From the Archives - San Francisco Grand Prix Spectator’s Eye View - Part II

Introduction

My last post was part one of an old Daily Peloton story from my archives (it is alas, not in their archive anymore). This week I give you part two. I left off describing how a bike race announcer has the difficult job of amping up the crowd and making the complicated sport accessible to non-fans. Here I pick up that thread again.

San Francisco Grand Prix: A Spectator’s Eye View Part II – September 14, 2003

Michael Aisner, together with Jeff Roake, did a splendid job announcing the San Francisco Grand Prix from the finish line along the Embarcadero. It’s not an easy job, but they managed to keep the crowd engaged during the long spells between laps, explaining the tactics of the race as they unfolded, and providing interesting tidbits such as the role of the team car and of the Mavic neutral support. In what seems to be a tradition, they had longtime cycling fan Robin Williams get up on the stage for some impromptu comedy: “Look for me, riding with Team Viagra. You’ll see in the team poster that not many of the bikes have kickstands. There’s a reason for this.”

But the better race commentary gig was at the top of Taylor Street, where another announcer, Dave Towle, had his station set up. Here, the crowd was at least half a dozen deep all the way down the hill, and was curb to curb farther up Taylor beyond the point where the course turns left. The upward block of the street is like a natural set of bleachers, except that these spectators were content to stand for four and a half hours.

Dave and I go way back—we grew up together in Boulder, Colorado, where he still lives—so it was with particular enjoyment that I watched him stoking the coals of the throngs of fans. It sure didn’t hurt that his own enthusiasm was off the charts—I’ve never seen anybody yell into a microphone at a bike race before—but he also knew the right buttons to push. He sensed that the crowd’s awareness of its own power was one such button. “If I yell, ‘Okay, Taylor Street, let’s give it up for these racers, show ‘em what you can do,” he explained, “I can bring their volume from here” (hand held, palm down, at chest level) “to here” (hand above head). “Of course, you can only go to that well so many times.”

Dave doesn’t stop with the spectators: he also works to motivate the racers themselves. Lap after lap he led the crowd in cheering on Jason Lokkesmoe, reminding them that this was a young neo-pro from Oakland on Health Net, a local team. Dave was convinced that for Jason to hear his own name must have motivated him. “Think about it,” he told me. “When you hear your name over the loud speaker, time and time again, you start to believe that the entire crowd, the entire world, is focused on you. And how could you not dig just a little deeper, knowing that?”

Dave explained the need to gradually build a crescendo as the race develops. “If you’re telling them on lap three that you’ve never seen anything so amazing in your life, what are you going to tell them on lap six? There are only so many times in a day you can be the most amazed you’ve ever been in your life. These guys are going to think, man, this guy amazes easy. What, did he just get out of prison?”

The highlight of Dave’s announcing was when he spotted his fellow Boulderite Trent Klasna, who earlier in the race had done major work for his Saturn team, then had dropped out, and now had changed into street clothes and was strolling the course. (To even recognize a cyclist in regular garb is something of a feat; earlier in the day Lance Armstrong rode right through the start/finish area in civvies, having dropped out as well, and just about nobody noticed.) Dave jumped at the opportunity to collar Trent and ask him a few questions, to give the crowd some insight from a cycling expert who’d sized up this field from within less than an hour before.

“Trent, right now Saturn has two riders in the group: Chris Horner and Mark McCormack. Mark is the better sprinter. I predict that if it comes down to a bunch sprint, Chris will lead Mark out. What do you say?” Trent grinned and assured Dave that it wouldn’t come down to a bunch sprint. And indeed on the final lap, Chris Horner crested the Taylor Street climb all alone, on his way to a dramatic victory. Thousands of fans had just witnessed a prophet in action. Even off the bike, Klasna came off as a most impressive cyclist.

