV, San Francisco's apparent sixth title was snatched away in an epic comeback as Patrick Mahomes claimed the first of his two rings as Kansas City claimed their first title in fifty years -- the first in what would become a gradual power shift towards the next generation of rising star quarterbacks in the league... and his opposition was once "Mr. Irrelevant" -- Brock Purdy was drafted last in the 2022 NFL Draft, also held in Vegas.
On the occasion of Super Bowl 50 eight years ago -- held in 2016 in Santa Clara, DCBLOG looked at the week of preparation an NFL team goes through before game day... which certainly isn't the case when it comes to the two weeks' buildup to Super Sunday and all of its assorted events leading up to it. We also looked at the long, great marriage of football and television, one that's far and away the most consumed piece of real estate in the broadcast universe. And we even delved into that time where The Challenge made its way to the big game when a Real World alum appeared in a Super Bowl commercial a couple years back. And now, we have a story that's been years in the making even before this rematch.
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| Pics 1 & 2 Courtesy: USA Today |
However, there will only be some 70,000 people who will have the honor of possessing tickets to Vegas' biggest sports event on this Super Sunday. It will be played in a stadium that didn't even exist a decade ago when no one thought that the town could support a major pro sports franchise, let alone multiple among a slew of major events all perpetuated by an act of the high court to make betting on sports more accessible to fans on these shores. You can add Super Bowl LVIII to a Formula 1 Grand Prix, a Stanley Cup, back-to-back WNBA titles and a pending move of a baseball team to the stature Southern Nevada has gained in the sports world after sports betting became legal in the U.S.
But while this one here got to experience what it's like to walk within walking distance of a Levi's Stadium that hosted Super Bowl 50 in 2016, it is nowhere in comparison near getting to experience, first-hand, the biggest sports event held in this country. That is, until this one found on social media through his fan connections with MTV's The Challenge one of those lucky people to have had possessed tickets to a Super Bowl that doubles as the sports fan's equivalent to a Willie Wonka chocolate factory pass. And he can tell all of experiencing a Super Bowl first-hand... and one that had a GOAT and a pop queen written all around his weekend in the Central Arizonan desert.
This Article is Sourced from the Went to That blog, which you can check an archived version of the post there from which much of this blog article's material is based on (it has since been deleted from the site's current iteration).
A glance at what was once that platform known as Twitter, and you'll find millions of people who've endured that year of change to still have an account there after one of the world's richest men decided to play around with it. One of them is a guy from the New York City area known as "The Ball is Orange," and other than for his first name of Dave he has requested total anonymity... as if you glance at his Twitter avatar he covers his face with a basketball -- symbolic of his favorite sport of hoops. But Dave has something that came up in preparing this post... which brought back some memories of sorts.
Like this one here, Dave once was a blogger -- he no longer is now in this new world we are in, though he has been to so many sports events that are too many to mention with all those ticket stubs. But amidst that collection is perhaps that most sacred of all of them: a Super Bowl ticket -- and from the night that saw the second renewal of what is the greatest dynasty in American sports in the 21st century. But like is always the case for getting a ticket to an event as highly anticipated as this, it is not an easy item to obtain... one has to be a lucky cat to nab one of only 70,288 who got to witness Super Bowl XLIX.
It was very easy for one to get a ticket to the very first one in 1967: the first incarnation of the AFL-NFL World Championship Game wasn't a sellout in the large Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum. And as this first edition of the peace treaty in the '60s war for pro football took place, at one point spectators were asked to move to seats in the middle of the stadium just so the TV cameras wouldn't have to worry about capturing rows upon rows of empty seats. But nowadays, it's the most coveted tickets anywhere with many easily running into the four figures... and thousands are actually reserved for corporate sponsors and dignitaries even before it's made available to the general public and a ticket lottery.
The Super Bowl has always been a hot commodity when it comes to sales on the secondary market, and in addition to those scalpers it is almost always the most cherished tickets to find -- if any -- on reseller sites. In Dave's case, it all depended upon the fate of his Patriots: only if Brady & Belichick made it to the 2014 AFC Championship Game did he decide if he seriously wanted to shell out the four figures -- a life's fortune for average Americans -- for a ticket to Glendale... and he would then have to act quickly before ticket sales went up. Even more so, he would have to get the OK from his employer to take a few days off for Super Bowl weekend... not surprisingly, his boss was in attendance two years earlier to Super Bowl XLVII -- otherwise known as both the Harbaugh Bowl and the Blackout Bowl.
