Hello, Super Bowl!
Welcome home.
Hey, crazy big heap kind of a lush national holiday disguised as a football match!
Good to see you again.
You were born in Los Angeles. You grew up here. You’ve never left here. You belong here.
He’s had seven other events here, a Coliseum, a Rose Bowl, Hollywood. This is where he set an attendance record. It was here that he saw New York Giants quarterback Phil Simms become the first user to yell “I’m going to Disney World. ” And, yes, of course, this is where he put on a halftime showing through Michael Jackson.
Welcome Welcome. Go ahead. We know that now it is another. We get it. But set aside $10,000 expenses and gold-plated passes for a moment and vice versa. We miss you very much.
You were created in the Colosseum 55 years ago, two years before you were named Super Bowl, long before the Twitter world erased the two guys flying in that first game dressed in jetpacks.
We were the first to need you. We were the first to love you, even though there were about 30,000 empty seats when you were between the Green Bay Packers and kansas City Chiefs. We’ve given you the most productive football time we can invoke, 59 degrees and of course. You gave us part time with Al Hirt. No we complained.
You came back here six years later, when the Miami Dolphins were enraged in the same box of the coliseum to celebrate the last undefeated season of the NFL. Then you walked the path of the Rose Bowl five times over the next 17 years, in games with iconic moments like John Madden lurking on the sidelines, John Riggins bursting into the box, Gatorade’s first swim after the game held across the country, and messy hair. Jimmy Johnson yelling, “And what about the Cowboys!
We ask, what about Los Angeles as one of the turning points of the Super Bowl?We wondered if it would be better to organize this game every two years.
We beat you. We deserved you. The Rams were the first NFL team on the West Coast. The Rams were the first NFL team to employ a black player, with Kenny Washington signing a contract at the insistence of the Colosseum. The Rams were also the first team to have a black quarterback. and win an NFL playoff game, thank you James Harris.
Los Angeles was the smartest and most complicated NFL, and after those first seven visits, their most important game has settled here.
But then you, the stupidly whimsical Super Bowl, blew us away.
The NFL left town and so did you, disappearing in the winter of 1993 and coming back for 29 long years, and how can only you?
You went to Jacksonville, yes, there’s a bit of a stadium there. You went to Detroit, where the weather outside ford Field closed 30 degrees. You went to New York, and it’s not a profane mess. You went to Indianapolis, so bored. You went to Minneapolis, where your intrepid columnist suffered a frostbite while waiting for an Uber.
You toured all over the country when your house is valid here. Then the NFL returned to Los Angeles in 2016, Rams owner Stan Kroenke spent $5 billion to build SoFi Stadium, opened it in 2020, and eventually came to your Senses.
You’re back. At last.
Super Bowl LVI will be played at SoFi Stadium on February 13, the eve of Valentine’s Day, and what you deserve, but what a love letter we write to you.
The Rams will be a team, the moment the team plays a Super Bowl on their own turf, the manifestation of Kroenke’s investment, a star quarterback named Matthew Stafford surrounded by a glamorous, richly paid organization worthy of our brightest lighting fixtures: Sunset Boulevard meets the red light zone.
The Cincinnati Bengals will be the other team, the opposite, annoying losers, a quarterback named Joe Burrow surrounded by commonly anonymous striped helmets and a small old-fashioned ovation that says, “Who dey, who dey, who thinks he’s going to win?the Bengals. . . nobody!”
Some think the joy robbed the New Orleans Saints, others think he got it from a local Cincinnati beer vendor, but regardless, he will be a worthy competitor to the Rams’ joy of “To. “!”
According to the super traditions of this city, the game features at least one premiere. The Los Angeles Rams have never won a Super Bowl. Neither will the Bengals. The winners will probably cry. The losers will probably cry. Just your typical histrionics on a Sunday afternoon in Los Angeles that will look like an audition for a movie.
This Super Bowl, that’s why it’s so cool that you’re back. This city full of soul suits you well. It’s the exciting emotion that suits you. Possibly, this would be the only position in America that is too big for you.
Of course, it’s been a minute since we saw you, and although you know the dramas, you may not recognize the place.
The Colosseum is nice, but it is now run by the city’s third professional soccer team, known as USC. The Rose Bowl is historic, but it’s the dominance of a UCLA team that no one is looking at.
SoFi Stadium is an absolutely different animal. It’s a beauty, but it’s a beast. It’s a grandiose palace with an impressive video card, but it’s stuck in a crowded corner of Inglewood where traffic is hellish and parking is worse.
You have to arrive 4 hours early and be willing to pay a month’s rent for a parking space, and even then, it may take you most of the afternoon to get off your lot. The post-game chaos is so wonderful that there are stories of other people attending the rams or Chargers night games who simply abandoned their car and slept in a local motel and returned home the next morning.
It’s not that you’re here just for the game. In fact, since you left, you have a vehicle for more than just the football field. Parties are the real center of the Super Bowl, and for that, you’ve notoriously come to the right place.
Super Bowl LVI Coverage
From the conference center and Crypto. com Arena to Century Park and the Petersen Automotive Museum, the weekend will be filled with drinks, dancing and cheeky mask retreats. They don’t know the rules of masks, adding that LAEric Mayor Garcetti and Gov. Gavin Newsom, neither of whom were photographed without a mask at the recent NFC championship game.
So be careful. Be careful. And if you have to party, check out the only party that represents Los Angeles’ combination of sports cultures and celebrities. It’s called “Shaq’s Fun House. ” It’s Friday night before the game at the Shrine Auditorium. This may be a classic Super Bowl scam, but because it’s introduced through adorable former Lakers star Shaquille O’Neal, it can be fun. up to $1,799. 99 — scam alert! — other people can attend a party that includes rap performances and rides and near-noticeable sightings.
During his last stop at the Super Bowl, Shaq was a rookie with the Orlando Magic. Yes, it’s been a long time. You have bigger and more impactful, but so has the Los Angeles sports scene.
Since that January day at the 1993 Rose Bowl, Los Angeles has added two new pivotal stadiums, while championships have been won by the Lakers and Dodgers and USC football and basketball UCLA and Kings and Sparks and Galaxy and Angels and Ducks and a host of others.
While super Bowl America’s premier sporting event, Los Angeles, America’s premier sports city, and the two pass together, in a way that rotates regularly, forever.
Welcome home.
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Bill Plaschke has been a columnist for LATimes since 1996. He has been named National Sports Columnist of the Year 8 times through the Associated Press and twice through the Society of Professional Journalists and National Headliner awards. He is the author of five books, adding a collection of his columns titled “Plaschke: Good Sports, Spoil Sports, Foul Ball and Oddballs. “Plaschke is also a panelist on ESPN’s popular daily communication show, “Around the Horn. “the year through Los Angeles Big Brothers/Big Sisters and won a Pursuit of Justice Award from the California Women’s Law Center. Plaschke made his impression in a movie (“Ali”), an HBO drama series (“Luck”) and, in an ideal cultural moment that he still doesn’t quite understand, his call can be discovered in a rap song “Females Welcome” by Asher Roth. In case you’re wondering – and it was – “Plaschke” rhymes with “Great Gatsthrough”.
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