You may say I’m not a sports fan, but that’s not true. I can’t remember not being a sports fan and I’ve been very close to sports all my life. I was privileged to cover six Super Bowls as a sportscaster and I know both the history of the NFL and the history of the Super Bowl very well.

For me, however, it’s a question of perspective, something I think the country lost long ago when it comes to Super Sunday.

Some of the breathless coverage would suggest that winning or losing the Super Bowl is equivalent to winning or losing a war. That is more than laughable when you consider we are in a ‘real’ war where young men are dying. Somewhere in this country on Sunday someone may very well get shot because of a Super Bowl bet gone bad or an argument over which team is better that can only be settled by gunfire. The winning city can probably look forward to cars being set on fire and bricks being thrown through windows. That might even happen in the losing city because we all know how terrible it is to lose a football game.

It has always been my experience that players and coaches have things much more in perspective than fans. Don’t misunderstand; the losing team will feel badly and there will be some tears. It is a very big game. The point, though, is that when all is said and done, it is still just a game.

Having said that, the game has all kind of storylines. One of them involves the coaches. Much has been made of the fact that Lovie Smith of the Bears and Tony Dungy of the Colts are black, the first two to go head to head in the Super Bowl. But more should be made of the fact they are friends and seeing how they have conducted themselves you know that will still be the case no matter who wins on Sunday. Dungy’s son took his own life last year, Smith waited for years to be a head coach. You can reasonably assume they have things in perspective and will handle what comes on Sunday night.

That, of course, is in marked contrast to many other coaches you can name; coaches who act as if world peace hinges on who wins the game, coaches who act as if they’ve cured cancer or won the Nobel Peace Prize simply because they are NFL coaches. These are many of the same men who treat fans, reporters and many times their own players with a haughty disdain worthy of a five star general or some Middle East potentate (feel free to insert the names of Bill Parcells and Bill Belichick here).

The other story line of big interest is the one involving Colt’s quarterback, Peyton Manning. Because he has never won a Super Bowl or (until this year) a conference title, some have said he has a ‘monkey on his back’, ‘he can’t win the big one.’

That ranks with the dumbest statements I’ve heard in sports and I’ve heard most of them.

With the exception of only three or four teams, every team in the NFL would take Peyton Manning tomorrow and consider themselves lucky to have him, that he would give them a better chance to get to the Super Bowl.

In the AFC title game, Manning drove his team to a score with one minute left. Tom Brady of New England, himself a great quarterback, tried to win the game for his team. He completed a couple of passes and then was intercepted. Had New England won the game, would that have made Manning a loser after leading his team to the biggest comeback in conference title game history? Of course not; he would merely have been watching while Brady beat the Colt’s defense.

Manning is another who has things in perspective. Certainly he wants to win, but he has seen his brother struggle as quarterback of the Giants, and his other brother (who might be the best athlete in the family) denied an NFL career because of a back injury. His father was a fine NFL quarterback but won very little while playing for the hapless New Orleans Saints. Manning knows athletic stardom is not always just big money and adulation. He has many times talked of his good fortune in being an NFL quarterback.

I was privileged to see something a few years ago at a Super Bowl that the average fan does not see. It was after Dallas had beaten Buffalo easily 52-17. Buffalo had been to four Super Bowls in a row and lost all four of them. You think Coach Marv Levy and quarterback Jim Kelly were losers because of that? Certainly not, something people in the NFL know very well and some fans never will.

As the Bills were coming off the field after a loss to a far superior team, Bill Polian, then General Manager of the Bills (now General Manager of the Colts), was in the tunnel and he shook hands with every player, thanking them all for a fine season and for giving their best. It was a class act from a man who has yet to get a Super Bowl ring, but who is most assuredly a winner, no matter what the scoreboard said then or even this Sunday. It is moments like that which, at times, make sports among the best thing we have. Let us hope there are such moments on Sunday.

BOOK OF THE WEEK

“LEE” by Douglass Southall Freeman

This book was written in 1935, but remains in print and still, despite being at times too worshipful, is considered the definitive biography of Robert E. Lee, the great Southern hero of the Civil War. Even today, 137 years after his death, Lee remains an icon of the South and clearly one of the great men in American History. Freeman won the Pulitzer prize for his book and deservedly so.