Deep Dive ~ Our first Super Bowl
All about our trip to Las Vegas for Super Bowl LVIII
Today’s Deep Dive is all about our first trip to the Super Bowl: why we went, what the game was like, and who we met in the elevator. We’ll be back to the normal Handpicked link list next week. Hope you enjoy this Deep Dive!
*Last week I promised a Deep Dive on picture books — I pushed it back to next month!
why we went
Short answer: my husband Nate works for the NFL. He had to go for work and I got to be his plus one.
Longer answer: Last summer, after eleven years working at traditional advertising agencies, Nate joined the NFL Marketing Team as a Senior Creative Director. Part of his job is making ads, like this one and this one. He and his team, as well as oodles of other NFL employees, set up shop in Las Vegas for Super Bowl LVIII, working around the clock all week on everything football-related you can imagine. Hundreds of current and former players, media outlets, and sportsy people assembled for interviews, social media content, pre-game events… It’s kind of hard to explain, but kiiind of like Comic Con for football? I was blown away by how hard everyone was working at all times.
why are you chiefs fans if you’re from california?
Before we moved to Manhattan Beach in 2019, we lived in Prairie Village, KS — a small suburb in Kansas City — for 3.5 years. Neither of us (lol, certainly not I) was loyal to a pro football team before then, and we were welcomed warmly onto the Kansas City Chiefs bandwagon the year before Patrick Mahomes started!
Nate and I are practicing Latter-day Saints, and we frequently attended church with the Reid family. In 2017 I was the photographer for a Q&A with Coach Reid and his wife Tammy, hosted by the BYU Alumni Association, which was open to fans and took place at our local chapel. The Reids were so gracious that night, and at every interaction. So inclusive, warm, and kind, and just as fun as they seem on TV (maybe more!).
did you meet anyone famous?
Kind of! We saw the president of the Pro Football Hall of Fame and his wife in the elevator. That was cool! They were extremely nice and she was wearing the cutest black suit. The other person we met briefly was glitter bomb engineer Mark Rober and I had precisely ZERO chill. He was also very nice.
halftime
On Sunday before the game, we took a shuttle from our hotel to the stadium, where they had a tailgate set up with some food and music. You would not believe the number of event staff guiding people where to go! I was so grateful because I was a little disoriented by the whole experience. The Las Vegas strip is so overstimulating, haha. Every single person, not only staff but everyone we met over the weekend, was supremely polite and hardworking.
Around 2:30 p.m. we made our way to our seats, near the 49ers endzone. All the pregame stuff, like the National Anthem and coin toss, felt so fast, especially the setup for the halftime show. Which, by the way, was terrific — Usher gets an A. From our seats, we could see a bunch of circus performers, show girls, and acrobats, as well as the marching band (who stole the show offstage) throughout the performance. When we watched a replay of it on TV at a post-game dinner, I felt like they were two different shows! One thing is certain: whoever performs next year has some big roller skates to fill.
nate and the game
And, after an entire essay on everything but the actual football, some thoughts on the game itself:
I cannot convey the intensity.
It was an absolutely glorious place to be a Chiefs fan, and a mighty stressful one to be an anxious empath. It felt like the emotions of 65,000 people were pulsing through my veins for four hours — meanwhile, Nate was on cloud nine and didn’t lose heart once the whole game.
Toward the end of the second quarter when the Chiefs were down 10-3 and our hearts were racing, Nate looked over at me, smiled, and said, “I’m still having fun!”
If you had asked me a year ago if I could picture myself sitting in the stands at the Super Bowl, screaming myself hoarse for the Chiefs for five quarters? That’d’ve been a no.
When the game winning touchdown was caught and the stands erupted, I finally understood that shocked face Taylor Swift always makes at Chiefs games. Hours and weeks and years of emotional investment rendered me utterly stunned. All I could do was stand there with my mouth open.
Most of my life I have cared the minimum amount about football; last summer that all changed when Nate got his dream job in the center of the sports-and-creative-direction Venn diagram. I’m so proud of his hard work. I, for one, did zero work this weekend and frankly I’m both frazzled and dazzled by the glimmering, deafening, marvelous, super spectacle I just experienced. Above all, extremely grateful.
Go Chiefs!!!1
One gigantic piece of this story is a wonderful girl named Meredith who took care of our babies while I was gone. I’m grateful for my other mom friends who encouraged me to enjoy this experience guilt-free and kept an eye out for my kids at school drop-offs and church. It takes a village to raise a Super Bowl!
Love that recap and loved all your outfits! Red sequins looked incredible and your black dress with leather jacket was gorg!! ❤️🔥❤️🔥❤️🔥
Absolutely LOVED this one! And thrilled for you (but okay, a little jealous) that you got to meet Coach Reid. (And why am I totally not surprised to learn that he's super nice? Some coaches look like the scary kid from high school who says he'll put frogs in your locker if you don't help him cheat on the geometry test, but Coach Reid always seems like the greatest guy.) I was cheering on KC, too, and it must have been so much fun to be there. Thanks for making us feel like we were right beside you!