A Super Bowl Almost Ate My Career

Super Bowl Sundays are for me a collection of colliding memories, expectations, disappointments and anticipation. In other words, I'm not sure I like 'em.

For one thing, the last time I watched a football game from kickoff to the last down was in 1965, the last time I did a split jump on the track inside the Ripon College football stadium. Cheerleaders were required to at least have a vague idea of what was happening on the football field behind us; wouldn't want to start the "First and ten, do it again" cheer, when it was fourth and goal.

After my last college down, though, my easily distracted mind found it very hard to keep my eyes on the game. At the dozens of professional football games I have attended, I was far more attentive to weirdoes who populated the stadium seats. That, and watching to see myself on the Jumbotron when the cameras swerved for "babe shots."

My son was a second-string quarterback on his high school team, so the only time I really paid attention to those games was when he was at the line of scrimmage. Even then, I spent half the time with my hands covering my eyes while I prayed he wouldn't fumble.

I hosted a few Super Bowl parties while I was married, which was fun, I guess. I would listen for the increase in the TV's volume that went along with commercials so I could watch the much-anticipated and bally-hooed Super Commercials and stop filling bowls and trays long enough to watch. Same with the half-time entertainment.

Then came my transfer to AT&T's Atlanta Public Relations department. Not that I'm complaining, but as Community Relations Manager it was my duty honor to attend just about every public event that required a corporate presence. This was back in the olden days, when corporations made commitments to function as good corporate citizens of the cities in which they had a corporate office. We wanted Atlantans to believe we saw ourselves as *locals.*

Super Bowl XXXIV was scheduled for January 30, 2000 in Atlanta. It wasn't enough I had to attend to all the hysteria surrounding the turn of the millennium and its likely destruction of the world due to computer glitches caused by the sudden change from 1999 to 2000. Now I had to coordinate AT&T's Atlanta-based Super Bowl activities as a major sponsor of the game.

For the entire year of 1999, my life was consumed by Y2K preparations, distribution of Super Bowl tickets, begging the NFL to send "real stars" to our $250,00o customer party the Saturday afternoon before the game, and handling all the maddening details of throwing a party of that magnitude.

Now Murphy's Law is not lost on me. Since my mother raised no fools, over the years I had learned to include the anticipation of everything that could possibly go wrong at every step of a plan. What to do if a celebrity cancels. What to do if the caterers’ truck gets in an accident on the way to the party. What to do if the liquor store sends the wrong brand of vodka. What I've never been able to figure out, though, is what to do when Mother Nature decides to take a dump on the geography.

On Friday evening, January 28, 2000, I was pacing the floor in front of the television, watching the radar as a giant swath of white rapidly approached Atlanta. Everything for the party had somehow come together, although my hair had gone from about 15% grey to a full 30% grey. The temperature was hovering around that critical point where the forecast changes from too much snow to too much freezing rain.

After the fitful few hours of sleep I managed to get, I awoke to a surreal vision of spectacular beauty. And then I screamed.

There was not a surface outside my window that wasn't coated in at least an inch of transparent, glistening ice. The sun was shining brightly through a very high overcast sky, dancing and bouncing off the lacy brilliance of the trees. Oh my God!

I turned on the television just in time to watch a city bus slide sideways across the expanse of a boulevard and slam into a parked car. In another scene, a car started down a hilly street, did a 180 degree spin and slid backwards into the intersection at the bottom of the hill.

This video of a recent Atlanta ice storm replicates the conditions we had in 2000:

As I fumbled through my Day-Timer for the AT&T regional president's phone number, visions of dollar signs danced in my head. A quarter of a million dollars. Oh my God!

We talked. We groaned. We discussed alternatives. Then I raised the spectre of L I A B I L I T Y. Would we be subject to lawsuits if employees accompanying AT&T customers to our corporate party were involved in accidents on the way to and from? That did it. We decided to cancel the party, which was scheduled to begin sometime (2 p.m.? I can't remember) that same afternoon.

You don't want to know what the scramble that ensued looked like. It wasn't pretty. I have never been yelled at by so many people on the same day in my life, before or since. When it was finally done, I sat in the middle of my kitchen floor and sobbed. I just knew my career was over for wasting all that money. It had been spent; it was much too late to recover most of it.

As it turned out, no one expected me to pay for the mercurial antics of that mother, Nature. But ever since, I have had very mixed emotions about Super Bowl weekends.

GO PACKERS!