Scanning through Twitter this morning, I saw Sports Illustrated writer Peter King reminiscing about Super Bowl XXIX – aka, my most favorite Super Bowl of all time. After four straight years of seeing my favorite AFC and hometown team, the Buffalo Bills, lose the Super Bowl, it was wonderful to see a Super Bowl where my favorite NFC team, the San Francisco 49ers, totally dominated. I had just turned thirteen, as awkward as a blue-collar teenage girl could be, and was struggling though a difficult time with my family. My baby brother was sickly, my dad was about to lose his job, my grandfather was sick, our car broke down and we couldn’t replace it, and I was going to have to drop out of dance classes. Pile that all on to turning thirteen, and of course I was looking for escapism anywhere I could find it.
As I wrote in 2009, that Super Bowl also meant a lot to me because reading the Sports Illustrated covering that game inspired me to want to be a sportswriter. If you doubt how much that one issue impacted me, I present to you a photo taken this morning of the ragged original copy that has moved with me to college, to Boston and grad school and now to my place in the ‘burbs. It may be torn, it may be worth absolutely nothing – but to me, it’s worth everything.
There are days where I wonder why I down multiple cups of coffee a day and sit up all hours of the evening to write for anyone and everyone who asks, despite working a demanding full-time job. All I have to do is break this out and flip through a few pages. If I can chronicle some event as well as King and Rich Telander did in this issue, and inspire some awkward thirteen year old by doing so, then all the late nights will all be worth it.
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Surprisingly, I’ve only written two blog posts over the years on Super Bowl XXIX. Here they are:
Fourteen Years Later, I Experience My Super Bowl XXIX
If you want to see some of the other newspaper clippings thirteen year old me saved from that Super Bowl, I took pictures and posted them on Flickr. It’s from back when there were two newspapers (Democrat and Chronicle and Times Union) in Rochester, NY. Snapping shots of these this morning made me appreciate newspapers the tactile quality. Saving printed articles from online isn’t the same as trotting out my folder of newspaper clippings.