Naturally, any race announcer is subject to the limitations of his material. If a race isn’t tight enough, no announcer in the world can inject it with suspense. But when a rider tries something bold, a good announcer can help the crowd enjoy it. Today was an interesting one in that Horner’s victory was far from expected, even though he is by many standards the winning-est rider in the domestic cycling scene. For a time it really looked like Jason Lokkesmoe was going to sew up the race. He had an amazing ride, starting out in a group of five that dwindled until it was just Jason and the huge German Rolf Aldag, both clearly giving it everything they had. But the race was very, very long. Surely there must have been a point when Lokkesmoe’s s effort seemed quixotic even to himself. Maybe he stayed out longer, even when he knew he was doomed, just to put on a good show.

Showmanship is not only a matter of riding fast. I well remember the Killians team in the Coors Classic who (unlike their sponsor) hailed from Ireland. I was a young fan, by no means an expert on the rules of the race, but had been convinced ever since the early 1980s that these guys were cut some slack on the time cuts because they were so popular with the crowds. So today I challenged Aisner on this point. “It might have been,” he said cautiously. “I don’t remember what the circumstances were but it wasn’t just at face value ‘we let them back in  [after missing a time cut].’ But they were crowd pleasers, they did all sorts of stuff. [Killians rider] Alan [McCormack] had a ... squirt gun, he would shoot other racers in the pack. There was one year when Paul [McCormack, Alan’s brother and teammate] was off the back of the criterium in North Boulder Park and he had an umbrella that had ‘Killian’s’ on it. He had it open, he was racing with an open umbrella over his head. But these guys weren’t just for show either. Alan won, he won a ton.”

I asked about Davis Phinney, who had enchanted me as a kid through his pantomime of a clerk punching the “SALE” button on a cash register every time he won a prime. Aisner replied, “Davis was flavorful and he was a double whammy because he also delivered and he had this huge sense of self-confidence, and though many loved it, others liked to see him lose, but either way [these fans] were out there.... A sport thrives on the combination of both of those, those who simply excel and those that can bring more than just cycling to the table.”

Oddly, American cycling may be, from the standpoint of spectacle, a victim of its own maturity. There was an unpolished, youthful exuberance to domestic cycling in the 1980s that at its best was Phinney’s cash register and at its worst was Alexi Grewal tearing his 7-Eleven jersey down the middle as he crossed the finish line in first. Either way, it was a wild show. Since that time the phenomenon of the American cycling professional has steadily developed. Lance is now expected to win the Tour de France, whereas Phinney’s first Tour stage win was a shock to everybody. As they have adapted to the European sport, these American riders seem to have adopted its culture and tradition, which isn’t given to theatrics (beyond the traditional victory salute, of course). This modern professionalism may make it harder for the American spectator to connect with the cyclists.

For example, this morning I watched the women’s field assembled a couple of hundred feet behind the start line. I could sense the tension in that group, especially in the half dozen front-runners waiting about six feet ahead of the rest of the group. Clearly they understood the importance of this race. Handled properly, this excitement can be a huge benefit to a racer, but there’s no benefit to showing your competitors how nervous you are. I know from my own racing days that when my head was right, the pre-race feeling was one I think of as “frothy”—my own coinage, based on the image of a champion racehorse that is literally champing at the bit to start a race, has whipped itself into a lather of sweat, and must be calmed by the jockey or the trainer. To feel frothy, but not to show it, is  admirable—a result of experience and discipline. The problem is, to the untrained eye it just looks like somebody who just isn’t taking the race very seriously.

The women I watched today didn’t just have poker-faces; they were joking around with each other like this was a social event. If you saw this on TV, you wouldn’t have felt the real tension there. But there was an odd moment when the announcer had just run down the impressive bio of Mari Holden, and was about to announce her name to summon her to the line, when his microphone suddenly cut out. For several awkward seconds, all was silent. Then I heard Mari whisper to Jessica Phillips, “He forgot his lines.” Jessica laughed loudly, but it wasn’t the hearty laugh of somebody truly amused; it had the tense quality of somebody laughing to bleed off nervousness, a venting laugh, like that of someone watching the tasteless over-the-top comic violence in “Robocop.” Eventually the crowd got tired of waiting for the announcer and yelled out, “Mari Holden!” and she pedaled to the line.

