Susan Orlean's Extended Metaphor: "Super-Duper"

A staff writer for The New Yorker magazine since 1992, Susan Orlean has published several works of nonfiction, including The Orchid (1999), The Bullfighter Checks Her Makeup (2002), and My Kind of Place: Travel Stories from a Woman Who's Been Everywhere (2004). The paragraphs that follow have been drawn from one of these travel stories, "Super-Duper," which originally appeared in The New Yorker in 1995.

Orlean's writing style has been variously described as "crisp [and] elegant," "snapshot-vivid," and "disarming but disciplined." Here she introduces specific examples to support her thesis that "the real contest at the Super Bowl" is not the game itself but the metaphorical battles leading up to it.

from "Super-Duper"

If football is a metaphor for war, then Super Bowl week is a metaphor for football. Throughout the week, everything had a sort of battlefield urgency and martial precision. Posted at the Media Center: "Following is a press release regarding the Super Bowl Sod. It is from Bermuda Dunes (near Palm Springs), California, not Las Vegas. . . . It is very important for it to be known that the sod is from Palm Springs . . . and not Las Vegas, as has previously been reported." Over the PA at an outdoor souvenir fair: "Attention, personnel! We need mini-helmets at the autograph booth! Mini-helmets! ASAP!" At the Commissioners' Party, an enormous gala at the Miami Beach Convention Center, the league owners were penned in a corner apart from the crowd and were guarded by wiry tough guys with walkie talkies. One tough guy had collared a small, tan man with luminous white hair who was headed into the pen. "Station to command base," the guard said into his walkie-talkie. "I have a certain individual here asserting he is one of the owners of the Seattle Seahawks. Can you clear me?" He was, and they did.

The Super Bowl is billed as the ultimate American sporting event and the ultimate athletic battle: No other television broadcast attracts a larger audience, and the money and effort that people spend to attend it is stupendous. But during my week in Miami, I didn't feel that it was on the brink of a singular decisive battle: I felt that I was bouncing from one little skirmish to another--the mini-helmet crisis, the heavy-duty credentials checkpoints at the parties, the elbowing through crowds to get near one of the players, the press briefings about which Charger had a case of the gout and whether the 49ers practiced in full pads or just in sweatclothes. Very few Super Bowls ever turn out to be exciting games. This is blamed, variously, on the misalignment in the two football conferences, which means the matchup always has one clearly superior team; on the fact that you can never guarantee that any single game in any sport will be suspenseful (as opposed to a playoff series, which builds momentum); or on the simple fact that nothing, no matter how thrilling, could ever live up to the hype that precedes every Super Bowl. Still, everyone runs around all week in a state of high excitation. There is a real contest at the Super Bowl, but it's not on the field--it's a battle for tickets and hotel rooms and invitations and autographs and access and souvenirs, and it requires both an offensive and a defensive strategy.

Originally published in The New Yorker (February 13, 1995), "Super-Duper" appears in Susan Orlean's collection My Kind of Place: Travel Stories from a Woman Who's Been Everywhere (Random House, 2004).