From its modest beginnings at the AFL-NFL Championship Game in Los Angeles in 1967, through to this year’s Super Bowl XLIV, Super Sunday has grown exponentially and, in the process, has become a bloated monster. Over the past quarter century or so, Super Sunday has illustrated the ability of a sporting event to offer a distorted and exaggerated version of social reality and social values in America, and it has done so on a grand, glorious and obscene scale.

It is difficult to say precisely when the Super Bowl reached larger-than-life proportions, but certainly by the end of the 1970s it was there. At Super Bowl XV in 1981, a New York Times headline claimed that 70,000 fans made “New Orleans Throb with Super Bowl Mania.” Gerald Eskenazi’s account described a “gridlock” of people in the French Quarter and an influx of “tens of millions” of dollars into the New Orleans economy.

The extravagances of the fans and everyone associated with the game had reached extraordinary proportions. Only the vocabulary created by Thorstein Veblen, the Norwegian-American economist who tracked the habits of the rich in the late 19th century, was capable of fully capturing the scene with such brilliant phrases as “conspicuous consumption,” “conspicuous leisure” and “conspicuous waste.”

The fact that all of this takes place around a football game would have delighted Veblen, who once observed that football is to education as bullfighting is to agriculture. Indeed, Veblen’s use of the phrases “predatory barbarism,” “pecuniary emulation” and “vicarious consumption” also seem particularly well suited to any description of our distinctive national holiday.

One of the most common measures of excess has been the price of commercial time. At the first Super Bowl, a 30-second commercial sold for $42,500 on CBS and $37,500 on NBC (both networks broadcast the game). By the early 80’s, the price for 30 seconds reached $400,000, and by the end of the decade it was a whopping $800,000. Thirty seconds of advertising reached the $1 million mark in 1995 and climbed to $2.1 million in 2000. In 2007, the price tag was $2.6 million, and estimates for this year range from $2.6 to $3 million.

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December closed with a remarkable flurry of headline sports stories. It was not only one for the memory bank, but it may have been the most fitting way to end the decade known as the Naughty Aughties. What seemed like an awkward tag at the beginning of the new century has become a most appropriate signature phrase.

The first shock was the fall from grace of the poster boy for clean living and family values. Tiger Woods instantly went from the slickest brand in the American pantheon of commerce to the butt of jokes and ridicule.

IMG, the International Management Group, had persuaded nearly all major sport corporate sponsors that Woods was their man: the perfect golfer with the perfect image, the quintessential sportsman. Everybody loved Tiger, admired Tiger, wanted to be like Tiger.

We all got on board, even though we should have known better. America still wants its sports heroes cut from the Frank Merriwell at Yale mode, and Tiger Woods of Stanford looked like one of them.

Instead, Tiger is the perfect hollow man, lacking a center and lost without a compass — except for the one on his yacht that has become his shelter from the firestorm.

Typical in cases like this, the media that touted the Tiger Brand as the genuine article turned with fury and self-righteousness on its former model of perfection. Even more amusing is how quickly the corporate world cut its ties to the feline philanderer.

Accenture, one of the major corporations that identified its brand with his brand, quickly began removing all images of Woods from company advertisements. Tag Hauer, the Swiss luxury watchmaker, announced it would scale down its association with Woods. Procter and Gamble lowered their Tiger profile by withdrawing its Gillette ads featuring Woods. Then AT&T pulled the plug on its Woods connection.

Only Nike has remained completely faithful, with Phil Knight saying that this whole thing was but a minor blip. There have been no TV commercials featuring Woods on television since late November. Tiger Woods has vanished from public view and from the branded world in which we live. It is doubtful, however, that sex has disappeared from the PGA tour or other sporting venues.

Sex and sport are inextricably linked. Faux sex surrounds all our sporting events, where young women called “cheerleaders” and “dancers” decorate the landscape with wiggles, jiggles and giggles passing as a cross between glamorous role models and purveyors of sexual titillation. Then there’s the real sex, as women make themselves available to athletes, and star athletes take it as a perk of the position.

The Tennessee Hostess Scandal is an adjunct to the Tiger Woods affair. Sending young women from the University of Tennessee out to a high school football game on a recruiting trip is about as bad as it gets. The stories of attractive young women traveling hundreds of miles to see and be seen with naïve high school athletes who are targets on the football recruiting board point to issues of sexual access and the insane pressures surrounding intercollegiate athletics.

Such insanity was on display in Florida recently as Urban Meyer, head football coach and minor deity, announced his retirement from coaching, citing his health. An outpouring of grief and angst flowed throughout Gatorland. Then Meyer reversed his decision. He will now take a leave of absence until he gets control of his world. This is comparable to most of us giving up breathing until we could live without having to do it constantly.

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When is the right time to leave? Some wait too long, others leave too soon. Some go out on top, some tarnish their legacy before letting go.

For those who have followed Florida State University football over the past three decades, the last few years have been painful. Bobby Bowden, one of the great football coaches and entertaining personalities of the coaching world, joined the long list of those who stayed too long. In the last five years, it became increasingly apparent that Bowden had relinquished day-to-day control of the football program. He seemed to have lost almost all interest in that aspect of coaching — and perhaps most of the other obligations of a college football coach.

The result has been a decline in FSU’s football fortunes and a growing number of fans and boosters calling for Bowden’s retirement. As the voices became louder and more insistent, Bowden became defensive, until he most recently resembled a wounded animal. His defense of his son Jeff as inept offensive coordinator took a toll on both Bowden and his reputation. Certainly it should never have come to this. And of course, it didn’t need to come to this.

Retirement is often a difficult choice. For the professional athlete it is particularly difficult, as it signals the end of what is likely to be the most significant part of their lives. Willie Mays stayed on too long, Joe Namath and Johnny Unitas went out as near empty shells, and there are any number of athletes who make one too many comebacks. It is the rare case, such as that of Sandy Koufax, when the athlete leaves on top.

There was a young man who worked in the history department here years ago as an adjunct faculty member. He had an master’s in history and was also a professional boxer. He was a marginal fighter, but he was able to keep fighting as long as he wanted, because at that point in boxing history promoters were looking for white guys to put in the ring.

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