There are other ways a non-savvy spectator can misread a bike race. For example, a strong performance made as a sacrifice to a teammate can make a good rider look bad. A cycling aficionado knows that when a great rider crosses the line in fiftieth, it’s probably because he led out his teammate and his job ended 200 meters from the line. But to the casual spectator, it just looks like a guy who isn’t that strong. I looked for Tim Larkin in the main bunch at the top of Taylor Street on the last lap today, and while he was still in contact, he was right on the back and looked pretty fried. Afterward, I asked what happened and he explained that a group of eight made it off the front of the main pack before the Taylor Street climb, and because his teammate was climbing better than he was today, Tim gave everything to drag him up to the group. As so often happens, this move galvanized the rest of the pack, and everything came back together, making Tim’s work for naught. But had he not done it, that group may indeed have stayed off. Tim likely changed the outcome of the race, but not in any way that made him look good. How many similar scenarios played themselves out today, unappreciated by the fans? Probably dozens. And when a rider blows up badly enough to lose contact with the group, there is nowhere to hide.

Whether this experience is mortifying to the struggling athlete all depends on the crowd. This sport has the unfortunate characteristic of looking far easier than it is, so the uninitiated onlooker may not sympathize with the rider. But if the energy is right, a bicycle race brings out the best in people: the crowds that turn out cheer on every guy, even the ones who get dropped, because after all they’re out there pedaling their hearts out.

It’s a wonderful thing about cycling: even though it’s very much a team sport, it’s not just two teams, one of which you hope wins. No riot ever broke out at a bike race because CSC beat Telekom. Ages ago, I watched TV coverage of unruly Denver Broncos fans who pelted their own team with snowballs because they were losing so badly. These were not people who stumbled onto a football game in progress—these are people who paid good money for a seat. They’re supposed to be the loyal ones! I can’t imagine such an attitude from bike race spectators, who are watching for the entire spectacle, not out of a tribal instinct to support their home team. This is true of seasoned fans as well; consider all the French people who camp out a full week in advance to watch the Alpe d’Huez stage of the Tour de France, even though a Frenchman hasn’t won there since Bernard Hinault in 1986.

Granted, such devotion to the sport is far greater in Europe than in the U.S., but in San Francisco today it was easy to imagine that gap quickly decreasing. Today the magnanimity of the spectators was on full display. They didn’t have to be experts on race tactics—not when they were watching on Taylor Street. They recognized extreme depths of human suffering when they saw it. Lokkesmoe ended up struggling over the Taylor climb solo, well off the back, today, but the crowd hadn’t forgotten his earlier glory, and screamed their lungs out for him.

Of course the fans cheer on the superstars like Lance Armstrong, but perhaps no more enthusiastically than they cheer for the poor sods who are way off the back and just trying to keep their bikes going. You can see how the cheering animates the riders, too: about half way up a climb, just as one of these guys is about to grind to a halt, you see a little sheepish grin appear on his face, maybe he shakes his head a little, then gets out of the saddle and shoves a little harder. The crowd responds to this, cheers louder, the process repeats, and like a slow-motion hockey puck the guy is gradually buoyed up the hill, lap after lap. It’s like watching a butterfly smash against your windshield, and then—like a cartoon of some kind—unfold itself, try its wings, and fly off again.

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From the Archives - San Francisco Grand Prix Spectator’s Eye View

Introduction

Since 2003, I’ve been an occasional contributor to the Daily Peloton. A few years ago, I discovered that most of my stories there are no longer available due to some server problems.  It’s another slow news day at albertnet, so here is one of the lost articles, restored and preserved for prosperity. This isn’t race coverage per se; it covers the sport in general and subtopics that I hope you’ll agree are still relevant.

