Through no particular achievement of my own, strictly an accident of birth, I have been a Super Bowl champion for most of my life.
A generation of sports fans born in Pittsburgh understands this. A generation born a decade later on one side of the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge gets it. A generation that grew up in and around this millennium in New England understands it now.
Nearly all my friends in Kansas City have no clue.
It has been a half-century since their Chiefs last participated in a Super Bowl. That one followed the 1969 season. It was their second in four years, portending a future filled with participation in "the Big Game." It did not turn out that way. Until Sunday.
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Now, at least one of them asserted Monday morning on Twitter, "I don’t know how to watch a Super Bowl that I care about." It occurred to me that I could give a seminar. The Steelers have been in eight Super Bowls in the past 45 years, or about one every 5.6 years. The fine people of Kansas City can learn from my experience.
I am only too pleased to present the lessons I’ve learned:
1. Enjoy this fortnight. No other sport gives you anything quite like it. You advance past the LCS in baseball, they’re throwing the first pitch before you can say, "Batter up!" The NFL gives you two whole weeks to revel in this experience.
I remember the night before Super Bowl 30, driving back from Hattiesburg, Miss., to Memphis following a college basketball road game I had covered between the Tigers and Southern Miss. I turned on ESPN radio and heard my old Pittsburgh Press colleague John Clayton talking about the game, talking about the Steelers. That’s when it hit me.
The entire world is focused on my team. Nothing is more important in this process than this. Win or lose, no one can take these weeks on the mountaintop from you.
But you can blow it by obsessing over whether your team can stop the run, or whether your best receiver can get open against that shutdown corner, or whether your team should take the ball or defer after winning the coin toss. Drink it all in. This is your time.
2. Don’t throw a Super Bowl party. A Super Bowl party is a great thing — when it’s two teams you don’t really care at all about, or even if you really loathe one of them.
Not when it's your team, though.
Do you really want to miss a crucial third-and-2 play because someone asked for more taco chips?
3. Don’t attend someone else’s Super Bowl party. If it's about the game, and it should be given how rare this experience is even for fans of the most successful teams, socializing is beside the point.
When the Steelers made the Super Bowl in the 1995 season, a neighbor threw a watch party and asked if we would come. I reluctantly agreed, but I decided we would cross the street only after watching the first half at home and getting some of those initial jitters out of the way.
As the Steelers began to recover from a rough first half, I was able to watch without much distraction. When it was over, though, after Neil O’Donnell had found the Cowboys’ Larry Brown open one too many times, it occurred to me that sharing that time with a bunch of strangers who weren’t nearly as invested in the result added nothing to the experience.
4. Don’t get drunk. You’ll want your memory of a Super Bowl victory to be a memory, right?
(If your men lose, do whatever, so long as you have a designated driver.)
5. Don’t watch with someone who won’t be part of your life. By this, I mainly mean: Don’t watch with your high school girlfriend/boyfriend — or, shall we say, someone you met two weeks ago on Match.com.
When the Steelers reached their third Super Bowl in five years during my teens, after the 1978 season, I was a freshman in college dating a young woman from my old high school. Her family asked if I wanted to watch the Super Bowl with them.
Now, when I think back on Rocky Bleier’s incredible catch or Jackie Smith’s fortuitous drop, there is an inevitable, if fleeting, collision with the ups and downs of that relationship.
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6. Don’t be the third wheel. For the last of the Steelers 70s Super Bowls, at the end of the 1979 season, I had expected to watch at my parents’ home — they were out at a party — with someone I’ll identify as a "friend." He brought along a date.
It was awkward enough during the first half being involved intensely in the game while my companions were fixated intensely on each other. It was much worse when the two of them ditched me and headed for the living room, where they spent the entire second half making out.
I watched alone. The game, I mean.
7. Watch with someone who matters. It could be your child, your parent, your best friends or your spouse. Watching the Steelers’ two championships of the 2000s with my wife in our Cincinnati family room created my happiest Super Bowl memories.
Now, she is pretty intense as a fan, and sometimes the pressure can get to her. When Mike Vanderjagt shanked a last-second field goal in the 2005 playoffs and allowed the Steelers to progress past the Colts in the divisional round, she was down in the basement when she heard the shout that he'd missed.
She’ll often occupy herself during the most pressurized games by ironing clothes — one of those activities you can do while keeping an eye on the action. In January 1996, when the Steelers were in a most furious AFC championship game against the Colts, we were at the end of a four-day trip to the Tampa Bay area, where I covered the Memphis Tigers in a road game against South Florida. There were no clothes to iron at that point; everything had been worn. So she got stuff out of the dry-cleaning bag and started ironing that.
Years later, after Larry Fitzgerald split the Steelers’ secondary and put the Cardinals ahead with just a few minutes remaining in Super Bowl 43, I talked her into sticking around for the last drive. It took all my powers of persuasion, but she hung in there. That game ended with Santonio Holmes’ amazing corner-of-the-end-zone catch.
We shared a beautiful hug, and a moment to remember forever.
That's how you do it.
