This story must begin with an understanding of how the Super Bowl has evolved.
Though it has always been a big game -- the first edition placed enormous stress on a man named Vince Lombardi (and probably contributed to his early death in 1970 at age 57) -- the cultural significance of the Super Bowl needed time to emerge in American life. Accordingly, the weight of the Super Bowl wasn't larger than life at the beginning.
The game had to become a cultural event. The empty seats for the first edition at the Los Angeles Coliseum offer a reminder that the game was once a novelty met with an uncertain reaction by the public. This game needed to be exposed to Americans before it could become our nation's great secular and commercial emblem of fun, festivities, and exhaustive analysis of television commercials.
Today, in 2018, The Super Bowl has carved out a history longer than half a century, which is long enough to create the feelings which oppress sports fans.
When the Philadelphia Eagles made their first Super Bowl, America's biggest game was just 15 years old. It's not as though a 15-year drought meant nothing, or that the 20-year drought since the Eagles' 1960 NFL championship was insignificant, but as Philadelphia sports fans and other sports fans know, 20 years do not create talk of …show more content…
Losing in the Super Bowl in the modern age brings internet memes, talk radio blast furnaces of scorn, and other media-amplified forces which didn't exist in the 1970s. The maturation of the Super Bowl into a manifestation of American cultural excess is the perfectly imperfect complement to the slow build of NFL history, which makes each successive failure to win the Super Bowl far more oppressive than it was when the Eagles lost to the Oakland Raiders in the
Though it has always been a big game -- the first edition placed enormous stress on a man named Vince Lombardi (and probably contributed to his early death in 1970 at age 57) -- the cultural significance of the Super Bowl needed time to emerge in American life. Accordingly, the weight of the Super Bowl wasn't larger than life at the beginning.
The game had to become a cultural event. The empty seats for the first edition at the Los Angeles Coliseum offer a reminder that the game was once a novelty met with an uncertain reaction by the public. This game needed to be exposed to Americans before it could become our nation's great secular and commercial emblem of fun, festivities, and exhaustive analysis of television commercials.
Today, in 2018, The Super Bowl has carved out a history longer than half a century, which is long enough to create the feelings which oppress sports fans.
When the Philadelphia Eagles made their first Super Bowl, America's biggest game was just 15 years old. It's not as though a 15-year drought meant nothing, or that the 20-year drought since the Eagles' 1960 NFL championship was insignificant, but as Philadelphia sports fans and other sports fans know, 20 years do not create talk of …show more content…
Losing in the Super Bowl in the modern age brings internet memes, talk radio blast furnaces of scorn, and other media-amplified forces which didn't exist in the 1970s. The maturation of the Super Bowl into a manifestation of American cultural excess is the perfectly imperfect complement to the slow build of NFL history, which makes each successive failure to win the Super Bowl far more oppressive than it was when the Eagles lost to the Oakland Raiders in the