San Francisco Grand Prix: A Spectator’s Eye View – September 14, 2003

I attended the San Francisco Grand Prix bike race today, and was reminded how different these events are in person. Being a live spectator is much more exciting than just watching on TV.

The SF Grand Prix covers a 10-mile circuit of downtown city streets, largely shutting down all normal traffic flows. Attendance was impressive—as always, the sidewalks were clogged with spectators, estimated today at over half a million. If you showed up early enough—and this year the first-ever women's edition started at 7:30—you got a good position along the scenic waterfront Embarcadero where the Start/Finish line is. I got a great spot, and if I’d stayed put for the next eight hours, I'd have had a great view of the finish of both the races.

But this stretch really isn't where the race is won or lost—that happens on the brutally steep climbs of Fillmore and Taylor streets, roughly on the opposite end of the loop. Last year I watched Charles Dionne win the race on Taylor Street. Of course I didn't know he was winning it at the time; nobody really did, not even the other riders in the lead group, or at least not all of them. That's because Dionne didn't do anything obvious, like drop the rest of the group, on that hill. All he did was manage not to get dropped himself. Dionne is a sprinter, and his superior sprinting ability is like money in the bank, a simple and incontrovertible fact of nature. If he's there to contest the flat finish line sprint among a bunch of climbers, stage racers, or time trialists, he'll beat them. The sprint itself was a formality for Dionne. The climbs are where the action is, so staking out a good spot on Fillmore or Taylor makes a lot of sense.

Still, it's not totally satisfying to see the defining action on the backside of the course only to miss the moment of victory, the winner throwing his arms up as he crosses the line. But since you can’t see the action on the climbs and still make it to the finish line in time, and you’re thus doomed to miss so much of the action, what is the attraction of being there? Any spectator, of any sport, will tell you that these things are just better live. You're not just there to watch the athletes; you're there for the entire spectacle of the thing, for the atmosphere. Just like the smell of popcorn at the movies, or of suntan lotion at the beach, there’s a sensory bonus to being at the race in person: sound. TV coverage gives you great voice-over (if the announcers are good), but you don’t hear the tires on the ground, the panting of the riders, or most importantly the cheering of the spectators.

When I worked as a general purpose gofer for ESPN covering the 1988 Coors International Bicycle Classic, my first assignment was to point this giant phallic microphone at the pack as it went by. After one stage of this, the recording was deemed unusable and I was off the hook. An even stranger request I got was to run up and down a flight of stairs a few times and then let a sound guy record my panting. This would be dubbed over footage of a pro cyclist climbing some grade. I must not have sounded authentic enough, because the recording was never used. But the fact that they tried to get it says something. And yet if you are actually there at the race, the sheer noise factor is almost overwhelming.

This year at the SF Grand Prix, sponsors such as Clif Bar and Saturn gave out cowbells, which created a huge and pleasant din. When I sat at a restaurant bar to have lunch, and watched the race on TV, what I got for sound was less than nothing: the one screen showing the race was muted, and all the other screens were showing a football game, with sound. Between the TV sound and the cheering football fans, it was hard to enjoy the subtle pleasures of cycling coverage. It struck me, when the 49ers scored a touchdown on fourth down with eight to go, that the yelling and cheering in the bar was nothing like what I’d heard outside. These guys weren’t cheering on the players, who after all can’t hear them anyway. Their cheering had a strangely turned-in quality, like they were cheering themselves on for living in San Francisco, the home of the 49ers, and thus basically deserving some of the credit.

Beyond the noise factor, at any sporting event the presence not only of your sports heroes but of the throngs of other spectators creates a certain energy that far surpasses what you get at home, or at a sports bar. I went to a Diamondbacks/Giants game years ago, and managed to miss every big play—I was fighting with the relish dispenser when Barry Bonds made an amazing catch that was on all the evening news highlights—but I still had a good time (better than I’d have had seeing it on TV). And the thrill of actually being there is even more pronounced in cycling than in any stadium sport, because the athletes and the action are so accessible—nobody has to watch through binoculars from the nose-bleeder seats. You're as close as you manage to get, often (ideally) with nothing between you and the racers but your own discretion.

