Do we go to the game or profit by selling them?
Before cell phones and caller ID, answering the phone could be your greatest adventure or your worst nightmare, and often I would let the answering machine pick up. On this January day in 1995, I was glad I didn’t.
“Hey, do you want to go the Super Bowl this weekend?”
My husband’s voice was super casual, and I knew that wasn’t a real question.
“Sure,” I said. “Let me have my assistant find us tickets, clear my calendar, and book our private jet. What’s up?”
“I’m not kidding! David got tickets, and he can’t go. He offered them to me, but I need to let him know NOW, or he’ll find somebody else.”
“Seriously?! How much?” I started crunching numbers in my head — tickets, flights, hotel, food. I didn’t even know who was playing in the Super Bowl other than it wasn’t my local team, so I doubted it would be worth it.
“FREE!”
That did not compute. Those tickets must cost hundreds. But he was a salesman, and he was always getting local event tickets. David was his boss — could this be real?
“But last-minute flights —”
“Lynn, I said FREE!” Now he’d abandoned his cool, and I knew it was real. “The tickets and the flights and the hotel are all included! He just needs to change them from their names to ours.”
“But the kids —” They were six and two.
“My dad can probably come down if your parents can’t take them.”
I was staring out the window at the steely sky and brown slush left over from last week’s snowfall. The game was in Miami, and visions of palm trees and sunshine danced in my head.
My husband was one of the least adventurous people I knew, and he didn’t really like to travel, so if he was ready to jump on this, why was I arguing?
“Okay, let’s do it!”
We worked out childcare with our parents and found ourselves on a plane to Miami with a bunch of other people also going to the Super Bowl courtesy of the same TV station that had paid for our tickets.
Two guys near us were discussing ticket prices. Face value was $200; they had already sold them for $2,000 each and were going deep-sea fishing instead.
I looked at my husband. His eyes were wide, and I could see the question in them. $4,000 would be life-changing to us. Should we scalp our tickets?
I wasn’t a football fan and could not have cared less about the game itself. The adventure of such a high-profile, exclusive event was what appealed to me, as did bragging rights — nobody we knew had ever been to a Super Bowl!
But the money was alluring, too. We were saving for a down payment on a house, and that would put us over the top.
I wrestled with it for maybe thirty seconds.
“This is once-in-a-lifetime,” I said. “We could use the money, but we weren’t budgeting for it, and we won’t miss it. We might never get another chance to go to the Super Bowl.”
On game day, we arrived blocks from Joe Robbie stadium and walked past parking lots full of limos under a sky full of helicopters and blimps.
Glitterati sat all around us, and we felt like the small-town hillbillies we were. It was the 75th anniversary of the founding of the NFL, and pomp and circumstance ruled the day. I think we were both more excited than we’d been on our wedding day.
At half-time, we broke open glow sticks on cue. Afterward, I heard from everyone that it was one of the worst half-time shows ever, but I couldn’t see what they saw, and it was amazing to me. I enjoyed the spectacle and the music (Patti Labelle, Tony Bennett, Miami Sound Machine), and I was excited to be a part of it.
Photos by Author
All I remember of the game is that it was a blowout.
We were able to buy our first house later that year, even without the money the tickets might have brought us. I got a sweatshirt I still wear — they hold up well when you only put them on once a year — a commemorative seat cushion I used in the bleachers at my kids’ baseball and soccer games for the next sixteen years, and a story I still get to brag about.
I’ve never regretted that decision. The money would have been nice, but it would have quickly evaporated.
The once-in-a-lifetime lasting memory is priceless.
V Lynn Connelly 