Best Super Bowl Ever

I like football. I was never allowed to play it as a boy. My father was a neurologist, a specialist in electroencephalography, and he knew as far back as the 1950s that football’s repeated small concussions were cumulative and caused serious brain damage. No football for the Marshall boys! But I loved the game. During a too-brief period when I was five and lucky enough to live with my father, he would take me to Velleggia’s in Baltimore’s Little Italy on Sundays after a Colts home game and we would sit just one table away from Johnny Unitas and his teammates as they celebrated another victory (they were all victories, as I remember it).

Like most red-blooded Americans, I look forward to the NFL playoffs and especially to the Super Bowl. Yet it isn’t always easy to find a place to watch. For a number of years I was working in London on Super Bowl Sunday, and the game wasn’t available on local TV, but I found a Chicago-style pizzeria on Maiden Lane, one street north of the Strand, that put the game up live on their big screens at 1 AM. (All other NFL games on British TV are pure fantasy. All the commercials, delays, reviews, time-outs and half-time are edited out. A game takes one hour and the players look like supermen, knocked down flat one moment and lined up for the next play a second later.)

By far the most interesting Super Bowl I watched on television was in Costa Rica in 1994. I was staying in a rental villa with my friend Patricia Forrester on Playa Flamingo along the pacific coast. There was no television and in every other circumstance, I was more than OK with that. I didn’t come to Costa Rica to watch TV! I was spending my days diving with swarms of manta ray and snorkeling pacific reefs while Patricia painted in the jungle while being serenaded by Howler monkies in the trees.

She was a fearless woman, Patricia. On our first night there I got up in the wee hours to use the toilet and my eyes were open just enough to register there was something on the floor that shouldn’t be. I held my foot in the air, switched on the light, and shouted out loud when I saw a seven-inch scorpion beneath my foot, claws raised and stinger poised to strike. I jumped up on the edge of the tub and was contemplating my best course of action when Patricia appeared in the doorway and said, “What’s wrong?” I just pointed at the scorpion and I think I made kind of a strange, whining noise. Words failed me. Patricia looked at the monster, took off her slipper, and with one solid whap, squished it to a pulp. She said, “go back to bed, Marshall,” and stomped off.

In my own defense, after a few more trips to Costa Rica with Patricia, I thought nothing of the occasional tarantula walking across my foot as I rested it on the ground and rocked myself back and forth in a hammock strung between two palm trees on the beach. But I digress.

Super Bowl Sunday was drawing near at Playa Flamingo, and I was bemoaning the fact I had not found anywhere to watch the game. Sunday morning came and Patricia surprised me at breakfast by telling me she had heard there was a place where we could watch. All we had to do was walk a mile north along the deserted beach, find a trail into the jungle and follow that for half a mile, and we would come to a clearing where we would find Jack’s American Bar. Really? But sometimes you just have to say, “Why not?”

If you haven’t been to central America, it might not have registered that Costa Rica is due south of the U.S. east coast and is on Eastern time. So, in the late afternoon we set off along the beach and sure enough, after a mile or so, we found a trail leading into the jungle. We hadn’t seen anyone else walking along the beach and the trail was empty as far as we could see into the dense foliage. Nor did we see any signs of human life as we trudged along the trail. The first hint we were headed in the right direction was the sound of a diesel generator up ahead. And then, right where it should have been, we came out into a roundish clearing about two hundred feet across with a palapa in the center and a sign up in the thatch that read, sure enough, ‘Jack’s American Bar’. There were probably a hundred people there, lounging on stools, benches, and folding camp chairs around barrels of roasted peanuts and hovering around stand-up bar tables. Cans of Miller and Bud covered every level surface and huge ice-filled tubs of beer guaranteed an endless supply. A string of half-oil-drum charcoal grills were lined up along one side of the clearing, and hamburgers, BBQ chicken, ribs, and hot dogs were giving off an all-American aroma in the middle of the tropical jungle.

But the people! Every American in Costa Rica must have made their way to Jack’s. There were DEA agents and drug dealers; tax expats and others with enough felony warrants for their arrests to ensure they would never be able to go home voluntarily. Every Yankee reprobate, misanthrope, sociopath, pedophile, rapist, murderer, and embezzler for hundreds of miles had turned up. Every sport fisherman, sex-tourist, and eco-adventurer come down from El Norte had found their way to this little piece of surreal estate. Jack himself, bearded and in jeans, wife-beater, Stetson, and cowboy boots, tended bar under the shade of the palapa.

And to make good on the promise of the day, an enormous eight-foot satellite dish was perched on top of the palapa, feeding a clear signal to a giant flat-screen TV hanging from the eaves, the diesel generator giving life and sustenance to the anachronistic electronics.

In any other setting the DEA would be arresting half the crowd and the other half would be trying to kill each other, but there was an unspoken truce in effect, like the Christmas Truce along the Western Front in World War I.

I don’t remember who played or who won the Super Bowl that year. There was cheering and booing, angst and exuberance, victory and defeat. I wasn’t watching the screen. I was too busy watching the people there at Jack’s American Bar to care. Second only to my Baltimore Ravens winning Super Bowl XXXV, it was the Best Super Bowl Ever.