Lance Armstrong commented some months ago on the vulnerability of cyclists in the Tour de France (a comment that many misconstrued as terrorist-attack paranoia). And we all watched in horror as Lance's handlebar hooked a spectator's musette bag on the Luz-Ardiden, crashing him. But I have to agree with Tour director Jean-Marie LeBlanc: it would be wrong to overreact to this incident and place new constraints on the spectators. The absence of ubiquitous crowd control is one of the things that makes bicycle racing special. And you don't see Lance complaining to LeBlanc, either. Doubtless he recognizes that without the spectator-friendly culture of the Tour de France, you won't get as many fans, and if you don't get enough fans, teams don't get the corporate sponsors, and without the sponsors, Lance doesn't get a paycheck.

Beyond their livelihood, the peloton surely appreciates the fans on a more human level. This is what we, as spectators, need to believe to thoroughly enjoy the event: that we are not just watching, but participating, having a connection with the athletes and creating the special energy that defines a big race. But do we? How much do the spectators really matter to the bicycle racer? Are we actually any different from sports fans in a bar congratulating ourselves for what the athletes are doing ten, a hundred, a thousand miles away? There's a simple answer, which would be yes, but it's not actually a simple matter.

First, we have to differentiate between two basic spectator scenarios: teeming masses vs. sorry handfuls. The fact is, there’s a critical mass required before the racers could possibly be inspired. Today certainly measured up. After the race, I talked to Tim Larkin, a professional on the San Francisco-based Ofoto / Lombardi Sports team, who is by any account one of the best bicycle racers in the Berkeley area. Though Tim was clearly fried from the race and couldn’t have been operating on more than 20% of his brain power, he immediately commented on the crowds. “The crowd was phenomenal,” he said. “You don't expect it in cycling over here, and to see that kind of turnout . . . from the first time up the hill they're going nuts, and they keep that intensity up for four and a half hours, just yelling their heads off, it's pretty amazing. Everyone’s ringing the cowbells, so you can't hear anything, just this din. What was new to me were those balloon things, that were big last year in the world series—the Anaheim Angels started that, got everyone in the stadium banging those together—so to see them at a bike race, to see them cross over from a mainstream sport, makes it feel like what you're doing gets more respect than racing in the middle of nowhere with, you know, people's parents there. Even if it's an important race for other reasons, if there aren't many people there, you're like, well, how important can it be?”

I’ve known that feeling myself, and it’s more common the further you get from Tim’s level. Let's face it, it is the reality for the majority of local races in the U.S, and it can be demoralizing. A race can feel an awful lot like a bunch of guys riding fast around a residential street or office park, if there isn’t someone there besides a referee keeping track of the results. It makes a huge difference if a critical mass of spectators manages to assemble itself, and seems to care about the action and the athletes, if not the outcome, regardless of how important the event is to the racing calendar. And this is why U.S. races should be held on city streets in places like Boulder, Colorado where cycling is in the blood of 90% of the residents, or tiny, quiet places like Sterling, Colorado, or Casper the friendly Wyoming, or Nevada City, California—places where the spectacle of a bike race is honest-to-God exciting to the small-town folk who turn up in droves with their Igloos and lawn chairs.

This enthusiasm certainly matters to any racer. Tim races all over the country and finds that good crowds are seldom a given, even when the race draws top talent. “Only a couple of other races in the country that have a really good crowd; Philadelphia has the long tradition there but [the SF Grand Prix] even takes that up a notch. To be fair to other races, criteriums can have a very loud crowd but it's a 1 km course, and this is a 10-mile loop with half a dozen places where it's just packed, so there’s no comparison to road races where you may expect people at the Start/Finish line and that's it. Very rarely do you get to have a race downtown, and this one happens because you have Lance and Thomas Weisel behind it to get the city’s buy-in. If promoters can keep on working to bring races to bigger cities, it can only be good for the sport.”

