Two floors of Super Bowl fans − 26 January, 1986
Fresh off two playoff shutouts, the Chicago Bears made their first trip to the Super Bowl to play the New England Patriots. A few of my friends had braved cold Illinois mornings to camp out in front of a Ticketmaster at Sears in Spring Hill Mall to buy what tickets we could for the Giants and Rams games. (We'd do the same the following year, with more people but a sadder outcome.) There was no hope of buying tickets to the game in New Orleans, so it was left to me to organize a party.
My dad offered to rent a big screen TV. In those days, that meant a mammoth projector-and-screen unit that required movers to install. We went to Ralph's Rent-all in town, but even ten days before Super Sunday there were none to be had. The best we could do is accommodate my pals with split-level viewing—a bunch of us watching a 30" set upstairs, and another watching on a 28" set downstairs.
The day is mostly a blur. As a fairly well-connected senior in high school, I managed to get about three dozen people barking at the T.V. with every sack. To celebrate the Rams win two weeks earlier, we stopped off at a restaurant and invested a couple bucks to invent kereoke with "The Super Bowl Shuffle" in the jukebox. I have no idea if there were other patrons in the building, but I sure hope they were Bears fans. We had our video of the Shuffle playing for our personal pregame, as well as recordings of "Bear Down, Chicago Bears" and numerous other songs with Chicago references. There was cheese. There were burgers. And lots of root beer. The chips were in a bowl shaped like a helmet, and the place was decorated with the plethora of orange pom-pons we collected from Soldier Field in the playoff run.
When Willie Gault scored on the bomb from McMahon, the party downstairs thought the one upstairs was going to crash through the ceiling and rain down on them. No such tragedy, thankfully. We also survived William Perry's touchdown—which by hindsight should have gone to Walter Payton. Festivities started about 2p with season retrospectives and pregame analysis. The final people didn't leave until about midnight (it was a school day come Monday, after all). The halls of Woodstock High were soon to be filled with barks and singing.
The buzz lasted about 36 hours before attention turned elsewhere. Most of these same friends and I were sitting in math class Tuesday when the principal announced the space shuttle Challenger had exploded.
My dad offered to rent a big screen TV. In those days, that meant a mammoth projector-and-screen unit that required movers to install. We went to Ralph's Rent-all in town, but even ten days before Super Sunday there were none to be had. The best we could do is accommodate my pals with split-level viewing—a bunch of us watching a 30" set upstairs, and another watching on a 28" set downstairs.
The day is mostly a blur. As a fairly well-connected senior in high school, I managed to get about three dozen people barking at the T.V. with every sack. To celebrate the Rams win two weeks earlier, we stopped off at a restaurant and invested a couple bucks to invent kereoke with "The Super Bowl Shuffle" in the jukebox. I have no idea if there were other patrons in the building, but I sure hope they were Bears fans. We had our video of the Shuffle playing for our personal pregame, as well as recordings of "Bear Down, Chicago Bears" and numerous other songs with Chicago references. There was cheese. There were burgers. And lots of root beer. The chips were in a bowl shaped like a helmet, and the place was decorated with the plethora of orange pom-pons we collected from Soldier Field in the playoff run.
When Willie Gault scored on the bomb from McMahon, the party downstairs thought the one upstairs was going to crash through the ceiling and rain down on them. No such tragedy, thankfully. We also survived William Perry's touchdown—which by hindsight should have gone to Walter Payton. Festivities started about 2p with season retrospectives and pregame analysis. The final people didn't leave until about midnight (it was a school day come Monday, after all). The halls of Woodstock High were soon to be filled with barks and singing.
The buzz lasted about 36 hours before attention turned elsewhere. Most of these same friends and I were sitting in math class Tuesday when the principal announced the space shuttle Challenger had exploded.
Comments:
kga245 (February 1, 2007. 12:04am)
Super Bowl Shuffle!