It didn't take long for Dave's dilemma to be put into motion once New England raced the Indianapolis Colts out of Foxboro at the half, en route to a 45-7 whooping in the AFC Championship and clinch their Super Bowl spot versus a Seahawks team who took out Aaron Rodgers' Packers in OT earlier on that Championship Sunday. Once the teams changed ends at the end of the 3rd quarter did he tell his fiancée that he was gonna go to the Super Bowl: it all took for a trip on his web browser to his first choice when it comes to ticket resellers in StubHub. Knowing that the best seats would cost upwards of the upper thousands to five figures, Dave had to settle with trying to find the cheapest ones available inside what was then University of Phoenix Stadium.
The key off-field figure of this year's Super Bowl was the cause of the feds calling for a hearing on Capitol Hill to possibly reverse the merger of Ticketmaster and Live Nation after the presale bruhaha for Taylor Swift's Eras Tour, but buying tickets on the secondary market to a big event like the Super Bowl is a whole different story than last year's hottest ticket. For Dave, he chose which general section of the stadium (which is how StubHub usually handles things) he would want to have, but only when he picks up those tickets did he know where he & his future wife be seated in. The check came out to around $2,088 for seats in the upper corner of what's now State Farm Stadium... but the next day came a scare: his credit card had temporarily been deactivated out of fear that it may have been hacked into, but in a call back he told them that it was not the case, and things were okay again.
Dave must've been lucky to have first dibs on those Super Bowl tickets: it was only days after he bought them that DeflateGate entered the discussion. During the two weeks leading into Super Sunday, the allegations that came to light of Tom Brady ordering for the game balls to be deliberately deflated before the AFC title game was on the minds of everyone... not only the sports world, but outside of it to the point that even mainstream media outlets wanted for the Pats to be DQ'd. Although the verdict wouldn't come much later in a suspension of the QB (later deferred by a year), fines and docked draft picks leveled at the Pats as well as league rule changes, the around-the-clock media coverage of the controversy cast a dark shadow over the usual fortnight of anticipation that surrounds any Super Bowl... not to mention in the case of SB XLIX, ticket issues that other sites outside StubHub encountered before this game.
In taking a few days off for this once-in-a-lifetime experience, Dave's Super Bowl weekend lasted all of around thirty-six hours on the ground in the desert, taking a JetBlue flight from JFK to Phoenix with nearly everyone on board wearing either Patriot or Seahawks gear -- the ladder (known as the "12's" after an arrangement with Texas A&M to use the "12th Man" trademark had expired) outnumbering the former in fan support coming on this flight from the Big Apple. It was the same when he arrived that night at Sky Harbor airport as he recalled, "...the airport was full of 12s chanting 'SEA-HAWKS' at each other like a high school pep rally." And as for what he did in between takeoff and landing: Dave spent the four hours in the air using the free Wifi to binge-watch Comedy Central's Key & Peele.
For Super Bowl LVIII, Las Vegas is more than equipped for the task of accumulating the hundreds of thousands descending on the desert: it easily has more hotel rooms than you might find anywhere else at over 150,000 -- most located on the Strip. It's not always the case in other cities that have hosted the Big Game in the past... and any city that lands the right to host one of these must have adequate space to accommodate fans, media and essential personnel needed for the game and related activities as well as the stars of the show: the two teams, their coaches and personnel. This week, the Niners and the Chiefs have stayed farther from the Strip to escape the distractions, including a regulation prohibiting them from entering casinos before the game. But for Dave, he did not have to worry about shelling out hundreds for a hotel room: the brief nature of his weekend saw him stay free at a friend's house 30 miles away in Scottsdale.
And when Super Sunday rolls around, Dave has to encounter something that any football player has to overcome: he awoke that morning to a sore back, but he knew he had a marathon of a day to power through. He and his wife put on respective Brady and Vince Wilfork jerseys, chowed down a power breakfast and took a 9:30AM Uber to Glendale and the same stadium that saw the heartache of an 19-0 undefeated dream going up in smoke by David Tyree's catch and Plaxico Burress' title-winner to the Giants seven years earlier as well as the SpyGate scandal. As his car breezed along with no traffic, Dave looked outside the window to the beauty of an Arizonan countryside replete with mountains and an open desert, paling in comparison to the skyscrapers of Manhattan... and a region that, like Southern Nevada, has skyrocketed to become a top-ten city and metropolitan area in the U.S. in population.