Cycling in the United States simply doesn’t have the strong tradition and national identity that it does in other countries, and as sports like soccer increase in popularity here, it must continually fight for a place in the national psyche. Certainly Lance’s phenomenal success has helped the sport, but I’m disappointed it hasn’t provided an even bigger boost. The road bike has gone from a standard to a specialty item. Junior fields in big races like the Nevada City classic have dwindled alarmingly. To keep the sport healthy will require that the spectators cease to be small gatherings of already interested people. It needs to bring in curious onlookers and hook them on the action, so they won’t change the channel from OLN once the bronco riders have finished up.

Of course it would be unfair to put the burden solely on the race promoters and the communities that can choose to put on races or not. I talked today with one of the race announcers, Michael Aisner, about what it takes to create excitement among the spectators of a bike race. Michael announces for various top U.S. races, but formerly had a much larger role in U.S. cycling than that. He essentially put the cycling on the map in this country, taking over the fledgling Red Zinger Bicycle Classic (sponsored by Celestial Seasonings, when it was a much smaller company than it is now), landing Coors as its new main sponsor with a much bigger budget, adding many more stages to the race, and drawing a world class international field.

I grew up watching this race, and even at a young age could see the progression each year. There’s nothing I can see that was a revolutionary change in the approach to the race; Michael’s formula seemed to be fairly simple: make each stage exciting to watch, show the crowd a good time, and next year the crowd will be bigger, the TV coverage better, and the race will increase in prominence. This in turn brings a better field every year. But what did this race do to achieve these ends? For one thing, there were plenty of criteriums, always held on downtown streets where crowds can find them. Purists criticized the format, trying to champion the more traditional point-to-point road races popular in Europe, but (as Tim Larkin pointed out) this format isn’t conducive to large crowds. It works in Europe because the sport is already huge there.

But beyond the format, the success of the Coors Classic depended on harnessing the elusive potential of the sport. “Cycling is kind of a rock and roll sport in a way, and its energy level was built on people being able to really exploit it in a big way,” Michael told me. “And I really credit the announcer for having done what he needs to do in order to make a race huge. I think you need to bridge the gap through your announcer, and through music and energy levels … so that cycling can become comparable to other things that people relate to that are exciting.”

This is a core difficulty with popularizing bicycle racing in America: making people relate to it, helping them understand that it’s far more complicated than it appears. Other sports have surpassed this obstacle, of course; a colleague of mine took a foreign client to a baseball game and explained the rules to him. “It’s really quite simple,” he started out, but by the time he’d explained the sacrifice fly, the bunt, the walk, and the strike zone, he realized that it’s really not simple at all: it just seems that way because we take our own knowledge for granted. It should be possible with cycling as well; after all, anybody who’s tried to ride a bike fast knows the challenge and the thrill of this sport. But it takes a good announcer to really amp up the crowd.

Click here for the second and final part of this article.

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From the Archives - Sitting Out Super Bowl XXIII

Introduction

About this time of year it dawns on me that the Super Bowl is coming up. Often I’m ignorant of who is even playing; I haven’t been invited to a Super Bowl party since the mid-‘90s. But this year my brother Bryan, who lives near Seattle, offered his condolences for “his” Seahawks beating “my” 49ers in the, uh, NFC conference championship game, I think it was. I didn’t know what to say, because at first I didn’t know what he was talking about.

Anyway, I have to confess I’m glad the 49ers didn’t make it to the Super Bowl, because the last time San Francisco won a championship of that magnitude (the 2012 World Series), there was rioting in the streets and some dumbasses celebrated by torching a city bus. Whatever pride I might feel in a sports team affiliated with my geographical area is completely eclipsed by such shameful acts.

