Dateline Detroit, Michigan
Ok so this is over a month late. February 5, 2006 a day which will live in infamy? Not really, no.
In all of my years covering sports I have never seen a spectacle quite like the Super Bowl. Usually it was spent in my living room eating submarine sandwiches and deciding what team to root for. I am a Detroit Lions fan so it comes as no surprise that for all 30+ years of my life I have had to latch on to a team on Super Bowl Sunday and root for them. I equate this ritual to choosing players for your gym class basketball team. "Oh I guess I will take the Denver Broncos...again" or "Hmmm perhaps its time for the Patriots to do well" You don't really become emotionally involved with the team, but for now they are on your side and you have to root for them. This year it was the Pittsburgh Steelers. I have always liked the Steelers and have always appreciated the mystique that they have brought to the game of football. Rarely in sports do you see a team that has such an identifiable and persisting identity. I can think of the Oakland Raiders and the quasi outlaw, Mad Max meets the longest yard sort of thing. The Glitz, glamour and Texas sized aura of the Dallas Cowboys. I don’t see too many other franchises in professional sports with a distinct identity like the Steelers. With the Raiders and Cowboys I see traits that identify the teams but now how they play. The Steelers are the only team that really shout out to me and scream "old school, smash mouth football." It was amazing to me to see the Super Bowl in person this year. While I don't typically have time to really appreciate what I am involved in or covering as I have quite a few assignments to deal with.
I was fortunate this year as I had a pretty cake job to do. I got an email from one of my favorite clients PMTV from Pennsylvania. They can be found on the web at www.pmtv.com for a little plug. They were looking for a crew to cover the Super Bowl for ARD1 the German television network. I have done international shows before for Hockey and Baseball but never for football. There is a commonality among championship games/series as it relates to the media. The amount of media covering the event is generally 10 or more times larger than normal. Generally this is due to the international media and newspaper and television nationwide are there to cover the event. In the case of the super bowl it’s the same thing only way bigger. The popularity of the NFL in the United States is unquestionable. The popularity of the NFL worldwide did surprise me though. I am not sure how many countries were there broadcasting but I am sure every populated continent was well represented. This is where I come in. PMTV had a call to cover the game from ARD1 in Germany. In order for there to be enough space/camera positions to cover the game there has to be a pool feed of the play by play action for all of the international networks to use on their broadcasts. This pool feed is called the world feed. The world feed is a crew that comes in to just cover the action of the game. Imagine watching Monday Night Football with no ABC graphics and the TV muted. That’s kind of like the world feed. What happens is that video signal and stadium audio are sent to who ever is covering the game. Just for example ARD1 receives this feed and needs to add German speaking commentators to the show to send back to Germany there is a production truck outside the stadium that receives the signals from the world feed and mixes in their own audio and whatever graphics they need to add and suddenly ARD1 appears to be covering the Super Bowl with their own Cameras. The same principal applies to the Olympics. The problem is that doing pre-game, halftime, and post game shows in 15 languages is a tall order for the world feed to provide so they don’t. The receiving networks will produce their own segments during those times. At the Super Bowl there needed to be a place for all of the networks to do a studio show. The NFL (who thinks of everything) thought of this and built a giant tower on the concourse level of Ford Field. This concourse tower housed 8 studios for international media to go on camera for their respective networks. ARD1 was in this tower and that is where I wound up during the game. In this tower there were 9 rooms, 8 studios and one room that controlled where all of the various audio and video signals were going. Since there were hundreds of production trucks in the north lot there had to be a vast amount of video and audio cable that had to be strung from the trucks to the studios. Most stadiums have enough cable to have up to 3 independent TV productions going on simultaneously built in to the building so you don’t have to run much cable. The Super Bowl had more than 15 TV crews there. ARD1 was responsible for 2 cameras, 3 video monitors, microphones and that was it. By comparison ABC had more than 30 cameras 4 production trucks, hundreds of microphones etc…
The NFL was even good enough to provide studio lights and power cables in our studio. This was to cut down on how much equipment was brought in by the various networks. My job was to shoot the pre-game, halftime and post game shows. During the actual football game we were free to watch the game. This was miraculous for me since I am usually shooting the game and not able to truly appreciate what was going on during play. So basically I got paid to watch the Super Bowl and be a camera operator for a studio show.
My day began with a trip to down to the Fox Theater parking garage across from Comerica Park. I had to park there and walk about a half mile to the parking structure where the Detroit Tigers and Tiger suite holders park during baseball season. There was a perimeter set up around Ford Field blocking off access to both Comerica Park and Ford field from all sides unless you had special clearance. So I had to walk through the first of many security checkpoints. This checkpoint was like a line for a roller coaster, only you get frisked at the end. I got through the first checkpoint without incident and had to walk by a group of people that were declaring camera equipment to security. When you do this you have to take it apart and turn the power on and off for every camera and piece of electronics you are carrying. Once I got through that I was allowed to go out to the street that leads between Comerica Park and Ford Field. That street led to yet another check point. I had to show the 2, yes 2 photo credentials I needed that day to the guard at this check point. He approved me to go in to the North parking lot to find hundreds of production trucks. All of these trucks were rentals and did not have discernable markings on them that would clue you in to which network they represented. It was like being at TV Woodstock. Luckily I ran into our tech manager and he showed me where our truck was. A small blue satellite truck a little bigger than a UPS truck. I got my assignment for the day and walked into the stadium with the other camera operator on the show with me. We had to go through another security checkpoint. There I was at the Super Bowl, only it was real and not on TV.