As he arrived in a conference room of a stadium area Renaissance Hotel to grab an envelope with his name on it with Super Bowl tickets inside, plus a protective lanyard to show that off to everyone inside the stadium, the feeling of having two of the most-coveted passes in the world became all too real. Dave says, "It seemed like every moment leading up to this was just a fever dream that I'd soon snap out of and realize I was sitting on a couch at some friend’s house watching on TV with my shirt covered in buffalo chicken dip. Holding your tickets to the Super Bowl you are about to attend is as powerful a feeling as shooting a gun or getting a substantial raise... even though they’re merely keepsakes at this point, they still look like pure gold to me."
Throughout any host city for a major sports event, there is plenty of fun and games to be had... and in the case of the Super Bowl, there's the NFL Experience theme park - a game week staple for three decades. StubHub also hosts its own football fun place with its own array of kid-friendly games like throwing and kicking balls plus more grown-up fare like beer pong. Of course there are celebrity and athlete sightings to be had, such as Mark Cuban and Donovan McNabb... and Dave finds a former Boston roommate of his, who came to the game with his dad and brother but in the tough decision of having to choose which of them would get those two tickets it was the two sons who came out victorious with the dad leisurely walking around with $14,000 in cold-hard cash stuffed in his pockets around the hotel.
Since the Pats' first Super Bowl victory post-9/11, security has been on the minds of everyone working the game and keeping everyone safe the same way as every Olympics after the Munich tragedy. When Dave makes his way from the hotel across the street to UOP Stadium, what he thought was going to be a long process of getting from the StubHub party to his seat turned out to be a more easier journey than at first. It was, though, accompanied by the usual procedure of ticket goers being patted down and going through metal detectors, tickets being checked for possible fortitude and an army of police dogs sniffing for prohibited items. Luckily, he got through the whole procedure as he made his way through the crowd and proceeded to open the envelope that gave him the seat assignments.
Once Dave finds out where he's sitting for SB XLIX, it's in section 421 and near the upper terrace level.... which means, near nose-bleed levels of the then-decade old venue. Having a steep seat comes with it an excellent view of the field along the lines of what the wide replay angle camera known as the "all-22" would offer, but with Dave's seats being located farther away to the point of having his view of any replays on the jumbotron being obstructed it was a little harder to notice some of the nuances one would get sitting at home. By comparison, when this blogger went to his most recent sports event of a Warriors-Nets game later in the year -- I and my party had our seats near the top of Oracle Arena... but with a better angle of the entire court.
Just as it was when he was at the airport, the geographical placement of Super Bowl XLIX being held in an NFC West rival's stadium saw Seahawks fans reportedly outnumber those of the Patriots by a 3-1 margin. Considering that they come from one of the loudest stadiums in the NFL, it was no surprise that those who made their way from the Pacific Northwest made the loudest noise... and as one of a handful of Pats fans in his section, Dave had to put up with fellow Seahawks fans who were eager to go back to back, and even taunted him a little whenever the Pats scored.
It's been three decades since the modern Super Bowl halftime show as we all take it for granted began: the humble experience of the '92 edition being out-rated by a live episode of In Living Color saw the NFL punt the old-style Olympic production numbers for mini-concerts starring music's biggest names, starting the following year with Michael Jackson. After his own Vegas residency last year, today will see Usher join Beyoncé, Gaga, Bruno, Justin, J.Lo, Madonna, Shakira, Coldplay, The Weeknd, Dr. Dre, The Rolling Stones, last year's headliner Rihanna and so many others who've played this ultimate stage.
In 2015 it was Katy Perry who added her name to that star-studded shortlist, being joined by Missy Elliott and Lenny Kravitz... and with SB XLIX airing on NBC that year came with it a couple of rather familiar sights to loyal viewers of the Peacock network (and that includes this blogger). Landshark, who devoured people at their door amidst the mania of the Jaws film, made a big splash again forty years after its first appearance on Saturday Night Live... becoming a social media meme in the days after upon their cameo on the stage with Katy during "Teenage Dream." Also joining in on the fun was a rainbow-colored comet that she rode on in her finale track "Firework," which by coincidence is the symbol of NBC's long-standing public service campaign, The More You Know.