In honor of this week’s big game, I invite you to read this piece from my archives, about being a UC Santa Barbara student caught up in the fanfare of Super Bowl XXIII.

Sitting Out Super Bowl XXIII - January 23, 1989

Guess what I didn’t do yesterday? Believe it or not, I didn’t watch the Super Bowl. Instead I studied for a test and wrote a paper. Perhaps what’s more surprising is that even if duty hadn’t called, I think I could have found something better to do than to watch two football teams throw the old pigskin around amid incredible hype.

“What’s that? You blasphemous pinko commie scumbag! Hey, pal, if you don’t like America, you can just leave!” That’s what at least some of you are probably thinking. Let me qualify my statement by saying that this isn’t a matter of principle. I have nothing explicitly against football or the Super Bowl. If I were bored out of my mind in a stranger’s home with no books around, no homework to do, and no cats to play with, I would probably turn on the TV and watch the game. What’s more, I would probably enjoy watching it to a certain degree.

I’ve been known to occasionally get excited about football; after all, my brother Bryan and I [back when we lived in Colorado] did exchange dual‑in‑the‑air‑high‑fives when the Denver Broncos made “the drive” to win the AFC Championship game a couple years back. (Some of our enthusiasm was about the dual-in-the-air-high-fives themselves, and our finally having an excuse to do them.) But I’ve never watched the San Francisco 49ers play, nor the Cincinnati Bengals. I suppose I could feel an affinity for the 49ers since they’re from California, but they’re not, really. I mean, they aren’t local boys or anything; the NFL draft makes sure that players don’t get to choose where they play. So why should I feel a tribal bond with any team at all?

Moreover, since I almost never watch football to begin with, why should that suddenly change just because this is the biggest game of the year? I know, I know … the pageantry, the spectacle, blah blah blah. I must admit, there’s a certain novelty to everything getting blown completely out of proportion, but that wears off pretty fast.

For a solid week before The Game, the newspaper covered every aspect of this sporting event, which was presented as being glorious even before the fact. The media even gave non-game-related news a game-related spin; for example, an outbreak of racial violence in Miami was reported in terms of how it could affect the Super Bowl. (They even mentioned later that the rioting stopped right at kickoff.) I found out what Joe Montana ate for breakfast the day before leaving for Miami. Dr. Ruth Westheimer predicted that the Bengals would lose because they were forced to stay in different hotels from their wives.

The published schedule for the game took up more than a few pages in the newspaper: the first pre‑game special would start at about 10:00 a.m., and various programs about The Game would run until the first kickoff at 2:30 p.m. Then, the supposedly hour‑long game was scheduled to run clean through the 5:00 news, and would eventually dominate the entire day’s programming.

Notwithstanding the fact that the 49ers’ home is hundreds of miles from Isla Vista, several local businesses took advantage of everybody’s enthusiasm (i.e., the Super Bowl’s ability to create wealth). Dave’s Market issued a special Super Bowl coupon book, and car dealerships had sales commemorating the event. But perhaps more incredible was the hype about the advertising that would run during The Game. I have never seen advertisements for advertisements before. In the L.A. Times, AT&T had a full‑page ad for their halftime commercial. Coca‑Cola had a promotion in stores everywhere: you could get a free pair of 3‑D glasses with the purchase of a six‑pack, for watching the 3‑D Coke commercial during the game. For the cost of one 30‑second spot at halftime, a company could sponsor a three‑week bicycle race!

Perhaps the most astonishing thing about the Super Bowl is the crazed following it has around here (that is, among those who ought to be all glum about our local Los Angeles Raiders missing out). An hour before the game even started, people in apartments all across town were leaning out of windows and yelling, “Yeah, 49ers!” Twenty minutes before kickoff, what passes for our downtown was a zoo of people rushing around, getting one more six‑pack of beer, one more bag of pretzels, or visiting one more apartment to share Super Bowl vows, prayers, or bets. But twenty minutes after kickoff, it was a ghost town. You’d swear a plague had hit the streets.

