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2000 Soap Box Archives Super Bowl I just came back from the Super Bowl in Atlanta where my Tennessee Titans were barely defeated by a great St. Louis Rams team. The game went down to the last few seconds as Super Bowl games should. This was no one sided match. Both teams were prepared and played their hearts out and the game could have gone either way. It was just two great football teams slugging it out for sixty minutes, no body backing up and nobody blinking. Just great football. In my opinion, there are no losers in the Super Bowl. One team just wins a little more than the other. After all, they are the two teams out of the whole N F L who have won the right to represent their conferences and every other team in the league would give their eyeteeth to be there. Tennessee is proud of our Titans. We’re proud of the season they’ve had, we’re proud of the individual players and we’re proud that they’ve played in their first Super Bowl. Win, lose or draw. There’s just something about a football team that pulls a community together. Something everybody can have in common, in spite of whatever other differences they have. My son, Charlie has become a Titan fanatic. He knows the player’s names, the status of their injuries and their individual value to the team. He eats, sleeps and drinks Titan football and hollers so loud at the games, it’s a surprise that he can talk afterward. But he's one among the many people in this community that have embraced this football team and support it at home and on the road. It kind of reminds me of another football team we have over in the eastern part of the state called the Tennessee Volunteers, whose Big Orange colors are an intricate part of so many Tennesseans lives, The support for the Vols, as they are affectionately known, is nothing short of spectacular. They draw in excess of one hundred thousand to every home game and their fans will travel anywhere to see their team play, including the moon, if they ever get invited to the Lunar Bowl. Now it seems that I sense a similar type of devotion developing for the Titans. I am seeing cars now with a Tennessee Titans flag on one side and a Tennessee Volunteers flag on the other. It’s the Vols on Saturday and the Titans on Sunday, and the Volunteer’s National Championship last year and the Titan’s Super Bowl appearance this year has done nothing but add fuel to the flame. I don’t know if the magnitude of going to the Super Bowl has dawned on Tennessee yet. How rare and wonderful it really is. How hard our players had to work to get there and the honor it has brought to the great state of Tennessee. My hat is off to my Christian brother Kurt Warner and the St. Louis Rams. They played a valiant game and beat a great team. But I'll tell you what fellows, don’t get that crown too firmly planted on your heads, because next season is not that far away and those high flying Tennessee Titans and their rabid fans will be coming after you again. What do you think? God
Bless America
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