Dave's verdict? He writes, "The halftime show was cool enough, but clearly was meant more for TV than the live audience. I knew nothing about the #leftshark until the next day and only when I looked at the videoboard midway through the performance did I notice how bizarre that concert was. The bros behind us hoped that Katy Perry would get stuck on the shooting star as it carried her off the field, and I have zero doubt in my mind that (Commissioner Roger) Goodell would have ordered the teams to play the second half with one of the world’s biggest pop stars precariously dangling over the proceedings."
Katy's free concert came in the middle of the game itself: a scoreless first quarter turned into a 14-all draw at the break -- two Brady touchdown passes to Danny Amendola and Rob Gronkowski matched by a Marshawn Lynch 3-yard TD run and an 11-yard Chris Matthews reply; the ladder coming after the Gronk's score inside the 1st half's last two minutes. What unfolded afterwards came to epitomize what any great Super Bowl can be: a stellar second stanza with the game's outcome in the balance, and a stirring finish that brought about the largest audience in U.S. television history at over 114.4 million viewers. A promising opening 2nd half Seattle drive could only muster a field goal, but they made up for it with a crucial front line interception that turned into a TD and a 10-point Seahawks lead.
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| All Game Pics Courtesy USA Today and Getty Images Sport |
After the go-ahead score Dave told his girlfriend, "Ya know, we haven't gotten a turnover yet, law of averages tells us we're going to get one here," and the Seattle dad & his son that were sitting next to him turned and faced him with stunned silence and some fear of what might happen next. He would write in his blog that it was his greatest-ever prediction as a sports fan... and the Hawks made their way down the field, they gave the Pats fan who watched it from that nosebleed a near-flashback to that SB XLII night: Jermaine Kearse's 33-yard catch to the 5 with 68 seconds left. And it all looked for sure that Seattle was about to be the first since the Pats to go back-to-back... but what happened next brought about one of the most questionable decisions in NFL history in front of 120 million viewers in those last minutes.
After a couple early drinks at the StubHub pregame party, Dave nearly passed out amid the euphoria of the Butler interception. As he gave his girlfriend a peck on the cheek and hugged a couple stranger Pats fans around him Dave recalled, "I fell into my seat in a daze and was told that I sat there for a few seconds just staring directly ahead while the Patriots bros behind us tried to give me high fives," while also receiving a congratulatory handshake from those 12's fans in front of him who saw that final drive nightmare. He took photos of the atmosphere that followed amid the confetti flying around the stadium, then was shockingly asked by security if he could move down to the lower deck to get closer to the Lombardi Trophy presentation and the eventual & traditional booing of the commish.
After exchanging high-fives and hugs with random fellow Pats fans both in the vowels of the stadium and in the streets, Dave and his friend found a bite and some drinks at a local Buffalo Wild Wings across from the stadium before making the long trek back to the friend's house for some peace and calm from the most memorable day in his life. Then came the long journey back... or at least, that had to wait: the blizzard that socked the Northeast saw him spend a night in Houston -- and by sure luck, that was the site of, two years later, the 28-3 comeback... but that's another story for another day.
If the rematch of the Chiefs and 49ers becomes just as thrilling a game that lives up to the hype -- just as this story on one's experience attending the second coming of the Brady dynasty was, then well over 110 million viewers in this country alone at home and many millions more at pubs and other places out-of-home will have experienced the most-watched Super Bowl ever, replete with its many storylines too many to mention. As one of those lucky enough to have experienced that thriller seven years ago for himself, Dave capped his blog post with this: "If your team is in the Super Bowl and you can even sort of swing it financially, go to the Super Bowl. Trust me, it’s better without the commercials."
🏈 🏈 🏈 🏈 🏈
Starting with this special post, DCBLOG will be presenting an expanded Summer of Sports season during this 2024 year as we plan to uncover many of the most fascinating stories, issues and curious events in the sports world, from the Paris Games to offbeat events like darts. For now, be sure to join the DCNOW Twitter account at @DC408DxNow for all the buzz from Vegas, starting just around ninety minutes before kickoff at 5PM Eastern & 2PM Pacific.
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