Even after I buried my nose in a book, I knew exactly what it was people were seeing on their TVs. With every cheer I heard from the adjacent apartment, I knew another player had trotted onto the field. Ooh, there’s an extra loud cheer—must be Joe Montana! Great job, Joe, you made it out of the locker room! Then, the din died down during the inevitable ten‑minute commercial break, except for the occasional random “Yeah 49ers!” coming from an apartment window. And then when the game finally got going, whooping and yelling would burst forth from all around my apartment, so often that I often thought the score must be well into the three digits for San Francisco.

A new twist on these old traditions was the screaming and yelling of girls. Yes, actual girls watching football. You can call me a chauvinist, but I simply refuse to believe that any female could actually enjoy watching football. I mean, it’s a very masculine game. The standard football fan is supposed to be fat man wearing a filthy white tank‑top, slouching in his overstuffed armchair with a beer resting on his belly, with all kinds of snack foods and a nagging wife nearby. Having somebody to ignore is part of the pleasure for these men, or at least used to be.

But I guess these women call themselves “liberated.” By being “liberated”, they’re subjecting themselves to a game they loathe, pretending to enjoy it, so that their boyfriends will respect them. “Yeah, my woman loves football! She even knows the rules!” they can brag to their friends. You may wonder, why do I even care? Well, it’s just that the female contingent adds an annoying new aspect to the game: shrieking. My ears were ringing with every big play.

I can well remember when the Denver Broncos were in the Super Bowl for the first time. This was back in the late ‘70s. Our Boulder fans were pretty rabid. My elementary school practically declared a holiday the Friday before. Instead of the normal lessons, we did Broncos-themed activities all day long. For example, we all gathered for a sing-along with songs apparently written specifically for this game. I only remember one chorus: “Ya gotta …. make those miracles happen!” There was also a crossword puzzle; one clue was “What the Cowboys’ offense will be after the Broncos get through with them,” and the answer was “CRUSHED.” That was based on the nickname for the Broncos’ defense: “Orange Crush.” There was a product tie-in with the artificially flavored, artificially colored orange soft drink. I wasn’t a very sophisticated kid, but still, I was pretty disgusted by the opportunism involved and how successful it was, with giant pyramids of extra Orange Crush throughout the grocery stores.

I finally got so sick of all the Broncos mania, I (very stupidly) lashed out at everybody and said, “I hate the Broncos! I hope they lose!” This utterly ruined me socially. I was a pariah from that day forward. Sometimes I think my social life still hasn’t recovered.

But the crazy thing was, during that Super Bowl, the Coloradans were fairly mild-mannered; I didn’t hear a peep from the neighbors. (Perhaps this was because the Broncos got completely slaughtered.) But this past Sunday, among the UC Santa Barbara student community, the yelling was over the top. Was it my sour imagination, or did the cheering seem fake and forced out here? It almost seemed like a competition between people to see who could yell the loudest and most often. An extra creative cheer could win bonus points: “Yeah 49er’s baby whooooh!”

Of course I’ve cheered at bike races and swim meets, but that was to spur on friends whose progress I had been watching for years, and who were actually teammates of mine. They could hear me cheering and would know my voice. As loud as the fans were here, I hardly think the 49ers could hear them all the way in Miami.

One thing that really didn’t amuse me about this Super Bowl was the big news of the player who broke his leg in two places. He refused to leave the field for hospitalization because he wanted to “be there” for his team. Naturally, his stupidity was applauded by the spectators. I guess none of them realize that when that player is condemned to a wheelchair, the game won’t seem that important anymore. Fortunately, the team doctor finally made him go to the hospital. (There’s probably a lawsuit pending on that one now, with the player claiming the doctor damaged his career.)

So. Do you think we can expect that kind of enthusiasm during this year’s bicycle racing season?